American Crisis

by William M. Fowler Jr.

  59 JCC, 24:93.

  60 John Shy, ed., Winding Down: The Revolutionary War Letters of Benjamin Gilbert (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 67.

  61 Head note, Morris to John Pierce, January 20, 1783, PRM, 7:327–37. This is an extraordinary footnote exemplary of the very best in documentary editing describing these circumstances.

  62 Shy, Winding Down, p. 82.

  63 McDougall and Ogden to Henry Knox, February 8, 1783, KP, reel 11.

  64 Ibid.

  65 There is no direct evidence for this “conspiracy,” but the circumstantial evidence that follows convinces this writer that these men did concoct a plan. See also Richard Kohn, “The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d’Etat,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 27 (April 1970), pp. 187–220; Paul David Nelson, with a rebuttal by Richard H. Kohn, “Horatio Gates at Newburgh, 1783: A Misunderstood Role,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 29 (January 1972), pp. 143–55; C. Edward Skeen, with a rebuttal by Richard H. Kohn, “The Newburgh Conspiracy Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 31 (April 1974), pp. 273–98.

  66 Nathanael Greene was also held in very high regard.

  67 McDougall and Ogden to Knox, February 8, 1783, KP, reel 11.

  68 Knox and Morris were well known to each other. They had served together the previous year in an unsuccessful attempt to work a prisoner exchange with the British. Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 168–70.

  69 Gouverneur Morris to Knox, February 7, 1783, KP, reel 11. Morris had a tendency toward the dramatic. On January 1, 1783, he wrote to John Jay: “The army may have swords in their hands … Depend on it, good will arise from the situation to which we are hastening … And although I think it probable, that much of convulsion will ensue, yet it must terminate in giving to government that power, without which government is but a name.” Morris to Jay, January 1, 1783 in Jared Sparks, ed., Life of Gouverneur Morris (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), 1:249.

  70 Benjamin Walker to Edward Hand, February 14, 1783, GWLC.

  Chapter Ten

  1 GW to Baylies, January 8, 1783, FW, 26:22.

  2 GW to Major General Arthur St. Clair, February 19, 1783, in ibid., 26:145–46.

  3 GW to Howe, February 10, 1783, in ibid., 26:114.

  4 The house had previously served as headquarters for Knox and is often referred to as Knox’s Headquarters at Vails Gate. “Knox’s Headquarters State Historic Site,” State of New York Office of Parks and Recreation. Gates to Elizabeth Gates, January 17, 1783, HGP, reel 13.

  5 Gates to Timothy Pickering, January 27, 1783, PP, reel 13. Mrs. Gates was indeed very ill. Gates to Elizabeth Gates, January 17, 1783, HGP, reel 1.

  6 GW to Pickering, December 25, 1783, FW, 25:464–66.

  7 Pickering to wife, January 19, 1783, PP, reel 1.

  8 Knox to GW, September 10, 1782, KP, reel 9. Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 172–73.

  9 GW to Knox, September 12, 1782, FW, 25:150n.

  10 GW to Tilghman, January 10, 1783, in ibid., 26:29.

  11 GW to Lund Washington, February 12, 1783, in ibid., 26:126–27.

  12 Ibid., p.127. It may be at this point that Washington regretted a decision he made when appointed commander in chief. He declined to take a salary and asked only to be reimbursed for his expenses.

  13 GW to John Augustine Washington, January 16, 1783, FW, 26:41–42.

  14 Although Mary Ball Washington complained about her poverty, at her death in 1789 she owned lands, several slaves, and had very little debt. She also, curiously enough, left nearly everything to her negligent son George. Mary Ball Washington Will, May 20, 1788, GWLC.

  15 GW to John Augustine Washington, January 16, 1783, FW, 26:42.

  16 Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), pp. 422–23.

  17 GW to John Augustine Washington, January 16, 1783, FW, 26:43–44.

  18 GW to Archibald Cary, June 15, 1782, in ibid., 24:347; Washington to Heath, February 5, 1783, in ibid., 26:97.

  19 Alan Valentine, Lord Stirling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 268.

  20 Captain Richard Sill to Washington, January 14, 1783, and Marinus Willett to GW, February 19, 1783, both in GWLC.

  21 Pickering to wife, January 3, 1783, PP, reel 1.

  22 GW to Rittenhouse, February 16, 1783, FW, 26:136–37.

  23 General Order, Newburgh, November 14, 1782, in ibid., 25:343.

  24 Janet Dempsey, Washington’s Last Cantonment (Monroe, NY: Library Research Associates, 1990), pp. 46, 54, 57, passim; see also GW to Joseph Jones, December 14, 1782, FW, 25:430–31.

