Keeping seventy-five hundred troops occupied at Newburgh and New Windsor and out of mischief, with most of the limited fighting taking place far to the south, was a challenge, and the General searched for projects to keep the men busy. This led to the Temple that will figure so prominently in the story I am about to tell you. Chaplain Israel Evans’s proposal for a structure at nearby New Windsor for religious services and social gatherings quickly won the General’s approval. It was a rough-hewn one-story log structure, but at 110 feet long and 30 feet wide, it was easily the most imposing edifice the army built during the entire war. It had a central hall and four side rooms for smaller meetings and office work. On the platform at the front of the hall, soldiers skilled in fine woodworking built a white columned balustrade with a dark railing. There, a chaplain could give a sermon, an officer could give a speech, or fiddlers could play a tune.
I’m often asked if we did anything for recreation in those encampments when there was little prospect of fighting. The troops threw the ball around, played cards, and drank their rations of rum. The General himself loved the theater and encouraged officers and troops to witness the shows he brought to Newburgh and New Windsor. Once, the Puritans in Congress passed a resolution that there should be no frivolous entertainment for troops such as plays. It is the only time I can remember the General saying a swear word directed at Congress. “Josiah,” he said, “no damn congressman is going to deny me the pleasure of going to the theater.”
And the General was true to his word. He must have seen Addison’s Cato, his favorite play, ten times during the war, either in the camps or nearby cities. It was one of the few congressional orders that the General flouted. I do not believe a day went by when the General did not quote Cato at least once to me. On mornings of looming battles, the General would turn to me and, acting as if he had never quoted those opening lines before, say: “Josiah, the dawn is overcast, the morning low’rs, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, th’ important day, big with the fate / Of Cato and of Rome.”
The General did not utter those words that week at Newburgh. No armed battle with the British loomed. And yet those words from Cato rang through my mind as we approached what I increasingly sensed was the most important conflict, if not armed battle, of the war.
Anyway, you now know why I was there in Newburgh and what we aides did in what I believe is the most eventful but least known week in our young country’s history.
Chapter One
DAY ONE—MONDAY
The First Anonymous Letter
Meanwhile I’ll hasten to my Roman soldiers,
Inflame the mutiny, and underhand
Blow up their discontents, till they breakfast
Unlook’d for, and discharge themselves on Cato.
—Sempronius, Cato, Act I, Scene 3
General Henry Knox delivered the letter. I remember the day—Monday, March 10, 1783—and Knox hauling his three hundred pounds across our threshold, approaching me with that pigeon-toed gait he had and thrusting his hand, minus his two lost fingers, toward me with several copies of the letter before our afternoon aides’ meeting. I admired Knox because he always struck me as the epitome of the Continental soldier; he had been a New England bookseller, a self-taught student in the classics and military engineering, who became an artillery officer and worked himself up to be one of the General’s most trusted and able commanders. Knox told me copies were circulating all over the camps. He asked me to show them to the General, who was out reviewing the troops.
When I read the letter, I knew why no one had dared to deliver it to the General on his daily rounds. It was brief, to the point, and anonymous.
Its full text read:
A meeting of the Gen’l & Field Officers is requested, at the public building, on Tuesday next at 11 o’clock—
A Commiss’d officer from each company is expected, and a delegate from the Medical Staff—
The Object of this Convention, is to consider the Late Letter from our Representatives in Philadelphia; and what measures (if any) should be adopted, to obtain that redress of Grievances, which they seem to have solicited in vain.
A shock ran through me. “Tuesday next” was tomorrow. “The public building” was our recently completed Temple. The letter might sound innocuous sixty years later, but it wasn’t to those who read it then. No one but the General circulated a letter calling for an officers’ meeting, and here was a letter apparently calling an unauthorized meeting to redress the army’s grievances. There had been grievances in the army throughout the war, and some had even led to mutinies—more than you might think. But those incidents had generally involved troops rather than officers. The first mutiny had come right during the siege of Boston in 1775. Thirty-two Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish mountain men had mutinied after agents of the Pennsylvania governor and legislature broke promises that the men would not do guard duty and would get certain clothing and pay.
I was stunned at this event so early in the war. Not so the General. He had apparently encountered similar episodes in the French and Indian War. After mounting overwhelming force to stop the mutiny from spreading, the General convened court-martials, which fined many of the mutineers twenty shillings from their next month’s pay for the hospital fund and imprisoned the ringleader, Jonathan Leaman, for what I thought was an extremely lenient six-day sentence. The General then had me draft letters to the Pennsylvania authorities about failed promises leaving “the greater part of the army in a state not far from mutiny.”
By 1783 the clothing and food situation had improved somewhat, due to French money, but the pay was delinquent as always. This was the eighth year of a war we had expected to end in a year, and over a year after the British surrender at Yorktown. And still the war and negotiations to end it dragged on. Rumors always plague an army, but given the circumstances, it was no wonder that rumors of mutiny and marching on Philadelphia to take over the government were rife at Newburgh.