Hickey Leaves A Bad Mark–June 26, 1776

That New York had a strong contingent of Loyalists was never a secret in 1776, but chances are that George Washington never thought one of his bodyguards, Thomas Hickey, was one of them. Hickey was a private in the Continental Army, which meant that he was part of a group that not only protected George Washington, but the Army’s local cache of money. At one point he was arrested for passing counterfeit money and it was while he was in jail that word got back to Washington that Hickey was planning to switch sides as soon as the British got there. So Hickey betrayed both the General and the currency he’d been assigned to protect. About the cover art: many years later, a story came out that was written by Washington’s grandson (more accurately, Martha Washington’s grandson) George Washington Parke Custis, that Washington was in danger of being killed by an insider via poisoning. After Custis died, his memoirs were published by his daughter Mary Anna Custis Lee, with extensive notes added by an antiquarian. According to this account: When Washington and his army occupied the city, in the summer of 1776, the chief resided at Richmond Hill, a little out of town, afterward the seat of Aaron Burr. [Samuel] Fraunces’s daughter was Washington’s housekeeper, and she saved his life on one occasion, by exposing the intentions of Hickey, one of the Life-Guard (already mentioned), who was about to murder the general, by putting poison in a dish of peas prepared for his table. Who alerted Washington to the poisoned peas varies from one account to another, and given a bunch of the details (which I’ve largely omitted here), it’s very likely that the story is apocryphal. The post Hickey Leaves A Bad Mark–June 26, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.