CHAPTER 14
Victory’s Unexpected Challenge
Negotiating peace became almost as nerve-racking as winning the war. George Washington had tried to accelerate the process by sending a letter to Ambassador Benjamin Franklin in Paris within a day or two of Cornwallis’s surrender, informing him of the amazing news. Washington made a point of enclosing a copy of the surrender document, which made clear that he was the commander in chief at Yorktown, the conductor of the negotiations, and the man in possession of the prisoners and captured weapons. He was ready to acknowledge French assistance but wanted the diplomats to know the American army had played a major role.
To emphasize this point, Washington enclosed a copy of Nathanael Greene’s report of the battle of Eutaw Springs. It was a very effective way of informing the diplomats—and the French—that the British were being defeated elsewhere, with no help from France.1
FRANKLIN AND his two colleagues, John Adams and John Jay, had to cope with a galaxy of problems before they could start talking peace with the British. They did not get along with each other. Adams hated Franklin, viewing him with an almost mindless compound of envy and suspicion that he was pro-French. Jay was even more anti-French. Congress had saddled them with a promise to sign nothing without French approval. Meanwhile, France had brought Spain into the war in 1779 by promising it would not sign a peace treaty until Spain acquired the fortress of Gibraltar and the island of Jamaica. Gibraltar would make Spain ruler of the Mediterranean Sea. Jamaica would guarantee her domination of the West Indies. The British were still inclined to resist these threats to their empire with all the violence and cunning in their power.
For most of 1782, while the diplomats talked, war raged in the West Indies and the Mediterranean. Two attempts to take Gibraltar failed. In the West Indies, the fleet that had helped trap Cornwallis suffered defeat in a battle that demolished French and Spanish hopes of dominating the immensely profitable sugar islands. Meanwhile, the diplomats continued to talk. John Jay and John Adams convinced Franklin that they had the right to negotiate without saying a word to the French. Soon they had the makings of a very generous treaty, which extended America’s western border to the banks of the Mississippi. Franklin exercised his almost magical powers of persuasion, and the French agreed to go along with it. Bankrupt, they were desperate for peace.2
AS 1783 began, rumors filtered into Philadelphia from ships recently arrived from Europe. They all reported that Benjamin Franklin and his fellow negotiators in Paris were close to signing a peace treaty with Britain. Now only a treaty between England and France and her European allies, Spain and Holland, was needed to end the war. This glimpse of peace just over the horizon stirred profound excitement and hope in the civilian population. But among the Continental Army’s officers, it produced a surge of sullen fury. Congress had not paid them for years. As a reward for their services, it had promised them half pay for life. Now Congress would no longer need them and was reportedly going to welsh on this agreement—and on the years of unpaid back pay. Suddenly a challenge to the strategy of victory came from a new and very dangerous angle.
FLURRIES OF antagonism over pay had flared between Congress and the officers during the Valley Forge winter. In response to Washington’s recommendation of a pension for life, Samuel Adams and his fellow New Englanders had done everything but threaten secession from the union to block a vote. Eventually Congress had compromised on half pay for seven years after the war.
In 1780, at Washington’s urging, Congress had again extended the pension to half pay for life. Almost immediately, under pressure from New England, the lawmakers got cold feet and rescinded their generosity. Instead they recommended the half pay idea to the individual states, where it got a very mixed reception. When asked to grant Congress the power to tax imports, Connecticut’s legislature specified not a single dollar should go to the army’s officers for half pay.
SMALL WONDER a determination was growing on the officers’ part to settle matters. They decided to send a three-man delegation to Congress, led by abrasive, outspoken Major General Alexander McDougall of New York. They brought with them a petition from the officers, which General Washington assured Congress was written in “respectful terms.” While this was true by and large, some of the language was more than a little threatening. “We have borne all that men can bear,” the petition declared. “Our property is expended—our private resources are at an end and our friends are wearied out with our incessant applications” (for loans). “Any further experiments on their [the army’s] patience may have fatal effects.”
On January 13, 1783, General McDougall and his delegation met with a “grand committee” of one congressman from each state. They had already conferred with Robert Morris, the nation’s superintendent of finance, who had said that without new taxes he could not pay them a single dollar. The nation’s financial situation was “so alarming,” Morris wondered if Congress should create a “confidential committee” to hear the gruesome details without panicking the public. McDougall and the two colonels who accompanied him only reiterated their anger at the on-again, off-again way Congress had dealt with paying them. The approach of peace made them fear they were in danger of being “still more neglected.”3
PENSION OPPONENTS soon resorted to slander to block negotiations. They accused Robert Morris of favoring a military dictatorship to collect federal money to balance his budget. One of the most outspoken of these enemies of the army, Arthur Lee of Virginia, accused them of “subverting the revolution.” Virtually a certified paranoid, Lee had the good fortune to be the younger brother of the influential Richard Henry Lee, leader of their wealthy powerful clan. McDougall and his committee responded by declaring that the army would not disband until Congress and the states had met their demands. This threat looked more and more like an open door to future calamities.
By this time most readers will have perceived that we are nearing the close of our time-travel journey. Looming ahead was a confrontation that no one had previously imagined. A glimpse of the dimensions of the potential disaster emerged when the committee returned to New Windsor. A group of malcontents was circulating stories that Washington was indifferent to the soldiers’ needs. In one letter he called them “the old leven [leaven]”—shorthand for General Horatio Gates and his circle. Gates was still with the army, wearing a mask of “apparent cordiality.” In fact, driven by rage and envy, he was working secretly to undermine the commander in chief. His New England congressional friends had protected him from an inquiry into his defeat at Camden, but his military reputation remained in tatters.4
Around him Gates had collected a group of hotheaded younger officers, whom he converted into critics of Washington. Soon after McDougall’s return, rumors swept through the army that Congress and the states were going to treat the officers shabbily. On March 10, 1783, an anonymous broadside called for a meeting of all the army’s field officers (colonels and majors) and company representatives (captains and lieutenants) the following morning (Tuesday) at 11:00 A.M.
The Newburgh address, as it became known, exhorted the officers to abandon “the milk and water style” of their petition to Congress. Failure to act now would condemn them to grow old “in poverty wretchedness and contempt.” Peace would benefit everyone but them. It was time to confront the “coldness and severity of the government” and the ingratitude of their fellow citizens, whom the army’s courage had made independent. They had only one option left: their swords. They should “suspect the man who would advise them to more moderate and longer forbearance.”5
This last piece of advice was a shaft aimed directly at General Washington. If peace was at hand and Congress refused them, it was time to give the politicians a taste of steel. If the war continued, “they should all retire to some unsettled country” and laugh when a frightened Congress confronted a revived enemy without the Continental Army’s protection.
John Armstrong, a twenty-four-year-old major and Horatio Gates’s aide, had written this blast of rage. Rather than challenge this wild emotion, General Washington played the commander in chief. He issued a brisk order banning the Tuesday meeting as “disorderly” and “irregular” and instead called a meeting for noon the following Saturday, at which all the officers and the senior general present at New Windsor—Horatio Gates—would discuss the situation.
The Gates men had no intention of letting Washington outflank them. Armstrong produced another anonymous address, urging everyone to attend the Saturday meeting. Waiting for that conclave could not, Armstrong wrote, “possibly lessen the independence of your sentiments”—another nasty gibe at Washington, implying that he was going to try to preach patience to them.
ON SATURDAY, generals and field officers and one representative from every company stationed in or near New Windsor gathered in a large building the soldiers had constructed in December. Gates had christened it the Temple of Virtue, a name intended to please his New England backers in Congress, who still saw unselfish virtue as the key ingredient in the Revolution. The building’s main purpose was to encourage mingling between officers from different states. Balls and theatrical entertainments were held in the main room, which had a stage at the far end.
