Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring

His anguished mind writhed with contradictions. He [Robert Townsend] was a man of parts and halfs, in a time of wholes and absolutes.

Yale students were the first American students to organize a boycott against British-made goods, and when Hale was entering, the graduating class voted almost unanimously to appear “wholly dressed in the manufactures of our own country” at their commencement ceremony.

Yale was notorious for its politics. Afterwards, one fierce Loyalist, Thomas Jones, recalled bitterly of his alma mater that it was nothing but “a nursery of sedition, of faction, and republicanism,” while General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in North America, branded the place “a seminary of democracy” full of “pretended patriots.”

Winter was traditionally a quiet time for armies, summer being the accepted and most civilized season to recommence killing the enemy.