by Ron Chernow
The Newburgh situation grew only more incendiary. In the following days, two anonymous letters made the rounds in camp, fomenting opposition to Washington and rallying the officers to apply force against Congress. One document warned darkly, “Suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.”43 It seemed as if the new nation might be lurching toward a military putsch. On March 12, Washington, alarmed by this state of affairs, told Hamilton that he would attend an officers’ meeting on March 15 to stop them from “plunging themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”44 Washington kept his diplomatic balance, trying to head off rash action by his officers while pleading for timely congressional relief. “Let me beseech you therefore, my good sir,” he told Hamilton, “to urge this matter earnestly and without further delay. The situation of these gentlemen, I do verily believe, is distressing beyond description.”45
On March 15, Washington addressed the officers, determined to squash a reported scheme to march on Congress. For the first time, he confronted a hostile audience of his own men. Washington sternly rebuked talk of rebellion, saying it would threaten the liberties for which they had fought. An insurrection would only “open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”46 He then staged the most famous coup de théâtre of his career. He was about to read aloud a letter from a congressman when the words swam before his eyes. So he fished in his pockets for his glasses. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.”47 The mutinous soldiers, inexpressibly moved, were shamed by their opposition to Washington and restored to their senses. Washington agreed to lobby Congress on their behalf, and a committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension payment equivalent to five years’ full pay. Whether Congress could really make good on such payments without its own taxing power was another question.
As soon as he heard of Washington’s virtuoso performance, Hamilton applauded him: “Your Excellency has, in my opinion, acted wisely. The best way is ever not to attempt to stem a torrent but to divert it. You coincide in opinion with me on the conduct proper to be observed by yourself.”48 Washington had heeded Hamilton’s advice in assuming a leadership role but had pointedly ignored his advice about inflaming the situation for political ends. Hamilton still clung to the notion that a convincing bluff of armed force could help spur congressional action, but that was as far as he would venture. “As to any combination of force,” he observed, “it would only be productive of the horrors of a civil war, might end in the ruin of the country, and would certainly end in the ruin of the army.”49
The feared mutiny at Newburgh deepened but also complicated relations between Hamilton and Washington. It reinforced their mutual conviction that the Articles of Confederation had to be revised root and branch and Congress strengthened. “More than half the perplexities I have experienced in the course of my command, and almost the whole of the difficulties and distress of the army, have their origin here,” Washington wrote of congressional weakness.50 At the same time, Washington saw a certain Machiavellian streak in Hamilton and bluntly told him of grumbling in the army about congressmen who tried to use the soldiers as “mere puppets to establish continental funds.” He lectured Hamilton: “The army . . . is a dangerous instrument to play with.”51 Washington must have seen that Hamilton, for all his brains and daring, sometimes lacked judgment and had to be supervised carefully. On the other hand, Hamilton had employed his wiles in the service of ideals that Washington himself endorsed.
In the spring of 1783, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-eight, already stood near the pinnacle of national affairs. He chaired a military committee that hatched the first plan for a peacetime army under the aegis of the federal government. In early April, Congress named him chairman of the committee in charge of peace arrangements, equipped with a spacious mandate to investigate ways to “provide a system for foreign affairs, for Indian affairs, for military and naval peace establishments,” in Madison’s words. That month, Congress ratified the provisional peace treaty with Britain, marking an end to eight years of hostilities—news that only amplified the menacing clamor among soldiers who wanted to pocket their pay before going home. “And here, my dear Colo[nel] Hamilton,” Washington wrote, “let me assure you that it would not be more difficult to still the raging billows in a tempestuous gale than to convince the officers of this army of the justice or policy of paying men in civil offices full wages when they cannot obtain a sixtieth part of their dues.”52 Even though Congress enacted a new system of import duties that April, Hamilton still feared that it would lack the requisite funds to pacify the army. When Robert Morris threatened to quit as superintendent of finance in May, Hamilton was among those enlisted to persuade him to stay until the army could be safely disbanded. He introduced an emergency resolution, asking the states to send money to the common treasury so the soldiers could be paid and demobilized.
In mid-June, the raging billows that Washington had warned about still surged and foamed. Rebellious troops in Philadelphia sent a petition to Congress, couched in threatening language, demanding their money. Two days later, word came that eighty armed soldiers were marching from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia to pry loose the pay owed to them. Their surly ranks swelled as they advanced. Hamilton, now Congress’s man for all seasons, was swiftly drafted into a three-man committee to fend off the threat. He and his colleagues appealed to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council to send local militiamen to stop these soldiers before they reached Philadelphia and made common cause with troops in local barracks. Hamilton was irate when the state refused to act until some outrage was perpetrated. Unafraid to lead, he stepped into the void fearlessly and directed Major William Jackson, assistant secretary at war, to intercept the rowdy protesters before they reached the city line. “You will represent to them with coolness but energy the impropriety of such irregular proceedings,” he instructed, “and the danger they will run by persisting in an improper conduct.”53
The troops, brushing Jackson aside, poured into Philadelphia on June 20, banded together with fractious troops in city barracks, and seized control of several arsenals. The next day, Elias Boudinot, president of Congress and Hamilton’s erstwhile sponsor, convened a special Saturday-afternoon session of Congress to deal with the worsening crisis. That morning, Boudinot heard reports that rebel troops might sack the local bank. The congressmen were scarcely seated when about four hundred rebel soldiers, bayonets stabbing the air, encircled the State House, where Congress and the state’s Supreme Executive Council occupied separate chambers. Things looked ominous: the mutineers far surpassed in number loyal troops guarding the doors. The symbolism was especially troubling: a mob of drunken soldiers had besieged the people’s delegates in the building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.
