This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code History at check out to get ten percent off Squarespace Build it Beautiful. Hi. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new houstuf Works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, and everywhere else that find podcasts are found. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from houstuf works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracing Built and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are picking up where we left off in our story of Curricules. Mulligan. Yes, inspired by the Blade Hamilton, although, as we mentioned in part one, literally the only character or place or whatever that appears in Hamilton's that no one has asked us to talk about. I just wanted to do it. After years of protesting and resisting British rule in New York, Hercules Mulligan passed some important information on relating to the safety of George Washington, which possibly saved the man's life, and today we will talk about how this one time act of happenstance where he just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right intoxicated person to get important information sort of transformed into a career as a full time spy. As we talked about in Part one. Hercules Mulligan owned an extremely fashionable clothing shop on Queen Street in New York. When British forces moved into the city, more and more British officers started buying clothes from him, including their uniforms and formal wear for the evenings. Mulligan also did repairs for soldiers in the lower ranks. He kept on selling to civilians as well. Basically, anyone who wanted fashionable, well made clothing could go to Hercules, and a lot of people were willing to overlook his solid history resisting the British in order to buy clothes from him. So great was his reputation. There are also people who overlooked the fact that they found the man personally to be kind of tacky and grant and ghost like. You can kind of imagine a very flamboyant, showy person rubbing some of the snobby or ilk the wrong way. Because Hercules Mulligan's brother owned cartwriting company and his wife was the niece of a Royal Navy admiral, he was in a pretty socially prestigious position, and as always, food, drink, and lively conversation were part of any shopping excursion to Mulligan's place of business. He started picking up little tidbits about the British forces and its plans through casual conversation and through exactly what kind of clothing people were ordering from him. Things that seemed to be unseasonably warm or cool for what the weather was like in New York suggested that somebody might be about to be deployed somewhere else. Soon he became reacquainted with Haimes Solomon, a Jew who had emigrated from Poland and had been jailed at Provost Prison at the same time as Mulligan had. Solomon told Mulligan that he had told the British he wanted to join their cause, and having heard that a lot of British officers were having trouble communicating with German speaking Hessian soldiers, he offered his services as a translator. As people had gotten used to his presence, they had stopped being particularly careful about what information they shared in front of him, or how sensitive the materials were that they gave him to translates a bit. As a bit of a side note, Solomon was one of the people who was spreading rumors to the Hessian soldiers that they'd actually be a lot better off deserting, which is a phenomenon we talked about in our previous podcast on the Hessians. Desertion rates were kind of high because they had heard that they could stay in the United States and run a farm, and how great that would be. One of the sources of that idea was Haims Solomon. Later on, Hams Solomon was actually captured as a by and sentenced to death, but the sons of Liberty Broke came out of jail. He went back to his former work as a financial broker, and a lot of his financial works supported the revolution, But some grandiose claims for from later on that led to him being nicknamed the financial Hero of the American Revolution were likely invented or at least really deeply embellished by a well meaning but over zealous son after his death. Mulligan's work at the shop and Salomon's work as a translator meant that together they had all kinds of access to information that would be very useful to the Continental Army. But by this point the Continental Army was headquartered in Pennsylvania, and there was no possible way either man could travel there and back unnoticed. Yeah, apart from the fact that Hercules Mulligan had already had only been released from jail under the condition that he not leave New York. That was kind of a hall. People would notice if you were gone for that long, And so this is when Hercules Mulligan turned to k too. So sometimes in the historical record and in articles that Kato is described as a servant, but it's far more likely that he was enslaved. Like a lot of times, people used the word servant to talk about people that they actually owned as property, not as servants who were paid for their labor. He so he probably was Hercules Mulligan's property. People were used to seeing Kato deliver Mulligan's merchandise, both to British and Hessian officers, so he seemed like a pretty good choice to start delivering other things as well. First, Mulligan gave Kato advertisements for his shop to take to Solomon and have translated into German. Those were then distributed to Hessian forces, and then Solomon would give Kato documentation of whatever intelligence that he'd gathered, and Kato would take that back to Mulligan. Some of this was about the British force and their plans, where they were being quartered, how they were being trained and disciplined, and what kind of supplies they were procuring. Some of the information was about what was happening in the war itself. Hercules Mulligan learned about the battles of Trenton and Princeton, for example, from Solomon via Cato. As the courier who carried the information. Hercules Mulligan gleaned information from his brother Hugh as well. Hugh's firm had become a supplier to the British Army, and as owner, he had information about everything they were buying and where it was to be sent. Some of Hercules Mulligan's intelligence was gathered in his own home as well, as was the case for a lot of people in New York. He was made to house British officers there there is some disagreement among historians about exactly when and how Hercules Mulligan started officially spying for George Washington. However, sometime around the spring of seventeen seventy seven, George Washington remarked to Alexander Hamilton's that he wished they had a trusted spy in New York City who could keep them informed on the situation there. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton's suggested his longtime friend, well known patriot and friendly year to a seemingly endless parade of British officers in need of clothing for the job. The formation of the Cooper Spy Ring would follow in about one year. Let's talk a little bit more about Hercules Mulligan's more official spycraft and how he eventually did become associated with this Cooper spir Ring after avery effort from a sponsored It's a little bit unclear exactly how Hercules Mulligan found out that he had gotten a job at a spy. The whole thing was undertaken with so much secrecy that there's actually no mention of it in Washington's or Hamilton's papers. In all likelihood, Hamilton's sent a message along with a farmer or a merchant, or some other civilian with a legitimate reason to get into New York. Along with the news that he was to be a spy, Mulligan also got a list of safe houses in New York and New Jersey where he could send messages. Many of these messages went via Cato, who people were used to seeing out and about carrying packages to and from Mulligan's shop. You would usually carry a collection of packages, all looking very much like normal parcels of clothing, but some of them contained the intelligence that Mulligan had gathered at the safe house. Goods and intelligence would be repackaged to remove all references to Mulligan and his shop, and then they would be sent on their way. In late April of seventeen seventy seven, Kato carried a package containing details of a British armada that was being assembled under General William how This is a particularly massive fleet which would contain two hundred sixty ships and more than seventeen thousand men, so the British Army was on the move and by sea. This information also contained details of a number of British and Hessian officers who were asking Mulligan to handle rush orders of lightweight uniforms, so logical conclusion the British fleet was headed south. Washington first moved his fighting force to Middlebrook side of New Brunswick, New Jersey, ready to either defend New Jersey from a massive British attack or to move southward if that was warranted. Watchers along the coast lost sight of the fleet for several weeks. When they were sighted in the Chesapeake Bay on August seventeen seventy seven, Washington deduced that their target was Philadelphia. This information meant that Washington was in fact able to meet in General how There and mount of Defense. However, how superior numbers meant that he took Philadelphia just the same, and he established a headquarters there For a while. This meant that Mulligan's intelligence in New York wasn't as important. It was nice to have, but with How's headquarters in Philadelphia, it often wasn't as critical until later on in seventeen seventy eight, when General Howe resigned and was succeeded by General Henry Clinton, who relocated the British Army's headquarters back to New York. It was about this time when Mulligan first made contact with the Culper Ring so to recap for the folks who aren't familiar. The call A Ring was one of George Washington's intelligence organizations during the American Revolutionary War. The Culper Ring was named for the code names of two of its agents, Abraham Woodhull, who was code named Samuel Culper and Robert Townsend, who was code named Samuel Culper Jr. The Culpa Ring was organized and managed by Major Benjamin Talmadge. There were other agents and sub agences in this spy ring as well, and apart from Hercules Mulligan, the most well known are Caleb Brewster, Austin row and a Strong and a woman known as three fifty five. Rather than sending scouts on short reconnaissance missions in enemy territory, the Colper Spiring operated by keeping a continual presence behind enemy lines in New York. They were all effectively working undercover and reporting your findings of British fortifications and movements back to the Continental Army. Mulligan seems to have become acquainted with the Coulpor Ring through Robert Townsend, a k A. Culper Jr. Who he had actually known for several years and once he was aware of the spir ring's existence, he thought it would be a good idea to maintain a formal connection, to have a second and sometimes better, depending on the circumstances, way of getting information to George Washington. Abraham Woodhull really didn't like this idea. As we mentioned in part one, Mulligan had been extremely visible in his pro independence activities, Connecting him Connecting with him seemed like way too much of a risk for a very covert spir ring. So when Townsend started spending time in Mulligan's shop and then collecting documents to pass on to George Washington, it was not entirely with Woodhull's approval. He was, in fact so anxious about the idea of being discovered thanks to Mulligan that he sometimes took to his bed over it. Talmudge, on the other hand, knew nothing about it until after the war because the need for secrecy was so great. Yeah, they did not have any person who knew literally every other person. That would be a bad idea and a covert spir ring. That is a poor way to run your spiring, right for one person to have literally all the detail about all the other people. So Hercules Mulligan used the Culper Spy ring to send his his intelligence occasionally and somewhat sporadically throughout the war. He really relied a lot more on Kato to do it. Kato wound up being arrested and interrogated at Provost Prison at least once, where he was reportedly treated extremely cruelly. Mulligan eventually arranged his release, and he did continue to work as a courier after that point, but having been captured once did make him a little bit less effective as a covert operative. He sort of was on the list now like Hercules Mulligan, of people who were troubled. Mulligan was arrested a second time in May of seventeen seventy eight, following an attempt by British forces to recruit him to the army at a tavern, thinking that he appeared to be so popular that if he enlisted, surely others would follow. Mulligan, of course refused, and the whole thing threatened to lead to a huge bar fight before the British forces left. Shortly thereafter, Mulligan was asted for obstructing a British officer in the performance of his duties. Mulligan wound up giving a jovial and lighthearted testimony on the matter, and the audience before him included a lot of his customers, and once again he was released, and once again afterward he returns to his spy work. The information Mulligan obtained and passed on in late seventeen seventy eight and early seventeen seventy nine included a plot to capture or assassinate George Washington and several prominent Patriot leaders, including Governor William Livingston of a New Jersey. In July of seventeen seventy nine. He also learned that Major Lynch was moving south was with his entire core, which he heard from the man himself in his shop and confirmed by finding out that his brother was provisioning them. He also passed along information regarding an eminent attack on Charleston, South Carolina in the winter of seventeen seventy nine to seventeen eighty, which Washington was once again able to act on, but similarly to previous experien in sas it was not enough to successfully defend Charleston from the British forces far superior numbers. In the summer of seventeen eighty, Mulligan gathered