The officers were soon seated, and General Gates mounted the stage to assume his role as chairman. The faces in the audience displayed a grim satisfaction. They knew Gates was on their side. It was an open secret that his aide, John Armstrong, had authored the anonymous addresses. The main item on the agenda was supposed to be General McDougall’s report of his visit to Congress. Before General Gates could say a word, an unexpected visitor stepped onto the stage through a nearby door. General Washington strode to the lectern and asked General Gates if he could say a few words. The flustered Gates could hardly refuse him.
The commander in chief turned to his officers and saw on almost every face a forbidding mixture of surprise and resentment. Many considered his appearance a double cross. He had promised to let them discuss the situation independently. General Washington spread some prepared remarks on the lectern but did not read them. Instead, he swept the room with angry eyes and launched a direct attack on the anonymous addresses. They were “unmilitary and subversive,” appealed to “feelings and passions” rather than “reason and good sense,” and had “insidious purposes.” More to the point they seemed to impugn his readiness to be the army’s friend and advocate. He reminded his listeners that he had been among the first to step forward to defend “our common country” in 1775 and since that time “had never left your [the army’s] side.” After so many years of companionship, how could anyone say he was “indifferent” to their interests?
The faces in the audience remained grim and unconvinced. These men had been disappointed too often to accept Washington as their unchallengeable friend. Wasn’t he at least partly responsible for letting them reach this desperate pass?
Washington returned to the attack on the anonymous addresses. He assailed the alternative they proposed—quitting the war and retreating into the wilderness or marching on Congress with drawn swords. “My God!” Washington exclaimed. Can this writer be “a friend to the Army? Can he be a friend to the country? Rather is he not an insidious foe?” He might even be a “secret emissary” from the British in New York. They never stopped trying to sow discord among the Americans.
SENSING THIS accusation of treason was having the hoped-for effect, Washington assaulted another aspect of the anonymous addresses. He regarded as a personal insult the claim that any man who recommended moderation should be suspected of disloyalty. This was an attempt to suppress freedom of speech so that he and the army could be led away, “dumb and silent… Like sheep to the slaughter.”
Congress was not the army’s enemy, Washington insisted. He knew from speaking to them personally that most delegates had “exalted sentiments” about the army’s merits and services. The soldiers needed to remember that “deliberative bodies” always acted slowly. But he vowed to do everything in his power to obtain “complete justice” as a reward for “all your toils and dangers.”
Completely passionate now, Washington exhorted the officers “in the name of our common country” and “your own sacred honor” to express their “detestation” of any man who wanted to “overturn the liberties of our country” and “open the floodgates of civil discord.” Instead, he begged them to retain their dignity and honor. If they did this he was certain that someday people would praise their “glorious example” and say, “Had this day been wanting the world would never have seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.”
This surge of emotion stunned most of the listening officers. But it did not change many minds. The men sat silent, their anger still dominant. Washington fumbled in the inner pocket of his coat and took out a copy of a letter he had recently received from Virginia congressman Joseph Jones, describing some of the positive steps Congress was planning to satisfy the officers.
After reading the first few lines, he stopped and peered at the page. Reaching into another pocket, he extracted a set of eyeglasses he had recently received from Philadelphia. No one except a few aides had seen him wearing them. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”
THESE UNPLANNED words had a huge impact on the audience. A murmur of emotion swept the room. Some men began brushing away tears; a few wept openly. Washington finished reading Jones’s letter and departed. General Henry Knox rose to his feet and made a motion to thank Washington for his speech. There were no objections. Colonel Rufus Putnam of Connecticut recommended appointing General Knox and Colonel John Brooks to prepare resolutions for the officers.
Washington had conferred with these men and made sure that these statements were already written. General Knox stepped offstage for a few minutes and then returned to read them. They affirmed the army’s unshaken attachment “to the rights and liberties of human nature” and asked Washington to become their spokesman with Congress. Another resolution declared the officers’ “disdain” for the “infamous propositions” advanced in the anonymous addresses and also condemned the attempts of “some unknown persons” to collect the officers together for purposes that were “totally subversive of discipline and good order”—a barely concealed swipe at General Gates and his circle.
