In November, 1782, preliminary and eventual articles of peace were agreed upon between the United States and Great Britain, by their plenipotentiaries. Nothing had been done by Congress for the claims of the army, and it seemed highly probable that it would be disbanded without even a settlement of the accounts of the officers, and if so, that they would never receive their dues. Alarmed and irritated by the neglect of Congress; destitute of money and credit and of the means of living from day to day; oppressed with debts; saddened by the distresses of their families at home, and by the prospect of misery before them, they presented a memorial to Congress in December, in which they urged the immediate adjustment of their dues, and offered to commute the half-pay for life, granted by the resolve of October, 1780, for full pay for a certain number of years, or for such a sum in gross, as should be agreed on by their committee sent to Philadelphia to attend the progress of the memorial through the house. It is manifest from statements in this document, as well as from other evidence, that the officers were nearly driven to desperation, and that their offer of commutation was wrung from them by a state of public opinion little creditable to the country. They recited their hardships, their poverty, and their exertions in the cause; and all that they said was fully borne out by their great commander, in his personal remonstrances with many of the members of Congress. The officers asserted, that many of their brethren, who had retired on the half-pay promised by the re

solve of 1780, were not only destitute of any effectual provision, but had become objects of obloquy; and they referred with chagrin to the odious view in which the citizens of too many of the States endeavored to place those who were entitled to that pro

vision.

But, from the prevailing feeling in Congress and in the country, nothing better was to be expected than a compromise in place of the discharge of a solemn obligation; and this feeling no American historian should fail to record and to condemn. If these men had borne only the character of public creditors, a state of public feeling which drove them into a compromise of their claims ought always to be severely reprehended. But, beyond the capacity of public creditors, they were the men who had fought the battles which liberated the country from a foreign yoke; who had endured every extremity of hardship, every form of suffering, which the life of a soldier knows; who had stood between the common soldiery and the civil power; and often, at the hazard of their lives, preserved that discipline and subordination which the civil power had done too much to hazard. They were, in a word, the men of whom their commander said, that they had exhibited more virtue, fortitude, self-denial, and perseverance, than had perhaps been then paralleled in the history of human enthusiasm.

Painful, therefore, as it is, this lesson, of the wrong that may be done by a breach of public faith, must be read. It lies It lies open on the page of history, and is the

case of those to whose right arms the people of this country owe the splendid inheritance of liberty. All real palliations should be sought for and admitted. The country was poor: no proper system of finance had been, or could be, developed by a government which had no power of taxation; and the ideas and feelings of the people of many of the States were provincial, and without the liberality and enlargement of thought which comes of intercourse with the world. But, after every apology has exhausted its force, the conscientious student of history must mark the dereliction from public duty; must admit what the public faith required; and must observe the dangerous consequences which attend, and must ever attend, the breach of a public obligation.

The immediate consequences which followed, in this instance, were predicted by General Washington, who gave the clearest warning, in advance of the officers' memorial, of the hazards that would attend the further neglect of their claims. But his warning seems to have been unheeded, or to have made but little impression against the prevailing aversion to touch the unpopular subject of half-pay. The committee of the officers were in attendance upon Congress during the whole winter, and early in March, 1783, they wrote to their constituents that nothing had been done.

At this moment, the predicament in which Washington stood, in the double relation of citizen and soldier, was critical and delicate in the extreme. In the course of a few days, all his firmness and patriot

ism, all his sympathies as an officer, on the one side, and his fidelity to the government on the other, were severely tried. On the 10th of March, an anonymous address was circulated among the officers at Newburgh, calling a meeting of the general and field officers, and of one officer from each company, and one from the medical staff, to consider the late letter from their representatives at Philadelphia, and to determine what measures should be adopted to obtain that redress of grievances which they seemed to have solicited in vain. It was written with great ability and skill. It spoke the language of injured feeling; it pointed directly to the sword, as the remedy for injustice; and it spoke to men who were suffering keenly under public ingratitude and neglect. Its eloquence and its passion fell, therefore, upon hearts not insensible, and a dangerous explosion seemed to be at hand. Washington met the crisis with firmness, but also with conciliation. He issued orders forbidding an assemblage at the call of an anonymous paper, and directing the officers to assemble on Saturday, the 15th, to hear the report of their committee, and to deliberate what further measures ought to be adopted as most rational and best calcu

lated to obtain the just and important object in view. The senior officer in rank present was directed to preside, and to report the result to the Commanderin-chief.

On the next day after these orders were issued, a second anonymous address appeared from the same writer. In this paper, he affected to consider the orders of General Washington, assuming the direction of the meeting, as a sanction of the whole proceeding which he had proposed. Washington saw, at once, that he must be present at the meeting himself, or that his name would be used to justify measures which he intended to discountenance and prevent. He therefore attended the meeting, and under his influence, seconded by that of Putnam, Knox, Brooks, and Howard, the result was the adoption of certain resolutions, in which the officers, after reasserting their grievances, and rebuking all attempts to seduce them from their civil allegiance, referred the whole subject of their claims again to the consideration of Congress.

Even at this distant day, the peril of that crisis can scarcely be contemplated without a shudder. Had the Commander-in-chief been other than Washington, had the leading officers by whom he was surrounded been less than the noblest of patriots, the land would have been deluged with the blood of a civil war. But men who had suffered what the great officers of the Revolution had suffered, had learned the lessons of self-control which suffering teaches. The hard school of adversity in which they had