The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  After three months’ reflection on what had transpired, Jefferson commented, “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”12 Even more than the commander in chief’s distinguished and disinterested service during the Revolutionary War, which was performed without salary or leave for more than eight and a half years, voluntarily surrendering the trappings of power for private life on a Virginia plantation made Washington a venerated American hero and world-renowned personification of republican virtue.

  AT LEAST IN THE UNITED STATES, Washington’s act did not surprise. Looking back, this becomes clear. Since accepting command of American forces in 1775, Washington frequently professed his intent to resign when the war ended. Indeed, just ten days after his appointment, he famously declared that, by becoming a soldier, he “did not lay aside the Citizen.”13 It was his way of affirming civilian rule and renouncing military pretensions. As the war wound down following the victory of combined American and French forces under Washington over British troops at Yorktown in 1781, the commander in chief spoke more openly and often about resuming a pastoral lifestyle after independence. Of course, the British could have fought on after Yorktown—they still occupied New York City and possessed deep reserves—but Parliament in London seemed increasingly inclined to cut the empire’s losses and accept an English-speaking trading partner in place of embittered and unruly colonies. Peace negotiations gained momentum in Paris.

  For Washington, retirement made sense. He treasured reputation over power and always was happiest at Mount Vernon. Further, the country lacked any position that could tempt him even if he had been so inclined. With peace, the army would melt away. Leading it could not satisfy Washington. The general government had little authority and no chief executive. The states were mired in debt from the Revolutionary War and most struggled with weak economies due to wartime restrictions on overseas trade and high postwar foreign tariffs. Any government office would further delay Washington’s return home without enhancing his fame or fortune. He hoped to rebuild his finances by restoring Mount Vernon to profitability and speculating in land on the frontier. To his cherished former lieutenant, Marquis de Lafayette, Washington wrote shortly after resigning his commission, “I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself; and shall be able to view the solitary walk, and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction.”14

  Moreover, as a practical matter, it is hard to see how anyone—even Washington—could have used a military position to consolidate political power in the United States of the early 1780s. The army itself was largely a state-based body of citizen-soldiers united by a shared desire for independence from Britain. Most of its members actually served in the various state militias rather than in the national or “continental” force. Once the external threat disappeared, nothing could keep those militias together as a combined army. And with thirteen coequal states and no single center of political authority, a mutinous army or power-hungry general would face the same dilemma that bedeviled British military strategists throughout the American Revolution. Troops could occupy cities and capture individuals, but they could not impose their will beyond the reach of their arms. If people doubted this, they need only look nine months prior to Washington’s retirement, when, in the waning days of the war, a small group of prominent Americans close to the General conspired to stage, or at least threaten, a military coup d’état as a means to secure political and personal ends. Washington’s suppression of this conspiracy in March 1782 had further enhanced his reputation for republican virtue and set the stage for his voluntary retirement nine months later.

  At the time of the conspiracy—which occurred after the Battle of Yorktown but before the British evacuated New York—a peace treaty with the United Kingdom appeared likely but not certain. Active warfare had virtually ceased. The main American army camped quietly under Washington’s immediate command in the lower Hudson River valley around Newburgh, New York. There it kept watch on the larger but similarly dormant enemy force that still occupied Manhattan Island.

  The United States then operated under the Articles of Confederation, which created a league of thirteen sovereign states. Without an executive or judicial branch, a single-chamber Confederation Congress directly handled the country’s business. Although each state could send as many delegates as it wanted to Congress, every state had just one vote; at least nine votes were needed for important decisions. Further, the state legislatures—not the people—chose the member of Congress and could recall them at will. The Articles gave Congress authority over foreign affairs and the war effort without giving it the power to levy taxes or raise troops. To pay soldiers, purchase supplies, and perform other functions, Congress relied on voluntary requisitions from the states, coupled with foreign and domestic loans. Neither source, nor both together, brought in enough hard cash to cover expenses. Any enforceable national tax required ratification by all thirteen state legislatures.

  Without taxing authority, Congress defaulted on some of its debts and all but stopped paying the troops. Fearing they would never be repaid, an increasing number of domestic lenders sold their government bonds to speculators—sometimes for pennies on the dollar—creating a new class of government creditors whom many citizens did not feel morally obliged to compensate. Further, in 1779, as the war wore on with no end in sight, the Continental Congress promised army officers who remained in service a postwar pension of half pay for seven years—and extended it to half pay for life a year later—creating another unfunded government obligation that many Americans opposed. These elite officer-pensioners would form a privileged class at taxpayer expense, critics complained.

  These unpopular debts provided excuses for cash-strapped states to cut their payments to Congress, which was on the verge of bankruptcy by the end of 1782. With war having bound the states together in cooperation, its impending end threatened to further undermine their support for Congress. Soldiers and creditors alike worried that, once peace came, they would never be paid. Although many details of the conspiracy that brewed in the Newburgh encampment remain murky, this desperate fiscal situation served as its necessary backdrop.

