Washington banned the outlaw meeting. In announcing the measure, he subtly tried to shame the officers by saying that their good sense would lead them to “ pay very little attention to such an irregular invitation.”51 Instead of negating their grievances, he tried to champion and divert them into orderly channels and called his own meeting at noon on March 15. Suspicious of how quickly events had moved, Washington voiced his fears to Hamilton the next day. A nameless gentleman—Colonel Walter Stewart—had come to the Newburgh camp, he said, and told the officers that public creditors would support their mutiny as a way to guarantee repayment of their loans. Stewart further suggested that certain congressmen supported the mutiny as a way of prodding delinquent states into paying promised taxes to the central government. There is no overt sense in this letter of Washington accusing Hamilton of orchestrating the plot from Philadelphia. Rather, he exhorted him to take timely action to redress the officers’ complaints, contending that many were so short of funds that they might be clapped into debtors’ prisons upon release from the army. The failure to take appropriate measures, Washington forewarned, would plunge the country “into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”52
In calling his meeting, Washington waited a few days to allow cooler heads to prevail. For its venue, he chose the same place as that proposed for the subversive gathering, a new building nicknamed the Temple of Virtue, a cavernous wooden structure completed a month earlier for Sunday services, dances, and Masonic meetings. Although this meeting proceeded under Washington’s auspices, he was not expected to attend, heightening the dramatic effect when he slipped through a side door into the packed hall. It was one of the infrequent occasions when his self-control crumbled and an observer described him as “sensibly agitated.”53
It was the first and only time Washington ever confronted a hostile assembly of his own officers. Mounting the podium, he drew out his prepared remarks, written on nine long sheets covered with exclamation points and dashes for pauses, revealing the strong sense of cadence he gave to his speeches. He began by chastising the officers for improper conduct in calling an irregular meeting and disputed that Congress was indifferent to their plight, stressing the need for making dispassionate decisions. Then, with considerable agility, he cast aside the stern tone and stressed his personal bond with his fellow officers, speaking as a man as well as a general and building rhetorical force through repetition:
If my conduct heretofore has not evinced to you that I have been a faithful friend to the army, my declaration of it at this time w[oul]d be equally unavailing and improper. But as I was among the first who embarked in the cause of our common country. As I have never left your side one moment, but when called from you on public duty. As I have been the constant companion and witness of your distresses and not among the last to feel and acknowledge your merits . . . it can scarcely be supposed at this late stage of the war that I am indifferent to [your] interests.54
Instead of elevating himself above his men, Washington portrayed himself as their friend and peer.
Having softened them up with personal history, he delivered an impassioned appeal to their deep-seated patriotism. The idea floated by the anonymous pamphleteer that they should take up arms against their country “has something so shocking in it that humanity revolts at the idea. My God! What can this writer have in view by recommending such measures? Can he be a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country? Rather, is he not an insidious foe? Some emissary, perhaps, from New York, plotting the ruin of both by sowing the seeds of discord and separation between the civil and military powers of the continent?”55
He pleaded with them to oppose any man “who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”56 Give Congress a chance to address your grievances, he implored the officers, saying he would do everything in his power to help them. Then, in ringing tones, he said that if they trusted Congress to take action, “you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘Had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’”57
It was an exemplary performance from a man uncomfortable with public speaking. He had castigated his officers but also lifted them to a higher plane, reawakening a sense of their exalted role in the Revolution and reminding them that illegal action would tarnish that grand legacy. For all his eloquence, Washington achieved his greatest impact with a small symbolic gesture. To reassure the men of congressional good faith, he read aloud a letter from Congressman Joseph Jones of Virginia and tripped over the first few sentences because he couldn’t discern the words. Then he pulled out his new spectacles, shocking his fellow officers: they had never seen him wearing glasses. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me,” he said. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”58 These poignant words exerted a powerful influence. Washington at fifty-one was much older and more haggard than the young planter who had taken charge of the Continental Army in 1775. The disarming gesture of putting on the glasses moved the officers to tears as they recalled the legendary sacrifices he had made for his country. When he left the hall moments later, the threatened mutiny had ended, and his victory was complete. The officers approved a unanimous resolution stating they “reciprocated [Washington’s] affectionate expressions with the greatest sincerity of which the human heart is capable.”59 Luckily, Congress delivered on Washington’s promise and, instead of half pay for life, granted the officers payment equal to five years of full pay. The threat of a military takeover had been averted by Washington’s succinct but brilliant, well-timed oratory.
Making good on his pledges, Washington wrote impassioned letters to Congress on behalf of the officers’ finances. In one to Joseph Jones, he said that Congress shouldn’t rely on him again to “dispel other clouds, if any should arise, from the causes of the last.”60 Perhaps he sensed that a deity couldn’t step down from the clouds more than once without dispelling his mystique. He had tamed his mutinous officers and established congressional supremacy in the nick of time. A few days later he received word that a preliminary peace treaty had been signed in Paris. In mid-April Congress ratified the treaty, leading to a formal cessation of hostilities eight years after the first shots rang out in Lexington and Concord.
The man who had pulled off the exemplary feat of humbling the most powerful military on earth had not been corrupted by fame. Though quietly elated and relieved, he was neither intoxicated by power nor puffed up with a sense of his own genius. On April 15 a Jamaican visitor dined with Washington at his Newburgh headquarters and was amazed at the simplicity of the scene: “The dinner was good, but everything was quite plain. We all sat on camp stools . . . Mrs. W[ashington] was as plain, easy, and affable as [the general] was and one would have thought from the familiarity which prevailed here that he saw a respectable private gentleman dining at the head of his own family.”61 Washington shunned the conqueror’s bravado. “In his dress he was perfectly plain—an old blue coat faced with buff, waistcoat and britches . . . seemingly of the same age and without any lace upon them composed his dress,” the visitor wrote. “His shirt had no ruffles at the wrists, but [was] of very fine linen . . . His hair is a little gray and combed smoothly back from the forehead and in a small queue—no curls and but very little powder to it. Such is the man, but his character I cannot presume to describe—it is held in the highest veneration over the whole continent.”62