New research sheds light on the possible identity of Cato, the Black man who conveyed the tailor’s lifesaving intelligence to the Americans during the Revolutionary War
According to popular lore, Hercules Mulligan—tailor, spy and ardent patriot of Hamilton fame—was working at his Manhattan shop on a frigid night in 1779 when a British officer bustled in, looking for an overcoat. Precious few orders had been placed that day, so Mulligan was happy to oblige, despite the late hour.
The intimate act of taking measurements was often eased by conversation, so Mulligan began prompting his customer with a few innocent questions. Suddenly, a boasting tale spilled out of the soldier’s mouth. His days of keeping watch in the freezing cold would soon be over, he was sure of it. In fact, the man bragged, the entire war would end in mere days with a sweeping British victory. What harm would it do to tell his tailor? After all, everyone would soon know about the brilliant plot to capture and assassinate General George Washington.
Mulligan calmly recorded the distance from the nape of the man’s neck to his waist and the circumference of his chest, but inside, his mind was racing. After the officer left, Mulligan began taking much more detailed notes, capturing every aspect of the imminent plot the man had described. Missive in hand, he quickly locked up and sprinted down to the docks, searching for his trusted assistant, an enslaved man named Cato, in hopes of spiriting the message out of British-occupied New York City and into the hands of an American contact, thereby saving the general—and perhaps even the young nation itself.
This is a compelling and oft-repeated narrative, but how much of it can be proved? How do contemporary historians know that the tailor was a spy at all? And who was the courier with enough bravery and skill to escape New York Harbor and safely convey the intelligence to the Americans?
Documents newly discovered by historian Claire Bellerjeau, one of the co-authors of this article, shed light on Mulligan’s life and the possible identity of the Black man believed to have helped him. These papers focus on an individual by the name of Cato, who was enslaved by members of the powerful Schuyler family, then fled New York around the time of the foiled assassination plot. They add to the growing corpus of previously untold and incomplete stories of Black patriots.
“These findings provide a more nuanced view of Cato,” underscoring the “role of Black Americans in the Colonies and the new nation,” says Bill Bleyer, author of George Washington's Long Island Spy Ring.
New York City fell into British hands in the fall of 1776. Many patriots remained behind enemy lines, and Mulligan wasn’t the only spy in town. The work of a group now called the Culper Spy Ring produced hundreds of letters, more than 190 of which still exist. None of Mulligan’s correspondence survives, but he is mentioned by name in a May 8, 1780, Culper letter from American spymaster Major Benjamin Tallmadge to Washington.
Sometime in the previous weeks, a key member of Washington’s spy network in New York, a merchant named Robert Townsend, had suddenly refused to continue in his role as lead spy, citing the danger and stress of his position. His counterpart on Long Island, a farmer named Abraham Woodhull (alias Samuel Culper), needed a new agent in the city, and “Mr. Mulligan” was one of two names suggested, along with a “Mr. Duchie.” Soon after, however, Townsend relented and agreed to continue collecting intelligence, so Mulligan never joined the Culper ring. But the letter stands as evidence that Mulligan was a known patriot and willing operative for the Americans during the Revolutionary War.
No other primary source backs up Mulligan’s work as a spy. The earliest telling of his role in thwarting the assassination plot appears in recollections composed by Alexander Hamilton’s son John Church Hamilton, who wrote the following in an 1834 biography of his father:
A partisan officer, a native of New York, called at the shop of Mulligan late in the evening, to obtain a watch-coat. The late hour awakened curiosity. After some inquiries, the officer vauntingly boasted that, before another day, they would have his rebel general in their hands. This staunch patriot, as soon as the officer left him, hastened unobserved to the wharf and dispatched a billet by a Negro, giving information of the design.
Details about Mulligan’s brave courier, called simply “a Negro” in the initial account, became more elaborate over time. The name “Cato” first appears a century later, in a 1937 book titled Hercules Mulligan: Confidential Correspondent of General Washington. Author Michael J. O’Brien asserted that it was Mulligan who’d enslaved Cato, “whose name has been handed down in tradition,” but provided no additional information about his identity.
Enslaved Black men were often assigned names from the classical world, such as Cato, Jupiter and Caesar. These names tended to reflect the enslavers’ desire to mock the powerlessness of those they enslaved and demonstrate their own sophistication and classical education in Greek and Roman history.
