History of the United States Constitution. George Ticknor Curtis

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СКАЧАТЬ to Congress again.170 At length, in consequence of his earnest and repeated appeals, a resolve was passed, on the 21st of October, that the officers who should continue in service to the end of the war should be entitled to half-pay during life, to commence from the time of their reduction.171

      From this time, therefore, the officers of the army continued in the service, relying upon the faith of the country, as expressed in the vote of the 21st of October, 1780, and believing, until they saw proof to the contrary, that the public faith thus pledged to them would be observed.172 But they were destined to a severe disappointment; and one of the causes of that disappointment was the adoption of the Articles of Confederation. The very change in the constitutional position of the country, from which the most happy results were anticipated, and which undoubtedly cemented the Union, became the means by which they were cheated of their hopes. The Congress of 1780, which had pledged to them a half-pay for life, was the Revolutionary Congress; but the Congress which was to redeem this pledge was the Congress of the Confederation, which required a vote of nine States for an appropriation of money, or a call upon the States for their proportions. When the vote granting the half-pay for life was passed, there were less than nine States in favor of the measure; and after the Confederation was established, the delegates of the States which originally opposed the provision could not be brought to consider it in its true light,—that of a compact with the officers. It was even contended that the vote, having passed before the Confederation was signed and acted upon, was not obligatory upon the Congress under the Confederation, as that instrument required the votes of nine States for an appropriation of money. In this manner, men deluded themselves with the notion, that a change in the form of a government, or in the constitutional method of raising money to discharge the obligations of a contract, can dissolve those obligations, or alter the principles of justice on which they depend. The States in the opposition to the measure refused to be coerced, as they were pleased to consider it, and in the autumn of 1782, the officers became convinced that they had nothing to hope for from Congress, but a reference of their claims to their several States.173

      In November, 1782, preliminary and eventual articles of peace were agreed upon between the United States and Great Britain, by their plenipotentiaries. Nothing had been done by Congress for the claims of the army, and it seemed highly probable that it would be disbanded without even a settlement of the accounts of the officers, and if so, that they would never receive their dues. Alarmed and irritated by the neglect of Congress; destitute of money and credit and of the means of living from day to day; oppressed with debts; saddened by the distresses of their families at home, and by the prospect of misery before them,—they presented a memorial to Congress in December, in which they urged the immediate adjustment of their dues, and offered to commute the half-pay for life, granted by the resolve of October, 1780, for full pay for a certain number of years, or for such a sum in gross, as should be agreed on by their committee sent to Philadelphia to attend the progress of the memorial through the house. It is manifest from statements in this document, as well as from other evidence, that the officers were nearly driven to desperation, and that their offer of commutation was wrung from them by a state of public opinion little creditable to the country. They recited their hardships, their poverty, and their exertions in the cause; and all that they said was fully borne out by their great commander, in his personal remonstrances with many of the members of Congress. The officers asserted, that many of their brethren, who had retired on the half-pay promised by the resolve of 1780, were not only destitute of any effectual provision, but had become objects of obloquy; and they referred with chagrin to the odious view in which the citizens of too many of the States endeavored to place those who were entitled to that provision.

      But, from the prevailing feeling in Congress and in the country, nothing better was to be expected than a compromise in place of the discharge of a solemn obligation; and this feeling no American historian should fail to record and to condemn. If these men had borne only the character of public creditors, a state of public feeling which drove them into a compromise of their claims ought always to be severely reprehended. But, beyond the capacity of public creditors, they were the men who had fought the battles which liberated the country from a foreign yoke; who had endured every extremity of hardship, every form of suffering, which the life of a soldier knows; who had stood between the common soldiery and the civil power; and often, at the hazard of their lives, preserved that discipline and subordination which the civil power had done too much to hazard. They were, in a word, the men of whom their commander said, that they had exhibited more virtue, fortitude, self-denial, and perseverance, than had perhaps been then paralleled in the history of human enthusiasm.

      Painful, therefore, as it is, this lesson, of the wrong that may be done by a breach of public faith, must be read. It lies open on the page of history, and is the case of those to whose right arms the people of this country owe the splendid inheritance of liberty. All real palliations should be sought for and admitted. The country was poor: no proper system of finance had been, or could be, developed by a government which had no power of taxation; and the ideas and feelings of the people of many of the States were provincial, and without the liberality and enlargement of thought which comes of intercourse with the world. But, after every apology has exhausted its force, the conscientious student of history must mark the dereliction from public duty; must admit what the public faith required; and must observe the dangerous consequences which attend, and must ever attend, the breach of a public obligation.

      The immediate consequences which followed, in this instance, were predicted by General Washington, who gave the clearest warning, in advance of the officers' memorial, of the hazards that would attend the further neglect of their claims. But his warning seems to have been unheeded, or to have made but little impression against the prevailing aversion to touch the unpopular subject of half-pay. The committee of the officers were in attendance upon Congress during the whole winter, and early in March, 1783, they wrote to their constituents that nothing had been done.

      At this moment, the predicament in which Washington stood, in the double relation of citizen and soldier, was critical and delicate in the extreme. In the course of a few days, all his firmness and patriotism, all his sympathies as an officer, on the one side, and his fidelity to the government on the other, were severely tried. On the 10th of March, an anonymous address was circulated among the officers at Newburgh, calling a meeting of the general and field officers, and of one officer from each company, and one from the medical staff, to consider the late letter from their representatives at Philadelphia, and to determine what measures should be adopted to obtain that redress of grievances which they seemed to have solicited in vain. It was written with great ability and skill.174 It spoke the language of injured feeling; it pointed directly to the sword, as the remedy for injustice; and it spoke to men who were suffering keenly under public ingratitude and neglect. Its eloquence and its passion fell, therefore, upon hearts not insensible, and a dangerous explosion seemed to be at hand. Washington met the crisis with firmness, but also with conciliation. He issued orders forbidding an assemblage at the call of an anonymous paper, and directing the officers to assemble on Saturday, the 15th, to hear the report of their committee, and to deliberate what further measures ought to be adopted as most rational and best calculated to obtain the just and important object in view. The senior officer in rank present was directed to preside, and to report the result to the Commander-in-chief.

      On the next day after these orders were issued, a second anonymous address appeared from the same writer. In this paper, he affected to consider the orders of General Washington, assuming the direction of the meeting, as a sanction of the whole proceeding which he had proposed. Washington saw, at once, that he must be present at the meeting himself, or that his name would be used to justify measures which he intended to discountenance and prevent. He therefore attended the meeting, and under his influence, seconded by that of Putnam, Knox, Brooks, and Howard, the result was the adoption of certain resolutions, in which the officers, after reasserting their grievances, and rebuking all attempts to seduce them from their civil allegiance, referred the whole subject of their claims again to the consideration of Congress.

      Even at this distant day, the peril of that crisis can scarcely be contemplated without a shudder. Had the Commander-in-chief been other than Washington, had the leading officers by СКАЧАТЬ