The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
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These errors were clear for all to see, as were the political and economic problems they were producing. Unless corrected, Hamilton wrote, they would haunt the infant republic, leading to “a number of petty states with the appearance only of union, jarring, jealous and perverse, without any determined direction, fluctuating and unhappy at home, weak and insignificant by their dissensions in the eyes of the nation.” The core mistake was to vest sovereignty in the states rather than in a federal government empowered to oversee the economy, including collecting taxes and regulating commerce, and to manage the inevitable expansion of a continental empire. As Hamilton put it, “Americans needed to think continentally.”37
That core mistake, currently embodied in the Articles, obviously had to be corrected, which should be the work of “those with the enlightened and liberal views necessary to make a great and flourishing people”—in other words, men like himself. But beyond the specific political reforms that would be necessary, there was also a grand illusion that had to be dispelled, which was another unfortunate by-product of the movement for independence: namely, the belief that political power itself was inherently evil and ultimately unnecessary, because virtuous citizens would internalize such a high level of sacrifice to the collective good that all forms of political coercion would prove superfluous. Hamilton unleashed all his political energy against what he regarded as the most seductive delusion generated by the patriotic rhetoric of the American Revolution:
We may preach till we are tired of the theme, the necessity of disinterestedness in republics without making a single proselyte…. We might as well reconcile ourselves to the Spartan community of goods and wives, to their iron coin, their long beards, or their black broth; for it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.38
A full year before he was elected to the Confederation Congress, then, Hamilton had developed a full-blooded vision of a truly national government to replace the Articles and the basic framework for the argument to justify that change. While Madison was still evolving in a national direction, Hamilton was already there. Part of the reason was his wartime experience, where the inadequacies of the state-based confederation were experienced on a daily basis in the form of periodic starvation and troops without shoes. Part of the reason was that as a recent immigrant with no long-standing loyalty to a particular state, Hamilton had no local or regional allegiance that needed to be overcome. (This was Madison’s problem.) And part of the reason was Hamilton’s distinctive personality, which instinctively regarded halfway measures as mere bromides, incremental acts that defied the aggressive core of his character. Whether Hamilton was charging a British redoubt or arguing about the full meaning of the American Revolution, he had to be out front. Nothing less was psychologically tolerable.
This all-or-nothing audacity posed problems, as he quickly learned when taking his seat in the Congress in July 1782. Upon arrival, he submitted a resolution, announcing that “the situation of these states is in a peculiar manner critical.” The main problem was the mounting debt and, despite heroic efforts by the Financier, the obvious inability of the current government to restore public credit. There was but one answer, the resolution concluded, and that was to call a constitutional convention “to revise and amend the confederation.” The delegates in the Congress promptly and without debate sent the resolution to a committee, which just as promptly buried it in a pile of papers, never to be seen again. Political combat, it turned out, was not like charging a redoubt, because a leader could get too far ahead of his constituents. This was a problem that would haunt Hamilton throughout the decade, for he was so far ahead of public opinion that his views were often discounted or ignored altogether.39
Hindsight allows us to see that Yorktown was the culminating battle of the war, but few if any political or military leaders at the time recognized that reality. Washington was especially outspoken on the need to maintain the Continental Army at full strength in order to meet a new British offensive. “The king will push the War as long as the Nation would find men or Money,” he warned, because all members of the British ministry believed that “the Sun of Great Britain will set the moment American Independence is acknowledged.” As a result, a full year after Yorktown the soldiers of the Continental Army—about ten thousand officers and men—were drilling every day at the main cantonment on the Hudson outside Newburgh, New York, waiting for the climactic battle that had, in fact, already happened.40
Long-standing grievances had been festering in the army for many months, and in January 1783 a delegation of officers headed by Alexander McDougall delivered a petition to Congress demanding their back pay, which was over a year in arrears; assurance that their promised pensions of half pay for life would be honored; and more generous rations and clothing allocations. McDougall’s petition, which was signed by thirteen generals, painted a pathetic picture of the Continental Army—half-starved, poorly clothed, and apprehensive that, when the war ended, they would be disbanded and sent home as beggars. Then McDougall ended on an ominous note: “The uneasiness of the soldiers, for want of pay, is great and dangerous; any further experiments on their patience must have fatal effects.” Congress needed to know that unless these grievances were addressed, the army might decide to mutiny.41
