Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (48 page)

Late in the year, as rumors of a peace treaty increased, discontent in the army rose so high that Washington, who had thought of going home to Mount Vernon for the winter, decided to remain with his
troops. The soldiers in huts at Newburgh and in camp at West Point were not exactly enjoying their winter quarters but apparently were reconciled to them. Many of their officers were not, among them a number who had requested leave or resigned from the army altogether. The largest number, however, stayed with their soldiers and worried over their pay, which was largely missing, and apparently talked over their chances of obtaining pensions when they left the service.

The most widely shared fear among these officers was that with peace, Congress would order their return to civilian life but not with their back pay in their pockets, and not with any assurance that they would ever receive pensions. The full extent of their response to this fear is not known, but some evidently resolved not to accept the dissolution of the army.

The discussions in Congress at this time about the army’s future did not include plans, or even suggestions, for its dissolution. Most members of Congress, in fact, had not thought through what should be done regarding most questions raised by the approaching end of the war. Uncertainty about the negotiations in Paris was prevalent in Congress, which probably had no more information than Washington about what was going on. A very different sort of negotiations had bedeviled Congress for many months—the impost on imports had preoccupied almost everyone. State finances could not be ignored; nor could the difficulty of simply keeping members in Philadelphia as the war seemingly ground down after Yorktown.
¹⁷

A small number of delegates had given thought to the army—not in any narrow sense, but rather as offering a means of strengthening the financial condition of the national government. They pointed out that in dealing with the army, the national government would have to be strengthened. This entailed giving much more power to the Congress, a shift of sovereignty from the states to Congress, in other words. The delegates included Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance; Gouverneur Morris; and Alexander Hamilton. James Madison shared many of their beliefs but was not part of the inner circle. Other delegates did not consider themselves a part of any combination or faction, and the three most active, the two Morrises and Hamilton, differed among themselves on some matters—the need to make peace, for example. Robert Morris had a secretive side, Hamilton was always an
independent creature, and Gouverneur Morris could be erratic, even extravagant, in thought and action. All admired Washington and in different ways were his friends.
¹⁸

Hamilton knew more than any of his colleagues in Congress about what went on in the army—for the most part knowledge gained through friends still in the service. He also understood the Congress, a body he appealed to in debates with fellow members to find support for the army. He thought at this time in terms larger than those concerning the morale of its soldiers; a favored focus found him examining circumstances affecting taxation. After much thought and study of how land and “numbers” (population) figured into the levying of taxes, he concluded that the problem was too large and complicated to yield the immediate answer required for doing justice to the army. He did not share this conclusion with Washington, but he did give him a review of the problem he thought his old commander faced.

The problems—Hamilton characterized them as “matters of delicacy and importance”—threatened to become “an embarrassing scene” and might occur “whether we have peace or a continuance of the war.” If the war continued, the army, he argued, would have to submit itself to “
defend
” the country; if peace were made, the army would have to “submit itself to
procure justice
to itself,” an oblique reference to back pay and pensions. This second option frightened Hamilton more than the first, but both possibilities led him, in this letter to Washington, to insist that nothing promising could happen to the American union without a change in the way the central government was funded. He, like his old commander, wanted a shift in power from the states to the Congress, or to whatever institutions were developed to finance the national government. In this letter of February 13, 1783, he phrased his ideas in language made familiar in the Articles of Confederation and in current discussions of national policy regarding relations between center and periphery. The real problem, apparently concealed by concern about the threat of an angry army, resided in a Congress that could not tax. Washington had made this assumption for years, had stated it in letters to delegates in Congress and to his friends outside of Congress. But he did not do more than adjure his congressional superiors to act; he did not look for more power as commander in chief, nor did he want it, though he suggested that perhaps at times he should have taken part in discussion in Congress. All his instincts, however, were for an
army that remained remote from politics. He refused indeed to seize power, as one of his officers urged him to do.
¹⁹

Washington’s moral and political instincts are clear in his response to Hamilton’s February letter. In his letter of March 4, he drew a clear line between civilian and military authority. His letter also revealed a resolve not to use the army to seize directly the subsistence to keep itself intact. It had been “in one or two instances its own proveditors,” an oblique reference to the history of the Republic of Venice—an action he said “would be productive of Civil commotions and end in blood.” Washington was almost never shaken in his beliefs or conduct, and he now felt that Hamilton’s “apprehensions in case of Peace are greater than there is cause for.” But he admitted that he might be mistaken and that “the old leven” is “again beginning to work, under the mask of the most perfect dissimulation & apparent cordiallity.” The choice of words in this sentence indicates that he thought that Horatio Gates, who was in camp at this time, probably had given encouragement to whatever unhappiness now existed in the army. As for his own actions, he would follow a moderate course. He told Hamilton that states “cannot, surely, be so devoid of common sense, common honesty, & common policy as to refuse their aid on a full, clear, & candid representation of fact from Congress.” Though he did not say so openly, he thought Congress would profit from an “Adjournment” for a few months in order to convey to the states the need for renewed support of national purposes.
²⁰

Washington, for all his intensity in calling every year of the war for renewed support for the army, seemed curiously uninformed of the feelings of a large number of officers. He also was uninformed about one aspect of money available to keep the revolutionary effort intact. He had apparently been told “from some source or another” that another loan from the Dutch was in prospect, and when it came the army would be able “to rub along.” His reactions to Hamilton’s letter, with its dire forecast, left him unmoved, perhaps because he had learned from experience that Hamilton sometimes gave way to impulse and emotion. Still, without telling Hamilton, he began to consider the possibility that officers might use violence to obtain “justice” from Congress.
²¹

