Conceived in Liberty (272 page)

To whipsaw Congress, Robert Morris had submitted his resignation at the end of January. This sudden and surprising move hit the Congress with the force of a thunderclap. It was an arrogant attempt at blackmail, for his resignation was to take effect at the end of May,
unless
Congress had by then established a system for the permanent funding of the public debt. He also took care to publish his resignation threat in the press, thus maximizing the pressure upon Congress from all sides. What Morris was demanding was that it
order
the states to pay a full schedule of federal taxes (internal as well as impost) if they did not pay their full quota of the federal debt within a year; this was to be an open assumption and seizure of an overriding tax power under the Confederation. The evident unconstitutionality of such dictation was swept aside. As Ferguson points out, “This ultimatum to Congress makes no sense except in the light of its timing to coincide with the army conspiracy.”
*

The final and critical link in the plan for a rightist coup was to persuade George Washington, a man of enormous if undeserved prestige as the victor of the Revolutionary War, to join in the scheme. Only the mighty Washington could successfully take the reins of a military coup d’état. Alexander Hamilton’s main role, then, was to convince the commander-in-chief. He urged Washington to intervene, in conjunction with General Knox, to “bring order, perhaps even good... out of confusion.” But Washington, while highly in sympathy with the conservatives’ goals, staunchly refused to take the path of a military coup, a course that would be “productive of civil commotions and end in blood.”

Stepping in to avert the plot, Washington ordered postponement of the officers’ meeting until March 15, when the report of the delegates to Congress could be considered. Armstrong countered quickly with his second Newburgh Address, frantically calling upon the officers to turn their arms against the government, to seize the vital moment, and to “carry your appeal from the justice to the fears of government.” Otherwise, the officers would only “wade through the vile mire of dependency” and “go, starve, and be forgotten.” He also maintained that Washington was secretly in favor of his plan. But at the officers’ meeting, Washington made a highly emotional speech in behalf of legal means, and he attacked the author of the addresses as perhaps an agent of the British, plotting disruption. In this climate, the conspirators could only suppress their bitter disappointment and vote unanimously to offer their loyalty to Congress
and to condemn the Armstrong addresses. In return, Washington sent an urgent message to Congress pressing it to meet the officers’ demands. Hamilton, seeing the way the wind was blowing, hastened to assure Washington that he had not meant to urge illegal means.

While the Newburgh Conspiracy had collapsed upon the rebuff of Washington, Congress was still under the twin blackmail threats of the army and the resignation of the Financier. Congress did agree to grant the army officers five years’ full pay in commutation of the promised pension. The pay would be in federal securities, thus adding the officers’ committed pensions to the rest of the growing body of the public debt.

But the major nationalist demand, as before, was for a federal taxing program. Morris, Hamilton, and Wilson demanded a comprehensive federal taxing system collected and administered by federal officers. James Madison also led in the struggle for federal taxation. But various taxes met strong opposition. Richard Henry Lee was an effective opponent, and the hard core of the radicals, headed by his brother Arthur and the Rhode Island delegation, opposed any federal tax whatsoever. Furthermore, the clear restrictions of the Articles of Confederation helped the left greatly; as Arthur Lee declared, “The Confederation is a stumbling block to those who wish to introduce new and... arbitrary systems.”

Rather than try to drive through a federal tax program, however, Congress finally fell back in April 1783 on a second request for an impost. This time the impost bill was modified: the grant of power to Congress for an impost was to be for twenty-five years instead of permanently, and the collectors would be appointed by the several states. However, for twenty-five years the federal government would also have the power to raise $1.5 million a year in estate taxes.

