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concern at America’s financial plight and told of his periodic frustration at being excluded from congressional decisions. If Congress didn’t receive enlarged powers, he maintained, revolutionary blood would have been spilled in vain. After spelling out areas of agreement with Hamilton, however, Washington said he refused to deviate from the “steady line of conduct” he had pursued and insisted that the “sensible and discerning” officers would listen to reason. He also asserted that any attempt to exploit officer discontent might only “excite jealousy and bring on its concomitants.”46 It was a noble letter: Washington refused to pander to any political agenda, even one he agreed with, and he would never encroach upon the civilian prerogatives of Congress. In a later letter Washington was even blunter with Hamilton, warning him that soldiers weren’t “mere puppets” and that the army was “a dangerous instrument to play with.”47

The officers continued to believe that Philadelphia politicians remained deaf to their pleas, and Washington had no inkling that they would soon resort to more muscular measures. In his general orders for March 10, he dwelt on a mundane topic, the need for uniform haircuts among the troops. Then he learned of an anonymous paper percolating through the camp, summoning officers to a mass meeting the next day to air their grievances—a brazen affront to Washington’s authority and, to his mind, little short of outright mutiny. Then a second paper made the rounds, further stoking a sense of injustice. Its anonymous author was, in all likelihood, John Armstrong, Jr., an aide-de-camp to Horatio Gates, who mocked the peaceful petitions drawn up by the officers and warned that, come peace, they might “grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt.”48 Before being stripped of their weapons by an armistice, they should now take direct action: “Change the milk and water style of your last memorial—assume a bolder tone . . . And suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.”49 The man of moderation was, of course, George Washington. When handed a copy of this manifesto, he conceded its literary power, later saying that “in point of composition, in elegance and force of expression” it had “rarely been equaled in the English language.”50 That only made it the more threatening, for it aroused the prospect of a military putsch.

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,