Codes and Ciphers of the American Revolution

Codes and Ciphers were a big part of the American Revolution. The main spymaster of the time was  George Washington. The war was won because of American intelligence, both getting information and intercepting messages from British. British and American spies used codes, invisible ink and hidden writings to transfer information.

Benjamin Church's cipher: (in which letters are substituted for symbols)

decipherer for the "Numerical Code"

 John Jay and Arthur Lee invented a "Dictionary Code" in which numbers  referred to a page, line and word in a specific dictionary edition. This code was popular because even if the enemy recognized it as a dictionary code, they still wouldn't know what edition to look at to decipher it. This was also good because it was a lot less conspicuous to have a dictionary then a decryption (code cracker). Another code with numbers was one in which the alphabet was substituted with a number 1-26.

Here is a picture of the list of words with their numbers for the Culper Spy Ring code

The Culper Spy Ring used a more complicated code made by Benjamin Tallmadge, the networks leader. In this code, Tallmadge took important words, names, and places and gave them a number. There were 763 in all. For example: 38 meant attack, 192 stood for fort and George Washington was known as 711. An american agent posed as a delivery man gave messages to the Ring. Anna Strong (a member of the Ring) signaled the location of a secret message with laundry hung on a line. Messages were concealed in the heel of a boot,or (in a couple cases) in a hollow silver bullet. Patience Wright (a sculpture in England) hid messages inside of her sculptures which were shipped back to America. The American Revolution served as a breakthrough in both coding and decoding. Challenge(not really): Here is a cipher called Pig Pen Cipher: Use the Decoder to figure out what it says.