Hamilton held out to the last, supporting the bill, but voting against it as a protest against the surrender of conservative goals, while Jonathan Arnold and John Collins voted against the impost, partly because the collectors would still be federal officers. Arnold, in fact, charged that the impost was a device to undo the Revolution. Morris, who had put his political career on the line, was also scornful of the compromise; and while he consented to stay in office until the end of 1784, his power rapidly melted away. For the nub of the conservatives’ program—the federal taxing power—had been rebuffed, and now Congress’ ratification of the peace treaty on April 15, 1783, meant that the pressure for centralization had passed away. Washington, highly critical of the Morrises for using the army’s demands as a weapon in their drive for centralized power, remained as a bulwark against any coup. Furthermore, Congress’ attempt to keep the army in being until Britain’s final ratification failed, as soldiers, eager to get home, protested, mutinied, and insulted their officers. Soon, the entire army disintegrated under this pressure from below except for
Washington’s own command. Congress authorized him to grant a wholesale furlough at the end of May, and within a month the Continental Army, its work obviously done, had virtually dissolved, ignoring the demands of its officer corps that it remain. Some of the departing soldiers were lucky enough to receive three months’ pay in Morris notes, while the noncommissioned officers were thwarted in their demands for five years’ pay. Unlike the officer caste, the soldiers did not pressure for grandiose terminal pay nor did they threaten a military coup or call for a permanent standing army.

*
Ferguson,
The Power of the Purse,
p. 161.

Robert Morris’ last year in office was a far cry from his all-powerful role as war dictator. Rueing the failure of the nationalists’ dreams, Morris found his power confined to administrative tasks in his own department and to redeeming Morris notes. Many leading nationalists quit federal office in disgust: Hamilton retiring from Congress to practice law in New York, Madison declining to serve out his term, Livingston resigning as secretary of foreign affairs to resume his old post as chancellor of New York. Gouverneur Morris resigned as Robert Morris’ assistant. The rotation in office imposed by the Articles’ injunction against more than three consecutive years in Congress insured the retirement of many of the ultranationalists. Furthermore, after being subjected to harassment by hundreds of mutinous Pennsylvania troops in late spring 1783 demanding the pay due them, Congress left Philadelphia, the home of Morris and the public creditors’ pressure, and retired first to Princeton and then to Annapolis. This change of atmosphere helped considerably to shift Congressional opinion from right to left, ending what David Howell called the “poisonous influence” of the Pennsylvania metropolis. And the young Massachusetts liberal Samuel Osgood claimed that the removal from Philadelphia eliminated “systems which would finally have ended in absolute aristocracy.”

Morris’ Bank of North America was also eased out of its status as a central bank during 1783, to revert to the status of a private bank chartered by the state of Pennsylvania. By mid-1782, the bank had $400,000 of loans outstanding to the U.S. government, and the government in turn owned five-eighths of the its capital. In December Morris, uneasy at the
close link between government and bank as his political power threatened to dwindle, began in December to systematically disengage the two institutions. By July 1783, all of the federal government’s stock in the Bank of North America had been sold to private hands, chiefly to Dutch capitalists; and by the end of 1783, all the U.S. government debt to the bank had been repaid. The danger of a central bank was ended for the time being, although the bank continued to discount short-term notes for the government.

Morris once more came under congressional fire for the mixing of the public and his private interests; and it was revealed that by quietly giving special redemption status in specie to his own Morris notes, he was aiding his business partners who were speculating in these tickets. The grasping and once dictatorial Morris had become, in a brief period, a personal liability to the centralizing cause, a liability that stimulated liberalism in such Massachusetts delegates as the wealthy merchant Stephen Higginson. Higginson’s major objection to the impost was that it was part of the scheme, the “web,” of Morris and his middle state cohorts; much of the southern opposition was also inspired by hostility to the financier.

The nationalist forces had succeeded in some of their plans: executive departments had been established within the Confederation (itself a centralizing of power beyond the original Continental Congress); the northwestern lands were being nationalized into the hands of Congress; and a great deal of the Revolutionary War debt had been assumed by the federal authority. But in the main tasks, the perpetuation of control by Morris and the financial oligarchy, the establishment of a permanent federal taxing power and of a permanent national standing army, the reactionaries had failed. With the end of the war, nationalist power ebbed strongly and Morris was thoroughly discredited. But the brilliant, wealthy coterie of Nationalist leaders was not about to abandon its plans; instead, these men bided their time and waited for a period of popular discontent which they might be able to channel toward the creation of central national power. For his part, Hamilton brooded once more on a scheme for a new constitutional convention to give overriding power to a central government with taxing power, a funding of the public debt, a central bank, and a permanent standing army.

