The Return of George Washington

by Edward Larson

  Confronted with fading prospects, Washington cut his demands on behalf of the officers. Immediately after the affair at Newburgh, he had asked Congress to ascertain the amount owed to each officer and establish a fund for its future payment. This at least would allow departing officers to obtain credit on the full amount due. By early April, with peace near and no new fund established, Washington sought only an accounting and partial payment—as little as three months’ back pay—so that officers would not depart destitute. “To be disbanded at last without this little pittance,” he wrote to one member of Congress, “will drive every Man of Honor and Sensibility to the extremest Horrors of Despair.”26

  By this point, Washington became so worried about unrest within the ranks that he privately counseled Congress to disband the army as soon as possible, with or without the ascertainment of accounts.27 Following the official cessation of hostilities between the United States and Britain on April 19, 1783, and with Congress still lacking resources to pay the army, Washington endorsed a plan simply to release the troops that had signed on for the war’s duration with orders that their states pay them. Although British forces still occupied New York pending a final peace treaty, Congress responded by furloughing most of the army in June. Departing officers were so resentful that they canceled a farewell banquet in Washington’s honor.

  IN A SERIES OF PRIVATE LETTERS to members of Congress, Washington lashed out at nationalists for betraying the army. They had used the officers “as mere puppets” to secure national tax revenues to repay all government creditors—including bond speculators.28 “The Army was a dangerous Engine to Work with,” he wrote in a letter to Hamilton that blamed the near mutiny at Newburgh on Robert and Gouverneur Morris.29 “I have taken much pains to support Mr. [Robert] Morris’s Administration in the Army,” Washington added in another letter to Hamilton, “but if he will neither adopt the mode which has been suggested [for paying officers], point out any other, nor show cause why the first is either impracticable or impolitic, they will certainly attribute their disappointment to a luke warmness in him, or some design incompatible with their Interests.” Further, the commander in chief objected to the nationalists’ policy of putting unpaid troops on an equal footing with other government creditors. “I know that Distinctions are commonly odious,” he wrote in April, “yet upon a candid Comparison, every Man, even the most interested, will be forced to yield the superior Merit and Sufferings of the Soldier.”30

  Hamilton responded in two remarkable letters that conceded most of Washington’s charges but turned them on their head. “I do not wonder at the suspicions that have been infused” in your letters, he wrote in early April, “nor should I be surprised to hear that I have been pointed out as one of the persons concerned in playing the game described. But facts must speak for themselves.” There are two parties in Congress, Hamilton explained: “one is attached to state, the other to Continental [or national] politics.” Only the nationalists support the Continental Army, he suggested, but they do so as a means to create one nation from a confederation of states. The nationalists “have blended the interests of the army with other Creditors from a conviction,” he stressed. “It is essential to our cause that vigorous efforts should be made to restore public credit.” This required national taxes to supply “public necessities.” An impost, Hamilton believed, would encourage domestic industry and bolster the national economy. “The necessity and discontents of the army presented themselves as a powerful engine,” he wrote, and never denied seeking to use it for political ends.31 What Washington had shunned as “dangerous”—using the military as a political tool in a republic—Hamilton embraced as “powerful”: Cincinnatus versus Caesar.32

  If he had not seen him as such before, Washington surely now saw Hamilton as a devious schemer ready to risk much to win all.33 He had shown those traits before. Born out of wedlock to a socially scorned Frenchwoman in the West Indies and orphaned at age ten, but gifted with words and adroit at winning patrons, Hamilton relied on the charity of island planters and merchants to obtain an education at New York’s Loyalist King’s College, later Columbia, during the run-up to the Revolutionary War. Turning on his West Indian sponsors and Tory teachers, Hamilton found his voice in college penning philosophically and economically conservative essays denouncing British rule, and he soon volunteered as a field officer in the Continental Army. By 1777, Washington had invited Hamilton to join his personal staff, on which he served until March 1781. Bathed in glory from his military service and newly married into a well-connected family of Hudson River valley patroons, Hamilton left the army in October 1781 to become a commercial lawyer and soon entered Congress as the sole nationalist in New York’s state-minded delegation. Remarkably, until he was knee-deep in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, Hamilton had not written to Washington since leaving the army. By then, Hamilton needed him.

  At this point, Washington could have turned his back on his former aide, who Washington now realized was willing to “make a sacrifice of the Army and all its interests” for partisan ends.34 He didn’t. Quite to the contrary, his responses to Hamilton sound almost apologetic for having squelched the Newburgh Conspiracy. “No Man can be more opposed to State funds and local prejudice than myself,” he assured Hamilton in one of his letters on the nationalists’ plot, and “I endeavor (I hope not altogether ineffectually) to inculcate [those sentiments] upon the Officers in the Army.”35 Expanding beyond simply expressing support for national taxing authority, Washington affirmed, “No Man in the United States is, or can be more deeply impressed with the necessity of a reform in our present Confederation than myself. No Man perhaps has felt the bad effects of it more sensibly; for to the defects thereof, and want of Powers in Congress, may justly be ascribed the prolongation of the War.” His further assurance that “all my private letters have teemed with these Sentiments”—itself a bald overstatement—spoke only of private letters, not public statements.36 Instinctively nonpartisan, Washington had largely avoided the intensely partisan debate over national powers—but that soon changed. Given his stature, taking a public stance on reforming the confederation instantly made him the country’s leading nationalist.

