First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  For the first time in more than two years the armed forces of the United States would have to stand alone, although such a turn of events no longer was as alarming as it would have been only a few weeks earlier. Many signs now suggested that Great Britain had decided to end its war for North America. Everyone knew that peace talks were underway in Paris, and in August General Carleton even had proposed to Washington that all prisoners be exchanged, a step he was anxious to take, he said, inasmuch as he had suspended his military activities and his government had decided to recognize “the independency of the thirteen Provinces.” Washington remained a skeptic, however, and he continued to warn that the peace talks might only be a ruse to lull America from its vigilant posture. Yet even Washington sensed that if Whitehall persisted with the war it was likely to be largely a naval conflict, and as the autumn progressed his hopes grew that perhaps the end really was near. Since he first had heard that the diplomats were talking, he had presumed that the issue would be resolved by early in 1783; either peace would be agreed to, or the talks would end in time to undertake a campaign in the summer of 1783. And all signs pointed toward peace. The American intelligence network reported that Carleton not only planned to end the occupation of Charleston, but that shortly he would reduce the size of his garrison in New York. It was difficult not to be optimistic.55

  Still, headquarters seldom took a holiday from vexation, and even amid all the felicitous signs—because of them, actually—Washington was tormented by a crisis prompted by the action of some of his own officers. During the fall of 1782, with the war seemingly all but over, apprehension grew in some circles that with peace Congress would disband the army, and that it would neither compensate the officers for the back pay that was their due nor honor the half-pay-for-life pledge that it had made two years before. On at least seven occasions that fall Washington advised the civilian authorities of the officers’ problems, and he warned that an ugly mood was growing, that the patience of men “soured by penury and ... the ingratitude of the Public” was nearing its end. The commander had not exaggerated. Soon after the army went into winter quarters at Newburgh north of New York, some officers decided to act. Just after Christmas they sent a petition to Congress, a memorial written by Henry Knox, that outlined their grievances in regard to pay, and which for the first time expressed their willingness to forego the half-pay scheme in return for an equivalent one-shot cash payment at war’s end.56

  The officers’ petition was like manna from heaven to those legislators who had been struggling against insuperable odds to enlarge the powers of the central government. To meet the officers’ demands would require additional revenue, and that could be garnered only through a new funding system. Some nationalists, men like Alexander Hamilton and the Morrises—Robert and Gouverneur—instantly saw that they might use the threat of unrest within the army to augment the powers of the national government. This faction quickly introduced a bill to substitute commutation, or the lump-sum cash payment, for half-pay for life; Congress debated the issue for thirty days, but twice, once in January and again early in February, it rejected such a course.

  What followed during the next month is shrouded in mystery, but there can be little doubt that some nationalists in Congress encouraged some officers at New-burgh to threaten action tantamount to mutiny against civil authority. Cleverly, the plotters in Philadelphia also saw to it that Washington was forewarned, thus enabling him to take the steps necessary to control his army. Thus, the officers’ menacing posturing would frighten Congress into acting to augment the powers of the national government, while the commander would keep the Continental army from actually doing any real harm.

  How much Washington knew of the plotting will never be ascertained. It is known, however, that late in February he received a remarkable letter from one of the conspirators, his former aide Hamilton. Now a New York congressman, Hamilton’s motive in confiding in Washington is cloudy, but it probably stemmed from his desire to coach the commander on how to handle the coming crisis; after all, if Washington was his engine to achieve bigger things, he would not have wished to see the general’s reputation sullied by a political blunder. Hamilton began his missive with the claim that by June the nation would be broke. There would be no money with which to wage the war, he warned, nor would there be funds for pensions if peace had been negotiated by then. A dearth of “wisdom and decision” in Congress prevented that body from acting to meet the crisis, he went on. However, if the army once again urged Congress to act, such a tack might sway “those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments.” The difficulty inherent in such a move was “to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation.” This was where Washington came in. From behind the scenes he could see that “prudent persons” directed the army’s petitioning. If matters got out of hand, he then could come forward and “bring order perhaps even good, out of confusion.”57

  Leaving nothing to chance the plotters sent emissaries to the Hudson to appeal to those “prudent persons” of whom Hamilton had spoken. They must have approached Knox—undoubtedly the person to whom Hamilton expected Washington to turn—but he apparently rebuffed their entreaties, probably on the advice of the commander, who clearly wished to have no part in these machinations. Some historians think the nationalists elicited the participation of Gates, a man who still was quite popular with many of the congressional foes of a stronger national government; but that can not be proven. What does seem clear, however, is that Gates, deeply in debt and in dire and immediate need of cash, became enmeshed in the rampant intriguing and that he encouraged and aided those who protested. What also seems obvious is that the real heart of the cabal at Newburgh lay within the ranks of the middle-grade officers, young men who had spent most or all of their adult life in the army and who harbored an abiding contempt for the Congress that had treated the soldiery so wretchedly. Many of these young zealots were close to Gates, but it can not be determined whether they brought him into their campaign, or vice versa.

