There was total silence. While I am sure it was only seconds, it seemed like minutes while the General tried to adjust his spectacles in order to read from the letter. I heard sobbing from around the Temple. Finally, calls came forth softly and then more loudly: “We’re with you, General.” The calls slowly turned into shouts. Then “Tell us what to do” cries emerged, followed by “Tell us and we will follow you.” The outpouring continued to come forth. I realized a loyalty built over seven long years would not be broken asunder by a few schemers. I was stunned. The General appeared stunned too.
Then he slowly put his spectacles aside and, with occasional glances at his own prepared speech, he proceeded to do just what his officers were asking: tell us what to do. First, in an increasingly firm voice, he pledged “to exert whatever ability I am possessed of, in your favor.” But in return he asked his officers “not to . . . sully the glory you have hitherto maintained,” to “rely on the plighted faith of your country,” to “value your own sacred honor,” and “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man [the anonymous writer] who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
After pausing and gazing into many of our faces, the General looked down at the speech he had written and ended his remarks with words that I can still vividly recall today. “By thus determining and thus acting, you will pursue the plain and direct road to the attainment of your wishes. You will defeat the insidious designs of our enemies, who are compelled to resort from open force to secret artifice. You will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue, rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings; and 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, [that] ‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’”
Nobody moved a muscle. I thought the General was looking me in the eye, but others have since told me they thought he was looking them in the eye. Then the General put his spectacles and his remarks, along with the unread letter, back in his waistcoat pockets, turned, and strode out the door that he had entered just a few minutes before.
Years later, Major Samuel Shaw, who had attended the meeting and was also one of the officers who had visited with the General on Thursday, wrote me that “there was something so natural, so unaffected in his appeal as rendered it superior to the most studied oratory. It forced its way to the heart, and you might see sensibility moisten every eye.”
Like me, Shaw knew the challenges the General faced at the meeting. “On other occasions,” Shaw wrote, “he had been supported by the exertions of an Army and the countenance of his friends; but in this he stood single and alone. There was no saying where the passions of an Army, which were not a little inflamed, might lead; but it was generally allowed that longer forbearance was dangerous, and moderation had ceased to be a virtue. Under these circumstances he appeared, not at the head of his troops, but—as it were—in opposition to them; and for a dreadful moment the interests of the Army and its General seemed to be in competition. He spoke—every doubt was dispelled, and the tide of patriotism rolled again in its wonted course.”
No sooner was the General out the door than General Knox, in his booming voice, moved, with a second by General Rufus Putnam, that the officers reciprocate with affection the General’s sentiments and express their unanimous thanks. This motion was met with thunderous “ayes.”
Back in the chair on the podium, General Gates looked bewildered. The contrast with General Washington was remarkable, even if unfair. No one had the presence of Washington. All of Gates’s features looked more pronounced than usual, and not to his advantage: his ruddy cheeks seemed more ruddy, his stooped shoulders more stooped, his aquiline nose more pointed, and his thin, graying hair more stringy. Unable in his role as chairman to speak, Gates peered around as if looking for a colleague to help him out.
Instead, General Putnam rose and, without waiting for recognition, moved, with a second by General Hand, that one general, one field officer, and one captain be appointed to a committee (the motion then named General Knox, Colonel Brooks, and Captain Howard, three of the officers most loyal to the General) to draft a resolution embodying the General’s sentiments and report back within half an hour with the resolution for our approval. Again a thunderous round of “ayes” greeted the motion, and off marched General Knox, Colonel Brooks, and Captain Howard to one of the side rooms, leaving all of us chattering with our neighbors, before an increasingly discomfited General Gates. We all felt we were present at a dramatic and seemingly spontaneous moment, and then I recalled that Generals Knox, Putnam, and Hand and Colonel Brooks and Captain Howard had been among the scores of officers who had bustled in and out of our headquarters that Thursday.
We did not have to wait thirty minutes. It seemed less than five minutes before the committee marched back into the auditorium with a resolution. Maybe I was the only one who felt that it seemed an uncommonly short time to draft what appeared to be a two-or three-page resolution. I was beginning to suspect that the rapid motions thanking the General and appointing a committee, along with the resolution from the committee, had all been planned in those Thursday meetings.
As General Knox read the resolution aloud in his authoritative voice, the message could not have been clearer. The resolution affirmed the army’s service to its country out of the “purest love and attachment to . . . rights and liberties” and that “no circumstances of distress or danger shall induce a conduct that may tend to sully the reputation and glory of which they have acquired at the price of their blood”; resolved that “the Army continue to have unshaken confidence in the justice of Congress” to arrange adequate funding for a sum equal to half pay for the officers’ retirement years; requested the commander in chief to write the president of the Congress “entreating . . . a most speedy decision”; expressed the army’s “abhorrence” and “disdain” and rejection of the “infamous propositions contained in a late anonymous address to the officers of the Army”; and finally praised General McDougall and the other interlocutors with Congress for their “prudence” and asked that they continue their “solicitations at Congress.”