For Two Shillings

The bells sounded the appointed hour of 11 o'clock on June 28, and the snare drums rolled darkly for Sergeant Thomas Hickey. All the buttons had been slashed from his uniform coat, and the red epaulet from his right shoulder. The 80 soldiers in the ceremonial guard stood at attention, bayonets fixed. A crowd of thousands had gathered in a field just off New York's Bowery Lane to watch Sergeant Hickey die on the gallows. The condemned man was "unaffected and obstinate to the last," Artillary Surgeon William Eustis reported later, "except that when the chaplain took him by the hand under the gallows and bade him adieu, a torrent of tears flowed over his face."

Hickey soon recovered and mounted the gallows. A hangman yanked the platform out from under him. Then the body remained hanging in mid-air as the crowd gradually dispersed.

Hickey was no ordinary criminal. He had been a member of General Washington's personal guard. He had been tried and convicted just two days earlier on a charge of "exciting and joining in a mutiny and sedition." Washington himself approved the sentence.

Because of widespread public alarm, New York gossips concocted wild stories of a Tory plot to kidnap or murder Washington--700 men were supposedly involved, and it was reported that the general narrowly escaped death. Most of these rumors are nonsense, but the facts are disturbing enough.

Hickey and another soldier, Micah Lynch, were seized June 14 on a charge of trying to pass counterfeit money. In jail, they were heard boasting that they had secretly enlisted with the British and that hundreds of other Continental soldiers had done the same.

Amid anxiety that recent instances of counterfeiting might be a British plot to discredit colonial currency, the New York Provincial Congress's Conspiracies Committee began a full investigation. It soon discovered that:

> New York Mayor David Matthews was involved in an even more serious plot. Arrested on June 22 and accused of "dangerous designs and treasonable conspiracies against the rights and liberties of the United States of America," Matthews admitted that he had received more than -L-100 from Tory Governor William Tryon, at Tryon's headquarters aboard the transport Duchess of Gordon, mostly for the purchase of guns to arm Tory sympathizers.

> Gunsmith Gilbert Forbes, proprietor of The Sign of the Sportsman at 18 Broad Way, admitted receiving Tryon's money through Matthews and sending one shipment of 20 guns to the British. He claimed, however, that nearly half the guns had been defective and that the real purpose of the money had been to recruit Continental soldiers to the British cause.

> William Green, the drummer in Washington's guard, was accused by Forbes of organizing the recruitment of disaffected American soldiers. Specifically, Green admitted recruiting Hickey for a payment of 2 shillings (Forbes also gave the soldier half a dollar).

Hickey himself pleaded not guilty, but he had little defense. A swarthy Irishman believed to have once deserted from the British Army, Hickey said his mam hope was that "if the enemy should arrive and defeat the Army here ... I might be safe." After the one-day trial, the 13 officers on the court-martial sentenced him to the gallows. Despite this stern punishment, General Washington appears to favor leniency for perhaps 20 others involved. In a letter received at Congress last week, the general said he was "hopeful that this example will produce many salutary consequences, and deter others from entering into the like traitorous practices."

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