73. The Fall of Morris and the Emergence of the Order of the Cincinnati

Robert Morris’ last year in office was a far cry from his all-powerful role as war dictator. Rueing the failure of the nationalists’ dreams, Morris found his power confined to administrative tasks in his own department and to redeeming Morris notes. Many leading nationalists quit federal office in disgust: Hamilton retiring from Congress to practice law in New York, Madison declining to serve out his term, Livingston resigning as secretary of foreign affairs to resume his old post as chancellor of New York. Gouverneur Morris resigned as Robert Morris’ assistant. The rotation in office imposed by the Articles’ injunction against more than three consecutive years in Congress insured the retirement of many of the ultranationalists. Furthermore, after being subjected to harassment by hundreds of mutinous Pennsylvania troops in late spring 1783 demanding the pay due them, Congress left Philadelphia, the home of Morris and the public creditors’ pressure, and retired first to Princeton and then to Annapolis. This change of atmosphere helped considerably to shift Congressional opinion from right to left, ending what David Howell called the “poisonous influence” of the Pennsylvania metropolis. And the young Massachusetts liberal Samuel Osgood claimed that the removal from Philadelphia eliminated “systems which would finally have ended in absolute aristocracy.”

Morris’ Bank of North America was also eased out of its status as a central bank during 1783, to revert to the status of a private bank chartered by the state of Pennsylvania. By mid-1782, the bank had $400,000 of loans outstanding to the U.S. government, and the government in turn owned five-eighths of the its capital. In December Morris, uneasy at the close link between government and bank as his political power threatened to dwindle, began in December to systematically disengage the two institutions. By July 1783, all of the federal government’s stock in the Bank of North America had been sold to private hands, chiefly to Dutch capitalists; and by the end of 1783, all the U.S. government debt to the bank had been repaid. The danger of a central bank was ended for the time being, although the bank continued to discount short-term notes for the government.

Morris once more came under congressional fire for the mixing of the public and his private interests; and it was revealed that by quietly giving special redemption status in specie to his own Morris notes, he was aiding his business partners who were speculating in these tickets. The grasping and once dictatorial Morris had become, in a brief period, a personal liability to the centralizing cause, a liability that stimulated liberalism in such Massachusetts delegates as the wealthy merchant Stephen Higginson. Higginson’s major objection to the impost was that it was part of the scheme, the “web,” of Morris and his middle state cohorts; much of the southern opposition was also inspired by hostility to the financier.

The nationalist forces had succeeded in some of their plans: executive departments had been established within the Confederation (itself a centralizing of power beyond the original Continental Congress); the northwestern lands were being nationalized into the hands of Congress; and a great deal of the Revolutionary War debt had been assumed by the federal authority. But in the main tasks, the perpetuation of control by Morris and the financial oligarchy, the establishment of a permanent federal taxing power and of a permanent national standing army, the reactionaries had failed. With the end of the war, nationalist power ebbed strongly and Morris was thoroughly discredited. But the brilliant, wealthy coterie of Nationalist leaders was not about to abandon its plans; instead, these men bided their time and waited for a period of popular discontent which they might be able to channel toward the creation of central national power. For his part, Hamilton brooded once more on a scheme for a new constitutional convention to give overriding power to a central government with taxing power, a funding of the public debt, a central bank, and a permanent standing army.

The right wing did, however, not brood and bide its time without an organization, a nucleus in being for future mischief. This especially held true of the old officer corps, which could form a mass base for the intrigues of the oligarchs. Hence, on May 10, 1783, shortly before the disbanding of the Continental Army, many of the officer corps formed the Order of the Cincinnati. Here was an organization that could keep up at least a modicum of military pressure for nationalist ends. It was fitting that the idea for the society came from its secretary, General Knox, and that its first presiding officer was the Prussian “Baron von” Steuben. George Washington was, of course, selected as president-general, to be succeeded at his death by Alexander Hamilton. Branch societies were formed in each of the thirteen states, and even in France among the returning volunteers of the American Revolutionary War.

The society’s membership was to be strictly hereditary, confined to eldest sons of members of the order, though some like-minded honorary members could be elected. This flagrantly aristocratic provision, combined with its obviously reactionary and militaristic complexion, played a large role in stimulating the radical cause by inspiring public opposition against the Order of the Cincinnati.

