Once upon a time there was a guy named John Honeyman.

Yes, it is a cute name and, no, I didn’t make it up. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can — but I’m not.

Honeyman the man was anything but a honey, however. In fact, he was a notorious butcher. Famous for selling beef. And notorious for his stinging contempt of the American Revolutionaries in 1776. In the spy business there are occasions when even an ordinary person can become a threat, and so it was with John Honeyman. He was a blatant Tory dedicated to the Revolution’s doom. Not only did he openly support the British troops in America, he happily did business with their armed allies: mercenaries known as Hessians, who were German soldiers hired by the King of England to help stamp out the American rebellion. In fact, Honeyman made himself so notorious that no less than General Washington himself ordered his scouts to capture Honeyman if they saw him. After all, it might be fun to shoot him. But capture him first. It might be more fun to interrogate him.

Eventually, Honeyman did get caught — and Washington got his chance to see this guy. After their meeting, this heifer handler for the Hessians’ hunger got hauled into a guardhouse.

Later that night, in the Patriots’ camp, a fire started. Not a camp fire but a raging fire. The blaze became so serious, it caused even Honeyman’s guards to scramble to put it out.

Leaving Honeyman alone.

He escaped — and made his way to the Hessians’ encampment. There Honeyman told the Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, that the American forces were a pathetic mess. And not very awe-inspiring.

But Honeyman neglected to mention one thing: in the Hessians’ own camp a Patriot spy was lurking. The spy’s name: Honeyman. Washington himself had arranged for Honeyman’s escape, first by distracting the guards with a convenient fire, and then by unlocking the guardhouse door. Earlier, in their brief meeting, Honeyman informed the General that the best time to attack the Hessians was the morning after Christmas. Presumably every Hessian mercenary would be nursing a hangover from partying the night before.

You can guess what happened next. On Christmas night, 1776, while the Hessians were whooping it up, drinking heavily and playing cards, and eating Honeyman’s beef, General Washington led his rag-tag army across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania and onto the shores of Trenton, New Jersey. The Hessians awoke to find themselves taken prisoner.

Did you guess that is what happened? Good guess! Wrong.

Yes, General Washington and his army did cross the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. The problem was, the Hessians weren’t drunk. They weren’t even all that surprised. They had been expecting an attack for several days because they had spies too. But on that blustery cold morning in December, the billowing winds prevented their muskets from firing because, amid the wind, their flint mechanisms could not spark enough flame to ignite the gunpowder. What could happen? Presumably nothing, and so the Hessians assumed that nobody, nobody, would dare attack them on that particular morning.

“No Dummköpf could be that stupid!”

Then again…

“Oh Scheiβe!”

That quaint German word refers to manure.

In this particular case it refers to the fact that both sides, both the Germans and the Americans, realized very abruptly that they now had to fight a real battle. With malfunctioning muskets.

It was not a fair fight. Not with professional German soldiers pitted against American farmers bundled up in grungy rags and, all too often, no shoes. The Germans lost. When you’re a German mercenary, stuck in a land where you don’t speak the language, where the weather is so frigid and windy that your musket malfunctions, and it is the day after Christmas — well, that’s okay. Life is an adventure! But the adventure gets very intimidating when the angry farmers you’re pitted against suddenly roll out eighteen loaded cannons. And your side has only six.

It was all over in an hour. The Hessians spent most of that time retreating.

If any of the Hessians did party the night before, it was their commander, Colonel Rall. Apparently he decided to party hard based upon the “intelligence” fed to him by John Honeyman. Later that evening, when a genuine Tory spy arrived to warn Rall that Washington’s army was on the move, Rall was so annoyed by this disturbance of his card game that he refused to admit the guy. The spy, astounded but undeterred, scribbled a note for Rall’s aide to pass along. Rall took the note from the aide and stuffed into in his coat pocket. Unread.

Honeyman, meanwhile, made himself conveniently absent from Trenton. With his true occupation still a secret, he spent the rest of the war hearing slurs that he was a Tory. Angry Patriots even charged him, time and again, with crimes related to being a Tory. Time and again, however, the charges got dropped, quietly, after somebody visited from Washington’s headquarters.

Spies are a secretive bunch, at least until they publish their memoirs. Honeyman never wrote any, and because spies like him dislike any official documentation of their activities — for who knows what traitors lurk among those ordinary bureaucrats? — little documentation exists. Consequently, some historians question whether Honeyman was indeed a spy for General Washington, despite what Honeyman’s descendents say. The naysayers theorize that the story, which Honeyman himself never told, has been embellished, perhaps from nothing.

Well, if the story is true, Honeyman covered his tracks pretty well, as a sneaky spy should. If the story is false — well, that means Honeyman ended up a pretty lucky Tory. For when the war ended, a great many Tories decided to skedaddle from the newly independent United States, most of them fleeing to England or Canada. But Honeymen and his family stayed put in New Jersey, unmolested. He died there, decades later, at the age of 93.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire