72. The Newburgh Conspiracy

The conservatives would not simply give up and abandon their dreams of centralized rule. If the peaceful road of passing an impost was blocked, then more drastic means would have to be found. Moreover, the right knew that it was pressed for time; soon the war would be over in all formality, and the cover of the war effort could no longer be used as a prop for centralizing government power. Thus, both Robert and Gouverneur Morris saw that peace would be fatal to their hopes of greatly expanding federal power. To the conservatives, it appeared to be now or never. One solution would have been a convention for a new constitution; and Hamilton and Schuyler had already pushed a recommendation for such a convention through the New York legislature in mid-1782. But there was scarcely time for such a drive.

The conservatives found their immediate opportunity in rising discontent among the officers of the Continental Army. Thanks to Washington’s drive for a conventional, disciplined army, the radical principles of a democratic army were vitiated, and an officer caste, highly paid in relation to the common soldier, was established during the war. The officers longed for the standard European system of half-pay pensions for life after the war; and in the fall of 1780, the triumphant conservatives in Congress, eager to establish an officer caste and a permanent standing army as an integral part of their nationalist plans, promised half-pay for life to the officers. But the states, more influenced by the radical hostility to the military, began to balk, and Congress, too, showed no signs of carrying through its promise. Time was also getting short for the officer caste, for peace would bring demobilization, weakening the potential counter-revolutionary pressure that the army might exert. It was now or never for the officers, and their aims now coincided with those of the right.

A delegation of three army officers, headed by Gen. Alexander McDougall, submitted the officers’ petition to Congress in early January 1783. The officers demanded payment of arrears, and, above all, half-pay for life, actuarially commuted into a payment of six years’ full salary. Otherwise, they warned, “fatal consequences” would follow. Congress, led by antimilitarist New England, rejected the proposal, but while in the capital the delegates conferred with the leaders of the Right: the Morrises, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton, now a member of Congress. These persuaded the officers to unite with the public creditors to try to obtain a centralized government with the power to tax and then to pay their claims. Robert Morris warned the officers that their demands—so useful to his schemes—must be made solely upon the federal government and not be referred back to the states. Generals McDougall and Knox, and Gouverneur Morris, spread the word of the new unity of the vested interests in federal government claims, and discreet hints began to circulate of an army coup, should Congress not capitulate. Arthur Lee, acutely worried, wrote to his fellow antimilitarist Samuel Adams that “the terror of a mutinying army is played off with considerable efficacy.” He reported also that unwelcome memories were being awakened of Cromwell’s counterrevolutionary coup during the English Revolution, when he and his army crushed Parliament for attempting to disband the army without meeting its demands for pay. Gouverneur Morris exulted to John Jay, “The army has swords in their hands. You know enough of the history of mankind to know much more than I have said....” Or, as he explicitly and revealingly added, “You and I, my friend, know by experience, that when a few men of sense and spirit get together, and declare that they are the authority, such few as are of a different opinion may easily be convinced of their mistake by that powerful argument the halter.”

With opinion in Philadelphia sufficiently alerted, it now became necessary to whip up the army. On March 8, Col. Walter Stewart, holder of a large amount of public securities and acting as an agent for Morris and his cohorts, arrived at Newburgh, where the Continental Army was stationed. Soon it was widely rumored that the army would refuse to disband, and, standing with the public creditors and aided by Morris, it would revolt against Congress. Asked by his close friend William Duer how the troops would be fed if they launched a coup against Congress, and in a sense against their country, Morris smugly answered, “I will feed them.”

On March 10, 1783, the conspirators decided to move. John Armstrong, Jr., an aide to General Gates and the young son of a fiery Pennsylvania radical, circulated his explosive “Newburgh Address.” In the address, he attacked the idea of moderation, and called for an officers’ meeting for March 11, to draw up a last remonstrance to Congress, a remonstrance which would be followed by an army revolt. And so the conservative conspirators began to put their plans for a military coup into effect.

