The Secret Agent

The summer of 1781 was crucial for King George III’s military in America and for the colonial forces opposing the British. Earlier that year, in March, General George Washington had ordered Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, to depart Philadelphia and lead Continental forces in Virginia. Lafayette was to help counter a British invasion of the American South, as well as confront the traitor Benedict Arnold and his marauders, then ranging around Virginia. In addition, the French officer was to gather intelligence on British troop strength, positions, and strategies.

That August, upon arriving in Virginia, British General Charles Lord Cornwallis, commander of British forces in the South, sent Arnold and his troops north to New York. Cornwallis then sparred with Lafayette across the Virginia Tidewater in actions at the North and South Anna, Rapidan, and James Rivers. From New York, British commander in chief General Henry Clinton ordered Cornwallis to secure a locale on the Virginia coast with a harbor sufficient to accommodate a fleet of warships that would be reinforcing British ground troops. Cornwallis drew his forces back from Portsmouth to Yorktown to meet the enemy, but American and French forces, always seeming to know his movements, steadily dogged the British general and his troops. By October 1781, the rebels and their French enablers were besieging Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, where circumstance forced the Briton to surrender.

Unknown to Cornwallis, for months writer described as “arguably, the most important Revolutionary War spy,” was James Armistead, an enslaved African-American.