The congressmen did not fear “premeditated violence,” Madison reported, “but it was observed that spiritous drink from the tippling houses adjoining began to be liberally served out to the soldiers and might lead to hasty excesses.”54 The increasingly drunken troops sent a scolding petition to the delegates inside, insisting that they be allowed to choose their own officers and threatening to unleash an “enraged soldiery” unless their demands were met within twenty minutes. The delegates refused to submit to such blackmail, shorten their session, or negotiate with rabble.
After three hours, the embattled congressmen marched out of the State House to the sneers and taunts of rioters. As he emerged, Hamilton saw embodied his worst nightmare: a portion of the revolutionary army had broken down into a mob that was intimidating an enfeebled central government. Now it was Hamilton, like Washington three months before, who made a vigorous case for military subordination to civilian rule. “The licentiousness of an army is to be dreaded in every government,” he later commented, “but in a republic it is more particularly to be restrained, and when directed ag
ainst the civil authority to be checked with energy and punished with severity.”55 The situation made him again wonder how a spirited young democracy could generate the respect necessary for the rule of law to endure.
That evening, Elias Boudinot assembled congressmen at his home. They passed a defiant resolution, written by Hamilton, claiming that government authority had been “grossly insulted” by the rioters and demanding that “effectual measures be immediately taken for supporting the public authority.”56 If Pennsylvania persisted in its spineless inaction, Congress would relocate to Trenton or Princeton—by no coincidence, the scenes of famous patriotic victories. The next morning, Hamilton and Oliver Ellsworth delivered this blunt ultimatum to John Dickinson, now the president of the Supreme Executive Council. If Pennsylvania could not guarantee the safety of Congress, then it would suspend all further meetings in the city.
After his encounter with the council, Hamilton lost all hope that the state would send out the militia, and he submitted a chilling report to Congress. The mutineers, he noted, had selected their own officers to present their grievances and authorized them to use force, even threatening them “with death in case of their failing to execute their views.”57 Aghast at the “weak and disgusting” behavior of Pennsylvania’s leaders at a moment demanding unequivocal action, Hamilton reluctantly concluded and Congress agreed that they should adjourn to Princeton by Thursday.58
In short order, Congress fled across the state line and set up a movable capital in Princeton. The delegates settled crankily into cramped, makeshift quarters, Madison sharing a bed with another delegate in a room scarcely larger than ten feet square. Most shocking to this bibliophile, it lacked a desk. “I am obliged to write in a position that scarcely admits the use of any of my limbs,” he complained.59 So primitive were the Princeton lodgings that one month later Congress, like a French medieval court in the hunting season, packed up again and moved to Annapolis, followed by Trenton one year later, then New York City in 1785. Of this runaway Congress, hounded from its home, Benjamin Rush said that it was “abused, laughed at, and cursed in every company.”60 True to Hamilton’s prediction, the insurrection collapsed as soon as resolute action was undertaken. The Pennsylvania council tardily called up five hundred militiamen; once the mutineers learned of an approaching detachment, they laid down their arms, and the Lancaster contingent trudged back to its base.
A perpetual magnet for controversy, Hamilton was stung by charges that he had conspired to move the capital from Philadelphia as part of a plot to transfer it to New York. In fact, Hamilton had feared that if Congress decamped, it would dilute domestic respect for its authority and sully America’s image abroad. On July 2, he seconded a resolution that Congress should return to Philadelphia and prodded Madison for a statement confirming that he had postponed the flight to Princeton until the very last instant. Like an attorney collecting affidavits in a lawsuit, Hamilton asked his colleague, “Did I appear to wish to hasten it, or did I not rather show a strong decision to procrastinate it?”61 Madison obliged with a letter: yes, Hamilton had stalled until the last moment. Once again, the thin-skinned Hamilton was quick to refute insinuations of duplicity or self-interest. Convinced that appearances, not reality, ruled in politics, he never wanted to allow misimpressions to linger, however briefly, in the air.
