The Letters to Congress

The vote for patience had transformed the conspiracy into a petition. The threat of military force had been channeled into constitutional action. The officers had shown that they could be trusted with power. Now Congress would have to show that it could be trusted with trust.

But first it had to be written. In the days following March 15, the officers who had gathered in the Temple of Virtue found themselves tasked with an altogether different kind of operation. They had voted for patience. They had rejected the anonymous addresses that called them to the brink of mutiny. Now they had to produce the documents that Washington had promised on their behalf. The general had told them that he would represent their grievances to Congress. He expected them to formalize those grievances in writing.

A committee of officers assembled to draft the memorials. They met in the same cantonment where they had passed the winter, the log huts and makeshift headquarters that had become their reluctant home. The quills came out. The paper was laid on tables. Men who had commanded regiments and brigades, who had led soldiers into battle and watched them die, now applied themselves to the careful work of composition. They were soldiers. They were also, whether they liked it or not, petitioners.

The drafting process required them to translate anger into language. Raw sentiment in camp was simple enough: pay was years overdue. Half-pay for life had been promised as a pension, and Congress had already moved to commute that promise into five years of full pay. But promises were not money, and the Treasury was empty. The officers knew that Congress had no power to tax. They knew that the states had refused to fund the national government adequately. They knew that the Articles of Confederation left Congress dependent on voluntary contributions that never came in full. None of this made their situation more tolerable. It simply explained why their situation was intolerable.

The committee had to frame these grievances in terms that Congress could accept. A petition that read like a demand would be rejected. A petition that read like a threat would confirm every fear that the anonymous addresses had aroused. The officers had to be respectful without being submissive, firm without being insubordinate. They had to remind Congress of its obligations without accusing Congress of bad faith. It was a delicate business.

Washington observed the process from a distance. He had intervened on March 15 to prevent the officers from taking action on their own. Now he allowed them to take action through proper channels. His role had shifted from crisis manager to institutional intermediary. He would carry their memorials to Congress, but he would not write them. The words had to come from the officers themselves.

The committee produced two documents. The first was a memorial from the general officers, the senior commanders who had served throughout the war. The second was a memorial from the field officers, the colonels and majors who had led regiments in the line. The separation was procedural, but it carried a message: the entire officer corps stood united. This was not a faction. This was not a splinter group. This was the army speaking with one voice.

The memorials followed a common form. Expressions of loyalty to Congress and to the civilian government opened each document. The difficulties that Congress faced were acknowledged. Thanks were offered for past efforts on the army’s behalf. Then the text turned to the matter at hand.

The officers reminded Congress of the promises that had been made. Pay for service had been promised. Pensions for years of sacrifice had been promised. Land bounties in the western territories had been promised. Congress had affirmed these promises repeatedly. But affirmation was not fulfillment. The officers wrote that they had waited with patience. Hardships of an unpaid service had been endured. Families had suffered while the officers remained in the field. Trust had been placed in Congress. That trust had not been rewarded.

The memorials stopped short of accusation. Congress was not charged with bad faith. Consequences were not threatened if payment was not forthcoming. The facts were simply stated. The army had not been paid. The promises remained unfulfilled. The officers expected Congress to act.

The language was careful, but the meaning was clear. The officers had shown patience. Patience had limits. Congress needed to act before those limits were reached. The memorials did not say what would happen if Congress failed. They did not have to. The anonymous addresses had already said it for them.

Washington reviewed the finished documents. He would not have written them this way himself. More restraint, more deference, more consciousness of the delicate political situation in Philadelphia would have marked his approach. But he understood what the officers were doing. Rights as citizens and as creditors were being asserted. The government was being called to honor its contracts. The forms of constitutional petition were being used to press a claim that had every right to be pressed. Washington signed off on the memorials. He prepared to send them to Congress.

The next step was transmission. A rider was selected to carry the documents from Newburgh to Philadelphia. The journey would take several days, depending on the weather and the roads. The memorials would travel south through New Jersey, cross the Delaware River, and arrive at the seat of Congress. The rider carried more than paper. He carried the formal expression of the army’s discontent, channeled into a legitimate petition.

Washington also sent copies of the anonymous addresses to Congress. He had withheld them on March 15, choosing to read only the letter from Joseph Jones that he had pulled from his pocket. But Congress needed to see what had circulated in camp. The addresses were evidence of the danger that had been averted. They were also evidence of the danger that remained. Washington wanted Congress to understand what he had prevented, and what Congress now faced.

The package that left Newburgh in late March contained the officers’ memorials, the anonymous addresses, and Washington’s own covering letter. The letter explained what had happened. The officers had been called to an unauthorized meeting. Washington had attended uninvited. He had spoken to them. They had voted to reject the addresses and to affirm their loyalty. They had authorized these memorials as the proper channel for their grievances. Washington was now transmitting those memorials to Congress as promised.

