Who Was Lydia Darragh, Quaker Spy of the American Revolution?

During the American Revolution, women across the Thirteen Colonies took on a range of nontraditional roles. Some assumed control of family farms and businesses while their husbands and sons were off fighting. Others, known as “camp followers,” traveled with the Continental Army, serving as cooks, nurses and seamstresses. Still others became spies, gathering crucial intelligence behind enemy lines. In fact, women made ideal spies because they often went unnoticed—sexist stereotypes suggested they simply couldn’t understand war and its complexities.

Popular lore credits a figure identified only as Agent 355 with using hidden messages and other covert techniques to convey the movements and plans of British troops to George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring. But details of this anonymous woman’s actions are sparse, and the story is more myth than truth. Female spies whose exploits were more grounded in fact include Ann Bates, a Philadelphia-based schoolteacher who gathered intel for the British, and Nancy Hart, who disguised herself as a man to collect information for the patriots.

Perhaps the most unlikely woman to engage in espionage during the Revolution was Lydia Barrington Darragh, an Irish immigrant who had settled in Philadelphia. A pacifist Quaker, Darragh was committed to nonviolence and neutrality in the fight between Britain and its colonies. But her devotion to her family and firm opposition to tyranny led Darragh to go against her religion and provide a key piece of intelligence to the Continental Army that may have helped save soldiers’ lives.

Who was Lydia Darragh?

“Unlike heroic Molly Pitcher, a composite of several women, Lydia Darragh is an easily verifiable historical figure,” historian Robert N. Fanelli writes in his 2025 book, Lydia’s Tale: The Mystery of Lydia Darragh, Irish Quaker, Patriot Spy.

Fanelli grew up in the greater Philadelphia area. “From the time that I was a boy, I would hear these legends about what had taken place here,” including Darragh’s story, the scholar tells Smithsonian magazine. “I kind of kept it in the back of my mind for years, and then as I began writing about the period of the Revolution, I eventually learned more about her.”

The idea of a pacifist Quaker spy is largely an oxymoron. The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, are a historically Christian group whose beliefs took shape in 17th-century England, during a time of intense religious turmoil. One of the core Quaker tenets is the “peace testimony,” a commitment to pacifism. For a practicing Quaker, engaging in any form of warfare, including espionage, is generally considered a breach of faith.

“I had to ask, ‘Was her story real? Did it really happen?’” Fanelli says. Many earlier scholars have cast doubt on Darragh’s tale, as it’s been perpetually embellished over the centuries. To separate fact from fiction, the author spent years conducting his own research. He explains, “Gradually, I was able to trace down the origins of the story to a couple of people who told it, who knew Lydia Darragh personally and who had heard the story from her.”

Lydia Darragh’s story

A wife, mother, nurse and midwife, Darragh emigrated to the American Colonies from Ireland in 1763, a decade after she married William Darragh, her onetime tutor. The family resided in a small wooden home on Philadelphia’s South Second Street. Darragh “was very actively involved in the life of the city,” says Fanelli, “and she heard lots about what was going on as the Revolution started to develop.”

British troops under the leadership of General William Howe marched into Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, after outmaneuvering George Washington at the Battle of Brandywine. Unopposed, the British seized Philadelphia, the Americans’ seat of government. Howe stationed himself in a mansion near the Darragh home, which he co-opted as a meeting place.

Around this time, members of the local Quaker community started voicing their support for the Colonies’ separation from England, “or, at the very least, the idea of liberty,” according to Fanelli. Many of Darragh’s closest contacts—Irish Americans who were opposed to English rule—were sympathetic to the patriots.

Fanelli started mining the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society. He also pored over Quaker documents, civil records, newspaper advertisements, and even Darragh’s obituary—an anomaly at a time when such tributes to women were few and far between. (“Quakers were marvelous record-keepers,” says Janaki Spickard-Keeler, an editor at Pendle Hill, a Quaker learning community just outside Philadelphia.)

By piecing together the available information, Fanelli managed to not only authenticate the details of Darragh’s story but also gain a sense of her personality. “The main thing that comes through from the different records is that Darragh was a very caring person, and she could not abide the thought that she knew about something that was going to cause bloodshed,” he says.

“There were Quakers who felt like God was asking them to go and fight against the British, and they were the ones who were disowned and kind of came together to be the Free Quakers,” an offshoot group of the main society, says Spickard-Keeler.

