The role Honeyman played in the Revolutionary War has been debated for some time. The first written record of his involvement with Washington appears to be his grandson Judge John Van Dyke's "An Unwritten Account of a Spy of Washington," which appeared in "Our Home" magazine in 1873, nearly 100 years later. Van Dyke is said to have relied on details he got from one of Honeyman's daughters, Van Dyke's Aunt Jane Honeyman who died in 1836. Judge Van Dyke's son, John Charles Van Dyke, the author of The Desert, added that "documents discovered in the Secretary of State's office at Trenton go to confirm it," without identifying the documents further. In his autobiography, John C. Van Dyke also wrote, "My father was much with him (Honeyman) in his later years, and he had fragments of the story from the spy's own lips, but the spy was never very communicative."