General Gates looked a little flustered, but there was not much he could do but heed the General’s request, especially since several officers from each section of the floor almost at the same time yelled out “Let’s hear the General” and “So moved.” The cries from the floor happened so quickly that I almost thought it was all prearranged.
The General took several pages from his waistcoat pocket, which, from the second row, I could see had been written in large letters by the General himself. It was probably the manuscript I had observed the General writing that morning. The General replaced General Gates in the front of the room, waving for him to take a seat. No one I have ever met had such a commanding presence as the General, and the officers now looked attentively forward with upraised faces. The General apologized for his presence, which was “by no means my intention when I published the order directing you to assemble.” So important was this moment for the future of the country that the General said he “had committed my thoughts to writing” and asked “the indulgence of my brother officers” to grant him liberty to read from what he had written. The General then took out his papers and began.
I know there are many accounts of what the General said that day, and in what order, but I copied the General’s manuscript later and have reread it hundreds of times in the sixty years since. The quotations that follow reflect exactly what he wrote except for one sentence the General seemed to ad lib, which has been quoted by many and which you will hear about shortly.
The General did not waste any time in addressing what he knew was the subject of every officer’s attention: the anonymous letters. “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 sense of the Army decide.”
There was no surprise here. The General had indicated as much in his order moving the meeting to Saturday. The officers might agree that improper procedures had been followed, but what about the substance of the second anonymous letter? Where did the General stand?
The General continued speaking in an even voice. First he tried to identify with the feelings of his audience, which the General sensed approved the letter. He gave credit to the author for “the goodness of his pen” but did not give “credit for the rectitude of his heart.” He observed that the letter appealed more to “passion” than “to the reason and judgment of the Army.” Otherwise, he asked, why would the letter writer remain secret and attack a “man who should recommend moderation”—in other words, someone who thought differently than he thought? The General was obviously sensitive about what he perceived as an attack on himself, but I did not think that point would carry much weight with the frustrated officers.
The General then acknowledged that the army’s grievances deserved a hearing, although not the hasty and irregular one called for by the writer, and went on to emphasize his own history of identification with the army’s grievances. He recalled that “as I was among the first who embarked in the cause of our common country . . . as I have never left your side one moment . . . as I have been the constant companion and witness of your distresses . . . as my heart has ever expanded with joy, when I have heard [the army’s] praises, and my indignation has arisen, when the mouth of detraction has been opened against it—it can scarcely be supposed, at this late stage of the War, that I am indifferent to its interests.”
I could see heads nodding, for everyone in the room knew how the General had shared their hardships and fought for their interests. But then the General asked how these interests were to be promoted. He quickly demolished the second alternative promoted by “the anonymous addresser”: to move west to unsettled country and leave the country we have left behind to defend itself. The General pointed out that would mean leaving wives and children behind or, if taken with us, leaving behind the farms that fed us.
Again the officers nodded.
Then the General addressed the writer’s other, and what everyone knew was the writer’s preferred, alternative: “If peace takes place, never sheath your Sword, says he until you have obtained full and ample Justice.” The General stated that this meant turning the army against our country and its government, “which is the apparent object unless Congress can be compelled into an instant compliance,” something we all doubted would happen.
At his moment I still was not positive as to which direction the General was going. Was he going to endorse moving on Philadelphia? The General immediately gave his answer. “This dreadful alternative . . . has something so shocking in it that humanity revolts at the idea,” said the General forcefully. I finally had my answer, and I found myself exhaling with relief. The General would not lead the mutiny, and I would not have to face the dreadful choice of following my General or my own republican beliefs.
The General said such an idea could not emanate from a “friend to this country,” that only an “insidious Foe” such as “Some Emissary, perhaps from [the British in] New York,” could sow “the seeds of discord and separation between the civil and military powers.” Still I did not for a moment believe, nor did I believe the General believed, that this was a British plot. I could understand, however, why the General wanted to make the officers believe that the proposal came from the British rather than from among his own officer corps. The General went on to call both alternatives “impracticable,” but I sensed most of the audience disagreed, at least as to the alternative of retaining our arms.
It was here that the General started to lose his audience. He tried to convince us that Congress would act on the army’s just grievances. He went on and on about that “honorable body,” which he asserted “entertains exalted sentiments of the Services of the Army; and from a full conviction of its Merits & sufferings, will do it compleat Justice; that their endeavors to discover & establish funds for this purpose have been unwearied, and will not cease till they have succeeded, I have not a doubt.”
The trouble was that the audience had considerable doubts, which I am sure the General shared. We remembered all the broken congressional promises about pay and clothing. We remembered the broken 1780 promise of pensions for the officers. We remembered that our recent delegation to Philadelphia had met with soothing words but no action.
