The Pen of John Armstrong Jr.

The stage was set with a commander trapped between his army and his government, and a rival in camp—a charged atmosphere into which the anonymous addresses would now land.

On the morning of March 10, 1783, an unsigned letter began circulating through the encampment at Newburgh. Officers found it passed from hand to hand, read it in clusters outside the log huts, and carried it back to their quarters to study in private. The language was direct and the grievances familiar: years without pay, promises unkept, a Congress that seemed to have forgotten the men who had won the war. But the conclusion was something new. The letter called for a meeting.

Major John Armstrong Jr. sat at his desk in the headquarters of General Horatio Gates. The paper before him was blank, the quill in his hand still warm from the work of the night before. He was twenty-five years old, an aide-de-camp to one of the senior major generals of the Continental Army, and he had just written a document that would test whether the army could be made to move against its own government. Armstrong is generally acknowledged as the author of the two anonymous letters directed at the officers in the camp. The first, titled “An Address to the Officers” and dated March 10, 1783, had already begun its circulation. The second would follow within days. Together, they constituted a deliberate provocation—an attempt to channel the officers’ accumulated grievances into a direct confrontation with Congress.

Armstrong had not acted alone, or at least not without context. He was the son of General John Armstrong Sr., a renowned Pennsylvania soldier born in Ireland of Scottish descent. His older brother James had become a physician and would later serve in Congress. The younger Armstrong had joined a Pennsylvania militia regiment at the start of the war and the following year was appointed aide-de-camp to General Hugh Mercer of the Continental Army. In this role, he had carried the wounded and dying General Mercer from the field at the Battle of Princeton, a moment that had marked him as someone who understood the cost of war at close quarters. He had then served as aide to General Gates, a position that placed him at the center of one of the army’s most contentious command networks.

Gates was a figure of ambition and controversy. Born in England, he had served in the British Army before casting his lot with the American cause. His victory at Saratoga had made him a rival to George Washington, and the so-called Conway Cabal—a shadowy attempt by some officers and politicians to replace Washington with Gates—had left a residue of distrust that never fully dissolved. Gates’s headquarters at Newburgh was a center of alternative loyalty, a place where officers who felt marginalized or aggrieved might find a sympathetic ear. Armstrong, as his aide, was positioned to hear every complaint, every murmur of discontent, every calculation about what the army might do if Congress continued to refuse payment.

The first address, which has come down to history as “An Address to the Officers of the Army,” laid out the case with rhetorical precision. It began with the familiar grievances: the army had not been paid for years, the promised half-pay pensions remained unpaid, and Congress seemed paralyzed by the requirement of unanimous state consent for any revenue measure. Washington himself had forwarded these complaints to Congress repeatedly, with increasing urgency and decreasing effect. What made the address inflammatory was not its statement of grievance but its proposal for action.

The address called for a meeting of the officers to consider their options. It suggested that if peace was declared and the army was still unpaid, the officers should deliver an ultimatum to Congress: pay what is owed, or face the consequences. The language stopped short of an explicit threat, but the implication was clear. An unpaid army, camped within marching distance of Philadelphia, could become an army that marched. The address appealed to honor, to self-respect, to the memory of sacrifices made. It asked the officers to consider whether they would accept the prospect of aging in poverty and contempt, or whether they would deserve the fate of a coward by refusing to act.

The rhetoric was sophisticated. It did not call for mutiny; it called for deliberation. It did not attack Washington; it addressed the officers directly, bypassing the chain of command. It did not specify what action should be taken; it demanded a meeting to discuss what action might be taken. The effect was to create a pressure point that Washington could not easily relieve. A meeting that had not yet been called could not be forbidden. Officers could not be disciplined for reading a letter that bore no author’s name. Arguments that were, in substance, the same arguments Washington had been making to Congress for months could not be easily refuted.

The address was designed to exploit the specific structure of the officers’ grievances. The back pay was a matter of simple arithmetic: the army was owed money, and Congress had not paid it. The half-pay pensions were a matter of honor: Congress had promised them, and now some in Congress were suggesting that the promise should be broken. The officers had been told that their service would be rewarded. They now faced the prospect that their service would be forgotten. The address gave voice to what many of them were already thinking.

Armstrong’s position as Gates’s aide gave him access to the intelligence of the camp. He knew which officers were most embittered, which were most vocal, which might be willing to take risks. He also knew that Gates, despite his rivalry with Washington, had not openly endorsed any kind of mutiny. The address was unsigned precisely because its author could not afford to be identified. If the scheme failed, Armstrong could not be seen to have been the instigator. If it succeeded, the credit would belong to the officers as a body, not to any individual pen.

The network of nationalist politicians in Philadelphia—Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton—had been working toward a federal taxing power for months. They had tried to use the army’s distress as leverage in the debate over revenue. Hamilton, in particular, had written to Washington suggesting that the army’s claims might be used to prevail upon the states to establish a national funding plan. The implication was clear: the threat of military unrest could be a political tool. Whether Armstrong was directly coordinating with this faction remains a matter of inference rather than documentation. But the alignment of purposes is unmistakable. The address pushed the army toward confrontation at precisely the moment when the nationalists in Congress needed confrontation to break the deadlock over taxation.