The officers approved the resolutions overwhelmingly. Only one man rose to object to this endorsement—lean, sour-faced Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, the army’s quartermaster general. He condemned the hypocrisy of denouncing publications that every officer in the army had read with “rapture” during the preceding days. Pickering was obviously trying to reignite the officers’ rage. But no one else agreed with him, at least publicly. Each man quietly departed to his quarters. Thus ended the most perilous moment to that point in the brief history of the fledgling United States of America.6
BACK IN Philadelphia, Major John Armstrong was still enraged with Washington and Congress. In a letter to Horatio Gates, who had rushed to Virginia to care for his sick wife, Armstrong reported that unrest was rising among five hundred Continental Army troops stationed in the city. The major included in his letter a copy of Congress’s latest attempt to raise money by taxing imports. The delegates said the money would go to commuting the officers’ promised half pay for life to a lump sum of five years’ full pay. Along with the appeal, Congress added Washington’s speech to the officers in Newburgh. The politicians seemed to think that the military men’s rejection of the Newburgh addresses would win admiration among civilians everywhere. They would soon learn this presumption was disastrously wrong.
A WEEK later, on Sunday, March 23, 1783, the Triomphe, a French sloop of war, dropped anchor off Philadelphia after a seven-week voyage. Her captain delivered to Elias Boudinot, president of Congress, an electrifying letter from the Marquis de Lafayette. In one hundred joyous words, he reported that all the warring nations had signed treaties of peace; America’s eight-year struggle for independence was over. President Boudinot rushed the news to Washington at Newburgh and included some good news of his own. On March 22, in response to a plea from the commander in chief, Congress had formally agreed to commute the officers’ promised half pay for life into full pay for five years.
For several days Congress debated about whether to ratify the treaty of peace with Britain. Lafayette’s letter convinced most members that this was the best course. In early April the delegates heard from the British commander in New York, General Sir Guy Carleton, that George III had issued a proclamation ending hostilities. On April 11, 1783, Congress ratified the treaty and officially proclaimed the war over. An exuberant President Boudinot wrote to General Washington, “You can only judge from your own feelings on this occasion with what peculiar joy I congratulate your Excellency and the army.”
BOUDINOT AND the rest of Congress were blithely unaware of the army’s continuing discontent. By this time Washington had discovered that the officers’ unhappiness was infecting the enlisted ranks. The soldiers of the New Jersey brigade informed the commander in chief that when discharged they wanted a clear statement of their exemption from paying taxes as civilians. The sergeants of the Connecticut line sent another petition demanding half pay for life, like the officers were reportedly getting. For a few hours Washington wondered if he should conceal the news of Congress’s declaration of peace.
Realizing this deception was impossible, Washington published the proclamation in the next day’s orders. He congratulated the men for winning a victory that had rescued “millions from the hand of oppression and laying the foundation of a great empire.” He hoped they could now preserve a “perfect… consistency of character through the very last act.” He was certain that Congress would soon release them with “every mark of distinction and honor.”
On April 19, 1783, the eighth anniversary of the first shots fired on Lexington green, officers and men of the regiments on duty marched to the Temple of Virtue. There, a field officer read Congress’s proclamation of peace, a chaplain recited a prayer, and the soldiers gave three cheers and sang “Independence,” by New England’s favorite musician, William Billings.
Washington made this ceremony as low-key as possible in an attempt to keep the army’s emotions under control. He was also wrestling with strong feelings of his own. He writhed at the thought that Congress might welsh on its promises to the officers. Immediately after the confrontation in the Temple about the Newburgh addresses, he admonished Congress that if it failed to compensate the officers, “then shall I have learned what ingratitude is, then shall I have realized a tale, which will embitter every moment of my future life.”7
WASHINGTON URGED Congress to discharge the men who had enlisted for the duration of the war as soon as possible and to let them take their guns and cartridge boxes with them. He predicted these weapons would become family mementos handed down to children and grandchildren. Congress approved this parting gift. But concerned about allowing the army to all but dissolve while a large British army remained in New York, the delegates settled on furloughs. They ordered Washington to send the men home on indefinite leaves that would become permanent with the signing of a final peace treaty.