  BY THIS POINT, Washington stood out as the most famous person in America, if not the world, but that fame had not come easily. Possessed with striking stature and immense personal dignity, he had leaped to the forefront of the patriot cause at age forty-two in June 1775, when the Second Continental Congress tapped him to lead the ragtag army of volunteers and New England militia troops besieging the British army in Boston. Prior to this appointment as commander in chief, Washington had a largely local reputation as leader of the Virginia regiment during the colonial French and Indian War. The Massachusetts cousins Samuel and John Adams, Pennsylvania’s incomparable Benjamin Franklin, and Virginia orator Patrick Henry certainly had wider reputations as revolutionary leaders than Washington in 1775, but they lacked military experience. When the patriot cause became an armed struggle following the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Congress turned to Washington for leadership in part because of his war record and in part because his presence as a respected Virginia planter commanding a mostly New England force would serve to nationalize the conflict and solidify southern support. Washington had much to learn about leading a large but poorly trained force against a disciplined and well-equipped army, however.

  Taking full advantage of a strong position, troops under Washington’s command forced the British to evacuate Boston in March 1776, only to face near disaster five months later in New York. The British had returned with overwhelming force and, beginning with the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, routed Washington’s army in a series of clashes that drove the Americans across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania by the end of November. Seeking to consolidate their gains in New York and New Jersey, the British then settled in for the winter with
the expectation of finishing off the rebels in the spring. Leading his beleaguered army back across the Delaware during Christmas Night, however, Washington captured advance British outposts at Trenton and Princeton in surprise attacks. The British viewed these defeats as minor but patriot propagandists made the most of them and morale rebounded. Despite a disastrous summer, Washington became a national hero.

  The summer of 1777 went much like the summer of 1776 for Washington, with the British pushing his army back through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Philadelphia fell in September, but not before patriot troops staged a respectable defense of the city at the Battle of Brandywine. In October, before settling into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Washington added a credible (though failed) counterattack in the Battle of Germantown that helped keep the British from pushing beyond Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in the Battles of Saratoga, a separate American force under Horatio Gates captured a British army invading from Canada, leading France to join the war on the patriot side and some to call for Gates to replace Washington as commander in chief.

  The British responded to these setbacks by withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York in 1778 and shifting the main theater of war to the southern colonies, which they viewed as more valuable and loyal than the northern ones. Shadowing this movement to New York, Washington’s army engaged the British army at the Battle of Monmouth and then effectively bottled it up in New York for the remainder of the war in the North. Initially at least, the British had more success in the South. After Savannah and Charleston fell in 1778 and 1780, a British army under Lord Cornwallis routed a counterattack led by Gates in South Carolina at the Battle of Camden and pushed north into Virginia by 1781 even as a reconstructed American army under Nathanael Greene liberated much of the Carolinas and Georgia. Washington then boldly shifted his main army from New York to Virginia and, working with the French, captured Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, which all but compelled Britain to accept America’s independence. By defeating the world’s leading power, Washington became a living legend by age fifty. Returning with his troops to the lower Hudson, he watched over the remaining British forces in Manhattan for nearly two years while Franklin, John Adams, and other American peace negotiators in Paris struggled to resolve the war on favorable terms.

  IT WAS THEN THAT the Newburgh Conspiracy hatched. During the closing days of 1782, a delegation of officers from the encampment carried a petition to Congress in Philadelphia appealing for back pay and expenses. It also contained an offer to accept lump-sum payments in lieu of the officers’ unpopular half-pay pensions. “The uneasiness of the soldiers, for want of pay, is great and dangerous,” the petition warned. “Any further experiment on their patience may have fatal effects.”15

  Upon its arrival, the delegation was embraced by Congress’s superintendent of finance Robert Morris, who managed the government’s business operations with a firm hand. A cunning and wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Morris had championed the cause of a strong general government for so long and with such ardor that he had split Congress into pro-Morris and anti-Morris camps. During the mid-1780s, these would evolve into recognizable nationalist and anti-nationalist factions, with the former favoring centralized control over interstate and international economic, military, and diplomatic matters and the latter preferring a weak confederation of sovereign states.

  The delegation reached Philadelphia only days after Morris learned that the states had failed to ratify his proposal for a national tax or “impost” on all goods coming from overseas, which he had pushed through Congress as the means to pay past debts and finance ongoing operations. Nationalists in Congress saw the officers’ petition as a timely tool to revive the impost. All they needed to gain its ratification, some overly optimistic nationalists believed, was for the army to link its worthy cause and veiled threats with the creditors’ political clout and Congress’s proposed solution.16 More cynical nationalists privately conceded that it might take an actual show of force by the unpaid troops to secure taxing authority for Congress from the states. And there were no greater cynics among the nationalists than Washington’s former aide Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris’s wise and worldly assistant, Gouverneur Morris (no relation). After conferring with them, members of the delegation began warning Congress that the troops might mutiny without pay. Here lay the conspiracy with the army at its heart.