While narratives concerning Cato’s enslavement by Mulligan and work in his shop are widely accepted today, no contemporary documents exist to prove these claims. Though enslaved people labored in a number of New York City tailor shops around the time of the American Revolution, Mulligan’s workforce in 1774 appears to have consisted of three Scottish indentured servants. Were elements of Cato’s story preserved in oral tradition, or are they merely historical embellishment?
In 1790, the first federal census indicated that Mulligan enslaved one individual, with no further details provided. The next time Mulligan appears in the census records, in 1820, he is still listed as only having one enslaved person in his household, an unnamed woman in a column marked “Females of 45 and upwards.”
It’s certainly possible that the person Mulligan enslaved in 1790 was Cato, and that this arrangement had existed for at least a dozen years, going back to the time of the Revolution. Perhaps Mulligan later sold or manumitted Cato and then purchased a Black woman prior to the 1820 census—but this seems unlikely.
Mulligan was a charter member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated for the gradual emancipation of enslaved people in the state. His name appears on the organization’s roll in February 1785 and again in May 1787, alongside other notable figures such as Hamilton, John Jay and Townsend. Although Mulligan (and many other members of the group) continued to enslave people, seemingly placing them at odds with the society’s goals, the tailor was less likely to be actively engaged in the buying and selling of enslaved people during that time.
An alternative explanation is that the individual listed in both census records was the same woman. By 1820, she may have been too old to be freed under New York state law, which prohibited people over the age of 50 from being manumitted so that the Overseers of the Poor would not be burdened with the expense of their care. (These officials were in charge of the welfare of indigent residents and also certified the manumission of enslaved people.)
But what if the Cato of legend was enslaved by someone else? The earliest account does not imply that the Black courier was enslaved by Mulligan, only that he was present at the docks, and the tradition O’Brien cites is quite specific regarding his name.
A Black man named Cato Howe is sometimes credited with being the man Mulligan used to send the dispatch. Howe served with the Second Massachusetts Regiment and participated in major military campaigns, like the winter of 1777 encampment at Valley Forge and the 1778 Battle of Monmouth. After his discharge in 1783, Howe returned to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he lived in a Black community called Parting Ways and worked as a farmer until his death in 1824. While several historians share an accurate story of Howe the Massachusetts soldier, many others conflate this man with the Cato who was supposedly enslaved behind enemy lines in Manhattan and aided Mulligan by passing along crucial intelligence.
A fresh examination of the historical evidence offers another compelling possibility for the mysterious Cato’s identity. The research is based on two documents: one, a description of an enslaved man named Cato in the archives of Trinity Church, where Mulligan was an active congregant and later buried, and the other, a newspaper advertisement seeking someone who appears to be this same Cato, who had “absconded”—likely by boat—at the very time of a newly discovered assassination plot against Washington in March 1779.
As Steven J. Niven, a historian at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, explains, the new analysis “serves as a model for other writers seeking to weave together church and census records, runaway slave adverts, and related fragments of evidence now available through open access digital humanities projects.”
After the original Trinity Church building was destroyed by fire in September 1776, congregants began worshipping a few blocks away at St. Paul’s Chapel. Some of the only primary documents from that time in the Trinity Church Archives are the 1782 pew rent ledgers, which record individuals who paid for seats at St. Paul’s, as was the custom at the time.
An entry in the ledgers indicates that Dirck Schuyler’s family paid in cash for the seat of a man named Cato. Dirck’s household was a branch of the powerful Schuyler family, whose members had been important figures in New York society and politics for generations. The fact that the Cato named in the church records is not listed as a Schuyler relative and lacks a last name of his own indicates that he was almost certainly an enslaved Black man who was held in high enough regard by the family to be allowed to sit in their pew rather than being consigned to the balcony with the other enslaved people. Only two other enslaved people were recorded as sitting in the expensive pews of St. Paul’s in 1782; both are women, described only as “DePeyster’s wench” and “Roomer’s wench.”
Dirck and his wife, Ann Mary Schuyler, were members of Trinity Church and successful chocolatiers in Manhattan, with a shop on Maiden Lane, not far from Mulligan’s tailor shop on Queen Street. Their chocolates, sold “by the box or less quantity,” according to an advertisement, were a product of the labor of Cato and other skilled enslaved people.