  The officers’ protest burst into the open on March 10, 1783. That morning the plotters published an unsigned statement that urged a general meeting on the next day. Secretly written by Major John Armstrong, a former aide to Gates, the Newburgh Address demanded a redress of grievances, and pointed the way to bludgeon Congress into action. On the morrow, the address proclaimed, the officers must resolve to resign en masse if the war continued, or they must indicate their intention not to disband the army if peace occurred.58

  Washington immediately deduced what was afoot. The conspiracy “was not only planned, but also digested and matured in Philadelphia,” he declared; congressional plotters—chiefly “public creditors”—had sought to use the army as tool to gain their selfish ends. Although he shared the ideology of the nationalists in Congress and also agreed that the officers had not received their due, yet he would not countenance a revolt against civilian jurisdiction, and he moved to head off the protest. He issued general orders that suggested that the officers “pay very little attention to [the] irregular invitation” to the proposed meeting. Instead, he summoned the officers to an official meeting four days hence. It was a shrewd move. He would attend the conclave that he had called, and his presence might deter the hotheads from a radical course.59

  A second address was issued by the plotters during the four-day interim between Washington’s orders and the formal meeting, but its design was merely to buck up morale.60 Then came Saturday, the day Washington had set for the meeting. The officers crammed into the Temple of Virtue, a wooden facility they had thrown up just after Christmas, a place for worship on Sunday and for social occasions during the week. Everyone was present and in his seat a few minutes early. It was sweltering inside the crowded Temple, the heat mixing unpleasantly with the heavy, semisweet fragrance of fresh-cut wood, with the pervasive reek of the tobacco users, with the atmosphere of supercharged tension.

  Precisely at noon Washington st
rode into the hall. He walked briskly to the front where, from behind a rustic pulpit, he slowly began to speak. Initially he fumbled nervously. Then, more calmly, he read on, plowing through a carefully prepared address. Speaking softly, now flawlessly, he required only about fifteen minutes to deliver a message that minced no words. The recent anonymous remarks of a few officers, he said, had been “unmilitary” and “subversive.” He knew the problems faced by the officers; after all, he had been with the army from the beginning. But how to solve those problems? Is it to be by “deserting our Country in the extremest hour of her distress, or [by] turning our Arms against it. . . ?” Had Great Britain sent an emissary into their midst to sow such ideas?

  Congress would redress their grievances, he continued, but the officers must have faith and remember that by nature legislative bodies acted slowly. As proof that Congress had not forgotten, he paused to read from a private letter he recently had received from a friend in Virginia’s delegation to the national legislature. As he began reading he stumbled a bit over the foreign hand. Pausing, he reached into his pocket for his reading glasses. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me,” he said looking up. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” Then on with the missive and, finally, back to the conclusion of his speech. To carry out the threat proposed in the Newburgh Address was to court the detestation of the citizenry and to “open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” To reject the appeal of the intriguers would be “one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue.” Choose the latter course, he added in the same flat, calm tone, and posterity would say of them: “ ’had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’ ”61

  With that Washington slowly folded his speech, removed his spectacles, and strode from the hall. The meeting continued, but the commander’s moving address had defused the plotters, leaving many officers, if one or two eyewitness accounts can be believed, in tears. Men close to Washington dominated the remaining minutes of the conclave, pushing through a statement of loyalty to Congress, one obviously prepared during the four-day lull that Washington had secured when he deferred the unofficial meeting. It was all over in twenty or thirty minutes, and not one word was uttered by any officer known to have been active in the intrigue.62

  Washington had acted from principle. A civilian who had taken up arms, he had no stomach for a mutiny—or even the appearance of such—against civilian authority. He knew, too that the army was not the vehicle to use to pursue the end for which both he and the nationalists in Congress yearned. Pragmatic where Hamilton was Machiavellian, politically shrewder than business moguls like the Morrises who comprehended how to get their way chiefly by the application of money or by deceit or brute force, Washington thoroughly understood the public temperament, and he realized full well the contempt with which such a radical step would be held by this republican people. It was a ploy almost certain to backfire, to assure the maintenance of state sovereignty; and for that reason too, he said, he had acted to thwart the conspirators. And that he had done, humbling and quieting the officers’ cabal not just with his words but with the drama of his staged performance as well. This man who early on had learned how to read and assess other men, this man who possessed what Garry Wills referred to as a “theatrical sense of audience,” had measured his quarry and scored another easy victory.63

  That done Washington proceeded to lobby tirelessly with Congress on behalf of his officers. Either because of his efforts, or because of the Newburgh Address, Congress was moved. Within a few days of the dramatic events in the northern cantonment, the legislators voted for commutation, an act that granted officers full pay for five years following the war’s end.64 Washington’s action in facing down the army’s conspirators has resulted in almost universal praise from historians. What often seems to be forgotten, however, is that he acted almost precisely as Hamilton hoped he would, and that in record time the plotters within the army achieved exactly what they had set out to get.