some particularly sensitive information British forces were planning to attack about five thousand troops led by Count Rochambeau of France when they arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, hoping to surprise them upon their arrival. This would Britain hoped derail France's involvement in the war. And this message was so important that Mulligan sent it via the Copra Rings information chain and by Kato, going straight to Hamilton's headquarters. Kato delivered his message first and once. Once George Washington heard about it from Alexander Hamilton's he immediately moved to defend of the French troop's landing. He also created some false orders about attack being planned onto New York, which he allowed to fall into British hands, making Clinton too wary to leave New York and protected in order to attack the French force. Rochambeau and his men arrived in Newport and on their way without having to fight off the British first. Other intelligence efforts were not quite as successful. In the Summer of Hercules, Mulligan was pretty sure that something was going on and that it was something big, but no amount of boisterous conversation and generous libations in his shop could reveal exactly what it seemed to be happening around the Upper Hudson River. Also suspicious on that front was Robert Townsend, whose family home on Oyster Bay was being used to billet British troops and Major John Andre was frequently seen visiting there. What was going on was that Benedict Arnold was plotting to hand over West Point to the British in exchange for money and a commission in the British Army. None of Townsend's or Mulligan's intelligence had added up to that. I mean they both knew something was up that that it still caught everyone by surprise. Andrea, however, was captured with incriminating documents, so that Patriots did find out about the plot, but not before Benedict Arnold was able to escape behind British lines, carrying with him the knowledge that Washington had a spy network, although apparently not a lot of clear detail about who was involved or how Andre was executed, and in retaliation, the British started rounding up anyone Arnold named as a spy or a sympathizer hercules brother, Hugh happened to be at Clinton's headquarters while negotiating a provisioning contract, and he heard about this order. He let his brother know and arrest was imminent, but Hercules refused to leave New York. Once again, Hercules Mulligan was arrested, and this time he was taken to Bridewell Prison, which is where he learned that his arrest had been because Benedict Arnold had named him as a spy. He nearly escaped three days in, but a patrol spotted him trying to climb over the prison wall. He wound up being recaptured and then moved to Provost Prison, which was still being overseen by his longtime enemy William Cunningham. At this point, Mulligan was court martialed. The lead witness against him was Benedict Arnold, but Arnold didn't really have any clear evidence to give. It's likely that he had simply named Mulligan as a spy because he had such long and obvious loyalist leanings. Cunningham testified as well, but his evidence was mostly his personal dislike of Hercules Mulligan. So with no hard evidence and yet another silver tongued defense, on the part of Mulligan himself. He was neither convicted nor acquitted, but kept in Provost prison because surely, after so many arrests, something must be going on. This really worked out to be kind of a bad turning point for Hercules Mulligan, and we will talk about exactly how after a brief sponsor break. Records aren't clear on exactly how long Hercules Mulligan was detained this time around in Provost prison. The reason for ultimately releasing him also is not totally clear, but it seems like he was in there for approximately five months. Even though his clothing shop had been open and staffed while he was in prison, business had dropped off precipitously. Previously, it had seemed as though British officers and soldiers were willing to overlook Mulligan's obviously loyalist leanings, whether it was because he was so friendly or because his store was so fashionable. They didn't seem willing to overlook Benedict Arnold's allegation that he was a spy, however, and that's this was especially true since he'd been imprisoned on charges of espionage and never acquitted of those charges. He wound up having to work for his brother while struggling to keep his own shop open, even though loyalists were far less likely to shop in his store. After this point, Hercules was still able to gather information while working at his brother's firm, which was still provisioning and outfitting the British military and the Americans. It was while working at his brother's firm that Hercules Mulligan heard of another plot to kill George Washington, intended to take place as he passed through Lebanon, Connecticut, on March five, s one. This followed the British forces learning that Washington was planning to meet up with Rochambeau. Sending messages via Kato was really no longer an option, both because of his own prior arrest and because he was owned by the not ever actually acquitted of treason Hercules Mulligan, So Mulligan wrote to Washington and sent his message by a Robert Townsend in the Culper Ring. The message arrived in time for Washington to change his route, avoid the British ambush, and still make his rendezvous with Rochambeau. So this was probably the second time that Mulligan saved Washington's life. Although the play Hamilton's makes it sound as though the Patriots knew their plan for the Battle of Yorktown would work thanks to Mulligan's spy work, and there was quite a bit of espionage involved in that battle success for the Patriots, Mulligan himself actually doesn't seem to have been a major player in that one. Most of the fighting in the American Revolutionary War ended after the Battle of Yorktown did now was in October of one, although the war itself didn't officially end until September three, seventeen eighty three. That window between the end of the Battle of Yorktown and the end of the war was a particularly difficult one for Hercules Mulligan and his family. Without British officers and soldiers buying clothes from him, his clothing business nearly felt failed entirely, and without a British army to outfit anymore, he couldn't moonlight at his brother's firm anymore because there just wasn't enough work for him to do there. He wound up deeply in debt, and he tried and failed to offset this debt by working in real estate. With the end of the war, Benjamin Talmadge became afraid that some of his Copra agent spies who had maintained loyalist covers during the war would be harassed or otherwise treated badly after the war had wrapped up. It was when meeting with Washington to try to figure out how to ensure the safety of his agents that Talmadge learned about Mulligan for the first time. At some point, the two men reportedly meant and Mulligan described his spy work as quote, Generals have a way of talking sometimes when they're being fitted for an embroidered waistcoat. So I keep my years, so been. On November seventeen eighty three, after the end of the war, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton went to Mulligan's home at twenty three Queen Street to have breakfast with the Mulligan family, probably as a show of thanks for Mulligan's work. Washington also ordered a complete wardrobe of civilian clothes from Mulligan, who from that point on described himself as clothier to General Washington and his advertisements. This event turned his business back around, although it was still quite some time before he was financially solvent again. His name was posted in lists of insolvent debtors until seventeen eighty five, during Washington's presidency, at which point the capital was in New York. He lived not far from Mulligan's shop, and he visited their several times. Washington also continued to buy clothes from Hercules Mulligan because of the extreme secrecy with which Mulligan had carried out his spy work. Most of their surviving correspondence is actually about ordering clothes, including a letter written to order some Moleskin pants just sent from Philadelphia in seventeen Hercules and his wife wound up having eight children together, three sons and five daughters, and they prospered until his eighteen twenty retirement. Their children were John, Sarah, Elizabeth, Margaret, William, Francis, Hercules, and Mary. Several of them lived quite long lives, although the younger three, Francis, Hercules and Mary died at the ages of ten, nine months and five. Hercules Mulligan himself passed away in eighteen twenty nine, and he's buried in Trinity Churchyard, not that far from Alexander Hamilton. That is Hercules Mulligan's story, and while um many people probably want to sing songs from Hamilton's Now I have the Disney Um Gospel Choir Hercules thing going on in my head. It's very fun to say Hercules Mulligan. It is. It's a good name. And I feel like some of the some of the things that I read as as I was preparing for this. Uh. You know, often we use people's surnames more when we're just talking about a person at length in a podcast. Uh. And it just seemed like a lot of people were electing to call him Hercules mulling In all the way through, maybe just because they were tickled by that being such an awesome name. I can't blame them. Uh. Do you have a little bit of listener mail for us as well? Do? It is from fan stands as good morning ladies. I just finished listening to the Wasp episodes and thought you might enjoy some personal slash family lore regarding the WASP group. My grandmother was a registered nurse in the Army Air Corps during World War Two. She was stationed stateside down in Dover, Delaware. She told us a story that involved herself and other nurses at the base. During the day, the nurses had washed their clothes and had everything hang out on a clothesline to dry. During that day, a group of wasp flew into the base. Once on base, they showered and freshened up. When my grandmother and her nurse friends went to retrieve their clothes, they were missing underwear. The presumption was when the wasps flew in, they nabbed the clean clothes to change into. After that, the nurses would dry their clothes inside their barracks. My grandmother told the story and laughed about it. I have no idea whether that family story is true or not, but it does amuse me a little bit that maybe if you were flying into a base and freshening up, you might want something clear to put on, and and and maybe you might take a less than up and up way solve that problem. During wartime, this letter goes on, my grandmother had to go to the mess hall to order food for the patients. So during this time she started dating a man who would become my grandfather. She was she was a second lieutenant, he was a staff sergeant. It was an officer and an enlisted avan situation which is frowned upon in the military. She finished her tour, was honorably discharged and they were married. Then my grandfather was sent over to India to finish this time and the war wrapped up. I find it amazing how women during World War two were allowed to do quote men's work, but once the men returned, women were sidelined. I think you did a great job of explaining how the wasp did their job in such a way as to not threaten a man's job, but as soon as things slowed down, they were they were essentially threatening men's work by taking away jobs from men. Uh think about it, This happened everywhere. Rosie the riverter was sent home from the factory when the boys came back from the warfront. This must have been very difficult for young women of that generation to have broken through the glass ceiling just to get pushed back down when the war was over. I was too young to really think about these things when my grandmother was alive. When I think about it, though, my mother grew up with two working parents, something that was kind of unusual back in those days. I feel like anyone can do anything regardless of your gender, race orientation, But even today, I think there is a gap between women and men, and also a race gap. I feel very strongly that there is a biased toward girls in certain race groups at a young age that carry on and perpetuate stereotyping. Well we as a society ever reached a place where everyone is equal based on GIL, I don't know, but I think there needs to be a ton of fundamental changes to happen before society embraces these viewpoints completely. Sincerely, Stand, Thank you so much. Stand. I love this story. As I alluded to, I love the story about UH alleged undergarment theft. It tickles me a little bit. I agree like with it. Definitely was hard for UH, for women who had been out in the workforce and enjoyed in a lot of cases being out in the word workforce, then being basically UH stepped backward once the war was over, which is one of the reasons why we have told some of those stories on the show. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, you can at History Podcast that How Stuffworks dot com. We do already have every other thing ever mentioned in the word in the in the play. Hamilton's on the list already, so no need to do that, But anything else go ahead right to us. UH We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Are Tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com. We're also on Pentpriss at penders dot com slash miss Industry. Our instagram is missed in History as well. You can come to our parents company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com. Put the words spies into the search bar and you will find how spies work little learn a little more about what we talked about today. You can also come to our website, which is missing history dot com. You will find show notes. You will find an archive of everything we have ever done. You will find I just said show notes. Those are the ones for Holly Holly's in my episodes, the one we have worked on, the ones we have worked on together. So you can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or a miss in history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer code History at check out to get ten percent off Squarespace Build it Beautiful. Hi. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, host of the new houstuf Works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture. Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, and everywhere else that find podcasts are found. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from houstuf works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracing Built and I'm Holly Frying. Today we are picking up where we left off in our story of Curricules. Mulligan. Yes, inspired by the Blade Hamilton, although, as we mentioned in part one, literally the only character or place or whatever that appears in Hamilton's that no one has asked us to talk about. I just wanted to do it. After years of protesting and resisting British rule in New York, Hercules Mulligan passed some important information on relating to the safety of George Washington, which possibly saved the man's life, and today we will talk about how this one time act of happenstance where he just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right intoxicated person to get important information sort of transformed into a career as a full time spy. As we talked about in Part one. Hercules Mulligan owned an extremely fashionable clothing shop on Queen Street in New York. When British forces moved into the city, more and more British officers started buying clothes from him, including their uniforms and formal wear for the evenings. Mulligan also did repairs for soldiers in the lower ranks. He kept on selling to civilians as well. Basically, anyone who wanted fashionable, well made clothing could go to Hercules, and a lot of people were willing to overlook his solid history resisting the British in order to buy clothes from him. So great was his reputation. There are also people who overlooked the fact that they found the man personally to be kind of tacky and grant and ghost like. You can kind of imagine a very flamboyant, showy person rubbing some of the snobby or ilk the wrong way. Because Hercules Mulligan's brother owned cartwriting company and his wife was the niece of a Royal Navy admiral, he was in a pretty socially prestigious position, and as always, food, drink, and lively conversation were part of any shopping excursion to Mulligan's place of business. He started picking up little tidbits about the British forces and its plans through casual conversation and through exactly what kind of clothing people were ordering from him. Things that seemed to be unseasonably warm or cool for what the weather was like in New York suggested that somebody might be about to be deployed somewhere else. Soon he became reacquainted with Haimes Solomon, a Jew who had emigrated from Poland and had been jailed at Provost Prison at the same time as Mulligan had. Solomon told Mulligan that he had told the British he wanted to join their cause, and having heard that a lot of British officers were having trouble communicating with German speaking Hessian soldiers, he offered his services as a translator. As people had gotten used to his presence, they had stopped being particularly careful about what information they shared in front of him, or how sensitive the materials were that they gave him to translates a bit. As a bit of a side note, Solomon was one of the people who was spreading rumors to the Hessian soldiers that they'd actually be a lot better off deserting, which is a phenomenon we talked about in our previous podcast on the Hessians. Desertion rates were kind of high because they had heard that they could stay in the United States and run a farm, and how great that would be. One of the sources of that idea was Haims Solomon. Later on, Hams Solomon was actually captured as a by and sentenced to death, but the sons of Liberty Broke came out of jail. He went back to his former work as a financial broker, and a lot of his financial works supported the revolution, But some grandiose claims for from later on that led to him being nicknamed the financial Hero of the American Revolution were likely invented or at least really deeply embellished by a well meaning but over zealous son after his death. Mulligan's work at the shop and Salomon's work as a translator meant that together they had all kinds of access to information that would be very useful to the Continental Army. But by this point the Continental Army was headquartered in Pennsylvania, and there was no possible way either man could travel there and back unnoticed. Yeah, apart from the fact that Hercules Mulligan had already had only been released from jail under the condition that he not leave New York. That was kind of a hall. People would notice if you were gone for that long, And so this is when Hercules Mulligan turned to k too. So sometimes in the historical record and in articles that Kato is described as a servant, but it's far more likely that he was enslaved. Like a lot of times, people used the word servant to talk about people that they actually owned as property, not as servants who were paid for their labor. He so he probably was Hercules Mulligan's property. People were used to seeing Kato deliver Mulligan's merchandise, both to British and Hessian officers, so he seemed like a pretty good choice to start delivering other things as well. First, Mulligan gave Kato advertisements for his shop to take to Solomon and have translated into German. Those were then distributed to Hessian forces, and then Solomon would give Kato documentation of whatever intelligence that he'd gathered, and Kato would take that back to Mulligan. Some of this was about the British force and their plans, where they were being quartered, how they were being trained and disciplined, and what kind of supplies they were procuring. Some of the information was about what was happening in the war itself. Hercules Mulligan learned about the battles of Trenton and Princeton, for example, from Solomon via Cato. As the courier who carried the information. Hercules Mulligan gleaned information from his brother Hugh as well. Hugh's firm had become a supplier to the British Army, and as owner, he had information about everything they were buying and where it was to be sent. Some of Hercules Mulligan's intelligence was gathered in his own home as well, as was the case for a lot of people in New York. He was made to house British officers there there is some disagreement among historians about exactly when and how Hercules Mulligan started officially spying for George Washington. However, sometime around the spring of seventeen seventy seven, George Washington remarked to Alexander Hamilton's that he wished they had a trusted spy in New York City who could keep them informed on the situation there. Unsurprisingly, Hamilton's suggested his longtime friend, well known patriot and friendly year to a seemingly endless parade of British officers in need of clothing for the job. The formation of the Cooper Spy Ring would follow in about one year. Let's talk a little bit more about Hercules