Spies, Espionage, And Secret Writing In 1770's - Historical Writing Series Part 5

we've got Brian Allison and he's just been downloading so much intense information about writing just standard writing using quills and pens and I'm it's always fascinating to have conversations Brian because he knows so much wonderful stuff so recently in the we had the series turn and it had spy stuff and it is 18th century Revolutionary War period spy stuff they didn't do spy stuff right over and they did have spy inks and paper and special ways to ride and and spy craft in the 18th century and you've studied some of that during there so tell me you tell me about some of the neat spy stuff for Revolutionary War period oh it's a you know the art of hiding things isn't old when it goes back to Caesar in fact the first cipher and by the way there's a difference between codes and ciphers ok codes tend to be when you take a subject and give it a numerical or letter code so and that's usually used with code books and in the Revolution you saw that with the in turn you'd see that where they'd say like 137 is the King 567 means Spain that's a code book and a code and that's the way they did it ciphers are where you use a table that replaces each letter with another symbol so you the first cipher in history was the caesarian cipher or Julius Caesar used it and it's called a ship cipher in other words you take alphabet a B C D D all the way to Z then you shift it over several letters and you put right over the a h i j KN lick and then go all the way up to the g and then when you're writing the letter if you want to substitute you instead of an A you write H me is I and so you'd say you know HIV all these strange letters and that would hide the message you know that was enough for Roman times that was the very first cipher and all of them I probably confuse exactly and when those people than me I'd look at it and say if I didn't know what it was now a mathematician in crack that in five seconds sure and that's a computer can do it in no time so this was this constant struggle between and this was the age of reason this was the age of learning mathematicians absolutely love challenge of cracking the code so it's actually a high point in espionage history this is a kind of unsung where there was a race between the mathematicians breaking the codes and people coming up with new ciphers and all through this area see it and not just in military circles turn shows the culper spy ring which is Samuel culper jr. or senior actually who it turns out to be a very boring farmer named Abraham Woodhull New York I took him years to figure out who he was and this kind of haphazard aspiring that miraculously didn't get anybody hanged and they were able to get the George Washington wonderful information and it's a compelling story but that's not just the only part of it I mean diplomats used it some of those entertaining stories you'll see is in John Adams correspondence where he's always just completely frustrated with James Lovell who was one of the congressional love figures at the time and who comes up with all their diplomatic ciphers and he applies to Adams the code names CR and gives him the CR code to work right it's confusing you get one letter off the whole message goes off I don't know they I have tried to use the CR cipher and I'm going wait a minute where did I lose this because if you're if you do that right the middle of the word you can lose an entire letter on one mistake and he is constantly complaining in his letters he's getting these instructions from Louisville without these high-rent and he's saying basically something from Louisville about mine of the 24th who knows what nonsense I can't read it you know it's just a constant complaining is like said that is this is so human but but this is part of everybody day life in those days a lot of great men like George Washington use ciphers to hide business deals or secrets like that and in private life love love affairs we're often using ciphers to hide things and and codes so it's a it's a fascinating subject and it goes through all strata of society spies were considered ungentlemanly in those days and them hanging wood they were caught but almost it's funny to see how the the double standard was that gentleman used these secrets but they didn't consider them some spies mmm-hmm what about hiding your message itself that is an art in itself I'm just developing right now a workshop to explore some of these techniques and that's the fun part is is how did they get the message hidden invisible ink is the the obvious one and most invisible inks for years or what they call thermally reactive inks thermally reactive means just that heat exposes it and if you remember from your kid days onion juice milk lemon juice things they're based off that you expose them to fire and it blackens up one of the cheapest and easiest ones to do and it actually just mentioned in an 1804 recipe book is if you take lemon juice and add alum to it okay what happens is there's something about the chemical reaction you can't see it when you write it and lemon juice can be iffy if you just use lemon juice I've often get these frustratingly vague remarks on the paper they're kind of breath you put that alum in it it turns black when it hits the flame and it's just like you can see why that was so you know effective so until you put them on the flame though you can't see basically yeah and so it's that they call it secret writing today or invisible ink this these techniques were known from antiquity I mean there's there's a message going back to the Roman times of them to talk about if you write in milk it'll be invisible and you heat it you can see it again so by the time the 18th century turn comes along that's old hat they don't really have you know every suspicious letters go deep well we can see what happens Washington and his spy ring actually used one of the more interesting and advanced techniques of the whole 18th century and that's something called sympathetic ink sympathetic ink is always to component you've got an agent as they call it which is the writing fluid then he got a reagent and that's the developer so in his case he raves about the stuff we still don't know exactly what it was composed of they've got some theories and some some studies done on it but you got different there I've got some suspicions that there's something else going on here okay we're missing the suspicion is that the he took the the prevailing theory I should say that he took the two components of iron gall ink this it's given to him the the recipe given to him by one of his operatives so tannic acid iron sulfate the two components and if you write with the iron sulfate and I've done this it does it's it's fairly invisible if you leave