The Philadelphia mutiny had major repercussions in American history, for it gave rise to the notion that the national capital should be housed in a special federal district where it would never stand at the mercy of state governments. For Hamilton, the episode only heightened his dismay over the Confederation Congress and the folly of relying on state militias. On the other hand, he thought Congress had been unfairly blamed for failing to fulfill its duties when it was consistently deprived of the means of doing so. Its flagrant weaknesses stemmed from its constitution, not from its administration.
By the time the Pennsylvania mutineers dispersed, Hamilton had endured seven weary months in Congress, a period that had taxed his energy and patience. That three of New York’s five delegates had been absent much of the time only added to his heavy burden. He had concluded that the country was not ready to amend the risible Articles of Confederation, because local and state politics exerted too dominant an influence. “Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,” he told Nathanael Greene.62 While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army. Hamilton again questioned the doctrine of free trade when he argued for federal regulation of trade so that “injurious branches of commerce might be discouraged, favourable branches encouraged, [and] useful products and manufactures promoted.”63 With his hyperactive mind, Hamilton was already fleshing out a rough draft of America’s future government.
Yet with the war ending, many advocates of state sovereignty wanted Congress dismantled as a permanent body. They thought the current Congress was too strong. “The constant session of Congress cannot be necessary in times of peace,” said Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to replace it with a committee.64 Slowly but inexorably, the future battle lines were being drawn between those who wanted an energetic central government and those who wanted rights to revert to the states. When his draft resolution foundered, Hamilton saw no need to dawdle any longer in this dwindling, demoralized Congress. On July 22, he informed Eliza that once the definitive peace treaty arrived, he would join her: “I give you joy, my angel, of the happy conclusion of the important work in which your country has been engaged. Now, in a very short time, I hope we shall be happily settled in New York.”65
Hamilton was dragooned into riding back to Albany with the dour Mrs. Schuyler, who insisted on making a detour through New York City. This stopover gave Hamilton a queasy foretaste of the tensions brewing between returning patriots and British sympathizers. He was scandalized by the flight of Tory businessmen—seven thousand had sailed for Nova Scotia in April alone—and feared the economic wreckage that might ensue from this large-scale exodus. When he got back to Albany, a shaken Hamilton wrote to Robert R. Livingston, “Many merchants of second class, characters of no political consequence, each of whom may carry away eight or ten thousand guineas have, I am told, applied for shipping to convey them away. Our state will feel for twenty years at least the effect of the popular frenzy.”66
For more than a century, November 25, 1783, was commemorated in New York City as Evacuation Day, the blessed end to seven years of British rule and martial law. At the southern tip of Manhattan, in a spiteful parting gesture, sullen redcoats greased the fort’s flagpole as the last British troops were ferried out to transport ships waiting in the harbor. Once the British had relinquished their hold over this last outpost of occupied soil, the procession of American worthies entered, led by General Henry Knox, who hoisted the American flag up a newly pitched pole. Cannon rattled off a thirteen-gun salute, flags flapped, and crowds cheered in delirium as George Washington and Governor George Clinton, guarded by Westchester light cavalry, rode side by side into the city, followed by throngs of citizens and soldiers marching eight abreast. The long, triumphant procession wound down to the Battery, taking in the roars of the ecstatic crowds packing the streets. America had been purged of the last vestiges of British rule. It had been a long and grueling experience—the eight years of fighting counted as the country’s longest conflict until Vietnam—and the cost had been exceedingly steep in blood and treasure. Gordon Wood has noted that the twenty-five thousand American military deaths amounted to nearly 1 percent of the entire population, a percentage exceeded only by the Civil War.67
As Washington gazed at the crowds, he could observe on every street corner debris left by the war. The British had ne
ver rebuilt those sections of the town blighted by the giant conflagration of September 1776. The city was now a shantytown of tents and hovels, interspersed with skeletal ruins of mansions and hollowed-out dwellings. Cows roamed weedy streets rank with garbage. When the future mayor James Duane saw his old properties, he moaned that they “look as if they had been inhabited by savages or wild beasts.”68 To provide firewood for British troops, the city had been denuded of fences and trees, and the wharves stood rotting and decayed. “Noisome vapours arise from the mud left in the docks and slips at low water,” said one visitor, “and unwholesome smells are occasioned by such a number of people being crowded together in so small a compass, almost like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease.”69 Hamilton was already meditating a plan for removing this devastation. Instead of patching up derelict houses and building huts on vacant lots, he expressed hope that the city’s mechanics and artisans would find “profitable and durable employment in erecting large and elegant edifices.”70
Less apparent but no less momentous than the physical change was the huge demographic shift triggered by the approaching peace. As British hopes of victory faded, many Loyalists had crowded aboard convoys and escaped to Britain, Canada, and Bermuda. At the same time, there was a countervailing influx of patriots that doubled New York City’s population from about twelve thousand on Evacuation Day to twenty-four thousand just two years later, making it a booming metropolis that surpassed Boston and Baltimore in size. The surge of new and returning residents drove up prices sharply for food, fuel, and lodging.