together, if the war had continued, when the victualls, clothing, and other expenses of it were to have been added?  Another thing, Sir, (as I mean to be frank and free in my communications on this subject,) I will not conceal from you—­it is the dissimilarity in the payments to men in Civil and Military life.  The first receive everything—­the others get nothing but bare subsistence—­they ask what this is owing to? and reasons have been assigned, which, say they, amount to this—­that men in Civil life have stronger passions and better pretensions to indulge them, or less virtue and regard for their Country than us,—­otherwise, as we are all contending for the same prize and equally interested in the attainment of it, why do we not bear the burthen equally?[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ford, X, 203.]

The army was indeed the incubus of the Americans.  They could not fight the war without it, but they had never succeeded in mastering the difficulties of maintaining and strengthening it.  The system of a standing army was of course not to be thought of, and the uncertain recruits who took its place were mostly undisciplined and unreliable.  When the exigencies became pressing, a new method was resorted to, and then the usual erosion of life in the field, the losses by casualties and sickness, caused the numbers to dwindle.  Long ago the paymaster had ceased to pretend to pay off the men regularly so that there was now a large amount of back pay due them.  Largely through Washington’s patriotic exhortations had they kept fighting to the end; and, with peace upon them, they did not dare to disband because they feared that, if they left before they were paid, they would never be paid.  Washington felt that, if thousands of discontented and even angry soldiers were allowed to go back to their homes without the means of taking up any work or business, great harm would be done.  The love of country, which he believed to be most important to inculcate, would not only be checked but perverted.  They already had too many reasons to feel aggrieved.  Why should they, the men who risked their lives in battle and actually had starved or frozen in winter quarters, go unpaid, whereas every civilian who had a post under the Government lived at least safely and healthily and was paid with fair promptitude?  They felt now that their best hope for justice lay in General Washington’s interest in their behalf; and that interest of his seems now one of the noblest and wisest and most patriotic of his expressions.

Washington had need to be prepared for any emergency.  Thus a body of officers deliberated not only a mutiny of the army, but a coup d’etat, in which they planned to overthrow the flimsy Federation of the thirteen States and to set up a monarchy.  They wrote to Washington announcing their intention and their belief that he would make an ideal monarch.  He was amazed and chagrined.  He replied in part as follows, to the Colonel who had written him: