The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington
(Flatiron, $30)
“It sounds like the plot of a mildly implausible thriller, but it actually happened,” said Michael Schaub in NPR.org.
In 1776, the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City plotted to have George Washington kidnapped or killed, and enlisted some of Washington’s personal guards in their scheme. The conspiracy wasn’t well devised and obviously didn’t work, but thriller writer Brad Meltzer and his co-author “do a great job keeping the reader turning the pages.” Though their writing is often histrionic— suited to an airport thriller or tabloid TV show—the story itself is “beyond fascinating,” and “the amount of research behind it is genuinely remarkable.”
The co-authors still wind up with too thin a factual record, said Mary Ann Gwinn in Newsday. The scene-setting poses little trouble: Meltzer and Mensch have “abundant” material to draw on as they describe New York on the cusp of war, with the imposing British fleet closing in, citizens fleeing, and scared, green Continental troops quartering in abandoned houses while Washington tries to whip them into a fighting force. Enter the story’s villain, British Governor William Tryon, hiding on a ship offshore as he plays spymaster for the British cause. But exactly how grand a plot Tryon cooked up and how Washington’s camp responded to the threat before making arrests was never recorded, so Meltzer’s “steady drumbeat of doom begins to feel strained.”
It’s hard to know if Washington was ever even targeted for assassination, said Stephen Brumwell in The Wall Street Journal. Meltzer and Mensch think he was, which casts a certain light on a spectacle that occurred June 28, 1776, when an Irish soldier accused of participating in the conspiracy was hung in lower Manhattan before a crowd of 20,000. But Thomas Hickey’s court-martial proceedings make no mention of an assassination plot, forcing the co-authors to rely instead on widespread rumors, which started circulating before the hanging. The timing was convenient, given that the story cast the British in the worst light just as the Declaration of Independence was being debated in Philadelphia and rebels in New York were being asked to turn back a British invasion. If, “as seems likely,” the scope of the plot was exaggerated to boost the patriots’ cause, “then the whole affair occasioned the birth not only of American counterintelligence but of another phenomenon—‘fake news.’”