In early December 1777, a British senior military adviser told Darragh that he and his fellow officers planned to hold a special meeting at her house. “They wished the family to retire early to bed, adding that when they were going away, they would call her to let them out and extinguish their fire and candles,” journalist Robert Walsh Jr. wrote in an 1827 account.

Darragh agreed, but her curiosity got the better of her. She crept over to the door of the meeting room and listened in through the keyhole, overhearing an order for the British troops to mount a surprise attack at Whitemarsh, north of Philadelphia, where Washington and his men were stationed.

Here was Darragh, “a nurse, a devout Quaker and a very tenderhearted woman,” says Fanelli. “It’s important to realize that she was faced with a very tough spiritual dilemma.” After wrestling with her predicament through the night, Darragh finally concluded that she couldn’t just stay on the sidelines. “She had to do something with the information, even though her religion forbade getting involved,” Fanelli adds.

Darragh knew that such actions could potentially risk her and her family’s safety. But she couldn’t shake the fact that her oldest son, Charles, had already broken with Quaker doctrine to join the Continental Army. He could be one of the soldiers caught unawares by the British attack. “I believe this really helped to solidify her views,” says Fanelli, “because she was concerned for his well-being.”

Darragh came up with a plan. According to Walsh, as early as the next morning, she received permission from an officer to cross British lines to fetch some flour at a mill in Frankford, outside of the city. It was a standard request, as locals were often granted permission from British troops to procure goods in the countryside. “She had the nerve to go out there and walk over six miles in the cold, risking her life and carrying this 28-pound sack of flour, all to inform a trusted officer of Washington that Howe was planning an attack on Whitemarsh,” says Fanelli.

An alternative version of events shared many years later by Darragh’s descendants suggests the midwife told her husband (and the British soldiers) that she was off to visit her young children, who might have been sent to stay with relatives outside of Philadelphia. Fanelli views this excuse as similarly plausible.

Howe and upwards of 15,000 British soldiers marched out of Philadelphia on December 4, hoping to surprise the American troops at Whitemarsh. But Washington and his men were ready for them. Following several inconclusive skirmishes, Howe and his army returned to Philadelphia for the winter, while Washington retreated to Valley Forge, west of Whitemarsh.

Later, the British officer who’d held the pivotal meeting at Darragh’s house returned to question her, asking if her family had really gone to bed or if someone had eavesdropped and leaked information to the Americans.

“She didn’t lie,” says Fanelli, “because another fundamental aspect of Quakerism is a regard for truth.” Instead, Darragh simply kept quiet.

Lydia Darragh’s legacy

Although Darragh’s tip was likely one of many that Washington and his men received, the information she conveyed “was pretty accurate,” says Fanelli. In fact, her story has since taken on a life of its own. Some sources even suggest that after her initial foray into spying, Darragh kept at it, writing messages on paper scraps and sewing them into the buttons on her son’s coat, which he’d then wear to sneak the notes across enemy lines. But Fanelli doesn’t buy it.

“The button story is one of those things that people would love to believe, but there is no evidence of any kind that this took place,” he says. “About December 11, Howe moved his headquarters up to High Street and most probably no longer required the Darragh house for meetings. This move would have terminated the opportunities for ongoing espionage.”

As Fanelli writes in Lydia’s Tale, “Darragh’s eavesdropping was a spontaneous act, not part of an elaborate espionage scheme. Characterized in later years as a kind of secret agent, she was, rather, an impromptu spy, acting on her own on the spur of the moment.”

Darragh shared her story with friends and family only after the British left Philadelphia, in June 1778. But it wasn’t until the 1820s that three writers—including the journalist Walsh—publicized her exploits more widely, drawing mainly on accounts shared by a Quaker woman who’d known Darragh personally. Nearly a century later, in 1916, an account passed down by one of Darragh’s daughters, Ann, outlined a somewhat different version of events, leaving a tangled web of sources for Fanelli to unpack.

Although she undoubtedly remains the American Revolution’s best-known pacifist Quaker spy, Darragh was actually “read out” of the meeting—in other words, removed from the Religious Society of Friends for violating community norms, in this instance by engaging in political activism—prior to her death in 1789. Despite her disownment, Darragh’s body was interred in the burial ground at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Meeting House, which is both a National Historic Landmark and an active Quaker site of worship.

While Darragh’s story remains closely associated with the Quaker movement, it’s also a remarkable tale of a woman’s bravery in the face of unprecedented adversity, at a time when she and her peers were regularly overlooked.

“Lydia had a great sense of agency, and she was willing to do whatever it took to get things done,” says Fanelli. “She didn’t let things get in her way.”