I could hear occasional mumblings, asides, and shifting on the benches. I knew by this time that the General was not going to accept the writer’s invitation to lead the coup and was firmly against it. But I had my doubts as to whether the officers would follow his lead, especially since I was sure that some had been primed to control the meeting and rouse the officers with tirades against congressional inaction.
When the General stated that the deliberations of Congress, a large body, with many interests to reconcile, were of necessity slow, and asked rhetorically, “Why then should we distrust them,” the mutterings rose. I expected at any moment that officers were going to stand up and shout, “You know why we should distrust them!” I heard an officer behind me mumble, “We have waited long enough.” Tensions held down for months and years seemed about to erupt. At any second, I feared someone would yell out for our officers to leave their leader and start a new revolution. What would the General do? What would I do?
The General looked up and seemed to sense he was losing his audience. He departed from his text, paused, reached into his pocket, and slowly pulled out a letter. I was pretty sure it was a letter from Congressman Jones, who had written the General, holding out hope for favorable action on our petition. The General obviously wanted to read the letter in an effort to convince us that Congress would act. After unfolding the letter in his hands, however, and looking at the first paragraph, the General mumbled barely a few incoherent words and then lapsed into silence. He seemed distracted, even agitated. Still the silence went on. As the seconds went by, I became embarrassed. Had the General suffered some kind of stroke or seizure? He seemed paralyzed. Not a word left his lips. The grumbling that had been rising while the G
eneral defended Congress started to subside. We had never seen our commander in such a state, so much in apparent need of sympathy. Soon there was complete silence. I now felt not only embarrassed but sorry for the man who had so often intimidated me.
It was at this moment the General reached into another waistcoat pocket and pulled out a pair of spectacles. I knew he had received these from Dr. Rittenhouse in Philadelphia only a month before, and I knew that he needed them to read small handwriting such as the script of Congressman Jones. But up until now, the General had only used the spectacles in his study. His officers, excepting me, had never seen the General wear his spectacles. The General, as I have said, was vain and proud about his appearance and reluctant to show any infirmity in public, and certainly not before hundreds of officers.
A long “ah” rose from the benches as the officers, for the first time, saw the General’s spectacles in his hands.
As the General started, with trembling hands, to put his spectacles on, he looked up, paused, and then declared in a halting voice, but one that now could be heard in the back row of the quieted assembly, “Gentlemen . . . you will forgive me . . . and permit me to put on these spectacles . . . for I have not only grown gray . . . but almost blind in the service of our country.”
There was total silence. While I am sure it was only seconds, it seemed like minutes while the General tried to adjust his spectacles in order to read from the letter. I heard sobbing from around the Temple. Finally, calls came forth softly and then more loudly: “We’re with you, General.” The calls slowly turned into shouts. Then “Tell us what to do” cries emerged, followed by “Tell us and we will follow you.” The outpouring continued to come forth. I realized a loyalty built over seven long years would not be broken asunder by a few schemers. I was stunned. The General appeared stunned too.
Then he slowly put his spectacles aside and, with occasional glances at his own prepared speech, he proceeded to do just what his officers were asking: tell us what to do. First, in an increasingly firm voice, he pledged “to exert whatever ability I am possessed of, in your favor.” But in return he asked his officers “not to . . . sully the glory you have hitherto maintained,” to “rely on the plighted faith of your country,” to “value your own sacred honor,” and “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man [the anonymous writer] who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
After pausing and gazing into many of our faces, the General looked down at the speech he had written and ended his remarks with words that I can still vividly recall today. “By thus determining and thus acting, you will pursue the plain and direct road to the attainment of your wishes. You will defeat the insidious designs of our enemies, who are compelled to resort from open force to secret artifice. You will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue, rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings; and you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, [that] ‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’”
Nobody moved a muscle. I thought the General was looking me in the eye, but others have since told me they thought he was looking them in the eye. Then the General put his spectacles and his remarks, along with the unread letter, back in his waistcoat pockets, turned, and strode out the door that he had entered just a few minutes before.
Years later, Major Samuel Shaw, who had attended the meeting and was also one of the officers who had visited with the General on Thursday, wrote me that “there was something so natural, so unaffected in his appeal as rendered it superior to the most studied oratory. It forced its way to the heart, and you might see sensibility moisten every eye.”
Like me, Shaw knew the challenges the General faced at the meeting. “On other occasions,” Shaw wrote, “he had been supported by the exertions of an Army and the countenance of his friends; but in this he stood single and alone. There was no saying where the passions of an Army, which were not a little inflamed, might lead; but it was generally allowed that longer forbearance was dangerous, and moderation had ceased to be a virtue. Under these circumstances he appeared, not at the head of his troops, but—as it were—in opposition to them; and for a dreadful moment the interests of the Army and its General seemed to be in competition. He spoke—every doubt was dispelled, and the tide of patriotism rolled again in its wonted course.”
