How it began
In late 1776 the war was going badly. After the British took Fort Washington and Fort Lee in November, Washington’s army retreated across New Jersey. As it passed through New Brunswick, Washington asked Joshua Mersereau to organize a network to watch the British in and around New York. The family was well placed. Their tavern and stage line had given them years of reasons to travel and talk with everyone, and Staten Island sat inside British lines, a short row across the Arthur Kill from New Jersey. By 1777 the network reported through Col. Elias Dayton of the New Jersey militia. Unlike the better-known Culper Ring on Long Island, it used no codes or invisible ink.
The Delaware boats
Its first service came at once. The family learned that the British had sunk boats along the New Jersey shore, planning to raise them and cross the Delaware River after the retreating Americans. The Mersereaus found the boats, raised them and floated them to the Pennsylvania side. Accounts differ over which family members did the work, but Washington’s army crossed the river without pursuit. Weeks later, on December 26, 1776, it crossed back to win at Trenton.
Joshua, the organizer
Joshua, born in 1738, was the younger brother and business partner of Capt. John Mersereau. He studied at King’s College, now Columbia University, and practiced law in New York City before the war. In 1775 he helped recruit troops for the American expedition into Quebec, and from 1777 to 1786 he represented Richmond County in the New York assembly. As deputy commissary of prisoners under Elias Boudinot, he had a legitimate reason to deal with the British, which made him well placed to run the ring. The British tried to seize him at his house and again at his hotel, and he escaped both times. He corresponded with Washington about prisoners and intelligence and was promoted to major in 1780. After the war he moved upstate with John, became one of the earliest judges of Tioga County, and died in Union on June 10, 1804.
Jacob, the colonel
Jacob, another of the brothers, served as a colonel. When the British occupied Staten Island he fled to New Jersey and could visit his wife, Charity, and their children only in secret. On one visit soldiers nearly caught him. He jumped from a window and hid in a swamp, and the British watched the house for more than a week afterward. Charity kept the family together on the occupied island for the rest of the war, and later writers called her a patron saint of the Revolutionary period. Jacob died in 1804, a few months after Joshua, and John wrote a letter of condolence on his death that September.
John LaGrange, the agent
The ring’s best-known agent was Joshua’s eldest son, John LaGrange Mersereau, born on Staten Island around 1760 to Joshua and his first wife, Sophia La Grange, whose family name became his middle name. He was a first cousin of Peter Mercereau, the sixth generation of this line. A weakness in his right arm kept him from handling a musket, so he served in another way.
In December 1776, as the Continental Army retreated through New Brunswick, Washington and Joshua agreed that John would stay behind when the town fell to the British and report on their movements to American headquarters. He was about sixteen. He worked first in New Brunswick, then on Staten Island and in Manhattan as the British shifted their forces, and he was with his father when they learned of the boats sunk along the Delaware.
On Staten Island he could see the New Jersey shore across the Arthur Kill. He crossed by raft with his reports in a bottle towed underwater, ready to be cut loose if a patrol came near, and he left messages under a large stone on Shooter’s Island. Lights along the river told his contacts when a report was waiting. His first courier was John Parker, an apprentice in his father’s household, who carried messages across the lines at least three times before the British caught him in New Jersey. Parker died in a New York prison.
After about eighteen months, John learned the British had begun to suspect him, and he slipped away to Rutland, Massachusetts. There he spent another eighteen to twenty months as deputy commissary of prisoners at the barracks holding captured British troops, including men from John Burgoyne’s army surrendered at Saratoga.
After the war he returned to Staten Island as clerk of Richmond County, then followed the family upstate, serving as surrogate, the county probate judge, for Tioga County from 1791 and for Chenango County from 1798. In March 1840, living in Tioga Township, Pennsylvania, and giving his age as 83, he applied for a Revolutionary War pension. His sworn statement, in which he described Washington’s arrangement with his father and his months behind enemy lines, is the main firsthand record of his work, and the pension was granted. He died in 1841.
The family at work
When John LaGrange left, others in the family kept the reports moving. His younger brother Joshua collected them by skiff, and a relative, Paul Mersereau, left copies in the cellar of his Staten Island house for pickup.
Bottles, stones and lights
Reports crossed the water by raft or skiff, sealed in a bottle and towed below the surface on a line that could be cut if a British patrol came near. A large stone on Shooter’s Island, in the Kill between Staten Island and New Jersey, served as a dead drop, as did rocks and hollow trees on shore. Lights shown from Staten Island told the New Jersey side that a report was waiting or had been received. Agents signed with initials, or not at all. What they sent back covered British troop movements and fortifications, the treatment of American prisoners, and even a shortage of hay that was hobbling the British cavalry.
John’s network
By 1780 most of the family had gone quiet, and Capt. John Mersereau had become the ring’s mainstay. Washington began writing to him directly in June 1779, and in the spring of 1780 he asked for regular reports. On April 30, 1780, John wrote back from Piscataway, New Jersey, that “the Correspondence is Setled.” He had arranged night meetings with two agents, promised reports once a week or more often, and asked Washington for a Continental horse, because the work meant constant riding and some of his men watched for signals every day. His letters that spring reported a fleet of about forty ships loading troops and stores for Charleston, regiments ordered to Quebec, and the 74-gun Russell standing off Sandy Hook. His own circle numbered at least six agents. Only one is known for certain, the family’s kinsman Paul La Tourette. The others appear only as initials, such as J.C., possibly John Cork, who also informed for the Culper Ring, and A.R., possibly Asher Fitz Randolph.
A friend of the Republic
John’s new correspondent may have been Abraham Bancker. Between May and September 1780 Bancker wrote eight letters signed “Amicus Reipublicae,” Latin for “friend of the republic”: five to John and three to Washington. They warned of British plans to sink ships off Sandy Hook, of Admiral Graves’s arriving reinforcements, and of a counterfeiting scheme in Bergen County. On June 24, 1780, he reported that West Point was the British target. Washington gave Benedict Arnold command of West Point that August, and Arnold’s plot to hand it over was exposed in September. When it collapsed, Bancker fled to Staten Island for the rest of the war. Years later John and Joshua both vouched for his service when he applied for a federal post. The National Park Service also credits a ring member with helping identify the alias John André used in arranging to meet Arnold.
The price
The work was dangerous. The British declared John a rebel and offered five hundred guineas for him, dead or alive. The ring’s story was overshadowed for two centuries by the Culper Ring, but its letters survive among George Washington’s papers in the Library of Congress, and the five brothers are honored on a plaque in Port Richmond.
Sources: Mersereau Ring (Wikipedia), National Park Service, John Mersereau’s letters to Washington of April 30 and May 10, 1780 (Founders Online), Journal of the American Revolution, Defense Intelligence Agency, History’s Women, John LaGrange Mersereau’s pension record (Find a Grave), Revolutionary Richmond County.