🕵️ A Fictional Historical Interview with Samuel Culper
Travel in Time with Dan | The Caroline Church, East Setauket, Long Island, New York
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. “Samuel Culper” was the code name used by Abraham Woodhull (1750–1826), one of the founders of George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring during the American Revolution. This imagined conversation is written as a tribute to his courage and the extraordinary network of ordinary citizens who helped save the American Revolution. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, inspired by the documented history of the Culper Spy Ring.
📍 Setting: The Grounds of the Caroline Church, East Setauket, Long Island, New York — circa 1779
The afternoon light falls softly through the trees surrounding the Caroline Church. It is a peaceful scene… a tidy churchyard, a village green nearby, the distant shimmer of the Sound just visible through the treeline. Nothing about this place announces itself as dangerous. That, I will soon learn, is entirely the point. A man approaches from the far side of the churchyard, moving casually, unhurried, nodding to a passing neighbor as if he hasn’t a care in the world. He is ordinary-looking in every possible way. Which is, again, entirely the point.
Dan: I appreciate you meeting me here. I’ll admit, I half expected you not to show up.
Samuel: (quietly, without breaking his easy expression) That is precisely the reaction I prefer. A man who looks like he might not show up draws far less attention than one who appears to be waiting for something. Shall we walk? Standing still in one place invites observation.
Dan: Of course. (falling into step beside him) I should say from the start that I know you as Samuel Culper. I understand that’s not your real name.
Samuel: (a slight smile) You understand correctly. And I’d ask that we keep it that way, even in friendly conversation. Habits of caution are only useful if they’re constant. The moment you relax because the company seems safe is the moment you make a mistake that costs lives. Not just your own.
Dan: That’s a sobering way to begin a conversation.
Samuel: It’s a sobering business. Though I’ll admit, (glancing sideways at me) — it has its moments of satisfaction.
Dan: Let’s go back to the beginning. How does an ordinary citizen of Long Island end up running intelligence operations for George Washington?
Samuel: (pause, choosing words carefully) You use the word “ordinary,” and I won’t argue with it. I am a farmer. A neighbor. A man who attends this church (nodding toward the building) and knows these roads and these people. And that, precisely that, is why I was useful.
The British occupied Long Island after 1776. They were everywhere. Soldiers in the taverns, officers in the finest homes, patrols on every road. Any man who looked like a spy would be caught within a week. Nathan Hale looked like a spy. (quietly) He was dead in a week.
Dan: Nathan Hale’s execution affected General Washington deeply. Is that what led to the creation of your network?
Samuel: Washington is a man who learns from failure without being destroyed by it. That is one of his great qualities. Hale was brave… extraordinarily brave. But he went alone, without cover, without a network to protect him, without any system for getting information back. When he was caught, everything died with him.
Washington needed something different. Not a hero making a bold solo gesture. A web. Quiet, connected, patient. People who already belonged where they were. People who had reasons to be there that had nothing to do with the war.
Dan: And Major Tallmadge put that web together.
Samuel: Benjamin is brilliant. (said with genuine warmth) And driven. You have to understand, Nathan Hale was his friend. His roommate at Yale. That loss was not abstract for Benjamin. He built this network in part as an act of grief and in part as a cold, clear-eyed determination that the next intelligence operation would not fail the same way.
He recruited carefully. He trusted slowly. He thought about the whole system… how information would move, how people would communicate, how we would protect each other if something went wrong. That kind of thinking saved all of our lives more than once.
Dan: Walk me through how the network actually operated. How did information travel from Long Island to General Washington?
Samuel: (lowering his voice slightly, old instincts intact even now) I gathered intelligence here on Long Island. Troop movements, supply counts, British plans, when I could get close enough to hear them, which, as a local farmer with business in the area, was more often than you might think. People talk freely in front of men they consider beneath their notice.
I passed that intelligence to our courier network. Caleb Brewster would row across the Long Island Sound at night, through British naval patrols, carrying messages to Connecticut. From there, Benjamin’s riders carried the intelligence overland to Washington’s headquarters.
Dan: And here at this church?
Samuel: (glancing around with the reflexive awareness of a man who spent years watching his back) A church is perfect. Everyone comes here. British officers, local loyalists, patriots, merchants, and farmers. No one questions why you are here. You are here to worship. If information passed between hands during a service, or in the churchyard afterward, it looked like nothing more than neighbors exchanging pleasantries.