The right wing did, however, not brood and bide its time without an organization, a nucleus in being for future mischief. This especially held true of the old officer corps, which could form a mass base for the intrigues of the oligarchs. Hence, on May 10, 1783, shortly before the disbanding of the Continental Army, many of the officer corps formed the Order of the Cincinnati. Here was an organization that could keep up at least a modicum of military pressure for nationalist ends. It was fitting that the idea for the society came from its secretary, General Knox, and that its first
presiding officer was the Prussian “Baron von” Steuben. George Washington was, of course, selected as president-general, to be succeeded at his death by Alexander Hamilton. Branch societies were formed in each of the thirteen states, and even in France among the returning volunteers of the American Revolutionary War.

The society’s membership was to be strictly hereditary, confined to eldest sons of members of the order, though some like-minded honorary members could be elected. This flagrantly aristocratic provision, combined with its obviously reactionary and militaristic complexion, played a large role in stimulating the radical cause by inspiring public opposition against the Order of the Cincinnati.

All over the country, indeed, opposition swelled against the blatantly militaristic Cincinnati. Even John Adams was severely critical, as were Benjamin Franklin and John Jay. But the man who galvanized the opposition was Judge Aedanus Burke of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. Burke’s pamphlet of 1783,
Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati,
blasted the order in no uncertain terms as planted “in a fiery hot ambition, and thirst for power; and its branches will end in tyranny by a hereditary aristocracy.” Although New England had been the center of antimilitarism and opposition to commutation pay for officers, it took Judge Burke’s pamphlet to arouse New Englanders to the menace of the Cincinnati. Connecticut had been the main center of opposition for the commutation pay for the officers; pamphlets and town meetings had condemned the settlement, as had the lower house of the legislature. The financial burdens of the scheme upon the taxpayers, the privileges to the officer caste, and the encroachment of Congress on the powers of the states in pledging payment, were the reasons for Connecticut’s opposition to the Cincinnati. Now, Judge Burke’s pamphlet was reprinted twice in Hartford and commended by a statewide anti-commutation-pay convention at Middletown.

The Middletown convention, which met three times during the winter of 1783–84, was the highwater mark of opposition to commutation pay in Connecticut. It appointed a standing committee headed by the veteran officer Capt. Hugh Ledlie of Hartford, formerly one of the Sons of Liberty at Windham. The revolutionary implications of the convention method aroused hostility in the press, as well as condemnation by the vacillating liberal Sam Adams, who refused even to support the movement.

Rhode Island’s hostility to commutation pay was also quickly widened by a Newport edition of Burke’s pamphlet to hatred of the Cincinnati. In the spring of 1784, Rhode Island even toyed with the idea of disfranchising members of the Cincinnati, and barring them from public office. Burke’s pamphlet, reprinted in the
Boston Independent Chronicle,
also stirred great opposition to the Cincinnati in Massachusetts. Liberal leaders Sam Adams, Samuel Osgood, and Elbridge Gerry, denounced the Cincinnati
as leading toward a “hereditary military nobility.” In late March 1784, the Massachusetts legislature condemned the Order of the Cincinnati, as “tending, if unrestrained, to
imperium in imperio,
and consequently to confusion and the subversion of public liberty.” Hereditary distinctions could lead to a hereditary nobility. The legislature therefore concluded that the Cincinnati was “unjustifiable, and... may be dangerous to the peace, liberty and safety” of Massachusetts and of the United States. A Cambridge town meeting instructed its representatives to outlaw the order, and in North Carolina, a bill was introduced to bar any Cincinnati member from taking a seat in either house of the legislature.