American Crisis Read online

  Although he was too old for frontline service, Nicola yearned to be close to the action. In March 1777 he wrote to Congress, proposing that it create an “Invalid Corps” of men who were no longer fit for combat but who would be competent for garrison and guard duty.41 Three months later Congress agreed and created a corps of one thousand men “to be employed in garrisons, and for guards in cities and other places, where magazines or arsenals, or hospitals are placed.” Reflecting Nicola’s interest in training officers, Congress, after appointing him to command the Invalid Corps, charged the corps “to serve as a military school for young gentlemen” where they might learn “geometry, arithmetic, vulgar and decimal fractions, and the extraction of roots.” Officers were “obliged to contribute one day’s pay per month … for the purpose of purchasing a regimental library.”42

  By the spring of 1782 four invalid companies had been formed. One unit was in Philadelphia, another in Boston, while the remaining two were with Nicola guarding Continental stores at the Fishkill supply depot across from West Point. Each morning as he mustered his men for roll call, Nicola faced visible and stark reminders of the true cost of the Revolution. He looked at soldiers carrying the scars of battle. He felt deeply about his men. On May 21, 1782, he wrote to Washington explaining their sad condition. “Captain Woolpaper [?] [is] entirely disqualified from age.” “Captain Williams paralectic [sic], he has lost the use of one side and his speech is much impaired.” “Captain Cooper has had his thigh cut [off ] so high he has not been able to walk out of the barracks.”43 These men had been faithful to a republic that Nicola believed had abandoned them. Congress was deaf to their pleas for compensation, and the country at large had forgotten them. Having described their sacrifice and pitiful condition, the next day Nicola wrote again to his commander with a message that could not be ignored.

  Washington’s concern for the welfare of his officers, and his “favourable reception” to Nicola’s previous “representation,” prompted this second communication; “[they] induced me,” wrote Nicola, “to trouble you with a matter I conceive of importance.”44 Historians have often misrepresented and misunderstood Nicola’s message. Many, when discussing this event, have referred to the Nicola “letter.” That description is misleading, for in fact two separate documents were included, the short cover letter from Nicola, 125 words, followed by a seven-page, 2,000 word, detailed “memoir.” Given its length and detail, Nicola must have labored some time over the text. Nicola began his memoir by briefly rehearsing the plight of the army, consisting mainly of the litany of promises made to them by Congress and then broken. Both the Congress’s and the states’ “schemes of oeconomy” seemed always aimed at the army. Such behavior in war augured ill for what might happen in peace when “our services are no longer needed.” Anger and frustration among officers had given rise, Nicola said, to rumors that the officers would refuse to go home after peace unless Congress settled “all grievances …, engagements and promises.” Nicola raised the specter of “blood and confusion.”

  An officer given to reflection, Nicola saw the unfortunate behavior of Congress and the states as a symptom of a far deeper problem. Republics did not work. “I am not that violent admirer of a republican form of government as numbers in this country are,” he wrote. Nicola’s answers to the nation’s woes were twofold: a constitutional monarchy on the model of Great Britain but with a king more tightly controlled by a balanced government (he referenced Montesquieu) and a land-grant system to reward veterans that would create a “distinct state” settled by former soldiers who would present a formidable barrier and “advanced guard” to protect the frontier of the nation.

  Nicola rejected both an absolute monarchy and a hereditary nobility. He even admitted that he was uncomfortable with the title of king, but he saw no alternative. Having laid out his ideas, he concluded by noting to Washington that “this war must have shown to all, but to military men in particular, the weakness of republicks, and the exertions the army has been able to make by being under a proper head.” The last remark was a thinly disguised compliment to Washington’s leadership. Nicola never suggested openly that the commander in chief should be king, but he left little doubt that Washington fit the job description. “Republican bigots will certainly consider my opinions as heterodox, meriting fire and [fagots],” but Washington need not worry for “I have … kept them within my breast.”45 Washington, however, did worry.