The second address, which appeared within days of the first, was more urgent in tone. It responded to reports that some officers were counseling patience and trust in Congress. Such counsel, it declared, was the language of those who flattered power for their own advantage. It warned that time was running out. Peace, when it came, would dissolve the army’s leverage. An army that had been disbanded could not threaten to march. The address urged immediate action, before the opportunity was lost.

The physical circulation of these documents through the camp was itself a kind of theater. Officers passed them from hand to hand, read them aloud in small groups, debated their meaning in the officers’ mess. The anonymity of the authorship added to the sense of conspiracy. No one knew who had written the addresses, but everyone knew that someone had. The effect was to create a secret within the camp—a secret that everyone shared but no one could name.

Washington received copies of the addresses as they circulated. He recognized immediately what they represented: a direct challenge to his authority and a potential threat to civilian control of the military. The addresses bypassed the chain of command. They appealed to the officers over the head of their general. They proposed a meeting that could become the nucleus of a mutiny. Washington’s response would have to be careful. To ignore the addresses would be to let the agitation spread unchecked. To attack them too directly would be to alienate officers whose grievances were real.

The question of Gates’s knowledge remains unresolved by the documents. Armstrong was his aide. He worked in Gates’s headquarters. He had access to Gates’s papers, Gates’s correspondence, Gates’s intelligence. It is difficult to believe that Armstrong could have written and circulated two such inflammatory documents without Gates’s awareness. But Gates left no record of approval, and Armstrong later claimed that he had acted on his own. The ambiguity served both men. If the conspiracy failed, Gates could disavow it. If it succeeded, he could claim credit for supporting it.

Armstrong himself would go on to a long political career. He would serve as a delegate to the Continental Congress, as a United States Senator from New York, and as Minister to France. He would become Secretary of War under President James Madison. His later prominence makes it clear that the Newburgh addresses were not the work of a marginal figure or a hotheaded radical. They were the work of a man who understood power, who had connections to the nationalist faction, and who saw an opportunity to force a political settlement through military pressure.

The addresses were, in this sense, an instrument of crisis engineering. They took grievances that were real and widely shared, and they shaped those grievances into a form that could be used to create a political emergency. The emergency, if it materialized, would force Congress to act. The action that the nationalists wanted was a federal taxing power. The addresses did not demand this explicitly. They demanded payment. But the subtext was clear: Congress could not pay without revenue, and revenue required a federal impost that the states had repeatedly refused to authorize.

The officers who read the addresses responded with a mixture of enthusiasm and caution. Some saw them as a call to action that was long overdue. Others worried that a meeting of officers, convened without Washington’s authority, would look like mutiny. The debate itself was evidence that the addresses had succeeded in their immediate purpose: they had made the question of action unavoidable. The officers could no longer simply wait and hope. They had to decide.

The addresses also succeeded in creating a problem for Washington. He had been the advocate for the army’s grievances. He had written to Congress, pleaded with Congress, warned Congress of the consequences of inaction. Now someone else was speaking to the army, and the message was that Washington’s patience had failed. The addresses did not attack Washington by name. But they implied that his methods had failed, that his faith in Congress was misplaced, that the time for patience had passed.

Washington’s response would define the crisis. He could not allow the meeting proposed by the addresses to proceed without his presence. If he tried to forbid it, he risked open defiance. If he ignored it, he risked losing control of his officers. The solution he found—appearing at the meeting uninvited, speaking to the officers directly, reading a letter from Congress that promised eventual payment, and then, in a moment of theatrical brilliance, putting on his spectacles to read a second document—would become one of the most famous scenes of the Revolutionary War.

But that moment lay ahead. On March 10, as the first address began its circulation, the immediate question was simpler: who had written this document, and what did they want? The officers asked each other. They studied the style, the phrasing, the arguments. Some guessed correctly that the author was someone close to Gates. Others speculated about more distant conspirators. The anonymity was itself a provocation. It suggested that the author feared retribution, or that the author wished to make the addresses seem the spontaneous expression of the officers’ collective will.

The Newburgh Conspiracy, as it would later be known, 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 engineered or encouraged by nationalist politicians in Congress who wanted to use the threat of military unrest to force the states to grant a federal taxing power. The exact degree of coordination between the civilian nationalists and the military conspirators remains disputed. But the outlines of the scheme are clear: an unpaid army, a paralyzed Congress, a faction that wanted federal revenue, and a moment when peace was close enough to dissolve the army’s leverage but not yet close enough to make payment certain.

Armstrong’s role in this scheme was to provide the spark. He wrote the addresses. He arranged for their circulation. He gave form to the grievances that the officers already felt. The addresses were not the cause of the crisis; the cause was the failure of Congress to pay the army. But the addresses shaped the crisis, gave it direction, pushed it toward confrontation.