All over the country, indeed, opposition swelled against the blatantly militaristic Cincinnati. Even John Adams was severely critical, as were Benjamin Franklin and John Jay. But the man who galvanized the opposition was Judge Aedanus Burke of the Supreme Court of South Carolina. Burke’s pamphlet of 1783, Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati, blasted the order in no uncertain terms as planted “in a fiery hot ambition, and thirst for power; and its branches will end in tyranny by a hereditary aristocracy.” Although New England had been the center of antimilitarism and opposition to commutation pay for officers, it took Judge Burke’s pamphlet to arouse New Englanders to the menace of the Cincinnati. Connecticut had been the main center of opposition for the commutation pay for the officers; pamphlets and town meetings had condemned the settlement, as had the lower house of the legislature. The financial burdens of the scheme upon the taxpayers, the privileges to the officer caste, and the encroachment of Congress on the powers of the states in pledging payment, were the reasons for Connecticut’s opposition to the Cincinnati. Now, Judge Burke’s pamphlet was reprinted twice in Hartford and commended by a statewide anti-commutation-pay convention at Middletown.

The Middletown convention, which met three times during the winter of 1783–84, was the highwater mark of opposition to commutation pay in Connecticut. It appointed a standing committee headed by the veteran officer Capt. Hugh Ledlie of Hartford, formerly one of the Sons of Liberty at Windham. The revolutionary implications of the convention method aroused hostility in the press, as well as condemnation by the vacillating liberal Sam Adams, who refused even to support the movement.

Rhode Island’s hostility to commutation pay was also quickly widened by a Newport edition of Burke’s pamphlet to hatred of the Cincinnati. In the spring of 1784, Rhode Island even toyed with the idea of disfranchising members of the Cincinnati, and barring them from public office. Burke’s pamphlet, reprinted in the Boston Independent Chronicle, also stirred great opposition to the Cincinnati in Massachusetts. Liberal leaders Sam Adams, Samuel Osgood, and Elbridge Gerry, denounced the Cincinnati as leading toward a “hereditary military nobility.” In late March 1784, the Massachusetts legislature condemned the Order of the Cincinnati, as “tending, if unrestrained, to imperium in imperio, and consequently to confusion and the subversion of public liberty.” Hereditary distinctions could lead to a hereditary nobility. The legislature therefore concluded that the Cincinnati was “unjustifiable, and... may be dangerous to the peace, liberty and safety” of Massachusetts and of the United States. A Cambridge town meeting instructed its representatives to outlaw the order, and in North Carolina, a bill was introduced to bar any Cincinnati member from taking a seat in either house of the legislature.

Perhaps the most remarkable influence of Burke’s pamphlet was in France. There, Franklin gave the pamphlet to the liberal leader Comte Honoré de Mirabeau, who was moved to expand it into a pamphlet of his own, Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus, which was quickly translated into English and German. Mirabeau’s pamphlet, evidently written with the particular conditions of his own country in mind, included a bitter attack on the monarchy and aristocracy under which, in contrast to republics, men were not equal before the law. The Cincinnati, in opposition to republican principles, would introduce into America an “eternal race of aristocrats, who may soon usurp those insulting titles by which the European nobility crush the simple citizens, their equals and brothers.”

Buffeted by the upsurge of hostility, Washington asked Thomas Jefferson, now in Congress, his opinion of the order, and this moderate liberal’s view proved decisive in determining Washington’s course. Jefferson wrote strongly that the society’s very foundation violated both the natural equality of man and the spirit of such equality before the law upon which American institutions were built. At the first general meeting of the Cincinnati in May 1784, in response to this opinion, Washington once again smashed at a particularly cherished goal of his friends on the far right. He forced the meeting to abolish all inherited and honorary memberships, and to confine the organization to dispensing charity. But this time his well-meaning intervention had quite a different impact, for the national meeting’s changes were null and void unless ratified by each of the constituent state societies, and this they refused to do. Yet public opinion took the shadow for the substance, and it was widely believed that the sweeping changes demanded by Washington had in fact been made. Criticism died down, and the Order of the Cincinnati remained as a reactionary canker upon the body politic.