it too long the arrow will oxidize oxidize it and it will appear but in a short term message yes it'll it'll be invisible and you write it fairly so you want the more yellow the paper the better because it is tend to be yellow but you let that go and the the trick is to make sure you don't your message doesn't attract attention right an actual letter over the top of that with another kind of ink and then that way they see that you know the inspector looks at it looks innocently pass it on when the person receives it they take that oak golf solution the iron gold tannic acid and they soak a cloth in it and dab it over the top of the secret ink and it instantly reacts with the air in total black right and so by doing that you've got this to sophisticated two-component ink that isn't going to be likely to come under scrutiny and everything my problem with it is and again they've done a lot of research on this and I'm not gonna say that's wrong I just have my major problem with the the current thinking on that is Washington in his correspondence calls it the sympathetic stain and he's just raving about this and talks about how superior this is to the old lemon juice method and everything and at one point he says it cannot be developed by heat or any other sort of treatment well this stuff can I've tried it with both the oak galls and the tecnique acid you hold that over a candle flame and does show us it does so much though so that wouldn't work at least by his description exactly so it doesn't meet that requirement the other requirement is we don't know what were the ingredients of sparking a problem but they went out of their way to hide the process the men who developed this sympathetic stain they said I think he said he several years maybe five years that he used to develop the process and we know it used a lot of exotic ingredients because they're always talking about getting my dose of medicine and code and saying you know I thought the ink has come in so it must not have been something like oak galls and right had that all yeah they could get that down to the hardware store but this was apparently something more sophisticated so at this point there's not much known about the sympathetic state there's more breeding so if there's still a mystery there we still don't actually know when my opinion there is because there's just too many clues were reading what Washington said and it just doesn't seem to add up to this this fluid and that the mystery is we do have existing some surviving spy letters from the culper ring that have been chemically analyzed and they found tannic acid and oh and and iron sulfate so something's missing I don't know what it is but I'd like to know more about it I'm no expert on chemistry if you're experts on this and you can guide me please let me know in the comments I'd love to know but I mean those two criteria they're you know the heat and and especially that that odd chemical like oh everybody knew about this right even people already knew about this ox call technique doing it in two different components and the arts called tannic acid method has been known at least since the mid 17th century so it seems unlikely that this by itself would be so mysterious by the late 18th century that it would fool the experts um still I think I'd love to know more about that I'd love to see need to do some well I'm serious I don't know if I'm licensed to do that but honestly that's the one of the fun things about doing this sort of research is you can have those questions and you might be wrong you might be right but that's the whole process here is questioning the sources finding the confirmation and moving on from there so and this is what's wonderful about this sort of research is so many of them are reticent about talking about it for example like I said some of those we mentioned love affairs would use this thing they often use what they call today dead drops and that's a Cold War term where you you drop a message off at a neutral point the other person picks it up they never see you in public together an 18th century dead drop was founded in 2011 by a furniture restorer in England it was a chair an eighteenth-century chair from a French estate and had come through this family it had been in that house since before the revolution in France and this family and England had bought it and they took it the upholsterer while he was working on it lo and behold in the arm of the chair he pulls out a love letter it's written all in French and I can't tell you the whole thing you could look it up online and find this news story but it basically says you know my aunt's in the next room and she's bothering me when I want to think you know and do you think I would tell anybody about what's going on I don't you know I wouldn't run that risk in her and it's a wonderful charming little letter but obviously shoved into the arm of this chair 200 years ago and it was never received something to be exactly whoever was supposed to pick that up in so when you realize there's cases like that where they're still finding these letters today there was a civil war spy letter that was only decoded I want to say five years ago I've been in a museum for years and nobody thought to actually decode it so this is this is an area where they obviously did not want their secrets found out and that's part of the challenge and the fun of it is trying to pick apart and find where the keys go and for how did they do it and try to rediscover those mysteries they wanted to forgot so we talked about turn a little bit and some of the things that they were doing are there more interesting things that you mind the burn is actually a very fascinating series and I give them full credit for making an entertaining story out of this this this fascinating subject obviously it's like any theatrical entertainment kind of thing they're going to cut corners and they're going to sometimes do things for dramatic licensure that wouldn't offend - exactly so one of the plans there to tell story yeah if you want to see that I was talking in another talk about the polygraph not the lie detector but the machine that copies like well if you want to see one look at the credits of turn there's one prominently displayed even though it wasn't invented til 1803 so but it looks and I understand what it did that as a graphic designer myself I would have said home keep it in you know it looks great that's the thing is you have to sometimes make those decisions one of the big ones was criticisms I heard levelled it was they went about this thing with the eggs these eggs to do secret writing to hide a message and send it from life that was never used by the culper spy ring at all in fact it was such an old trick it was probably forgotten by the 18th century now in the 17th