In 1783 the United States had just won the most improbable war in its history, and then it deliberately took apart the spy networks that had made victory possible. The reasoning was almost noble. Spies and standing armies were the machinery of monarchy, and the new republic wanted none of it.
Britain and the great powers of Europe had not given up on breaking America apart. A government of the people that actually worked was a threat to every throne, and the War of 1812, with the White House in flames, was the reminder. In Part 2 of our series, Professor Jeff Steinberg took up the question of who filled the gap when a nation abolished its own intelligence services. His answer was a handful of private citizens, several of them famous for other reasons.
He described the Society of the Cincinnati, the hereditary order of Revolutionary War officers, as quietly carrying the republic's security work when no government would. He noted that a French king chartered a branch of it and that its members were thick on the ground at the Constitutional Convention. When I asked him point-blank whether the Society engineered the whole thing, he said, "You could say that. Yes."
He told us about the Bread and Cheese Club, thirty-five of America's best-known artists, writers, and scientists who met in a New York bookstore, ostensibly to invent an American culture. One of them became a sought-after portraitist of European aristocracy, welcome in the private rooms of the very monarchs his network wanted to understand. His name was Samuel Morse.
Then he turned to Edgar Allan Poe. Steinberg argues from the primary sources that the drug-addled, half-mad Poe we were taught about was largely invented after his death by a rival who bought up his papers and burned what he pleased. In his account the real Poe was the grandson of Lafayette's quartermaster, received Lafayette as a teenager, was sponsored into West Point by the most powerful general of the era, and broke codes publicly in the newspapers. Steinberg points to a manuscript reported on the front page of The New York Times in 1929, in which Alexandre Dumas describes an American houseguest sent to him by Fenimore Cooper, who kept his rooms dark and walked Paris only at night. Dumas named him as Edgar Poe.
Poe died after being beaten and dressed in a stranger's clothes. Near the end of the hour I said it sounded like he had flown too close to the sun. Steinberg answered, "Exactly right. And so then the question is, who was the sun that felt threatened?" We did not settle any of it that night. This is the second of eight sessions, and he walks through the letters and forgotten manuscripts behind every claim.
Read the full essay on Substack: https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-republic-that-fired-its-own-spies