  DESPITE THESE PROVOCATIONS, Newburgh remained quiet until mid-February 1783, when word reached the United States that the British government had agreed in principle to American independence. Then, on March 8, an officer with ties to General Gates arrived in the encampment from Philadelphia with promises of aid from other government creditors and support from nationalists in Congress should the army rise up and demand payment.17 The cabal may have included Gates and the Morrises.18 Hamilton almost certainly knew about it. Some historians surmise that he orchestrated it.19

  On March 10, the conspirators at Newburgh distributed an anonymous call for a general meeting of field officers and company representatives on the following day, coupled with an unsigned address outlining their demands. Congress has promised to pay the troops, the address began, “but faith has its limits.” The meek language of the officers’ earlier petition had produced nothing, the writer noted. “If this, then, be your treatment while the swords you wear are necessary for the defense of America, what have you to expect from peace?” To avoid “poverty, wretchedness, and contempt” in old age, the address called on officers to “suspect the man who would advise to more moderation”—presumably Washington—and tell Congress that the army would not disband without payment.20

  Washington reacted swiftly. He issued general orders disallowing the anonymously called meeting. Perhaps fearing that it might proceed anyway without an orderly alternative, he authorized a similar gathering for March 15 and directed Gates to preside.21 The orders suggested that Washington would not attend. In a second unsigned address, the conspirators accepted the later meeting date.22 Their mutinous demands remained the sole item on the meeting’s agenda. The camp buzzed in anticipation.

  Officers from every unit in the Newburgh encampment attended the meeting. As soon as Gates called the session to order, Washington dramatically entered the hall and asked to speak first. It was the Ides of March—the anniversary of the day that Brutus and his fellow conspirators had murdered Julius Caesar.

  As was his custom on formal occasions, Washington read a prepared statement. Less than two thousand words long, it spoke of his sacrifice, a soldier’s duty, and the impracticability of the conspirators’ scheme. To secure the officers’ back pay and future pensions, he vowed to do as much “as may be done consistently with the great duty I own to my country.” He admonished the officers, however, that “as you value your own sacred honor,” you should “express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord.”23

  After concluding his short but stern speech, Washington reached into his coat pocket for a letter from a supportive member of Congress. It reiterated the extreme gravity of the government’s financial situation and summarized the ongoing efforts of Congress to address it. Struggling with the handwriting as he quoted from the letter, Washington drew reading glasses from his waistcoat and asked, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”24 Few of the officers had seen Washington wear glasses. Coming on the heels of his hard address, this soft show of familiarity in their presence moved many. It both humanized and elevated him. Whether from his lofty words or his lowly gesture, some officers wept openly. With this finely timed performance that some historians suspect was rehearsed, Washington carried the day. After he left, the officers approved resolutions asking Washington to represent their interests before Congress and repudiating both the “infamous propositions” contained in the two unsigned addresse
s and the conspirators behind them.25

  AS WORD OF THE ENCOUNTER reached Congress and then spread across the land in newspaper accounts, Washington gained yet another laurel. Already first in war, he was now first in peace and clearly first in the hearts of his countrymen. He had no rivals. As their own financial situation went from bad to worse, however, many of the unpaid officers soon regretted their decision to trust Congress. Even Washington began to doubt the course that he had recommended for them, at least to the extent that it relied on the goodwill of Congress. By this time, though, the twig was bent and so it grew.

  Taking his vow to champion the officers’ cause to heart, Washington began using his platform as America’s leading citizen to call for quickly and fairly compensating the troops, and ultimately for building a strong union that could support those payments and some form of permanent military establishment. He argued his case in a series of letters to members of Congress. It took days for mail to pass between Newburgh and Philadelphia, however, and circumstances could change dramatically in the meantime. In response to Washington’s initial report of the anonymous addresses circulating in Newburgh but before hearing about the outcome, for example, a panicked Congress approved the officers’ request to commute the half-pay pensions into lump-sum payments. By the time Congress got around to voting on a new import-tax measure to fund those payments and other government debts and expenses, members had learned both that Washington had defused the situation in Newburgh and that peace negotiators in Paris had agreed to a preliminary treaty. Nationalists lost the upper hand. As passed by Congress, the impost was limited to twenty-five years, could only be used to pay debts, and would be collected by the states. Hamilton was so disgusted that he joined a few extreme anti-nationalists in opposing the compromise. The states failed to ratify it anyway.