Christian McBurney’s book Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, presents some evidence that women might have played the roles of spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island.
Mary Gould Almy was very open about her Loyalist sympathies and in his book McBurney includes a document apparently written by a French officer on August 23, 1780. In the document the author writes that a group of people meet at a rooming house on Thames Street near a wharf. Mary’s rooming house might meet the description. The officer portrays the keeper of the rooming house being a “widow” (which Mary Almy was not) but if her husband was away she might seem to be alone with her children. In her journal Mary Almy states that she has a son in New York and in this document the officer describes a young man coming regularly from New York and spending a day or two before leaving. The British were in control of New York at that time. When the young man arrives a group of men meet in a guarded room upstairs in the house. These meetings occur regularly.
McBurney includes the story of Mary Wenwood who was secretly sending information to the British about the strength of the American forces and their supplies in Massachusetts in 1775. Mary Wenwood traveled from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Newport and asked her former husband Godfrey Wenwood to pass a letter to British Captain Wallace of the ship Rose. Mary thought her ex-husband was a Loyalist and that she could trust him, but he showed the coded letter to Ezra Stiles and others who allied themselves with the Patriots. Two months later Mary asked her former husband about the letter “to her sister” and why it hadn’t been delivered. He realized that the author of the letter had to be working for the British. The letter was passed on to Henry Ward the Rhode Island Secretary of State and then on to Nathanael Greene and ultimately George Washington. Washington sent for Mary and under duress she told him that Dr. Benjamin Church was the author. Church had fooled everyone. He was a member of the Sons of Liberty in Boston and worked closely with Washington, John and Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Church was arrested and found guilty of treasons. After his release made his way to the Carribean. The story is John Nagy’s book, Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy.