Washington tried to find money to give the men before they departed. He thought each man—officers and enlisted ranks—should receive three months’ back pay, for a total of $750,000. But the bankrupt Congress could not come close to achieving this figure. Washington could only ask the men to accept “Morris notes”—certificates payable in six months, signed by the superintendent of finance. Everyone knew that many of the soldiers would have to sell this pseudo-money to speculators, who were eagerly buying up at discounted prices government promissory notes issued earlier in the war. But the Morris notes were better than nothing.
Morris had to sign each note, which took weeks. On June 2, 1783, an almost frantic Washington rushed a messenger to Philadelphia, begging him to deliver the notes he had already signed. The commander in chief warned that he feared “the worst consequences” if the notes did not arrive soon. He added a lament that Congress could not give the men at least a month’s pay in hard money.8
On June 5 a committee of officers asked Washington to suspend the furloughs, which they looked on with “a mixture of astonishment and chagrin.” The army was being disbanded in front of their eyes without even one of their demands for justice met. They asked Washington to “insist” that no officers be sent home without receiving payment in full, including the commutation of their half pay. They also wanted a gift of $80 for each enlisted man.
Washington could only tell them there was no money to do any of these things. Nor was there any alternative to an immediate departure, for there was also no money to pay the cost of keeping the army together. Almost pathetically he could only ask them to understand that he was merely a servant of the public, required to obey the orders of Congress. He insisted, despite the evidence to the contrary, that the lawmakers still retained “the best disposition toward the army” and would eventually meet their demands. Aware by now of the animosity toward the Continental Army spreading throughout the nation, most soldiers dismissed this attempt at optimism.
No farewell parade or other ceremony marked the departure of the furloughed troops. The regiments of the victorious Continental Army simply marched away. Among the officers, disgust with Congress and with General Washington were almost universal. One friend of General Gates told him with unconcealed glee that the officers had canceled a dinner at which they had planned to make General Washington the guest of honor.
IN PHILADELPHIA, Major John Armstrong was still hoping for the worst. In another letter to General Gates, he reported that the “little corps at this place”—the five hundred or so Continentals who served as a garrison in the capital—had reacted to the furloughs “very spiritedly.” They had sent a message to Congress: “We shall not accept your furloughs and demand a settlement.” In Newburgh, Washington was at work on a document that he hoped would keep at a distance “embitterment” with Congress and the nation for their financial failure. His circular letter to the governors of the states urged them to support an “indissoluble union” and to maintain a “sacred regard for public justice.” It was another way of exhorting them to pay their debts, to the army above all. He also recommended the creation of a small peacetime “military establishment.” Once more he was emphasizing the essential idea of his strategy of victory: a trained regular army, capable of looking an enemy in the face. He sent this sermon to Elias Boudinot, the president of Congress, who mailed it to the governors of the states with a warm letter of approval.
