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Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The (Alleged) Plot to Assassinate George Washington
20 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss a little known conspiracy theory, the plot to assassinate soon-to-be president but-then General George Washington!
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Transcript
Welcome and Patron Acknowledgment
00:00:08
Speaker
It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy patron bonus episode. Why, hello there, listeners to the patron bonus episodes, the podcast's guide to the conspiracy, and a special hello to Lisa. Lisa, who happens to be our new patron, our latest patron. Welcome, Lisa, to the bonus episodes of the podcast's guide to the conspiracy.
00:00:36
Speaker
made it sound a little bit hammer horror there, but that's not a bad thing, I suppose. Could've gone for my, I'm about to say Alfred Northhead impression, but that's a philosophy that no one remembers. Alfred had just gone, hello, deeeev! That was me trying to do some kind of Scottish gamekeeper. Hello there! No, that's not even Scottish. That's not even Scottish. I've completely lost the plot.
Assassination Plot Introduction
00:01:01
Speaker
Let's talk about George Washington then.
00:01:02
Speaker
Indeed. So did you read the story? I didn't actually, because it's a Washington Post article and when I looked at it, it was like, if it wasn't behind a paywall, I'd already read my number of things on the Washington Post per month that you're allowed to read and it wouldn't let me read it. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
00:01:25
Speaker
You could have just searched for the story and found the Smithsonian article instead. Well, I didn't know it was based on the Smithsonian article because I couldn't read the original, which would have told me it was based on the Smithsonian article. Just look how plot George Washington assassination. Oh, for God's sake, man. Anyway, there's notes here so I can just read off them or just listen to you while you talk about it.
00:01:43
Speaker
It's true. So this is a story which kind of came into my orbit two or three months ago, and it's been kind of sitting in the background for something to talk about. But there's really only one particular source, which is conspiracy thriller writer Brad Meltzer.
00:02:00
Speaker
and not enough kind of additional stuff to kind of support going into any particular depth, which is why it's perfect content for a Patreon bonus episode. So, Brad Meltzer is an author of conspiracy thrillers. I know his work through the TV show Decoded. Now, I put Josh through the horror of watching a season of America Under.
00:02:24
Speaker
I mean, Brad Meltzer's Decoded is even more stupid. And it's kind of wonderfully stupid. So Brad Meltzer basically acts as Charlie in Charlie's Angels. He sends his three investigators off to investigate mysterious American mysteries such as where is the cornerstone of the White House and has it gone missing? Did John Wilkes Booth actually fake his death?
00:02:49
Speaker
who was D.B. Cooper, and is the Declaration of Independence on display in Washington the original? Oh, and in season two, they investigate whether the Spear of Destiny is real or not, which is not a particularly American story, but they were obviously stretching in season two to find topical things to do. And the three presenters who were sent off by Brad appear to have been employed on the notion that they are the most credulous people they could find.
00:03:17
Speaker
It was really amazing, an engineer, an English professor, and a US army lawyer, and they would just buy, hook, and sinker notions of template conspiracies and the like without there being any real evidence whatsoever. It was a delicious train wreck to watch every week, and I'm sad that it only lasted two seasons. Every so often I look up to see if they're going to make more, and they're not.
00:03:45
Speaker
Now it's hard to tell whether Brad was kind of in on a joke because he would just send them off on their missions and they would ring him up halfway through the show to get further clues for things to do and you kind of sometimes got the impression that
00:04:01
Speaker
he thought what he was getting to do was absolutely ridiculous, but they were giving him money, so why not?
Details of the 1776 Plot
00:04:08
Speaker
It's hard to tell. But he has uncovered an interesting historical footnote in Revolutionary War history, which was back in 1776, there appears to have been a plot to assassinate General George Washington of the Revolutionary Army.