Mulligan's more official spycraft and how he eventually did become associated with this Cooper spir Ring after avery effort from a sponsored It's a little bit unclear exactly how Hercules Mulligan found out that he had gotten a job at a spy. The whole thing was undertaken with so much secrecy that there's actually no mention of it in Washington's or Hamilton's papers. In all likelihood, Hamilton's sent a message along with a farmer or a merchant, or some other civilian with a legitimate reason to get into New York. Along with the news that he was to be a spy, Mulligan also got a list of safe houses in New York and New Jersey where he could send messages. Many of these messages went via Cato, who people were used to seeing out and about carrying packages to and from Mulligan's shop. You would usually carry a collection of packages, all looking very much like normal parcels of clothing, but some of them contained the intelligence that Mulligan had gathered at the safe house. Goods and intelligence would be repackaged to remove all references to Mulligan and his shop, and then they would be sent on their way. In late April of seventeen seventy seven, Kato carried a package containing details of a British armada that was being assembled under General William how This is a particularly massive fleet which would contain two hundred sixty ships and more than seventeen thousand men, so the British Army was on the move and by sea. This information also contained details of a number of British and Hessian officers who were asking Mulligan to handle rush orders of lightweight uniforms, so logical conclusion the British fleet was headed south. Washington first moved his fighting force to Middlebrook side of New Brunswick, New Jersey, ready to either defend New Jersey from a massive British attack or to move southward if that was warranted. Watchers along the coast lost sight of the fleet for several weeks. When they were sighted in the Chesapeake Bay on August seventeen seventy seven, Washington deduced that their target was Philadelphia. This information meant that Washington was in fact able to meet in General how There and mount of Defense. However, how superior numbers meant that he took Philadelphia just the same, and he established a headquarters there For a while. This meant that Mulligan's intelligence in New York wasn't as important. It was nice to have, but with How's headquarters in Philadelphia, it often wasn't as critical until later on in seventeen seventy eight, when General Howe resigned and was succeeded by General Henry Clinton, who relocated the British Army's headquarters back to New York. It was about this time when Mulligan first made contact with the Culper Ring so to recap for the folks who aren't familiar. The call A Ring was one of George Washington's intelligence organizations during the American Revolutionary War. The Culper Ring was named for the code names of two of its agents, Abraham Woodhull, who was code named Samuel Culper and Robert Townsend, who was code named Samuel Culper Jr. The Culpa Ring was organized and managed by Major Benjamin Talmadge. There were other agents and sub agences in this spy ring as well, and apart from Hercules Mulligan, the most well known are Caleb Brewster, Austin row and a Strong and a woman known as three fifty five. Rather than sending scouts on short reconnaissance missions in enemy territory, the Colper Spiring operated by keeping a continual presence behind enemy lines in New York. They were all effectively working undercover and reporting your findings of British fortifications and movements back to the Continental Army. Mulligan seems to have become acquainted with the Coulpor Ring through Robert Townsend, a k A. Culper Jr. Who he had actually known for several years and once he was aware of the spir ring's existence, he thought it would be a good idea to maintain a formal connection, to have a second and sometimes better, depending on the circumstances, way of getting information to George Washington. Abraham Woodhull really didn't like this idea. As we mentioned in part one, Mulligan had been extremely visible in his pro independence activities, Connecting him Connecting with him seemed like way too much of a risk for a very covert spir ring. So when Townsend started spending time in Mulligan's shop and then collecting documents to pass on to George Washington, it was not entirely with Woodhull's approval. He was, in fact so anxious about the idea of being discovered thanks to Mulligan that he sometimes took to his bed over it. Talmudge, on the other hand, knew nothing about it until after the war because the need for secrecy was so great. Yeah, they did not have any person who knew literally every other person. That would be a bad idea and a covert spir ring. That is a poor way to run your spiring, right for one person to have literally all the detail about all the other people. So Hercules Mulligan used the Culper Spy ring to send his his intelligence occasionally and somewhat sporadically throughout the war. He really relied a lot more on Kato to do it. Kato wound up being arrested and interrogated at Provost Prison at least once, where he was reportedly treated extremely cruelly. Mulligan eventually arranged his release, and he did continue to work as a courier after that point, but having been captured once did make him a little bit less effective as a covert operative. He sort of was on the list now like Hercules Mulligan, of people who were troubled. Mulligan was arrested a second time in May of seventeen seventy eight, following an attempt by British forces to recruit him to the army at a tavern, thinking that he appeared to be so popular that if he enlisted, surely others would follow. Mulligan, of course refused, and the whole thing threatened to lead to a huge bar fight before the British forces left. Shortly thereafter, Mulligan was asted for obstructing a British officer in the performance of his duties. Mulligan wound up giving a jovial and lighthearted testimony on the matter, and the audience before him included a lot of his customers, and once again he was released, and once again afterward he returns to his spy work. The information Mulligan obtained and passed on in late seventeen seventy eight and early seventeen seventy nine included a plot to capture or assassinate George Washington and several prominent Patriot leaders, including Governor William Livingston of a New Jersey. In July of seventeen seventy nine. He also learned that Major Lynch was moving south was with his entire core, which he heard from the man himself in his shop and confirmed by finding out that his brother was provisioning them. He also passed along information regarding an eminent attack on Charleston, South Carolina in the winter of seventeen seventy nine to seventeen eighty, which Washington was once again able to act on, but similarly to previous experien in sas it was not enough to successfully defend Charleston from the British forces far superior numbers. In the summer of seventeen eighty, Mulligan gathered some particularly sensitive