No sooner was the General out the door than General Knox, in his booming voice, moved, with a second by General Rufus Putnam, that the officers reciprocate with affection the General’s sentiments and express their unanimous thanks. This motion was met with thunderous “ayes.”
Back in the chair on the podium, General Gates looked bewildered. The contrast with General Washington was remarkable, even if unfair. No one had the presence of Washington. All of Gates’s features looked more pronounced than usual, and not to his advantage: his ruddy cheeks seemed more ruddy, his stooped shoulders more stooped, his aquiline nose more pointed, and his thin, graying hair more stringy. Unable in his role as chairman to speak, Gates peered around as if looking for a colleague to help him out.
Instead, General Putnam rose and, without waiting for recognition, moved, with a second by General Hand, that one general, one field officer, and one captain be appointed to a committee (the motion then named General Knox, Colonel Brooks, and Captain Howard, three of the officers most loyal to the General) to draft a resolution embodying the General’s sentiments and report back within half an hour with the resolution for our approval. Again a thunderous round of “ayes” greeted the motion, and off marched General Knox, Colonel Brooks, and Captain Howard to one of the side rooms, leaving all of us chattering with our neighbors, before an increasingly discomfited General Gates. We all felt we were present at a dramatic and seemingly spontaneous moment, and then I recalled that Generals Knox, Putnam, and Hand and Colonel Brooks and Captain Howard had been among the scores of officers who had bustled in and out of our headquarters that Thursday.
We did not have to wait thirty minutes. It seemed less than five minutes before the committee marched back into the auditorium with a resolution. Maybe I was the only one who felt that it seemed an uncommonly short time to draft what appeared to be a two- or three-page resolution. I was beginning to suspect that the rapid motions thanking the General and appointing a committee, along with the resolution from the committee, had all been planned in those Thursday meetings.
As General Knox read the resolution aloud in his authoritative voice, the message could not have been clearer. The resolution affirmed the army’s service to its country out of the “purest love and attachment to . . . rights and liberties” and that “no circumstances of distress or danger shall induce a conduct that may tend to sully the reputation and glory of which they have acquired at the price of their blood”; resolved that “the Army continue to have unshaken confidence in the justice of Congress” to arrange adequate funding for a sum equal to half pay for the officers’ retirement years; requested the commander in chief to write the president of the Congress “entreating . . . a most speedy decision”; expressed the army’s “abhorrence” and “disdain” and rejection of the “infamous propositions contained in a late anonymous address to the officers of the Army”; and finally praised General McDougall and the other interlocutors with Congress for their “prudence” and asked that they continue their “solicitations at Congress.”
I was struck by how many of the phrases in the resolution echoed the phrases of the General’s address. Perhaps this was just a coincidence or maybe the committee members had good memories.
The officers roared their approval as the presiding General Gates looked around the room, apparently searching for one of his colleagues to speak. He
finally called on Quartermaster General Pickering, who I thought showed great courage in arguing against the resolution. He pointed out the army’s hypocrisy in damning with infamy letters that only days before they had read “with rapture.” I had to admit Pickering was right. He reminded the assembly that nothing had changed in the intervening time. But things had changed—the General had spoken and completely swayed the officers’ feelings. General Pickering was shouted down. General Gates, sensing the situation was beyond his control, called for a vote, and the motion was adopted unanimously with not even General Pickering voting no. With that, the meeting ended upon a motion for adjournment.
As I left the Temple, I could sense the warm feelings of those around me. It was as if we had realized that we had averted danger and had followed the idealistic, but right, course. I walked back to Hasbrouck House with David Humphreys and Benjamin Walker, and we talked about how remarkable it was that the General, who most, including us, regarded as an unremarkable speaker and writer, had changed the direction of the meeting so abruptly. As I reflect back, I have come to believe that the General was a more remarkable speaker and writer than we gave him credit for. It is often written that, during his presidency, the General was not a politician. Of course, he was a great politician in large part because he was not perceived as a politician. It was the same with his writing and speaking. The other Founding Fathers orated and wrote with embellishments, including frequent Greek and Latin allusions. Everything they wrote was a distinguished essay, every speech a great oration. And I notice these essays and speeches are quoted often and inserted in school textbooks. The General, by contrast, wrote for his audience, albeit, because of his lack of formal schooling, his writing included many misspellings. He spoke to his audiences as he had that day at Newburgh. And, unlike on other less important occasions, he did not stammer.
The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel Page 17