00:04:32
Speaker
which you'd think would be something we'd know more about, but for reasons we'll get to never really made much of a splash at the time. When you say the story comes via him, did he write the article? So he and another person have written a
00:04:52
Speaker
non-fiction book called The First Conspiracy, the plot to assassinate George Washington. And he came across the details of the plot in a footnote to a history book he read years ago, and it was kind of sitting in the background of his writing mind as something to do something with. And eventually he got around to the point where he's going, well, you know,
00:05:17
Speaker
I could if I tried to write a fictional story about a person who would eventually become American president who has been plotted against by a foreign power who's actually about to invade the country people would go no no that's uh you've gone a little bit too far with your thriller fiction there Brad but you see this is a true story and it's quite an
00:05:41
Speaker
Interesting one. So back in 1776 it's kind of thought by most historians that about one in five British colonists were actually loyal to the British monarch and the majority of the loyalists either lived in New York or New Jersey at the time. Now the governor of New York
00:06:03
Speaker
And the mayor of New York, William Tyron and Dave Matthews, not on the Dave Matthews Band. I had to check this. They were loyalists to the British Crown.
00:06:15
Speaker
But at the time, New York was also kind of being occupied by a large number of revolutionaries. So the governor was basically living on a boat in the middle of the New York harbour in kind of self-imposed exile so that he wouldn't get into trouble with the revolutionaries on the land. And he would take visitors who would come to see him.
00:06:38
Speaker
And basically one day, he and the mayor, David Matthews, once again, not of the Dave Matthews Band, decided that they would hatch a plot to cause havoc in New York, blow up bridges, and kill George Washington, who at the time was General George of the Continental Army, the force that was trying to repel the British from the American shores.
00:07:06
Speaker
So how did they plan to assassinate him then? Well, they recruited conspirators from the lifeguards. Lifeguards? I suppose they could just be on hand when he was having a swim in
00:07:21
Speaker
and conspicuously not safe. David Hasselhoff would grease himself up, slip into the water, wrap his arms around George Washington, realize he's too greasy and George Washington escapes, and then you get an episode of Baywatch Nights, a show which no one remembers.
00:07:38
Speaker
I really, I even watched it. I'm aware that it existed. So don't know why it existed. If I was to ask you to describe what is the plot of Baywatch Night, what would you say? David Hasselhoff's character from Baywatch becomes a private investigator who ends up investigating weird supernatural stuff like werewolves and shit.
00:07:58
Speaker
Precisely. So there were two seasons of Baywatch nights. The first season is David Hasselhoff becomes an investigator playing the character from Baywatch. So he's still here. He's still a lifeguard during the day, but he investigates crimes at night.
00:08:16
Speaker
And then the first season didn't do particularly well, so they retold the second season to bring in the supernatural alien abduction and the like. And it did even worse. Funny that.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yes. But the point is, actually, these weren't lifeguards in the sense of people who go around saving people from drowning. These were the life separate guards, the elite guards who basically protected George Washington at any particular point in time. So they were his bodyguards, essentially.
00:08:48
Speaker
and the mayor and governor of New York basically found, I think it's four lifeguards who were willing to engage in a plot to kill George Washington. So I assume... Did it go into detail or is it just sort of a general, well, if they've got to his bodyguards, then they'll wait till they're alone with him at some stage and stab him in the back, literally or metaphorically?
Discovery and Consequences of the Plot
00:09:16
Speaker
Yeah, so there's not much story here as to...
00:09:18
Speaker
why the plot wasn't enacted immediately, but the plot was quickly discovered because one of the lifeguards was this man called Thomas Hickey, and he was actually arrested as a counterfeiter, put into the New York jail, and made the mistake of then boasting to another prisoner in that jail, Isaac Kitchen,
00:09:42
Speaker
about the plot to kill George Washington. So essentially, a jailhouse snitch ratted out one of the conspirators to assassinate George Washington. There's just no ethics in prison. There's no ethics in prison at all. So once word got out,
00:09:58
Speaker
Then yes, I assume this would have been taken very seriously. Yeah. So the plot unraveled quite quickly to the point where when the story came out, some of the other conspirators immediately, oh, we know about this plot. He's entirely to blame. And thus Thomas Hickey was arraigned on charges of sedition, mutiny and treachery.
00:10:24
Speaker
and was then convicted, which then led to the most populous public hanging in American history of that time, where 20,000 people attended to see Thomas Hickey get hanged.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yes, although I see part of that was due to the fact that Washington required his troops to attend. Well, I mean, basically, an example to them. This is what happens. Except that Washington didn't talk about this. So on the day that Hickey is hanged, Washington writes a letter to John Hancock, an infamous old lady named where we have John Hancock when it comes to this.