  HAMILTON AND THE NEWBURGH CONSPIRACY may have helped to force the cautious Virginian’s hand on the thorny issues of national sovereignty and constitutional reform, but Washington played it with conviction. Due to the formal cessation of hostilities in April 1783, and the pending furlough of most soldiers and officers over the following summer, the commander in chief had time to focus on the country’s future as he waited with a skeleton force for the final peace treaty and the last British troops to leave New York. The process dragged on until nearly December. Early in that prolonged period of enforced inactivity, Washington issued the two most significant documents of his military career. Though both took years to bear fruit, they helped to lay a foundation for the new constitutional order that Washington would eventually lead.

  The first, “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” drew on the work of various staff and field officers but carried Washington’s personal and official stamp. It ran counter to conventional wisdom. During the conflict, few Americans had thought realistically about the postwar military. Oppressed by professional British and paid Hessian soldiers before and during the Revolutionary War, and hesitant to assume the cost of a peacetime military, most Americans instinctively opposed a standing army. State and local militias had risen to the defense of individual liberty against imperial troops, and presumably would melt away with peace.

  Monarchies needed a professional army to gain and retain power, many Americans thought, but not republics. These commentators lacked reference points, however. In the popular mind, the only successful republican governments were ancient Greek city-states and modern Swiss cantons. These tiny islands of democracy, so far as Americans knew, had been or were defended by citizen-soldiers. Republican Rome, once it gained size, had fallen to its own power-hungry military leaders. In his “Sentiments,�
�� Washington began changing the conversation at least insofar as it related to the needs of a continental republic with international commercial interests and imperial ambitions of its own on the western frontier.

  “Altho’ a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country, yet a few Troops, under certain circumstances, are not only safe, but indispensably necessary,” Washington began. These would be “Continental Troops” of the general government, he stressed, organized into four regiments of infantry and one of artillery to secure the western frontier and guard the border with British Canada. Existing state militias would be restructured on a Swiss model as a uniform force of citizen-soldiers ready for call-up in times of need. Washington also recommended that the general government establish coastal fortifications and a navy to protect commerce in wartime, maintain a base at West Point to block invasion from Canada, and open an academy to train army officers. But his main concern was the West—notably the old Northwest, where Virginians were settling and he had invested. States were in the process of ceding their western land claims to the general government and many people saw the West as key to the country’s future. Washington called for creating a series of military posts up the Potomac Valley, along the Ohio River, north to the Great Lakes, and west to the Mississippi. “The Tribes of Indians within our Territory are numerous, soured and jealous,” he warned.37 If accepted, Washington’s proposal would go a long way toward forging a continental union and giving it national purpose.

  Of far greater import, Washington followed this proposal, which he submitted to Congress, with a circular letter to the thirteen state governments. An appeal for unity at a time when peace with Britain had removed the common enemy that had drawn the states together, the letter built to its main point: national supremacy. “It is indispensable to the happiness of the individual States, that there should be lodged somewhere, a Supreme Power to regulate and govern the general concerns of the Confederated Republic.” Long on theme but short on specifics, the letter called for “an indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head,” a continental army supported by uniform state militias, taxing power for Congress, and “complete justice to all the Public Creditors,” particularly the unpaid troops. Its pounding theme throughout, however—from Washington’s opening appeal to “citizens of America” through his depiction of “the glorious Fabrick of our . . . National Character” to his closing prayer for “a happy Nation”—was American nationhood. “It is only our united Character as an Empire, that our Independence is acknowledged,” Washington reminded state leaders. If the nation split apart, Britain would reabsorb the states one by one, he warned.38

  In opening and closing the letter, Washington played his trump card. His words on this matter could be trusted, he said, because he was relinquishing power soon and “not taking any share in public business hereafter.” For the first time in a public statement, he declared his firm intent to retire. Not seeking power for himself, Washington observed, he could have no “sinister views” in promoting a strong national government. At the time, Washington viewed the circular letter as something of a farewell to the American people and asked that they accept it as “the Legacy of One, who has ardently wished, on all occasions, to be useful to his Country.”39 Certainly Americans received it as such. Hailed as “Washington’s Legacy,” the letter appeared in newspapers from New England to the Deep South and became one of the most celebrated documents of the day.40 Though none of its nation-building recommendations were realized for over five years, they immediately became associated with Washington. Indeed, in the public imagination, that Virginian had become the first American.