  Washington’s views of the feebleness of Congress differed little from Nicola’s. Had Nicola thought otherwise, he would never have exposed his radical opinions to the most powerful man in America. The colonel’s letter teetered at the edge of treason and certainly was in violation of section 2, article 1 of the Articles of War: “Whatsoever officer or soldier shall presume to use traitorous or disrespectful words against the authority of the United States in Congress assembled, or the legislature of any of the United States, … if a commissioned officer, he shall be cashiered.”

  Section 2 notwithstanding, a public sanction of Nicola, a highly respected officer, was out of the question. Discontent was rife in the enlisted ranks. Washington and his officers were the bulwarks of discipline. Should that wall crack, Washington feared that there would be no force sufficient to hold back desertion and mutiny. It was imperative that he move quickly to silence, chastise, and isolate Nicola. Within hours, with his aides Humphreys and Trumbull by his side, Washington composed a stinging rebuke to the colonel, a verbal flogging.46

  He first told Nicola that he was astonished “that such ideas [existed] in the Army” as he had expressed. He did not, however, deny that they existed, but for the moment he would keep them in his own “bosom.” Washington was urgent to separate himself from Nicola’s views particularly in light of what the colonel had written in his letter about Washington’s “favourable reception” to Nicola’s previous “representation.” “I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischief that can befall my Country.” He finished by warning Nicola, “Banish these thoughts from your Mind, and never communicate, as from yourself or any one else, a sentiment of like nature.”

  In the copy of the letter kept at headquarters Washington wrote at the bottom of the page, “The foregoing is an exact Copy of a Letter which we Sealed and sent off to Colonel Nicola at the request of the writer of it.” The note in Washington’s hand was signed by Trumbull and Humphreys. This was his reputational insurance policy. Despite Nicola’s assertion that he alone was author of the letter, there was no guarantee of the truth of that. For the sake of the army, the secret would be kept. For the sake of history, a record would be kept.

  Washington’s fierce rebuke tossed Nicola into full retreat. Sensing his own reputation was in jeopardy, the next day he sent Washington a fawning letter of apology. The day following he sent another and four days later a third.47 Washington never responded. The less said, he apparently believed, the better. Nicola continued in command of his regiment with no hint of dissatisfaction from his commander. Some years later, in 1788, when the Reverend William Gordon was writing a history of the Revolution, he asked Washington for permission to publish his response to Nicola. Washington replied that he “had quite forgot the private transaction.” Having been reminded of the event, however, he refused Gordon’s request: “No good but some harm might result from the publication. The letter in my judgment had better remain in concealment.”48

  Nicola was right that the army was in a melancholy and weary state. From West Point Henry Knox reported to the secretary at war that the officers were “much discontented,” while farther down the chain of command a twenty-seven-year-old Massachusetts Lieutenant, Benjamin Gilbert, wrote home that his men were “calling for money.” He feared they might mutiny.49 The ennui of camp life was sucking the energy out of the army. Soldiers live to fight, and with an enemy apparently gone to ground, American troops encamped along the Hudson, left with little else to do,
turned their minds toward lamentation and mischief. Washington needed a distraction. Once again his French allies came to his side.

  Louis Joseph Xavier François, the second child and the first son of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, was born on October 22, 1781.50 As heir to the throne of France, young Louis was immediately titled Dauphin. To give proper recognition to this grand event, and to please an ally, Congress invited the French minister, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, to attend a public audience on Monday May 13. Escorted by a troop of light horse, the minister’s coach made its way to the statehouse, where at the foot of the stairs two members of Congress waited to lead him into a chamber packed with more than two hundred spectators, including members of Congress, secretaries of the executive departments, military officers, as well as the president and council of the state of Pennsylvania. In a carefully orchestrated ballet that eschewed any notion of “republican simplicity,” members stood and bowed several times.51 After a minute or two of silence Luzerne rose and addressed the body in French, presenting a letter from the king which Secretary Thomson read to the body. After several more bows and formal acknowledgments, the minister took his leave and Congress adjourned for the day. The whole ceremony did not take more than thirty minutes.52 That evening Congress “strained every nerve of Finance to give the Ambassador a dinner,” followed by a grand display of fireworks.53

  Washington too offered to celebrate the Dauphin’s birth, recognizing a chance to plan a celebration on a scale worthy of a great ally and an event grand enough to divert the attention of his men to something other than their own condition. Early in May he summoned the chief engineer at West Point, the Chevalier de Villefranche, a French officer serving in the Corps of Engineers, to headquarters.54 The “ingenious” Villefranche laid out a plan for a breathtaking event.