century you see several authors mentioning it but there's not one documented use during that war something they do get amazingly at right and in very dramatic form one of the agents then of course she becomes the love interest in the thing in real life there probably never was a love affair between and a strong and her neighbor Abraham Woodhull but again that's Hollywood we've got to have it exactly and it's it was it was that part of it was one of the best parts of the show I thought however they at least show Anna strong as being what she was a very independent a very foreign minded woman who took a really dangerous role in this affair because she was the linchpin we talked about dead drops they had a very sophisticated one for the 18th century and it's meant it's shown beautifully in that show exactly how it work the way it works is the agent would come along to one of woodhull's fields and the dead drop was a porcelain jar he would leave the letter or whatever he'd found in there stopper it put it in the field and bury it after dark Woodhull would come out either the next day the next night when no one was watching dig it up bring it in but now he's got to get back to Washington's hands and that means putting it into the courier's hands and the couriers were Brewster and those those sailors that would come in in the middle of the night and meet him at these coves well there were six coves near Setauket on Long Island and they were each numbered by the the ring one through six it was Anna strong job to act as the courier as the flag to get the the code across to make sure these guys knew message was coming and she did it in a beautiful fashion the best way to keep a secret as it's been said Margaret Atwood said it the best way to keep a secret is to print pretend there isn't one and that's exactly what she did she had one black petticoat and every time there was a message left and Woodhull gave her the knob she'd put out that black petticoat on the line and then she put one three five six garments out next to it there's your code the black petticoat meant the message is coming and one two three that means the third Cove and so the boat would come into the third Cove that night they'd meet him handoff and out before the British were even aware it was happening so they had a very sophisticated arrangement and and a strong was definitely the the linchpin that held that ring together in that sense so there were things they did get very right in that show and other things for dramatic license but in a way that doesn't matter to me because it's I had a friend one time who mentioned Hollywood and history and this is a controversial thing among re-enactors I'm sure I know too many people who have told me what how many things are wrong with Gettysburg I've heard that all the you know over and over again but think about it this way if it wasn't for Hollywood how would we have our history I mean we still think that Andrew Jackson looked like Charlton Heston because we've all seen him so many times that's the me what the turn benefit is you watch it you're fascinated you think this is a an amazing story did this really happen and even when you read the book and find out well some of it happened but some of it didn't when you get the true story you wouldn't probably have picked up that book except you saw it on the screen it was so fascinating and flashy and over-the-top so to me the best way to use Hollywood the best way to use TV is as a gateway you get the spectacle there and there's still cheesy movies from when I was a kid but I still in love with because they they served as the Gateway for me they're part of our memory for remembering those things and in the same way folk tales we know that there's truth there and we also know it's over-the-top exact right and so we know as we interpret movies well this is over-the-top but there's this there's this that's real underneath and we the ability this amazing ability to kind of interpret that right exactly it's like that part yeah battle part I believe okay you know the balloon came down they didn't and things like that you know so you do get these these you've got a filter it's like anything else one of the best moments I ever had in my career was years ago when I was working at Carson plantation in Franklin and we gave it's a civil war hospital when we give tours of the battlefield and I have this school group and there's this little looks like she's about nine years old you know and she's a troublemaker you can tell up front of the room and I mentioned something about one of the portraits in the house the lady in the portrait and how and somebody said how pale she looked and I said well Victorian women generally didn't wear a lot of makeup in those days it was considered impolite and this little girl looks me dead in the eye and she says I don't believe you just like that you know obviously I'm styling some trouble I stopped and I said you don't I said good and I stopped the whole school group I said she just said she doesn't believe me good never believe anything that somebody tells you look it up yourself I said you all have minds you all have a reason look it up read it find out don't take my word for it I might be wrong I said now when you read it the reason I'm telling you this you're gonna find out I'm right on that but I said don't ever take somebody's word for it always do your own research that little girl didn't know where to put her face I didn't fall for it but it's valuable advice I didn't realize how valuable it was till after there I should apply that to my own studies because it's the same thing TV is great movies are great in the internet isn't right it can lead us to question it does so it always does and by doing so it leads you a little closer to the truth so yes movies don't get every button right and they don't get that they don't they can't they have a budget they just can't do that but they can give you the feel they can give you and they can bring that world to life in a way that something can't or they can do it wrong and you say oh I'm gonna figure out right exactly so even by a negative example they can lead you to the truth that way thank you Brian I am love all that wonderful spine for me everybody loves spy stories and there's so much there to cover if you want more information about Brian Allison and what he does there'll be a link down in the description section thank you all for all your amazing support and thanks for watching

Channel: Townsends

Views: 115,569

Keywords: 18th century, 19th century, brian allison, codes and ciphers, espionage, history, jas townsend and son, jon townsend, reenacting, spies, spy, townsends, turn, turn show, writing, writing with ink

Id: FVpkrRKphcU

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019