Robert Townsend

Robert Townsend was a New York merchant and journalist who served as the Culper Spy Ring agent known as Samuel Culper Jr during the American Revolutionary War. From British-occupied New York he gathered political and military intelligence and passed it through Abraham Woodhull’s network to Benjamin Tallmadge.

His identity remained secret long after his death and was not firmly established until the twentieth century. Lucia St. Unlike battlefield heroes, his historical importance depended on remaining outwardly ordinary.

Hourly History’s Culper Spy Ring follows Benjamin Tallmadge, Abraham Woodhull, Robert Townsend and their associates as they used couriers, coded messages, invisible ink and carefully constructed cover identities. In Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Shadow Patriots, Robert Townsend, initially another reluctant Quaker, becomes part of the intelligence network later known as the Culper Ring. In Roseanna M. White’s Ring of Secrets (the Culper Ring), in British-occupied New York in 1779, Winter Reeves lives among Loyalist relatives while secretly passing military information to the Patriot intelligence network associated with Robert Townsend.