Colo. Luddenton and his officers being absent, he will with advice of his field officers nominate and furnish one Captain and Three Subalterns, to join Colo. Hopkins’ Regt.
The above Detachments to be Compleated and at the place of Rendevous without Delay, Compleatly Equipped, Agreeable to Genl. Orders, to which the most strictest attention is to be paid.
By Order of Colo. Comdr. Jac. Swartwout
Hend. Wyckoff MB
Thereafter Colonel Ludington and his regiment were frequently engaged in important work, especially during the time of doubt and dread caused by the treason of Arnold, and in the operations preliminary to Washington’s epoch-making march from the Hudson to the Chesapeake. But those services belonged to the other phases of public duty to which reference has been made and of which fuller consideration must be reserved for another chapter.
CHAPTER V
SECRET SERVICE
Another part of Henry Ludington’s services to his country during the Revolution was intimately connected with that little known underworld of the Secret Service—the men who take their lives in their hands perhaps more perilously than the soldier in the open field, who have no stimulus of martial glory, who receive no public recognition, and whose very names are doomed to obscurity. A recent work of fiction, one of the best “historical novels” of our day—“The Reckoning,” by Mr. Robert W. Chambers—gives a singularly dramatic and convincing picture of the work of a Patriot spy in New York City in the Revolution, doing work which was hateful to him and yet which was of the highest importance to Washington himself. It is a picture as true as it is graphic. An earlier work dealing with the same phase of Patriot service, “The Spy,” of Fenimore Cooper, has long been familiar to the American public, and it has generally been assumed that its hero, “Harvey Birch,” was an actual character, drawn from life; even more closely than the genius of “The Pilot” was drawn from the illustrious Paul Jones. Such indeed was the case, and with the original of “Harvey Birch,” Enoch Crosby, Colonel Ludington was intimately associated. Indeed, because of his familiarity with the borderland between the British and American lines, and also because of his knowledge and judgment of men, his discretion, and his known trustworthiness, Colonel Ludington was selected, by Washington’s instructions, to choose the man or men who should do the secret service of the Patriot cause within the British lines at New York, and to make the needed arrangements for his dispatch and for maintaining communication with him.