The covering letter was carefully composed. Washington knew that his words would be read not only by Congress but by history. The record needed to show that order had been preserved, not dissent suppressed. The officers had acted honorably, not treasonously. The crisis had been resolved through constitutional means. But Congress also needed to understand that the resolution was temporary. The underlying grievances remained. The army had not been paid. The promises had not been kept. Patience had been chosen, but patience was not permanent.

The rider departed from Newburgh. The documents began their journey to Philadelphia.

While the memorials traveled, Washington turned to other business. An army had to be maintained, even if that army was waiting for peace. The preliminary treaty had been signed in Paris. Word had reached America that the war was effectively over. But the definitive treaty had not yet arrived. The British still occupied New York. The Continental Army still held the Hudson Highlands. The cease-fire held, but the peace was not final. Washington had to keep his soldiers in place, unpaid and increasingly restless, while politicians in Philadelphia argued about money.

The irony was not lost on him. The war had been won. The independence that Congress had declared seven years earlier had been secured. The greatest military power in the world had been defeated. And now the army waited, month after month, for the government it had created to pay the soldiers who had created it. Washington had spent the war writing letters to Congress, pleading for supplies, explaining why the army could not fight without food and clothing and gunpowder. Now he wrote letters about pay and pensions, explaining why the army could not simply dissolve without settling its accounts.

The nationalist politicians in Philadelphia had argued that the army’s grievances should be used to pressure the states. Alexander Hamilton had written to Washington in February, suggesting that the army’s claims could be deployed to secure a federal taxing power. Hamilton wanted Congress to have the authority to raise revenue directly, rather than depending on state requisitions. He believed that the army’s desperation could be turned into political leverage. Washington had rejected the suggestion. The army would not be used as an instrument of political pressure. But the pressure existed whether he used it or not. The memorials now traveling to Philadelphia were that pressure made manifest.

The rider made his way south. The roads were muddy from the spring thaw. The rivers were swollen. The journey took longer than expected. In Philadelphia, Congress continued its debates.

The delegates did not yet know what had happened at Newburgh. Trouble had been brewing. The army was known to be restless. Anonymous addresses had circulated in camp. But Washington’s intervention remained unknown to them. The officers’ vote for patience had not yet been reported. The formal memorials making their way south were still days away. The delegates debated the army’s grievances in abstract terms, arguing about pensions and pay and the commutation that Congress had already approved.

The commutation was itself a compromise. Half-pay for life had been promised to officers who served for the duration of the war. Many in Congress had always been uncomfortable with the promise. It looked too much like a standing army pension, a European practice that republicans distrusted. Some states had refused to honor the commitment. Others had dragged their feet. In an effort to resolve the issue, Congress had voted to commute the half-pay for life into five years of full pay. It was a lump sum, a one-time payment that would discharge the government’s obligation. The officers had accepted the commutation in principle. But the principle was meaningless without the money.

Rhode Island had opposed the commutation. The state had a long record of resisting federal impositions. It would refuse to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention four years later. It had rejected the impost, the proposed federal tax on imports that would have given Congress an independent revenue stream. Now it opposed the pension commutation, arguing that Congress had no authority to bind the states to such an expense. The opposition from Rhode Island was enough to block action. Under the Articles of Confederation, major financial measures required supermajorities. A single state could hold up the will of the rest.

The debates in Philadelphia were fracturing along predictable lines. The nationalists, those who wanted a stronger federal government with real taxing power, pointed to the army’s grievances as evidence of the system’s failure. The states-righters, those who defended the existing confederation, argued that Congress had overreached and the states were right to resist. The army’s unpaid service was not just a financial problem. It was a constitutional problem. It was a test of whether the new nation could meet its obligations without the coercive power that European governments took for granted.

Hamilton had written to Washington in February that the moment was ripe for pressing the nationalist agenda. The army’s discontent could be channeled into a political movement. He was not alone in this view. Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance, had been arguing for months that Congress needed a reliable revenue source. Gouverneur Morris, no relation but a fellow nationalist, had been making the same case. They saw the army’s grievances as a tool. They did not create those grievances. The grievances were real enough. But they understood how those grievances could be used.

The anonymous addresses had appeared in camp on the morning of March 10, 1783. They called the officers to a meeting for 11 a.m. the next day and urged the army to send Congress an ultimatum. They hinted darkly at what might happen if Congress failed to act. The addresses were later acknowledged to be the work of Major John Armstrong, Jr., an aide-de-camp to General Horatio Gates. Armstrong was a talented writer with a gift for inflammatory rhetoric. He had served under Gates throughout the war. He knew the officers’ grievances. He knew how to express them.