A week later, the possibility seemed more than a prospect. On March 10, Colonel Walter Stewart rode in from Philadelphia, sent by
a combination of nonmilitary men—perhaps delegates—to organize army officers for action. Stewart carried a call for a meeting of officers on March 11, at which presumably the group would organize itself into a force avowedly committed to compel Congress to a settlement. The call, later labeled the “First Newburgh Address,” offered no specific plan other than the gathering of the officers the next day to make a “last remonstrance.” Stewart was housed by General Gates’s command, an arrangement that made his appearance even more curious. He had not written the notification of the meeting on March 11; that action had been taken by Major John Anderson, undoubtedly a member of a combination of army officers and others in Philadelphia. The number and names of this group have never been discovered.
²²

Washington read the message brought by Stewart and immediately issued orders prohibiting the meeting scheduled for March 11. To say that he was “horrified” would be to put the matter accurately. He had awakened, if he had been asleep, to the danger that the army was on the verge of becoming a political subversive. No one outside of the instigators of the plan to mobilize the officers believed that the army or the Congress would be served by such a transformation.

But something more than heading off the March 11 meeting seemed required, Washington thought, and he now called a second meeting for March 15, in place of the first, which had not come off. This postponement would give officers time to cool off and to think things through. Ostensibly to give the meeting discipline and substance, he appointed Horatio Gates as moderator. Every line would send at least one officer as its representative.

On the day Washington issued the order convening the meeting on March 15, a second “address” appeared, this one written in camp and carrying a message that informed everyone that General Washington agreed with the critics of Congress and hence had called for the meeting in which grievances could be stated. This second address was a clever and cynical pronouncement, again written by Anderson and intended to trap Washington in a position he never held. By this time, Washington had come to understand the key elements of what he faced. That Stewart had distributed the call for an officers’ meeting indicated that he and other officers believed that the army was available for action against Congress.
²³

The meeting was held in a building, one hundred by thirty feet, recently constructed and called the Temple of Virtue. It sat on the west side of the camp, a favorable location, for it faced the camp and was marked near its entrance by a long flagstaff. Its roof was ridged and carried a long gable; its walls and ceiling were plastered, an unusual feature in the cantonments of the Continental Army. The large room, which made up most of the building, was cut by large sash windows. At either end were two smaller rooms, used for several purposes, including sitting courts-martial.

Officers crowded into the main room with an air of expectancy created by the addresses as well as the curious events since their distribution. There had been talk about the army’s fate in the months since Yorktown, and the intensity of feeling had grown with Washington’s simultaneous actions of canceling one meeting and convening another.

Few, if any, officers expected that he would appear at the meeting. But he had intended to come from the moment he summoned the officers to attend. When the officers had found seats and were awaiting the beginning of the meeting, a door to the room where they sat opened and General Washington strode in. Without any preliminary explanation, he asked Horatio Gates, who was presiding, if he could speak. Gates could not have been pleased to see his commander, nor did he wish to listen to him, but he could not refuse his request. Washington’s opening was an angry exclamation: “Gentlemen: By an anonymous summons, an attempt has been made to convene you together—how inconsistent with the rules of propriety!—how unmilitary!—and how subversive of all order and discipline—let the good sence of the Army decide.” According to Major J. A. Wright, who was present, Washington appeared “sensibly agitated” as he spoke these words. The agitation did not disappear as he continued, though the passion that accompanied it now focused on the army and the nation it served. Not that officers who were outside of any combination or conspiracy were not afflicted with legitimate fears, he thought; indeed, they might take dangerous action unless Congress acted to provide back pay and pensions. These officers—presumably a majority—feared that when peace came, they would be ordered to disband without any settlement of their accounts. They then would be forced to apply as individuals to authorities set up in Philadelphia by Congress or sent off to auditing
offices in the states, where they would be sent from board to board “drawing attendance at all, and finally perhaps be postponed until we lose the substance in pursuit of the shadow.”
²⁴

Long concerned about what was being done to the army by the Congress and the states, Washington now thought of what the army might do to the Revolution. There had been suggestions that it simply refuse to continue as the fighting army of the United States or that it withdraw its troops and take up station in the wilderness. The shadowy group in Philadelphia, as well as the one in camp, whispered these ideas. Washington, initially skeptical of the existence of such combinations or at least doubtful of their strength, had continued to assume that, through its suffering and despite its officers’ profound uneasiness, it would remain apart from political action. He had thought that Congress would eventually meet its responsibilities, but in March, with Hamilton’s warnings and those of others, plus the Newburgh addresses, he confronted an altered political reality.

Washington simply dismissed as unworthy the author responsible for the attempt to persuade the officers to form a conspiracy. He branded “the secret mover” of this scheme, “in which candor and liberality of Sentiment, regard to justice, and love of Country have no part,” as guilty of “the blackest designs.”

Hamilton had written Washington in February that “An idea is propagated in the army that delicacy carried to an extreme prevents your espousing its interests with sufficient warmth.” Washington, always sensitive to any aspersions on his reputation, had not responded to Hamilton then, but now, in this meeting with the officers, he met the charge head-on. His purpose was not primarily to defend himself, but to remind his listeners with forcefulness that he had always acted in the service of the army’s well-being and, more than that, he was among the first “embarked in the cause of our common Country.” Nor had he ever “left your side one moment, but when called from you, on public duty,” had in fact been “the constant companion and witness of your Distresses, and not among the last to feel, and acknowledge your merits—As I have ever considered my own Military reputation as inseperably [
sic
] connected with that of the army.” He was saying in these powerful sentences that he was one of them and insisted, as he came to the climax of this part of his appeal, that “it can
scarcely be supposed
, at this late stage of the war, that I am indifferent to its interests.”