Enslaved workers were key to the Colonial chocolate business: A 1772 ad sought to purchase a “valuable” Black man who had been “bred to the chocolate-making business,” while a 1775 listing announced the sale of a 32-year-old Black man who “understands the business of chocolate-making.” That work would have included hefting heavy sacks of cocoa beans; grinding cocoa powder in a large mill; and even rendering animal fat slowly over a fire to produce tallow, which was used to give the chocolate a creamy texture.
Maiden Lane was home to several other chocolate makers, such as Mark Murphy, who advertised “chocolate of the first quality,” and Peter Low, who concluded a 1771 fugitive slave ad by reiterating that he “continues to make and sell chocolate, at his house on the upper end of Maiden Lane, near the Broadway, where those who please to favor him with their custom may be supplied with that which is good, on reasonable terms.”
Mulligan, meanwhile, was a vestryman of Trinity Church, meaning he was one of the parishioners who managed the administration and financial concerns of the congregation. He was also a close friend of Hamilton, whose future wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, was a distant cousin of Dirck. While Mulligan may not have been close with this particular Cato, he was almost certainly aware of him.
Interestingly, an enslaved man named Cato appears to have gone missing around the same time as the plot to assassinate Washington. On March 24, 1779, Ann Mary (by now a widow) ran a notice in the Royal Gazette seeking information about the escapee:
Absconded from his mistress, the widow of the late Dirck Schuyler of this city, a Negro man named Cato, alias Joshua, about 30 years old, strong-made and of a yellowish complexion, and is well known in this city, he is designed to go a privateering, and I do forewarn all captains of privateers and others from harboring or concealing him.
The timing of this ad is not insignificant. While historians have long known that the British formulated an assassination plot against Washington in 1779, the exact date was unknown. In 2023, however, three students at James Madison University uncovered a Virginia court document apparently connected to the plot. Dated March 13, 1779, the bond agreement references an upcoming trial for a conspiracy “to murder George Washington and the honorable members of the Continental Congress.”
Given this timeframe, could it be that Cato, who appears to have had ambitions to make money at sea as a privateer, was the same Black man whom John C. Hamilton described as being present at the docks to transport Mulligan’s dispatch across the water? And is Cato’s reappearance in the Schuyler pew in 1782 evidence that his absence from the chocolate shop was only temporary, as he assisted Mulligan with spying activities, and not a full-fledged escape from his enslavers?
The timing seemingly aligns, and according to the ad, Cato was “well known in this city.” Was he well known enough for Mulligan to trust him with such an urgent and dangerous message? Knowing that Cato was a member of the same church might have given Mulligan confidence in the man’s character, and a further examination of his alias may provide a clue as to his intentions.
In addition to the name given to him by his enslaver, Cato seemingly chose a biblical name for himself: Joshua, according to the ad placed by Dirck’s widow. The selection of that particular name could be significant. In the Hebrew Bible, Joshua is an enslaved Israelite who escapes Egypt in the Exodus and becomes one of the faithful spies sent to scope out the land of Canaan in the Book of Numbers. Later, it is Joshua who assumes leadership of the Hebrew people after the death of Moses and leads them into war to conquer the Promised Land. It doesn’t require a great leap of faith to imagine a regular churchgoer like Cato recognizing the symbolism such a name might carry in the context of his own life.
Elizabeth J. West, a literary scholar at Georgia State University, says that Cato’s adoption of the name Joshua exemplifies “a legacy of enslaved African Americans proclaiming their agency” by reinterpretating the stories of biblical heroes and heroines. She adds that his life offers a lens through which to view “the everyday role of African Americans [in] business and industry in Colonial New York.”
Niven, of the Hutchins Center, connects the new research to “the recent flowering of local history projects and deeper investigations of forgotten people of color in the Colonial archive.” The analysis “carefully separates long-established myth-making with a nuanced microbiography of the skilled chocolatier Cato,” he explains.
We will likely never know for certain whether Cato, the enslaved worker in the Schuylers’ shop, was also a spy for the Americans whose courage and skill on the water helped thwart a credible assassination plot against Washington. Whatever the case, however, Cato stands as evidence of the many often “invisible” figures whose presence, skill and labor helped shape the course of the Revolution—and the history of the United States.