What happened next, called the Newburgh Conspiracy, has all the elements of a classic mystery novel, rendered more intriguing because of the multiple behind-the-scenes conversations that, for obvious reasons, never found their way into the historical record. The essence of the story, as best we can recover it, goes like this: the army was prepared to threaten mutiny in order to pressure Congress for its promised pay and pensions; Hamilton and Morris decided to use the crisis to generate support for reform of the Articles to permit passage of the impost and more vigorous tax collection; meanwhile, a faction in the army, led by Horatio Gates, Washington’s chief bête noire, was prepared not just to threaten mutiny but to act on the threat. For our purposes, however, the significance of the Newburgh Conspiracy goes beyond the layered plotting and clandestine scheming that gives the story its seductive allure. The episode is also an airburst in the night that exposed the fault lines running through any projections of American nationhood as the war ended.42
The idea to manipulate the army’s grievances to effect fiscal reform probably originated with Morris’s assistant and best friend, Gouverneur Morris (no relation), a towering peg-legged raconteur whose reputation as a wit and ladies’ man endeared him to both Morris and Hamilton. But the key player, once the scheme was hatched, was Hamilton, currently serving in the Confederation Congress, whose connections with the officers in the army and with Washington himself were impeccable. The chief problem was to maximize the threat posed by the army while controlling the explosive energies such a threat created. Hamilton explained to Washington that he was, once again, the indispensable man:
It appears to be a prevailing opinion in the army that…if they once lay down their arms, they will part with the means of obtaining Justice. It is to be lamented that appearances afford too much ground for their distrust…. The claims of the army, assigned with moderations and firmness, may operate on those weak minds which are influenced by their apprehensions more than their judgments…. But the difficulty will be to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation…. This Your Excellency must effect.43
There was no doubt in Hamilton’s mind that Washington was up to the task. Having spent four years working at his side, Hamilton could attest that “his virtue, his patriotism, and his firmness would never yield to any dishonorable or disloyal plans, that he would sooner suffer himself to be cut to pieces.”44
Washington’s massive probity precluded any possibility of making himself complicitous in any Morris-Hamilton plot. He sensed that, as he put it, “there is something very mysterious in this business.” And later, when the full contours of Hamilton’s scheme became c
lear, he lectured his former aide-de-camp on the impropriety of manipulating soldiers “as mere Puppets to establish Continental funds” and finally scolded, “The Army is a dangerous instrument to play with.”45
But in response to Hamilton’s initial solicitation, he expressed agreement on the two most substantive issues. First, the army deserved better treatment than it had received, and “the prevailing sentiment in the Army is that the prospect of compensation for past Services will terminate with the War.” And second, the government under the Articles had to be revised: “For it is clearly my opinion that unless Congress possess powers competent to all general purposes, that the distresses we have incurred, and the blood we have spilt in the course of an eight year war, will avail us nothing.”46
Washington played his role to perfection. He canceled a meeting of officers that had been called by the radical faction loyal to Horatio Gates, who were intending to vote on a proposal to mutiny by refusing to throw down their arms when peace was declared, or if the war continued, by refusing to fight. Instead, Washington scheduled his own meeting on March 16, and all five hundred officers showed up at a large auditorium called the Temple to hear him deliver what has come to be regarded as the most important speech of his life. Here is the most salient passage:
But as I was among the first who embarked in the Cause of our common Country. As I have never left your side for one moment…. As I have been the constant companion and witness of your distress, and not among the last to feel and acknowledge your Merits. As I have ever considered my own Military regulation as inseparably connected with that of the army…it can be scarcely be supposed at this stage of the War that I am indifferent to its interests. And let me conjure you, in the name of our Common Country, as you value your own sacred honor—and as you regard the Military and National Character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any 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.47
The audience sat in frozen silence for several seconds after Washington had finished, momentarily obscuring their reaction to his words. Then Washington pulled out of his waistcoat a recently acquired pair of spectacles and said: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown grey, but almost blind in service to my country.” Several officers began to sob, then came a smattering of applause, then resounding applause, then a standing ovation. All prospects for a military coup died at that moment.
Within the long arc of American history, Washington’s speech is significant because it prevented the American Revolution from descending the path taken by previous and future revolutionary movements, from republican ideals to military dictatorships. Which is to say that Washington did not do what Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had done before him and Napoleon would do after him. In the crucible of that moment, however, the more immediate significance was that the army ceased to be a pawn in a plot to expand the powers of the Congress. The failure of the Newburgh Conspiracy meant that whatever dim prospects for a revision of the Articles it had created were now dead.
Henry Knox, trying to sound an upbeat note, proposed an elegantly simple solution. “As the present constitution [the Articles] is so defective,” he observed, “why do not you great men call the people together and tell them so. That is, to have a convention of the states to form a better constitution.” This suggestion must have generated a bemused smile from Hamilton, who viewed the political prospects from his cockpit in Philadelphia. He had reached the conclusion that even holding the current confederation together would prove “arduous work, for to borrow a figure from mechanics, the centrifugal is much stronger than the centripetal force in these states—the seeds of disunion much more numerous than those of union.” He told Washington that the prospects for reform were bleak: “I fear we have been contending for a shadow.”48
Washington wanted it to be known that he had done his level best to get the army what it justly deserved, and to register his rather conspicuous opinion that only a radical change in the Articles could permit that to happen. “No man in the United States is, or can be, more deeply impressed with the present necessity of a reform in the present Confederation than myself,” he explained, “for to the defects thereof, and want of powers in the Congress may justly be ascribed the prolongation of the War and the current plight of the Army.”49
The unattractive truth was that the arrival of the provisional treaty ending the war in April 1783 made the Continental Army superfluous, and the sooner it disappeared, the better. Congress eventually voted to provide full pay for five years for officers in lieu of half pay for life, but doing so was a purely rhetorical exercise, since there was no money in the federal coffers to pay anyone. Even that meaningless commitment generated widespread criticism, especially in New England, where returning officers were greeted with newspaper editorials describing them as blood-beaked vultures feeding at the public trough. At least in retrospect, the dissolution of the Continental Army in the spring of 1783 was one of the most poignant scenes in American history, as the men who had stayed the course and won the war were ushered off without pay, with paper pensions and only grudging recognition of their service. Washington could only weep: “To be disbanded…like a set of beggars, needy, distressed, and without prospect…will drive every man of Honor and Sensibility to the extreme Horrors of Despair.”50
Morris could not tolerate the injustice of it all. So he agreed to pay all members of the army for three months, and since there were no federal funds to cover that expense, he spent his last days in office writing personal checks, called Morris notes, to the tune of $750,000 in today’s dollars. This nearly bankrupted him, but it constituted a dramatic statement to his critics that he had never been in it for the money.51
Morris had already announced his decision to step down, declaring that “I will never be the Minister of Injustice,” presumably referring to the shabby treatment of the army. More broadly, he had been overseeing an inherently dysfunctional fiscal policy. “To increase our debts while the Prospect of paying them diminishes,” he caustically noted, “does not consist with my Ideas of integrity.” Throughout his tenure as superintendent of finance, Morris had acted on the assumption that the United States were in fact bound together by a common debt incurred in the war for independence, and that bond created a common obligation to support a national fiscal policy. But it was now clear beyond any doubt that very few Americans shared that assumption. “I hope my successor will be more fortunate than I have been,” Morris explained to Washington upon resigning, “and that our glorious Revolution may be crowned by those Acts of Justice, without which the greatest human Glory is but the Shadow of Shade.”52
As if to underline the growing sense of dissolution, when the provisional treaty arrived in Congress, a quorum did not exist to approve it, and no one was sure who had the authority to sign it as that body’s official representative.
A dramatic sequel to this silliness then occurred in June, when three hundred soldiers from the Lancaster and Philadelphia barracks, dissatisfied with the Morris notes and demanding their back pay, refused to stack their weapons and instead marched on the Pennsylvania State House, where the Congress was sitting. Enjoying the support of the local residents, who dispensed free alcohol to the troops as they surrounded the statehouse, for several hours they peered into the windows at the delegates, shouted obscenities, and aimed their muskets at any delegate who protested the demonstration.53
Though rowdy, the troops remained nonviolent and eventually marched back to their barracks to the cheers of the assembled crowd. Hamilton was especially incensed at being the target of intimidation—in his highly refined code of honor, the troops had challenged his manhood. He wrote a blistering letter to John Dickinson, currently serving as president of the Pennsylvania Council, inquiring in belligerent fashion why the Pennsylvania militia had not been called out to disperse
the mutinous troops. Dickinson explained that the militia might very well have joined the mutiny. This was probably true, but it did not satisfy Hamilton, who drafted a resolution, endorsed by the full Congress, that the inability of the Pennsylvania government to provide security for the delegates meant that the seat of the American government should move to New Jersey.54
That decision initiated a long odyssey for the Congress, first to Princeton, then to Trenton, then to Annapolis, and finally to New York, creating the impression of an itinerant traveler moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse with no real home of his own. Hamilton bemoaned the appearance of such a transitory body, especially in the eyes of European powers already convinced that the infant American republic was likely to die in the cradle.55
But by midsummer 1783 Hamilton himself had given up the ghost. “There is so little disposition either in or out of Congress to give solidity to our national system,” he explained to Nathanael Greene, “that there is no motive for a man to lose his time in the public service…. Experience must convince us that our present establishments are Utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better.” Not the kind of man to waste his time in noble but futile causes, Hamilton believed that he had done his best, just as Morris had done his best, but America was not yet ready for what they wanted. He was going back to New York, to his beloved Betsy and their infant son, where he could “begin the business of making my future.”56