Historian Richard Kohn writes that a number of key details about the individuals and their motivations are not known. It is unclear exactly how much Colonels Brooks and Stewart, the principal messengers in the affair, knew. The intent of the addresses remains debated. Some historians see them as a genuine call to mutiny, a bottom-up expression of soldiers’ desperation. Others see them as part of a coordinated effort to create a crisis that would force Congress’s hand. The truth may lie somewhere in between. Armstrong wrote the addresses. But the atmosphere that made them possible had been cultivated by months of nationalist agitation.

Washington’s intervention on March 15 had changed the dynamic. He had entered the meeting uninvited. He had spoken to the officers. He had read them a letter from Joseph Jones, a Virginia congressman, that urged patience and affirmed Congress’s commitment to the army. Then he had pulled out a new pair of spectacles. He had put them on to read a second document. The gesture was simple. The effect was profound. The officers saw their commander, the man who had led them through eight years of war, struggling with failing eyesight. They saw his sacrifice written on his face. The spectacle of Washington’s humanity disarmed the conspiracy.

The officers had voted to reject the anonymous addresses. They had voted to affirm their loyalty to Congress. They had voted to authorize the memorials that were now traveling to Philadelphia. The crisis had been averted. But the crisis had also been transformed.

The memorials arrived in Philadelphia while Congress was debating the pension issues. James Madison termed Washington’s intelligence about the anonymous addresses “alarming.” The letters from Newburgh confirmed what the nationalists had been saying. The army was desperate. The government was paralyzed. Something had to be done.

Nationalist leaders in Congress moved quickly. They orchestrated the creation of a committee to respond to the officers’ memorials. The committee was stacked with supporters of a stronger federal government. Its charge was to draft a response that would acknowledge the army’s grievances and propose a solution. But the solution would require what the nationalists had wanted all along: a federal taxing power.

The officers’ memorials had given Congress a reason to act. The anonymous addresses had given Congress a reason to fear. Together, they created a political opening. The nationalists had not created the army’s grievances. Those grievances were the product of years of unpaid service, of promises made and not kept, of a government too weak to meet its obligations. But the nationalists understood how those grievances could be deployed. The memorials were the legitimate expression of the army’s claims. The addresses were the illegitimate expression of what might happen if those claims were ignored. The combination was powerful.

Washington had contained the immediate threat. He had turned the conspiracy into a petition. But the petition itself was a form of pressure. It demanded a response. It carried with it the implicit memory of what the officers had almost done. Congress could not simply ignore it. Congress had to answer.

The committee in Philadelphia went to work. Its members drafted a response that acknowledged the officers’ service, affirmed Congress’s commitment to payment, and proposed a series of financial measures to make that payment possible. The measures would require the states to contribute. They would require a federal impost. They would require the kind of centralized revenue system that the nationalists had been advocating for years.

The officers in Newburgh waited. They had done what Washington asked. They had formalized their grievances. They had sent their memorials. Now they would see what Congress would do.

Washington watched from a distance. He had warned Hamilton that the army would not be used as leverage. He had meant it. But the leverage existed whether he used it or not. The memorials were that leverage made formal. They were the legitimate expression of claims that could not be denied. Congress could not ignore them without confirming every fear that the anonymous addresses had stoked.

The Newburgh Conspiracy was a failed apparent threat by leaders of the Continental Army in March 1783, at the end of the American Revolutionary War. The Army’s commander, George Washington, successfully calmed the soldiers and helped secure back pay. The conspiracy may have been orchestrated or encouraged by nationalist politicians in Philadelphia, though the evidence remains contested. What is clear is that the crisis entered a new phase after March 15. The threat of immediate mutiny had passed. The pressure for political action had not.

The memorials now lay before Congress. They were respectful, carefully worded, and entirely legitimate. They were also impossible to ignore. The officers had been promised pay. They had been promised pensions. They had been promised land. They had served for years without receiving any of it. Now they had put those promises in writing and sent them to the government that had made them. The government had to answer.

The answer would require money. Money required taxes. Taxes required the consent of the states. The states had not consented. The impasse that had created the crisis now shaped the response. Congress could promise payment. Congress could affirm the officers’ claims. Congress could pass resolutions and issue statements. But Congress could not pay the army without the states, and the states would not pay without being forced.

The nationalists in Philadelphia saw their opportunity. The army’s memorials provided the justification for the measures they had wanted all along. The anonymous addresses provided the warning of what might happen if those measures failed. Washington’s intervention had provided the cover for Congress to act without appearing to bow to military pressure. The crisis had been contained. It had also been channeled.

The officers’ memorials now lie in Philadelphia, a tangible pressure that demands a congressional response.