To whipsaw Congress, Robert Morris had submitted his resignation at the end of January. This sudden and surprising move hit the Congress with the force of a thunderclap. It was an arrogant attempt at blackmail, for his resignation was to take effect at the end of May, unless Congress had by then established a system for the permanent funding of the public debt. He also took care to publish his resignation threat in the press, thus maximizing the pressure upon Congress from all sides. What Morris was demanding was that it order the states to pay a full schedule of federal taxes (internal as well as impost) if they did not pay their full quota of the federal debt within a year; this was to be an open assumption and seizure of an overriding tax power under the Confederation. The evident unconstitutionality of such dictation was swept aside. As Ferguson points out, “This ultimatum to Congress makes no sense except in the light of its timing to coincide with the army conspiracy.”*

The final and critical link in the plan for a rightist coup was to persuade George Washington, a man of enormous if undeserved prestige as the victor of the Revolutionary War, to join in the scheme. Only the mighty Washington could successfully take the reins of a military coup d’état. Alexander Hamilton’s main role, then, was to convince the commander-in-chief. He urged Washington to intervene, in conjunction with General Knox, to “bring order, perhaps even good... out of confusion.” But Washington, while highly in sympathy with the conservatives’ goals, staunchly refused to take the path of a military coup, a course that would be “productive of civil commotions and end in blood.”

Stepping in to avert the plot, Washington ordered postponement of the officers’ meeting until March 15, when the report of the delegates to Congress could be considered. Armstrong countered quickly with his second Newburgh Address, frantically calling upon the officers to turn their arms against the government, to seize the vital moment, and to “carry your appeal from the justice to the fears of government.” Otherwise, the officers would only “wade through the vile mire of dependency” and “go, starve, and be forgotten.” He also maintained that Washington was secretly in favor of his plan. But at the officers’ meeting, Washington made a highly emotional speech in behalf of legal means, and he attacked the author of the addresses as perhaps an agent of the British, plotting disruption. In this climate, the conspirators could only suppress their bitter disappointment and vote unanimously to offer their loyalty to Congress and to condemn the Armstrong addresses. In return, Washington sent an urgent message to Congress pressing it to meet the officers’ demands. Hamilton, seeing the way the wind was blowing, hastened to assure Washington that he had not meant to urge illegal means.

While the Newburgh Conspiracy had collapsed upon the rebuff of Washington, Congress was still under the twin blackmail threats of the army and the resignation of the Financier. Congress did agree to grant the army officers five years’ full pay in commutation of the promised pension. The pay would be in federal securities, thus adding the officers’ committed pensions to the rest of the growing body of the public debt.

But the major nationalist demand, as before, was for a federal taxing program. Morris, Hamilton, and Wilson demanded a comprehensive federal taxing system collected and administered by federal officers. James Madison also led in the struggle for federal taxation. But various taxes met strong opposition. Richard Henry Lee was an effective opponent, and the hard core of the radicals, headed by his brother Arthur and the Rhode Island delegation, opposed any federal tax whatsoever. Furthermore, the clear restrictions of the Articles of Confederation helped the left greatly; as Arthur Lee declared, “The Confederation is a stumbling block to those who wish to introduce new and... arbitrary systems.”

Rather than try to drive through a federal tax program, however, Congress finally fell back in April 1783 on a second request for an impost. This time the impost bill was modified: the grant of power to Congress for an impost was to be for twenty-five years instead of permanently, and the collectors would be appointed by the several states. However, for twenty-five years the federal government would also have the power to raise $1.5 million a year in estate taxes.

Hamilton held out to the last, supporting the bill, but voting against it as a protest against the surrender of conservative goals, while Jonathan Arnold and John Collins voted against the impost, partly because the collectors would still be federal officers. Arnold, in fact, charged that the impost was a device to undo the Revolution. Morris, who had put his political career on the line, was also scornful of the compromise; and while he consented to stay in office until the end of 1784, his power rapidly melted away. For the nub of the conservatives’ program—the federal taxing power—had been rebuffed, and now Congress’ ratification of the peace treaty on April 15, 1783, meant that the pressure for centralization had passed away. Washington, highly critical of the Morrises for using the army’s demands as a weapon in their drive for centralized power, remained as a bulwark against any coup. Furthermore, Congress’ attempt to keep the army in being until Britain’s final ratification failed, as soldiers, eager to get home, protested, mutinied, and insulted their officers. Soon, the entire army disintegrated under this pressure from below except for Washington’s own command. Congress authorized him to grant a wholesale furlough at the end of May, and within a month the Continental Army, its work obviously done, had virtually dissolved, ignoring the demands of its officer corps that it remain. Some of the departing soldiers were lucky enough to receive three months’ pay in Morris notes, while the noncommissioned officers were thwarted in their demands for five years’ pay. Unlike the officer caste, the soldiers did not pressure for grandiose terminal pay nor did they threaten a military coup or call for a permanent standing army.

*Ferguson, The Power of the Purse, p. 161.