  Although no one knew it, even as Washington addressed his officers that tense day in the Temple of Virtue peace already had been agreed to. Thirty days before the country had learned through George III’s annual speech to Parliament that the Crown was inclined toward peace; from that moment on the burning question as to British intentions had been answered. Afterwards only the details of the peace treaty were awaited, and that information reached Washington’s headquarters three days after his moving speech.65

  The document had been signed in Paris more than three months before. It was an incomplete pact in that final details awaited the conclusion of negotiations of the separate Anglo-French treaty. But this compact nevertheless proclaimed an end to hostilities, it recognized the independence of the United States, and it stipulated that prisoners were to be exchanged. The army would have to remain intact until the definitive treaty arrived, probably within a few weeks or months at most, but the long-awaited moment finally had arrived. On April 9, nearly eight years to the day since shots had shattered the morning stillness at Lexington and Concord, Generals Carleton and Washington almost simultaneously issued orders for a cease fire.66

  Desirous as was Washington to hurry to the ease and beauty of Mount Vernon, the period from April 9 until noon, November 25, the moment when the last redcoat in New York stepped off American soil and onto the gangplank of his out-bound ship, must have seemed an eternity. For the most part the nature of his work remained as it had since Cornwallis’s surrender—repetitious, meticulous administrative drudgery. But the work load was lighter, and the strain that had accompanied life-and-death decisions at last was gone too, a fact that prompted one eyewitness who first had observed the commander in 1775 to remark now that the general’s formerly “contracted, pensive phiz, betokening deep thought and much care” had given way to an “uncommonly open and pleasant” demeanor.67

  During these last months of the war two matters took up most of Washington’s time. Working from an office in the Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, a two-story stone farmhouse that stood elegantly atop a knoll overlooking the Hudson, he presided over the final exchange of the prisoners of war and the breaking up of his army.

  Negotiating prisoner releases was not a new undertaking for Washington. Beginning in 1776 when large numbers of Arnold’s and Montgomery’s armies fell into British hands at Quebec, he had been pressed by congressional inaction—as well as by the potential chaos that would have resulted from thirteen states attempting to regain its captive sons—into taking over this responsibility. The following year Congress created a Commissary of Prisoners, but this official was only to carry out the prisoner swaps negotiated by the commander, and it fell to Washington to disentangle a myriad of thorny questions that arose from taking captives in a civil war. Were Continental army captives rebels or military prisoners? What of America’s Tory internees? And what of United States privateers captured on the high seas? How should the women and children who were captured along with the redcoat soldiery be treated? Should prisoners be swapped straight up, or, as the British proposed, should there be a tariff of exchange providing that officers carried more weight than did the men? Compared to the thicket of problems that always had attended prisoner negotiations, Washington’s task in 1783 was not too difficult. The capture of Cornwallis and his army gave him the bargaining chips to facilitate the final transfer, as did a congressional act passed in 1782 that bestowed upon him plenipotentiary powers to reach any accord on this matter with the British high command. Nevertheless, matters dragged until General Carleton knew for certain that the war was about to end; then terms for the final exchange were worked out, much of it actually negotiated by Washington’s emissaries, Knox and Gouverneur Morris.68

  While the prisoner exchanges proceeded, Congress first authorized, then ordered, the commander to furlough many of his troops, a money-saving expedient that the legislators hit upon, for a
smaller army would consume smaller amounts of food. Soon, too, those who had signed on for the duration were formally discharged.69

  As happy as was Washington to see these men depart—it meant that his own “retirement to the placid Walks of domestic life” could not be too far removed—he knew that the veterans were marching home under a cloud. Unpaid for months, the men expected to leave camp with at least three months’ back pay jingling in their pockets, for Washington was known to have pleaded with Congress to find and distribute at least that meager amount. But the Congress did not provide the money. Although the legislators presumably would leave no stone unturned to make a more than generous settlement with the officers, Congress provided the soldiery only with back-pay certificates that could not be redeemed before January 1784, and then only for three months’ overdue wages. “Ingratitude has been experienced in all Ages, and Republics in particular have even been famed for the exercise of that unnatural and Sordid Vice,” Washington suggested, as if in comfort. Strikingly, though, his correspondence conveys little empathy for the plight of the common soldier. The nation’s niggardly treatment of these poor souls might tarnish the “future reputation, tranquility, happiness and glory of this . . . Union,” he feared, but it was “particularly to the officers” that his heart bled for any potential “consequences or distresses of the most cruel nature.”70