America at 250 by Francis P. Sempa

General Washington Preserves the Republic

Two hundred fifty years ago, this great nation was forged in war, boldly declaring its independence from the world’s greatest empire. Thomas Jefferson placed before the world the reasons for our separation from Great Britain, and the most important reason was that Americans—indeed “all men”—had “inalienable rights” that came not from kings and parliaments but from God, their Creator. John Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and others lit the torch of liberty with their words and actions. George Washington and the Continental Army waged war to attain that liberty and independence. And a decade later, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton created an institutional framework to preserve that liberty against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

At the end of the War of Independence, the Republic’s future was in doubt. The officers of the army were owed back pay, and Congress had promised them pensions for their service to the new country. Gen. Washington in early 1783 received information that “dangerous combinations” within the army, then encamped at New Windsor, New York, a few miles from Washington’s headquarters at Newburgh, planned to march on Congress. There were rumors of a planned coup d’etat by frustrated officers. Other officers suggested that Washington assume monarchical or dictatorial powers to force Congress to pay the troops. Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner called these developments the American Revolution’s “moment of major political crisis.”

Would the American Revolution go the way of the French Revolution, which when it broke out six years later promised liberty, equality, fraternity, then descended into a reign of terror followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship and monarchy? At New Windsor in March 1783, that was a distinct possibility. On March 15, 1783, the officers at the New Windsor encampment gathered at the Temple Hill meeting hall to discuss their grievances against Congress. Flexner calls this meeting “probably the most important single gathering ever held in the United States.”

The mood among the soldiers in the hall was grim and defiant. Gen. Washington appeared unexpectedly and walked across a small stage. He appealed to the officers’ patriotism, lauded their bravery and told them he would urge Congress to keep its promises to the army. Do not open “the flood gates of civil discord,” he pleaded. Do not act in a manner that “will lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained,” he implored them. Washington sensed, however, that the officers were not listening to him. They remained defiant.

Washington brought with him a letter from a congressman that he intended to read—a letter he hoped would reassure the officers that all would be well. He reached into his pocket for his eyeglasses, which he seldom wore in public. The hall was quiet—almost solemn—as the officers watched their commander fumble to place the glasses on his face while holding the letter in one hand. Washington then said: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Some of the officers started weeping. Washington’s words, wrote historian Bruce Chadwick, “touched the hearts of every man in the hall.” When Thomas Jefferson learned of this incident he wrote: “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

The New Windsor encampment is a New York State historic site, which features a reconstructed meeting hall on the site where Gen. Washington preserved the Republic. When Britain’s King George III learned that Washington planned to retire to Mount Vernon after the war instead of ruling America as a dictator or monarch, he said, “If he does that he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Francis P. Sempa is the author of the books “Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century” and “America’s Global Role.” He is a contributing editor to “The American Spectator” and writes a regular column for “Real Clear Defense.”