  Washington positioned his entire command on both banks of the river so that they formed a circle surrounding West Point. Massachusetts regiments took positions on the west side and across the river between Nelson’s Point and the Middle Redoubt. Connecticut troops marched to the Highlands behind Constitution Island. Other regiments assembled on the plain behind West Point. The focus of the ceremony was a huge arbor, six hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, erected in the middle of the plain. For more than a week one thousand soldiers, including all the “Carpenters and Joiners in the Army,” worked under Villefranche’s supervision to build the grand structure. It was, according to Dr. Thacher, built of “simple materials which the common trees in this vicinity afford.” Impressed by “this superb structure,” Thacher went on with his lyrical description. The roof “consists of boughs, or branches of trees curiously interwoven, and the same materials form the walls, leaving the ends entirely open. On the inside, every pillar was encircled with muskets and bayonets, bound round in a fanciful and handsome manner, and the whole interior was decorated with evergreens, with American and French military colors, and a variety of emblems and devices.” Thacher fairly swooned that the arbor “in symmetry of proportion, neatness of workmanship, and elegance of arrangement, has seldom … been surpassed on any temporary occasion.”55

  Villefranche had set the stage. The commander in chief instructed “all the general, brigade and staff officers of the army to assemble.” He also invited “officers’s ladies with and in the neighborhood of the army” and “any other ladies of [the commander in chief ’s] acquaintance … Without the formality of a particular invitation.”56 For the enlisted men, Washington ordered “an extra gill of rum per man.”

  At two thirty on Friday afternoon the booming sound of cannon echoed down the valley. This was the signal for the officers and others to make their way to the plain. Five hundred people gathered under Villefranche’s boughs. After the crowd quieted, the band from Colonel John Crane’s Third Battalion of Continental Artillery struck up a martial tune as Washington, accompanied by his wife and an entourage of dignitaries, entered “through the line formed by” the men of the battalion.57 After the feast, “the cloth being removed, the diners drank thirteen appropriate toasts, each one announced by the discharge of thirteen cannon and accompanied by music.”58 After dinner the guests relaxed as the Continental regiments, gathered along the river, fired volleys of cannon and musket salutes. Gradually sounds of the salutes died away, and fireworks lit up the sky as the guests returned to the shelter of the arbor now illuminated “by a vast number of lights” for an evening of dancing.59 Washington was unusually cheerful. Known for his skill and fondness for dancing, the commander in chief took to the floor “with a dignified and graceful air, having Mrs. Knox for his partner.”60

  In the days following the grand party for the Dauphin, camp life along the Hudson returned to normal, with the men continuing to grumble about the lack of pay. This time the officers of the Massachusetts Line spoke up. Like the rest, they had not been paid. They decided to meet and prepare a petition to Congress, but in deference to the commander in chief they asked for his approval. General Heath was their emissary. He asked if Washington had any objection to the officers meeting at Colonel John Lamb’s headquarters to draft a petition to Congress.61 Washington replied that he had no objection. The men were only asking for “their just dues,” but he was “very sorry there should be any occasion for such proceedings.”62 Washington had little hope that Congress would act.