  25 Russell Bastado, comp., “Likenesses of New Hampshire War Heroes and Personages in the Collections of the New Hampshire State House and State Library,” http://www.nh.gov/nhdhr/publications/warheroes/evansrev.html, accessed December 11, 2009; Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army (Washington: Center for Military History, 1983), pp.197–98.

  26 General Orders, December 25, 1782, FW, 25:464; Gates’s role in this project can be followed in Edward C. Boynton, ed., General Orders of George Washington Issued at Newburgh on the Hudson, 1782–1783 (Harrison, NY: Harbor Hill Books, 1973), pp. 62–67.

  27 GW to Rochefontaine, Service Certificate, August 19, 1783, GWLC. Following the establishment of the United States Army, President Washington appointed Rochefontaine commandant of the Corps of Engineers. United States Army Corps of Engineers, History of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (Washington: Corps of Engineers, 1998), p. 21. United States Army Corps of Engineers Web site, “Commanders of the Corps of Engineers,” http://www.usace.army.mil/History/

  Pages/Commanders.aspx, accessed December 11, 2009.

  28 Gates was deeply involved in the project. See Benjamin Tupper to Horatio Gates, January 8, 10, 25, 1783, and Tupper, Nelson, and Rochefontaine to General Horatio Gates (?), Estimate on Building Expense, January 1783. Nelson is not identified. He may have been a private contractor. See also Robert Oliver to Horatio Gates, January 16, 1783, HGP, reel 13. Tupper’s regiment, the Sixth Massachusetts, disbanded on January 1, 1783. He was reassigned to the Tenth. Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1967), pp. 38–39.

  29 State Historic Site. Although Rochefontaine’s actual plans have not survived, sufficient contemporary descriptions of the building exist to make us fairly certain of its appearance. A reconstruction of the public building stands at New Windsor Cantonment, New York.

  30 In 1757 David Fordyce’s Temple of Virtue was published posthumously. This book by a popular Scottish professor of philosophy received wide notice and may have influenced Evans’s choice of name.

  31 Dempsey, Washington’s Last Cantonment, p. 93.

  32 Ibid., p. 96.

  33 Ibid., p. 101.

  34 General Orders, January 8, 1783, FW, 26:23.

  35 A feu de joie was an impressive sequential firing of thousands of muskets. I am indebted to Mike McCurty for this description.

  36 General Orders, January 29, 1783, FW, 26:75–76.

  37 Dempsey, Washington’s Last Cantonment, p. 106.

  38 Ibid., p. 105.

  39 After Orders, March 6, 1783, in Boynton, General Orders of George Washington, pp. 68–69.

  40 Dempsey, Washington’s Last Cantonment, p. 88; William Heath, Memoirs of General William Heath by Himself, ed. William Abbatt (New York: William Abbatt, 1901), p. 330.

  41 Pickering to his wife, February 6, 1783, PP, reel 1.

  42 Major General Gates’s Orders, February 8, 1783, in Boynton, General Orders of George Washington, p. 67; Tupper to GW, May 2, 1783, GWLC.

  43 Knox to McDougall, February 21, 1783, KP, reel 11.

  44 James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Boston; Little, Brown, 1968), p. 203. Ron Chern
ow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 73–74.

  45 Hamilton to Philip Schuyler, February 18, 1781, PAH, 25:563–68.

  46 Hamilton to GW, February (13), 1783, LD, 19:688–90. Some historians have suggested that Brooks carried both Morris’s and Hamilton’s letters. Given the dates, this seems unlikely.

  47 For Brooks’s role, see Richard Kohn, “The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d’Etat,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 27 (April 1970), p. 198n. Kohn’s essay is the best analysis of the Newburgh Conspiracy.

  48 Pickering to Gates, May 28, 1783, PP, reel 5.

  49 Armstrong to Gates, April 29, 1783, HGP. Gates too was watching with great interest the “the political pot in Philadelphia.” Gates to Richard Peter, February 20, 1783, in ibid., reel 13. It is possible that both Brooks and Hamilton were playing a double game, with each, in his own way, warning Washington about the machinations in Congress and among his own command.

  50 Knox to Morris, February 21, 1783, KP, reel 11. On the same day, he wrote a very similar letter to McDougall: Knox to McDougall, February 21, 1783, in ibid.

  51 “Brutus” to Knox, February 12, 1783, in ibid., Kohn, “The Inside History,” pp. 197, 197n.

  52 Knox to McDougall, February 21, 1783, KP, reel 11.

  53 See Kohn, “The Inside History,” p. 204.

  54 Diary of Robert Morris, February 13, 1783, PRM, 7:431.

  55 Madison, Notes of Debates, February 20, 1783, LD, 19:719.

  56 Madison to Edmund Randolph, February 25, 1783, in ibid., 19:733.

  57 Madison, Notes of Debates, February 26, 1783, in ibid., 19:740.

  58 Von Steuben to Knox, February 25, 1783, KP, reel 11.

  59 On the evening of February 20, at a private dinner where nationalist sympathies ran high, Hamilton noted that “he knew Genl Washington intimately and perfectly, that his extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his popularity; but that his virtue, his patriotism and his firmness would it might be depended never yield to any dishonorable or disloyal plans into which he might be called; that he would sooner suffer himself to be cut into pieces.” Madison, Notes of Debates, February 20, 1783, LD, 19:719.

  Chapter Eleven

  1 JCC, 23:726.

  2 Madison, Notes, February 20, 1783, LD, 19:718.

  3 Gates to Peters, February 20, 1783, HGP, reel 13.

  4 Gates to his wife, January 17, 1783, in ibid.

  5 Gates to GW, November 7, 1782, HGP, reel 13.

  6 Gates to his wife, February 11, 1783, in ibid.

  7 For a particularly critical view of Gates, see Dave R. Palmer, George Washington and Benedict Arnold (Washington: Regnery 2006), passim.

  8 C. Edward Skeen, John Armstrong Jr. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), p. 3.

  9 Pension Application of Banks (Barruck) Webb S40654, http://www.southerncampaign.org.pens40654, Maryland State Archives, Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution, vol. 18, pp.155, 363, and 584. Accessed online October 12, 2009. Following the military practice of the time, it is possible that Richmond continued to act as an aide to Gates and stayed with him in Virginia and then accompanied him to New Windsor. Washington to Gates, August 27, 1782, FW, 25:68.

  10 Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey, http://www.njstatelib.org/NJ; Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army (Washington: Rare Book Publishing, 1914), p. 48; Information received from Library Society of the Cincinnati, typescript paragraph on back of photograph of portrait of Richmond in library collection; Francis J. Sypher, Jr., New York State Society of the Cincinnati Biographies of Original Members and Other Continental Officers (Fishkill: New York State Society of the Cincinnati, 2004), p.15. Berg, p. 60; Wright, p. 167.

  11 Speech of John Pope Hodnett given before United States Senate Committee on Education and Labor, May 21, 1886, Report 1313, 19th Congress, First Session, p. 39. Walter Stewart Orderly Book, online catalog description, American Philosophical Society. “Notes and Queries,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1898), p. 382.

  12 GW to von Steuben, February 18, 1783, FW, 26:143; Charles Willson Peale, “Mrs. Walter Stewart,” Yale University Art Gallery, http://artgallery.yale.edu; obituary, “Walter Stewart,” Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, June 6, 1796. Washington to Stewart, January 18, 1783, FW, 26:47.

  13 The office of the inspector general had been created by Congress in February 1779. Congress appointed von Steuben to the post and granted considerable power to him directly and to his subordinates. JCC, 13:196; General Orders, July 5, 1781, GWLC.

  14 The impact that the revolutionary experience had on young men such as the officers with Gates is examined in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly 76, no. 2 (June 1961), pp. 181–216.

  15 After the war Stewart returned to Philadelphia, where he became a very successful merchant. He was a partner in ventures with Robert Morris and an investor in the bank of the United States as well as canals. He was also a holder of federal securities. Stewart obituary; Richard Kohn, “The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d’Etat,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 27 (April 1970), p. 205n; Forrest McDonald, E. Pluribus Unum (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 27. For Stewart’s views, see also Stewart to Gates, June 20, 1783, HGP, reel 13.

  16 Gates to Armstrong, June 22, 1783, in George Bancroft, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 1:93.

  17 Gouverneur Morris to Knox, February 7, 1783, PRM, 7:418.

  18 Peters to Gates, March 5, 1783, HGP, reel 13.

  19 GW to Jones, December 14, 1782, FW, 25:431.

  20 Jones to Washington, February 27, 1783, LD, 19:746.

  21 Hamilton to James Duane, September 6, 1780, PAH, 2:420; Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: Youth to Maturity, 1755–1788. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 146–52. Hamilton had married the daughter of General Philip Schuyler, Gates’s predecessor as commander of the northern army and an officer ill treated by Gates. He was firmly in the anti-Gates camp.

  22 Although dated February 27, the letter did not leave Philadelphia until one or two days later. LD, 19:748n. Stewart’s arrival came two days after the soldiers had lined up to get their weekly half crown. “The officers,” however, according to Lieutenant Benjamin Gilbert, “got no pay as yet, and very little prospect of getting any at any period.” Gilbert to his father, March 6, 1783, in John Shy, ed., Winding Down: The Revolutionary War Letters of Lieutenant Benjamin Gilbert of Massachusetts, 1780–1783 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 83.

  23 GW to Hamilton, March 4, 1783, FW, 26:185. Brooks remains something of a mystery. See Gates to Pickering, May 19, 1783, and Pickering to Gates, May 28, 1783, both in HGP, reel 13. See Washington’s comments about “the arrival of a certain Gentlemen from Phila in Camp.” GW to Joseph Jones, March 12, 1783, FW, 26:213–16; GW to Hamilton, March 12, 1783, in ibid., 26:216–18.

  24 GW to Hamilton, March 4, 1783, FW, 26:186.

  25 For summaries and analysis, see Kohn, “The Inside History,” William and Mary Quarterly, pp. 187–220; Paul David Nelson, with a rebuttal by Richard H. Kohn, “Horatio Gates at Newburgh, 1783: A Misunderstood Role,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 29 (January 1972), pp. 143–55; C. Edward Skeen, “The Newburgh Conspiracy Reconsidered, with a Rebuttal by Richard H. Kohn,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 31(April 1974), pp. 273–98.

  26 The evidence is clear that Armstrong was the principal author of the March 10 paper as well as the one on March 12. Logic suggests, however, that he sought advice from those around him, most likely including Richmond, Stewart, and Barber. To what degree he consulted Gates is uncertain. In addition to the officers me
ntioned, the names of Timothy Pickering and Dr. William Eustis, an army surgeon from Massachusetts, have been suggested as possibly being present. For evidence, most of it circumstantial, see: Pickering to wife, March 16, 1783, March 20, 1783, PP, reel 1; Gates to Armstrong, June 22, 1783. Bancroft, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America, 1:318; Pickering to Gates, May 28, 1783, HGP, reel 13. As the editors of the PRM note (7:592–93n), there is a “discrepancy” in the surviving texts of the first “Address.”

  27 Pointed out to the author by Mike McGurty, historic guide, New Windsor Encampment, New York State Historic Site, during visit of April 16, 2010.

  28 Armstrong’s “Address” is printed in JCC, 24:295–97.

  29 GW to Jones, March 12, 1783, FW, 26:214–15.

  30 GW to Hamilton, March 12, 1783, in ibid., 26:216.

  31 GW to Jones, March 12, 1783, in ibid., 26:215.

  32 I am grateful to Michael McCurty for making this observation.

  33 There is no documentary evidence to support this; however, given the previous roles these officers played and their closeness to Washington, it seems logical that their opinions would have been sought.

  34 For Trumbull’s service, see John W. Ifkovic, Connecticut’s Nationalist Revolutionary: Jonathan Trumbull, Jr. (Hartford: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1977), pp. 52–73.

  35 JCC, 5:788–807. Article 1: “Whatsoever officer or soldier shall presume to use traitorous or disrespectful words against the authority of the United States in Congress assembled, or the legislature of any of the United States in which he may be quartered, if a commissioned officer, he shall be cashiered; if a non commissioned officer or soldier, he shall suffer such punishment as shall be inflicted upon him by the sentence of a court martial.”

  Article 3: “Any officer or soldier who shall begin, excite, cause or join, in any mutiny or sedition, in the troop, company, or regiment to which he belongs, or in any other troop or company in the service of the United States, or in any party, post, detachment of guard, on any pretence whatsoever, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as by a court martial shall be inflicted.”