I knew the details of the Pennsylvania 1781 mutiny because of my cousin Benjamin. He was a couple of years younger than I and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well. He enlisted in the Pennsylvania militia, the 11th Regiment with Colonel Stewart. We ran into each other later at Yorktown, and he told me the whole story. Many of the troops had enlisted for three years or the duration of the war. The Pennsylvania authorities wanted to hold them to the end of the war without the bounties that troops from other states were getting. The Pennsylvania troops began chafing at the perceived unfairness. Plus, fighting in ever more tattered clothing, the men lost patience with the repeated promises of shirts, caps, and pants that never came. Even after the mutiny started and the clothes were again promised, they were not delivered.
Benjamin said that if the General had used force, the mutiny would have spread, or at least continued. After all, twenty-five hundred troops was not a small number, and, as I well knew as the General’s aide, the units from nearby states had little appetite for disciplining their Pennsylvania neighbors. At the time, I had wondered if the General’s strategy was correct—he had ordered General Anthony Wayne to stay with the mutineers, even acting as a hostage through weeks of negotiations—but in the end the mutiny had ended with most of the troops reenlisting. (I never did know why General Wayne got the nickname Mad Anthony. His conduct during the mutiny was careful and cautious, and he scrupulously followed the General’s orders to stay with and negotiate with the mutineers.) Benjamin told me that the mutineers were well aware of the General’s sympathy with many of their requests.
The British probably thought the mutineers would join their forces, but the mutineers made clear from the beginning that their quarrel was not with their commanding officers but with Congress and the Pennsylvania Council. When the British sent emissaries, the mutineers turned them over to General Wayne, and they were shot. The British had encountered many mutinies but never one like that! The mutineers were not completely successful—some were hung but some got discharged, and some got a month’s furlough, a month’s pay, and some clothing before returning.
But these earlier mutinies were either privates led on occasion by corporals or sergeants or a small number of officers defying a single order. Here at Newburgh was a potential mutiny of the main army unit of seventy-five hundred led by and involving hundreds of the highest-ranking officers. Even those earlier smaller mutinies, particularly the last Pennsylvania one, might have spread but for the General’s careful responses; now this week came a potential mutiny that invited the leadership of the General himself!
I realized that thinking back to those earlier mutinies offered little in the way of guidance. Still, the willingness of the authorities to negotiate according to the General’s wishes back in 1781 showed that a mutiny today might intimidate the Congress into passing the necessary revenue measures. Those in Congress sympathetic to our plight already were proposing taxes on imports and exports. Collecting the revenue might prove more difficult but looked achievable. The governors and legislatures of nearby states could be intimidated, but even that might not be necessary. The revenues could be collected without the states’ acquiescence just by continuing to occupy the ports of Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, and by moving into the port of New York—moves that would probably be uncontested by the British under any peace agreement bringing independence. Such a revenue-raising strategy might indeed succeed.
Success would probably need the cooperation of other army elements, particularly the officers and troops in the South who could move into Charleston. But if the main body in Newburgh raised the flag of insurrection, and if the General even just stood aside, other units would probably join. The Pennsylvania mutineers in 1781 had quickly been joined by New Jersey elements. If the General took the lead, I was sure almost all units would join.
If General McDougall was correct and the letter was already being read with enthusiastic approval, perhaps on Saturday the officers would make the decision to move with or without the General. With the writer’s argument to resist the voices of “moderation,” the letter seemed to make the argument to go ahead in either case. But the invitation to our “illustrious leader” showed that the movers behind the letter clearly preferred the General’s support.
I went back to more mundane matters. I drafted a response to a confusing letter from Elijah Hunter in New Jersey, who begged the General to help recover Hunter’s horses that had presumably been stolen by American militia. Then I drafted an order to William Shattuck to go into Vermont and track down two miscreants wanted by the Congress for treason. This assignment was made more difficult because the General did not want Shattuck to rile Vermonters led by Ethan Allen. (Allen was playing a double game—taking our side while at the same time negotiating for a union with Canada.) Then I drafted a plea to General Benjamin Lincoln, the secretary of war in Philadelphia, to urge on Superintendent of Finance Morris the rapid dispatch of needed clothing to the army. Oh, how many letters of this nature I had drafted.
The General arrived back shortly past noon, and before I could utter a word, he gave a list of orders he wanted sent to various units regarding the lack of discipline he had observed. Here the war might or might not be drawing to a close, a mutiny was in the offing, and the General was noticing the marching and formation habits of units and demanding that standards be upheld!
“General,” I said, “we have another anonymous letter.”
He grabbed it out of my hands, led me back into his study, and read the letter through not once but twice. He did not seem as calm as when reading the short letter the day before but perhaps that was my imagination. “Well, Josiah,” he said, “this man has a good pen . . . he certainly appeals to the passions of the moment. And does not our army have grievances?”
With this comment, the General embarked on a speech I had heard many times, comparing the nobility of our troops with the corruption of some merchants and congressmen and the unwillingness of many of our citizens to pay taxes to support the war effort. “Chimney corner patriots” he called them—men orating from their cozy fireside seats while our underdressed, underfed, and underpaid army struggled on unassisted. The General lamented that the lust for private gain was increasingly replacing the desire to sacrifice for liberty. As the General’s irritation increased, he went through the list of the worst offenders. There was Comfort Sands, that New York merchant who had promised and failed to deliver rations and then had finally delivered spoiled flour, rotten beef, and putrid whiskey. There was Congressman Samuel Chase of Maryland, who used his office to parlay knowledge of the arrival of the French fleet to buy wheat at low prices and sell at a huge profit. There were the citizens of Norwich, Connecticut, who rioted about paying taxes for the support of the army and then drank toasts to King George III. The General’s anger reminded me of the sentiments oft expressed to me by my cousin Benjamin.