  By the summer of 1782 Washington, like everyone else in America including Congress and Carleton, waited for news from London as to whether peace would be proclaimed. At the same time, however, Washington still harbored a distant hope that the French might yet assist him in an attack on New York City or Charleston. In a somber mood at headquarters, Washington wrote to his Virginia friend Archibald Cary, “I pang for retirement.”63

  Unable to do so, Washington decided to travel north for a visit to Albany and his posts in that vicinity. He invited his friend Governor George Clinton to join him. On the same day when the officers of the Massachusetts Line were meeting at Colonel Lamb’s, June 26, he and the governor left for Albany.64 The trip, explained Washington, was “an opportunity of blending my public duty with my private satisfaction,” and served, perhaps, as a means of distancing himself from the meeting at Colonel Lamb’s.

  Leaving Martha behind at Newburgh to enjoy the amiable company of her friend Mrs. Knox, Washington and Clinton set out for Albany. On the evening of the twenty-seventh the “suite” arrived to a grand reception. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that Albany’s mayor, Abraham Ten Broeck, presented the commander in chief with the “freedom of the city in a gold box.”65 Crowds gathered, and “at 6 o’clock, P.M. the bells of all the churches began to ring, and continued their joyful peals until sunset, when thirteen cannon, one for each state, were discharged from the fort and the city illuminated.”66 That night Washington was the honored guest at a sumptuous banquet.

  Among those greeting Washington was his old friend General Philip Schuyler. Now retired from the military, Schuyler had given his daughter Elizabeth in marriage to Washington’s former aide Alexander Hamilton. Schuyler, who owned more land in New York State than any other person, happily became Washington’s tour guide. He took him north to see the Saratoga battle site. From there Schuyler accompanied Washington and Clinton on a trip west along the Mohawk River as far as Schenectady. Five miles outside the city a troop of sixty citizens greeted the general’s party. As the barge neared, cannon boomed and bells rang while “one hundred warriors of the Oneidas and Tuscarora completely armed and painted for war” met him at the town gate.67

  When he could take a minute and escape from the admiring throngs, Washington cast his keen eye on the land about him. He saw fertile valleys through which rivers flowed and rich lands farther west. As a planter and surveyor, he did not need anybody in his party to point out to him the promise of this vast territory, nor that the Mohawk, like his beloved Potomac, was a river that led west. All that was needed was to settle this “rising empire.”68

  Washington was back in Newburgh on July 2, i
n time to preside over festivities celebrating the sixth anniversary of independence. He ordered all the regiments to form “on each side of the river. The signal of thirteen cannon being given at West Point, the troops displayed and formed in a line, when a general feu de joie took place throughout the whole army.”69 One week later he bid farewell to his wife, who, having spent nine months in Newburgh, was returning to Mount Vernon.

  During the commander in chief ’s absence army morale had not improved. Soon after he returned he opened a second startling letter from a senior officer, Major General James Mitchell Varnum of Rhode Island. Varnum had retired from the army in 1779 and returned to Rhode Island, where he was elected to serve in Congress. Rhode Island’s political atmosphere was decidedly anti-Congress and in favor of states’ rights. The smallest state had an extensive coastline and was thus most exposed to British attack.70 Its economy, so heavily dependent upon maritime trade, had been devastated. Given their economic situation, as well as a long tradition of political independence dating back to Roger Williams, Rhode Islanders were wary of any central authority that attempted to exert control over them, particularly in matters of raising revenue. Rhode Island’s independent streak had most recently put it in direct collision with the Congress when that body had approved a national impost fee to be levied for the benefit of Congress on imports into America. Rhode Island alone refused to vote in favor of the measure, and since the Articles of Confederation required unanimous approval, the issue was dead and Congress was still broke.71

  Varnum’s service in the army and in Congress had given him a perspective decidedly at odds with his constituents. Frustrated and angry that his fellow Rhode Islanders had so hobbled Congress, he placed the blame squarely on the Articles of Confederation, that “baseless fabric.” He had lost faith that the citizens of Rhode Island, or for that matter all of America, were capable of governing themselves. He shared his feelings with Washington. “Avarice, Jealousy and Luxury controul their feelings,” Varnum wrote of his fellow citizens. His solution went far beyond Nicola’s constitutional monarchy. The general wanted an “absolute monarchy or a military State.” Sadly, he concluded, “we are too young to govern ourselves.”72