00:11:04
Speaker
signature and doesn't mention it at all, Washington doesn't mention it in his diaries or personal correspondence at all, because it seems that he didn't want any information getting out that there ever was a plot against him.
00:11:22
Speaker
Because he seemed to be of the opinion that this would be bad for morale generally if people were aware that there were plots that could have been very successful to wipe him off the map. Yes, I suppose that makes sense, and as it was kind of just dumb luck that it got rumbled in the first place,
00:11:40
Speaker
You don't really want to draw attention to it. Yeah, because next time they might succeed. Yeah. Now, it also turns out that around about this time, the New York Provisional Congress, which was made up of revolutionaries, had established what was called the Committee on Conspiracies. The Committee on Conspiracies.
00:11:59
Speaker
And it was a secret we should be interested in. Precisely. They should have called it the Podcaster's Committee on Conspiracy. Well, obviously. We would have found that in a Google search. But yes, so they were a team of civilians who were gathering information about the British and British loyalists to thwart their plot, and thus
00:12:18
Speaker
they were the ones who did the investigation to find out what Thomas Hickey was doing and who was associated with it. And it's also interesting they don't mention the plot in any of their official correspondence. So do you think that was decided upon that that was going to be the official policy? We shall not talk about this, although we're going to make damn sure everyone knows that it got hanged. Yeah, although
00:12:45
Speaker
I have a bit of a worry about this entire story.
Authenticity and Historical Doubts
00:12:48
Speaker
So if you start searching for details, which is why this never made it into a fulsome episode of the podcast proper, you get Brad Meltzer's interview with the Washington Post, Brad Meltzer's interview with Smithsonian Magazine,
00:13:08
Speaker
a Wikipedia article on Thomas Hickey which mentions the plot and then has brackets citation needed. It does seem that once you start researching the plot what you find are links that go back to Brad and Brad claims that he discovered the existence of the plot
00:13:33
Speaker
in a history book he can't remember the name of in a footnote. Right. Now I'm not saying this is an entirely fictitious story. I'm simply saying that trying to research it is quite difficult
00:13:49
Speaker
It is interesting that all the people that you'd expect to have written things down about it, Washington, or the Committee on Conspiracies, conspicuously never mention it at all. That is a little suspicious.
00:14:07
Speaker
I mean, yes, as we've seen, you could tell a story as to why they wouldn't want to make any mention of it, publicly at least, but that is a little bit odd that private correspondence didn't mention it at all. But that being said, so there's a podcast I listened to called Futility Closet, which had a very interesting episode either last week or the week before last about the giant hedge that the British
00:14:31
Speaker
planted across India to act as a customs border, which was hundreds of miles in length, very, very thick and ran for about 20 years and has almost completely disappeared from history because the colonial records that kept the records of the customs
00:14:55
Speaker
system and the hedge maze were destroyed when the British left the Raj. And thus there are only occasional mentions in very few history books, most of which have not been consulted in quite some time. And as people pointed out, this was a giant undertaking by the British over decades. And it's almost been completely lost to history because it wasn't in the right text and written down at the right time.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yeah, well there you go. So I guess that does lead credence to the possibility, at least, that this could certainly be a genuine story. Yes, it's just that...
00:15:30
Speaker
There's a lot of, I mean, so it's quite possible there was a plot to assassinate George Washington. Thomas Hickey was involved, but exactly the shape of that plot. A little bit hard to discern from the limited information we have available to us at this time. Well, there you go.
Conclusion and Patron Appreciation
00:15:47
Speaker
But you, our, I still want to say, Panus Botron, our Lord and Saviour, our patrons with your bonus content, get to hear about it.
00:15:58
Speaker
And the rest of them don't. No. Because they don't deserve it. They do not deserve it. You are the only ones who are deserving. You are the most deserving of all people. You are the greatest and the best. The most exciting. The most beautiful. The least troublesome.
00:16:18
Speaker
The most woke? Yes. Most sweet-smelling, least likely to explode spontaneously into a shower of organs. Unless, of course, you want to. Well, I suppose. At which point you're all the most capable. So good for you. But for now, I think we will finish recording this bonus episode and get on with our lives. And I recommend you do the same. Indeed.
00:16:46
Speaker
go forth and prosper. Because I believe Colonel Spock once said to J. Michael Straczynski. Sounds about right. Yeah. Goodbye. Goodbye.