  WITH HIS LEGACY PUBLISHED in June 1783, Washington entered an interlude of relative quiet insofar as the commander in chief of a rapidly disbanding army can experience quietude. It lasted until the last British troops left New York seven months later. Martha joined him in Newburgh for this period of quasi-peace that he once depicted in theatrical terms. “Nothing now remains,” Washington wrote in general orders to the troops, “but for the actors of this mighty Scene to preserve a perfect, unvarying, consistency of character throughout the last act; to close the Drama with applause; and to retire from the Military Theatre.”41 In this closing act, he played his role with constancy through to his carefully scripted final exit before Congress on December 23.

  Several tasks engaged Washington during this period. He furloughed four-fifths of the army in June, spent late July touring upstate New York with Hamilton and Governor George Clinton, and endured ten weeks of unsuccessfully negotiating with Congress over the peacetime military. These negotiations took place at cramped college quarters in tiny Princeton, New Jersey, where Congress convened for five miserable months during mid-1783. It had moved to Princeton in June to escape protests from local soldiers in Philadelphia demanding back pay and remained there until November, when it moved to Annapolis and later to Trenton before settling in New York. Congress’s abrupt move to Princeton, where the well-born Madison complained of having to share a bed with another Virginia congressman, added to Washington’s despair over the country’s prospects. First the Newburgh Conspiracy, then mass furloughs without back pay, and now riotous troops in Philadelphia driving Congress to meet in a college lecture hall and dormitory. Meanwhile, the states were pressing ahead with plans for peace heedless of Congress. Washington saw no future in such designs—no chance for the states ever to open the West or remain independent in a hostile world. Small confederations might form, he thought, but no grand nation capable of taking its rightful place on the world’s stage. Sharing Washington’s disgust, both Hamilton and Madison left Congress during its exile in Princeton and never returned.

  During this period, Washington’s private letters capture his concerns more fully than his public pronouncement. To survive, Washington wrote to Lafayette, the United States must “form a Constitution that will give consistency, stability and dignity to the Union; and sufficient powers to the great Council of the Nation for general purposes.”42 He advised the commander of American forces in the South, Nathanael Greene, “It remains only for the States . . . to establish their Independence on that Basis of inviolable efficacious Union . . . which may prevent their being made the Sport of European Policy.”43 To his brother John, Washington wrote, “Competent Powers for all general purposes should be vested in the Sovereignty of the United States, or Anarchy and Confusion will soon succeed.”44 While he spoke in public only of strengthening the Articles of Confederation, in private Washington was already calling for a “Convention of the People” to draft a new “Federal Constitution.”45

  Effective November 3, after learning that the British were finally beginning to leave New York, Congress discharged the furloughed troops and disbanded most of the remaining army. No one received more than a pittance in back pay. This second round of contractions left the army with eight hundred men—split between bases at Fort Pitt on the frontier and West Point, near Newburgh—which was scarcely one-third of the number that Washington had proposed for the peacetime force.

  One day before the discharges took effect, Washington beat the drum for nationhood again in his Farewell Orders. He used the army itself as an exemplar. Who could have imagined, he asked, “that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers?” After thanking the officers and soldiers for their service, he warned them that unless “the powers of the union increased, the honour, dignity, and justice of the nation would be lost forever.” And by “justice,” he meant their back pay. He challenged all of them to return home as champions of a continental republic, reminded them of his pleas to Congress and prayers to the “God of Armies” on their behalf, and assured them that they “must and will most inevitably be paid.”46

  Then they left, including most of the officers who had served longest with Washington. While
the people sang his praises and Congress voted to erect an equestrian statute of him at its permanent seat—which might require putting the monument on wheels, some joked—his officers and soldiers departed Newburgh with decidedly mixed feelings about their commander. The remaining officers captured those feelings in a written response to Washington’s Farewell Orders. Grudgingly conceding Washington had done everything he could do for them, it excoriated Congress and the states for failing to provide the just and promised compensation for the officers’ long and dangerous service.47 The public mostly sided with the states and Congress, particularly regarding officers’ pensions, which many denounced as a ploy to create an aristocratic class. Word that the retired officers had organized a fraternal association for themselves and their male descendants, called the Society of the Cincinnati, fed popular fears that a homegrown nobility might emerge from the American Revolution. For some ardent republicans, these fears only intensified after the wealthy and well-born Washington consented to serve as the society’s first president.

  WHEN THE BRITISH FINALLY evacuated New York on November 25, Washington’s rump force in and around Newburgh played the role of a liberating army with all the pomp and circumstance that it could muster. As they crossed the rural portions of northern Manhattan Island to the defended entrance of the inner city at the Bowery, the soldiers saw land stripped bare and houses in disrepair. There they paused until receiving word at about one o’clock that the last British troops had embarked and the Royal Navy had moved out to sea. After an advance guard, its flags taut in a stiff breeze, took possession of the city to the sound of fife and drum, General Washington and Governor Clinton, riding side by side on magnificent horses, led a triumphant procession of army officers and state officials down Broadway to the Battery.