Swords in Their Hands: George Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy

Fearful that they will never see the back pay they are owed and the postwar pensions they have been promised, George Washington's officers gather on March 15, 1783, in the Temple of Virtue in the Hudson Highlands. They are "ready to revolt." They have read an incendiary address written by a fellow officer that has made them recall the great neglect and suffering they have endured and that proposes they send only one more petition to Congress, one containing an ultimatum: Pay the Continental Army what it is owed and provide the officers with pensions or else face the alternative of seeing them refuse to disband if peace arrives or of watching them turn their backs on America and leaving it defenseless against the British if the Revolutionary War continues.

Congress, though, cannot pay the Continental Army or provide the officers with pensions; it is broke and does not have the authority to tax the American people directly to obtain the funds needed to do those things. If it wants to do those things, it has to go to the states to get funding. However, when it does request funds from the states it almost always is ignored.

That is something a faction of nationalists in Philadelphia who insist that the states must grant real taxation authority to Congress cannot tolerate. So they have set in motion a desperate plot to hang the angry army over the heads of state legislators and delegates in Philadelphia who support the idea of state sovereignty to terrify them into giving them what they want.