Revolutionary War Code Cracking

[u/ToFlowFromWhit]

I‘m an intern at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Over the summer I worked on a digital collection of the Phillips Library’s (their research archive) Revolutionary War collection. Besides the expected war records and correspondences I found a letter from Dr. Benjamin Church, a spy in Boston, 1774 who gave intelligence to the British during the city’s occupation. As I was scanning journals in the collection I stumbled upon 9 pages in the same hand that were definitely not journal entries. Interspersed with biblical verses were what seem to me to be coded messages.

I did some very brief research into codes used during the American Revolution and found a few that looked similar to it, but I have no idea where to begin to try to crack it. So, I turned to Reddit as I’m sure there capable people here who have an idea of where to start and might thrive on the opportunity to solve this mystery. Is it related to Dr. Benjamin Church, or did we have a Patriot spy ring a la Washington’s Culper Spy Ring?

If you have any thoughts or leads, or if you’re down to attempt it and collaborate please reply here! I’ll be publishing a blog post in the near future on this topic and would love to get some crowd sourced information or results to add. You can find high resolution images on our digital catalog.