information British forces were planning to attack about five thousand troops led by Count Rochambeau of France when they arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, hoping to surprise them upon their arrival. This would Britain hoped derail France's involvement in the war. And this message was so important that Mulligan sent it via the Copra Rings information chain and by Kato, going straight to Hamilton's headquarters. Kato delivered his message first and once. Once George Washington heard about it from Alexander Hamilton's he immediately moved to defend of the French troop's landing. He also created some false orders about attack being planned onto New York, which he allowed to fall into British hands, making Clinton too wary to leave New York and protected in order to attack the French force. Rochambeau and his men arrived in Newport and on their way without having to fight off the British first. Other intelligence efforts were not quite as successful. In the Summer of Hercules, Mulligan was pretty sure that something was going on and that it was something big, but no amount of boisterous conversation and generous libations in his shop could reveal exactly what it seemed to be happening around the Upper Hudson River. Also suspicious on that front was Robert Townsend, whose family home on Oyster Bay was being used to billet British troops and Major John Andre was frequently seen visiting there. What was going on was that Benedict Arnold was plotting to hand over West Point to the British in exchange for money and a commission in the British Army. None of Townsend's or Mulligan's intelligence had added up to that. I mean they both knew something was up that that it still caught everyone by surprise. Andrea, however, was captured with incriminating documents, so that Patriots did find out about the plot, but not before Benedict Arnold was able to escape behind British lines, carrying with him the knowledge that Washington had a spy network, although apparently not a lot of clear detail about who was involved or how Andre was executed, and in retaliation, the British started rounding up anyone Arnold named as a spy or a sympathizer hercules brother, Hugh happened to be at Clinton's headquarters while negotiating a provisioning contract, and he heard about this order. He let his brother know and arrest was imminent, but Hercules refused to leave New York. Once again, Hercules Mulligan was arrested, and this time he was taken to Bridewell Prison, which is where he learned that his arrest had been because Benedict Arnold had named him as a spy. He nearly escaped three days in, but a patrol spotted him trying to climb over the prison wall. He wound up being recaptured and then moved to Provost Prison, which was still being overseen by his longtime enemy William Cunningham. At this point, Mulligan was court martialed. The lead witness against him was Benedict Arnold, but Arnold didn't really have any clear evidence to give. It's likely that he had simply named Mulligan as a spy because he had such long and obvious loyalist leanings. Cunningham testified as well, but his evidence was mostly his personal dislike of Hercules Mulligan. So with no hard evidence and yet another silver tongued defense, on the part of Mulligan himself. He was neither convicted nor acquitted, but kept in Provost prison because surely, after so many arrests, something must be going on. This really worked out to be kind of a bad turning point for Hercules Mulligan, and we will talk about exactly how after a brief sponsor break. Records aren't clear on exactly how long Hercules Mulligan was detained this time around in Provost prison. The reason for ultimately releasing him also is not totally clear, but it seems like he was in there for approximately five months. Even though his clothing shop had been open and staffed while he was in prison, business had dropped off precipitously. Previously, it had seemed as though British officers and soldiers were willing to overlook Mulligan's obviously loyalist leanings, whether it was because he was so friendly or because his store was so fashionable. They didn't seem willing to overlook Benedict Arnold's allegation that he was a spy, however, and that's this was especially true since he'd been imprisoned on charges of espionage and never acquitted of those charges. He wound up having to work for his brother while struggling to keep his own shop open, even though loyalists were far less likely to shop in his store. After this point, Hercules was still able to gather information while working at his brother's firm, which was still provisioning and outfitting the British military and the Americans. It was while working at his brother's firm that Hercules Mulligan heard of another plot to kill George Washington, intended to take place as he passed through Lebanon, Connecticut, on March five, s one. This followed the British forces learning that Washington was planning to meet up with Rochambeau. Sending messages via Kato was really no longer an option, both because of his own prior arrest and because he was owned by the not ever actually acquitted of treason Hercules Mulligan, So Mulligan wrote to Washington and sent his message by a Robert Townsend in the Culper Ring. The message arrived in time for Washington to change his route, avoid the British ambush, and still make his rendezvous with Rochambeau. So this was probably the second time that Mulligan saved Washington's life. Although the play Hamilton's makes it sound as though the Patriots knew their plan for the Battle of Yorktown would work thanks to Mulligan's spy work, and there was quite a bit of espionage involved in that battle success for the Patriots, Mulligan himself actually doesn't seem to have been a major player in that one. Most of the fighting in the American Revolutionary War ended after the Battle of Yorktown did now was in October of one, although the war itself didn't officially end until September three, seventeen eighty three. That window between the end of the Battle of Yorktown and the end of the war was a particularly difficult one for Hercules Mulligan and his family. Without British officers and soldiers buying clothes from him, his clothing business nearly felt failed entirely, and without a British army to outfit anymore, he couldn't moonlight at his brother's firm anymore because there just wasn't enough work for him to do there. He wound up deeply in debt, and he tried and failed to offset this debt by working in real estate. With the end of the war, Benjamin Talmadge became afraid that some of his Copra agent spies who had maintained loyalist covers during the war would be harassed or otherwise treated badly after the war had wrapped up. It was when meeting with Washington to try to figure out how to ensure the safety of his agents that Talmadge learned about Mulligan for the first time. At some point, the two men reportedly meant and Mulligan described his spy work as quote, Generals have a way of talking sometimes when they're being fitted for an embroidered waistcoat. So I