The young major who sat at his desk in Gates’s headquarters understood something about power. He understood that grievances, by themselves, were not enough. Grievances could fester for years without producing action. To produce action, grievances had to be organized, channeled, given a target. The addresses organized the officers’ grievances around a specific demand: a meeting. They channeled the grievances toward a specific outcome: an ultimatum to Congress. They gave the crisis a shape that could be used.

The nationalist faction in Philadelphia wanted a federal taxing power. They had tried legislative means and failed. They had tried persuasion and failed. The states, particularly Rhode Island, had refused to authorize the impost that would have given Congress an independent source of revenue. Without revenue, Congress could not pay its debts, could not pay the army, could not function as a national government. The nationalists believed that a stronger federal government was necessary for the survival of the republic. They were willing to use the army’s distress to create the pressure that would force the states to yield.

Whether Armstrong was in direct communication with Hamilton, with the Morrises, with any of the civilian nationalists, the documents do not definitively show. But the alignment is suggestive. Armstrong was from Pennsylvania, the state where Robert Morris was the dominant financial figure. His later career would place him in the same political circles as the nationalists. And the addresses themselves advanced exactly the kind of crisis that the nationalists needed.

The second address made the logic explicit. It warned that peace would dissolve the army’s leverage. It urged action before it was too late. Hamilton had made the same argument to Washington in his letter of February 13: that the army’s claims, pressed before peace was declared, might succeed in establishing a funding plan that would be impossible once the army was disbanded. The timing was too precise to be coincidental.

The addresses also reflected Armstrong’s own position within the army. As Gates’s aide, he was close to a general who had his own reasons for wanting to see Washington challenged. Gates had never accepted his defeat in the struggle for supreme command. He had never fully reconciled himself to Washington’s primacy. The Newburgh Conspiracy offered Gates a chance to see Washington tested, perhaps weakened, perhaps forced to take a more aggressive stance toward Congress. If Gates could not be commander-in-chief, he could at least be the center of an alternative power center within the army.

The meeting that the addresses demanded was scheduled for March 11. The officers were to gather at the New Building, a large structure that served as a meeting hall. The agenda was unspecified, but the implications were clear. A meeting of officers, convened without the commander’s authority, to discuss grievances and possible action against Congress—this was the structure of mutiny, even if the word was not spoken.

Washington moved quickly. On March 11, he issued general orders condemning the anonymous addresses and forbidding the meeting. He denounced the disorderly and irregular nature of the call to assemble. He warned that such a meeting would be a more fatal blow to the army than any thing that had happened since its formation. But he did not simply forbid the gathering. He called his own meeting for March 15, four days later, and ordered the officers to attend. He had seized the initiative. The meeting would happen, but it would happen on his terms.

The effect of Washington’s orders was to create a new problem for the conspirators. The addresses had called for a meeting to consider action. Washington had called a meeting to consider the same grievances, but under his authority. The officers would now have to choose: attend Washington’s meeting and accept his leadership, or defy him and proceed with their own. The second address, which appeared after Washington’s orders, urged the officers to ignore Washington’s prohibition and meet as originally planned. But the momentum had shifted.

Armstrong, watching from Gates’s headquarters, could see that his documents had set events in motion. Whether he had expected Washington to respond so quickly, so decisively, is unclear. The addresses had been designed to create pressure, to force a confrontation. They had succeeded. But the confrontation would now happen on Washington’s ground, at Washington’s time, under Washington’s control.

The authorship of the addresses was an open secret within the camp. Officers who knew Armstrong, who knew his position, who knew his style of writing, could make a reasonable guess. But Armstrong never publicly acknowledged his role during the crisis. He let the documents speak for themselves. He let the anonymity protect him from direct accountability.

The addresses were a kind of political weapon. They were not simply expressions of grievance; they were instruments designed to produce a specific effect. They used the language of honor and self-respect to push the officers toward confrontation. They appealed to emotions that were already present—frustration, anger, a sense of betrayal—and gave those emotions a target. They were, in the language of a later era, agitation and propaganda combined.

Armstrong’s later career suggests that he saw nothing discreditable in what he had done. He went on to serve his country in various capacities. He wrote a history of the war that defended his actions and those of his associates. He does not seem to have regarded the Newburgh addresses as a shameful secret. He had taken a risk, and the risk had failed. But the calculation behind the risk—that the army’s grievances could be used to force political change—was one that the nationalists continued to make.

The crisis that Armstrong’s addresses created would culminate in Washington’s appearance at the March 15 meeting. There, in the New Building, surrounded by his officers, Washington would read a letter from Congress, would appeal to the officers’ patience and honor, and would, in the famous moment, put on his spectacles to read a difficult passage, remarking that he had grown gray in their service and now found himself growing blind. The gesture, human and vulnerable, would disarm the agitation. The officers would approve a resolution affirming their loyalty and their trust in Congress. The crisis would pass.

But that resolution lay ahead. On March 10, as the first address circulated through the camp, the outcome was uncertain. The officers who read the document felt the force of its arguments. Congress had failed them. Their service had not been rewarded. Peace, when it came, would leave them with nothing but promises. The addresses gave voice to what they already believed.

The authorship is identified and the instrument placed; the written agitation has been released into the camp, setting in motion the demand for a physical gathering.