The mundane is the best cover there is. The moment something looks dramatic, you’ve already lost.
Dan: Tell me about Anna Strong. Her role in the network is remarkable.
Samuel: (smiling with genuine admiration) Anna is one of the most clever people I have ever known, and she accomplished her work in plain sight of everyone. Her laundry line. (shaking his head at the elegance of it) A black petticoat hanging on the line meant Caleb had arrived and was ready for a pickup. The number of handkerchiefs told us which of the hidden coves he was using for the crossing.
Every neighbor could see that laundry. British soldiers rode past it. Nobody gave it a second glance. That is the genius of it… hidden in the most visible, domestic, unremarkable thing imaginable.
Dan: What about Agent 355? The mysterious woman whose identity has never been fully confirmed?
Samuel: (a long pause, expression careful)
There are things I took to my grave and intended to keep there. Some protections don’t expire just because time has passed. What I will say is this: there was a woman. Her access was extraordinary. The circles she moved in, the conversations she was present for… information came through her that we could not have obtained any other way.
She was as brave as anyone in this network. Braver, perhaps, because the consequences for a woman caught in this work would have been particularly severe. And she operated without any of the protections the rest of us had, no cover story that held perfectly, no way to simply blend into the landscape and disappear.
(quietly)
History has not given her the recognition she deserved. That is one of the things about this work that sits uneasy with me.
Dan: The network helped expose Benedict Arnold. Can you speak to that?
Samuel: (jaw tightening slightly)
Arnold’s betrayal was — it is difficult to describe the feeling of it even now. A general. One of Washington’s most trusted men. Willing to hand West Point to the British, which would have cut the colonies in half and quite possibly ended the revolution.
The intelligence that unraveled the plot came through our network. Major André, the British intelligence officer coordinating with Arnold, was identified and questioned. The documents he carried confirmed everything. Washington was devastated. I am told it was the only time during the entire war that those around him saw him weep.
When I think about what would have happened if that intelligence had not reached him in time — (shakes head slowly) — we do not get to see how this story ends. Not the way it ended.
Dan: That is the weight of what your network actually did. It’s staggering.
Samuel: We were farmers and shopkeepers, and a woman hanging laundry and a man rowing a boat at night. (simply) None of us were soldiers in any traditional sense. None of us sought glory. We sought to be useful… quietly, consistently, without recognition.
And that is perhaps the thing I would most want people to understand about this work. The loudest voices in any cause are not always the most important ones. Sometimes, the people keeping everything from falling apart are the ones you never hear about until a hundred and fifty years have passed.
Dan: It was over 150 years before the public learned the Culper Spy Ring even existed. How do you feel about that kind of invisibility?
Samuel: (thoughtfully) When I was young and first began this work, I confess there were moments when I wondered… will anyone ever know? Will any of this matter to anyone beyond these fields and this river?
But then I thought about what we were actually trying to protect. Not our own names in the history books. A revolution. A new kind of country built on ideas that had never been fully tried before. If that country survived and grew and became what Washington believed it could become — what we all believed, in our quiet, private moments — then our names being forgotten was a perfectly acceptable price.
The work was the point. Not the credit.
Dan: That may be the purest leadership lesson I’ve ever encountered.
Samuel: (stopping, turning to face me directly for the first time in our conversation)
Leadership is not about being seen. It is about being effective. The Culper Ring worked because every one of us understood that. We didn’t meet to celebrate ourselves. We didn’t seek promotions or public recognition. We asked one question, constantly, every day: What does the mission need from me today?
Answer that question faithfully enough, for long enough, and you change things. Quietly. Invisibly. Permanently.
(He glances toward the road, where a British patrol is visible in the distance)
And on that note, I believe our conversation should conclude. I have a farm to return to, and you, I think, have somewhere to be.
(He extends a hand, grips mine briefly, and then turns and walks away at the same unhurried pace he arrived with — just another unremarkable man on an unremarkable afternoon in a village that has no secrets whatsoever.)
I stood in the Caroline Church cemetery for a long time after he left, reading the names on the old stones. Ordinary names. Farmers, merchants, neighbors. People who looked like they had nothing to do with the fate of a nation.
The Culper Spy Ring remained unknown to the public for over 150 years. Its members took their secrets to their graves, buried in churchyards just like this one, under stones that said nothing about invisible ink or laundry lines or midnight rows across the Sound.
They didn’t need the credit.
They had already done the work. 🕵️
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