keep my years, so been. On November seventeen eighty three, after the end of the war, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton went to Mulligan's home at twenty three Queen Street to have breakfast with the Mulligan family, probably as a show of thanks for Mulligan's work. Washington also ordered a complete wardrobe of civilian clothes from Mulligan, who from that point on described himself as clothier to General Washington and his advertisements. This event turned his business back around, although it was still quite some time before he was financially solvent again. His name was posted in lists of insolvent debtors until seventeen eighty five, during Washington's presidency, at which point the capital was in New York. He lived not far from Mulligan's shop, and he visited their several times. Washington also continued to buy clothes from Hercules Mulligan because of the extreme secrecy with which Mulligan had carried out his spy work. Most of their surviving correspondence is actually about ordering clothes, including a letter written to order some Moleskin pants just sent from Philadelphia in seventeen Hercules and his wife wound up having eight children together, three sons and five daughters, and they prospered until his eighteen twenty retirement. Their children were John, Sarah, Elizabeth, Margaret, William, Francis, Hercules, and Mary. Several of them lived quite long lives, although the younger three, Francis, Hercules and Mary died at the ages of ten, nine months and five. Hercules Mulligan himself passed away in eighteen twenty nine, and he's buried in Trinity Churchyard, not that far from Alexander Hamilton. That is Hercules Mulligan's story, and while um many people probably want to sing songs from Hamilton's Now I have the Disney Um Gospel Choir Hercules thing going on in my head. It's very fun to say Hercules Mulligan. It is. It's a good name. And I feel like some of the some of the things that I read as as I was preparing for this. Uh. You know, often we use people's surnames more when we're just talking about a person at length in a podcast. Uh. And it just seemed like a lot of people were electing to call him Hercules mulling In all the way through, maybe just because they were tickled by that being such an awesome name. I can't blame them. Uh. Do you have a little bit of listener mail for us as well? Do? It is from fan stands as good morning ladies. I just finished listening to the Wasp episodes and thought you might enjoy some personal slash family lore regarding the WASP group. My grandmother was a registered nurse in the Army Air Corps during World War Two. She was stationed stateside down in Dover, Delaware. She told us a story that involved herself and other nurses at the base. During the day, the nurses had washed their clothes and had everything hang out on a clothesline to dry. During that day, a group of wasp flew into the base. Once on base, they showered and freshened up. When my grandmother and her nurse friends went to retrieve their clothes, they were missing underwear. The presumption was when the wasps flew in, they nabbed the clean clothes to change into. After that, the nurses would dry their clothes inside their barracks. My grandmother told the story and laughed about it. I have no idea whether that family story is true or not, but it does amuse me a little bit that maybe if you were flying into a base and freshening up, you might want something clear to put on, and and and maybe you might take a less than up and up way solve that problem. During wartime, this letter goes on, my grandmother had to go to the mess hall to order food for the patients. So during this time she started dating a man who would become my grandfather. She was she was a second lieutenant, he was a staff sergeant. It was an officer and an enlisted avan situation which is frowned upon in the military. She finished her tour, was honorably discharged and they were married. Then my grandfather was sent over to India to finish this time and the war wrapped up. I find it amazing how women during World War two were allowed to do quote men's work, but once the men returned, women were sidelined. I think you did a great job of explaining how the wasp did their job in such a way as to not threaten a man's job, but as soon as things slowed down, they were they were essentially threatening men's work by taking away jobs from men. Uh think about it, This happened everywhere. Rosie the riverter was sent home from the factory when the boys came back from the warfront. This must have been very difficult for young women of that generation to have broken through the glass ceiling just to get pushed back down when the war was over. I was too young to really think about these things when my grandmother was alive. When I think about it, though, my mother grew up with two working parents, something that was kind of unusual back in those days. I feel like anyone can do anything regardless of your gender, race orientation, But even today, I think there is a gap between women and men, and also a race gap. I feel very strongly that there is a biased toward girls in certain race groups at a young age that carry on and perpetuate stereotyping. Well we as a society ever reached a place where everyone is equal based on GIL, I don't know, but I think there needs to be a ton of fundamental changes to happen before society embraces these viewpoints completely. Sincerely, Stand, Thank you so much. Stand. I love this story. As I alluded to, I love the story about UH alleged undergarment theft. It tickles me a little bit. I agree like with it. Definitely was hard for UH, for women who had been out in the workforce and enjoyed in a lot of cases being out in the word workforce, then being basically UH stepped backward once the war was over, which is one of the reasons why we have told some of those stories on the show. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, you can at History Podcast that How Stuffworks dot com. We do already have every other thing ever mentioned in the word in the in the play. Hamilton's on the list already, so no need to do that, But anything else go ahead right to us. UH We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Are Tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com. We're also on Pentpriss at penders dot com slash miss Industry. Our instagram is missed in History as well. You can come to our parents company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com. Put the words spies into the search bar and you will find how spies work little learn a little more about what we talked about today. You can also come to our website, which is missing history dot com. You will find show notes. You will find an archive of everything we have ever done. You will find I just said show notes. Those are the ones for Holly Holly's in my episodes, the one we have worked on, the ones we have worked on together. So you can do all that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or a miss in history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com