March 15, 1783: The Most Important Day in American History?

General Washington delivers his momentous remarks.

(Dennis Lyall/Artworks Illustration)

You can visit a reconstruction of the bare wooden room where it happened. In a little town on the Hudson, 70 miles upriver from British-occupied Manhattan, George Washington managed to talk a much-provoked Continental Army out of mutinying and turning its guns on the Continental Congress. It happened 224 years ago today, in an unprepossessing structure variously remembered as the Temple of Virtue, the New Building, and the Public Building. It may well have been the most important moment in American history.

Many of the officers of the Continental Army had resolved to march on Congress at the head of their regiments and demand redress of real and pressing grievances. Trouble had been brewing for months, and the officers had been most recently roused by three brilliant pamphlets written by one of their number, a pseudonymous “Brutus.” Washington was attempting to deflect them from their resolution, but he was not a brilliant speaker, his text was too ornate to carry the day, and he did not seem to have the ability to command the crowd. Struggling to read a letter he thought relevant to the case—a promise by one Congressman Jones to support the Army—Washington found he could not even make out the handwriting. He reached into his pocket and put on reading glasses, which no one in that room had ever seen him wear. He then remarked, “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” And at that minute, the Newburgh Mutiny was over.

It is harder to say when it began, for it had been a long time brewing. As the historian Jim Cullen notes in the prologue to his wise and often moving book Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumph, soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan, Washington had initially acted very slowly to the news of real trouble brewing up in Newburgh, New York. In the spring of 1782, with the Army ever angrier over arrears of pay, wretched supplies, broken promises, and doubts about the likelihood of the Continental Congress ever raising the resources to pay promised pensions, an officer had written Washington suggesting that “strong arguments might be produced for admitting the title of king” and crowning Washington. The general replied by saying that “no occurrence in the War has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army.”

In December 1782 Washington wrote to a Congressional ally that “the temper of the Army is much soured, and has become more irritable than at any time since the commencement of the War.” That same month, a group of officers went to Philadelphia, the national capital, to offer a compromise. They would abandon their right to pensions and settle for a less valuable lump payment. But they also made a threat, which as articulated by Gen. Henry Knox, read, “We have borne all that men can bear—our property is expended—our private resources are at an end, and our friends are wearied out and disgusted with our incessant applications. Any further experiments on their patience may have fatal effects.” The officers had sympathizers in Philadelphia, including both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who wanted to expand the government’s powers in any event. In January 1783 those sympathizers proposed that the colonies tax imports in order to pay both the army and other government creditors.

On February 13 Hamilton wrote to Washington what Jim Cullen describes as “an exquisitely calibrated letter . . . that managed to both invite and sidestep treason.” Hamilton argued that the challenge would be “to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation. . . . It will be advisable not to discountenance their endeavours to procure redress, but rather by the intervention of confidential and prudent persons, to take direction of them. This however must not appear: it is of moment to the public tranquility that Your Excellency should preserve the confidence of the army without losing that of the people. This will enable you in case of extremity to guide the torrent, and bring order[,] perhaps even good, out of confusion.”

Hamilton wrote the letter on the day the news arrived in Philadelphia that preliminary articles of peace had been signed in Paris. The prospect of peace, however, looked like a mixed blessing to many of the troops encamped in Newburgh. With independence secured, the Continental Congress would have even less incentive to pay any of what it owed to the men who had won the war. Even when the Congress had most desperately needed the Army, in the winter of 1777 to 1778, the miserably clothed and fed troops had half-starved at Valley Forge. Now, five years later, the Congress might act on the theory that it would never need the Army again.

On Monday, March 10, with rumors spreading that the army was going to march on Philadelphia, the pseudonymous Brutus—in fact John Armstrong, aide-de-camp to General Horatio Gates—wrote his first Newburgh Address to the officers of the army. He urged his fellow officers to reject “the meek language of entreating memorials” and “change the milk-and-water style” of their correspondence with Congress. He insisted that “faith has its limits as well as temper—and there are points; beyond which neither can be stretched without sinking into cowardice.” And apparently referring to Washington, he urged his comrades to “suspect the man, who would advise to more moderation and longer forebearance.” He was very clear on the danger of peace: “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, when your voice shall sink, and your strength dissipate by division? When these very swords, the instruments and companions of your glory, shall be taken from your sides, and no remaining mark of military distinction left, but your wants, infirmities, and scars!”

Brutus had demanded a meeting to discuss what should be done. The following day Washington managed to postpone the meeting, following which Brutus circulated a second letter. When some hundreds of officers convened in the New Building on March 15, Washington showed up, contrary to all expectations, to address them.

His prepared remarks were not successful, and it was assumed that Brutus would appear, speak with the rhetorical prowess evident in the anonymous letters, and carry the day. Instead, Washington fumbled with his spectacles, made the immortal remark about growing not only gray but blind in his country’s service, and a number of officers began to weep. Washington left the room, the mutiny quelled.

A few years later, on September 18, 1787, the Constitutional Convention concluded in Philadelphia, the city on which the Continental Army had almost marched. Asked whether the convention had produced a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin replied that we had a republic, if we could keep it. That remark is more famous than the Newburgh mutiny, but it shouldn’t be, for the possibility of a republic almost disappeared on March 15, 1783, when Washington, oddly less vivid to posterity than most of our great Presidents—the man seems to have disappeared within all the marble that has memorialized him—made all that followed possible.

Republics require, above all else, the subordination of their armies to civilian authority. The greatest of previous republics, Rome, fell when that principle failed. While some republics have failed because they could not mobilize sufficient military power—this was true of both Florence and Venice, and of the French Third Republic—most, including the first two French republics, fell to the military power they had themselves created. In the wake of the founding of the American republic, scores of others have been founded, and almost all of them have failed, at one time or another, in the same way Rome did, when an army, sometimes very grossly provoked, sometimes with much less provocation, slipped the leash of civilian control.

March 15 should be more famous than it is.

—Fredric Smoler teaches history and literature at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.