The next day, an agitated Boudinot sent Washington a cry of distress. A menacing ring of Continental Army soldiers had surrounded the Pennsylvania State House and was threatening Congress with fixed bayonets. Some of these troublemakers were part of the city’s garrison; others had marched from Lancaster under the command of growling sergeants, who claimed their officers had deserted them. They wanted money, and they wanted it now—and not in Morris notes. Major General Arthur St. Clair, the soldiers’ local commander, tried to talk sense to them. They told him to go away. When congressional president Boudinot tried to pass through the cordon of mutineers, they roughed him up and called him unprintable names. The frantic president of Congress begged Washington to send some dependable troops as soon as possible.9
Congress demanded that the state of Pennsylvania call out the militia. Its spokesmen refused, fearing that the amateur soldiers would side with the mutineers. When the mutineers insulted and shoved more congressmen, the theoretical rulers of the thirteen states decided on a drastic solution. They abandoned Philadelphia and moved to the rustic simplicity of Princeton, New Jersey. Delighted, Major Armstrong told General Gates that most Philadelphians deemed the decision of the “Grand Sanhedren of the nation” “not unacceptable.” They had long questioned the congressional delegates’ wisdom, suspected their virtue, and laughed at their pretensions to dignity.10
FOR THE next seven months, Congress attempted to govern the nation from Princeton. From Philadelphia came sneers in the newspapers that their decision to cut and run “exhibited neither fortitude, dignity nor perseverance.” Other newspapers took up this theme with savage alacrity. “The flight of Congress” became sarcastic dinner conversation from Boston to Savannah. European allies were appalled. The Marquis de Lafayette wrote from Paris, wondering if the decision meant “a wane of disposition to the federal union.”11
Obviously looking to dignify its sojourn in the boondocks, Congress invited General Washington to visit to discuss the chief question on his mind, a peacetime regular army. He was soon on his way with his wife Martha, two aides, and an escort of twelve dragoons—unaware that the idea was already in trouble. A chief opponent of Congress’s attempts to raise money to pay the officers, David Howell of Rhode Island, had already attempted to emasculate the invitation. He had forced Congress to vote on a resolution to invite Washington with no mention of the peacetime army.
Congress arranged for Washington to stay in a handsome twenty-room house at nearby Rocky Hill. There he gave a dinner for the twenty-two members of Congress in attendance—another sign of trouble to come. Numerous delegates had gone home in disgust, including Washington’s former aide Alexander Hamilton. The commander in chief learned that Congress was debating where to erect a gigantic equestrian statue of him. But he soon saw that its members had little or no interest in his recommendations for a peacetime army. Virginian Arthur Lee joined David Howell and other believers in the power of a virtuous militia to dismiss the idea. It was better for the nation’s political health, Lee averred, if Congress remained “a rope of sand rather than a rod of iron.” The mindless fear of a standing army seemed impervious to criticism from a theoretical or practical point of view.12
Instead of working out plans for a peacetime army, Congress ordered Washington to dismiss the remaining regiments in the service. A handful would remain as token garrisons at Fort Pitt to guard the western frontier and at West Point, where America’s artillery and ammunition would be stored. Washington noted with some concern that the British had not yet handed over five northern and western forts as promised in the peace treaty. When Washington sent General Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to Canada to discuss this omission with the British and obtain a schedule for the forts’ surrender, Steuben got a brusque brush-off. The forts would remain in British hands for another ten years and become strongholds for arming and encouraging Indians to oppose American settlers in the west.
IN OCTOBER, Washington abandoned his attempt to persuade Congress to create a peacetime army. Instead, he wrote a message that he hoped would resonate with the last regiments that were about to disband and go home. He began his “Farewell Orders to the Armies of the United States” by telling them their victory should inspire “astonishment and gratitude” in every American heart and mind. Better than anyone else, they knew how often they had been reduced to a “feeble condition.” But their unparalleled perseverance through “almost every possible suffering and discouragement” had produced a victory that would forever remain “little short of a standing miracle.” Men from every state had put aside local prejudices and become “one patriotic band of brothers.”
Washington said he was sure they would make the transition from soldiers to citizens by maintaining “the same steady and decent behavior” that had characterized their military careers. He was taking this opportunity not only to praise them but to profess his “inviolable attachment and friendship.” He hoped that their country would do “ample justice” to them—and pay them what they deserved. No one else had secured by their courage and devotion “such innumerable blessings for others.”
At West Point, where most of the remaining officers had gathered, they decided to write a reply to this farewell. News from the New York state legislature had soured their mood. The lawmakers, under the leadership of Governor George Clinton, had voted to reject the new impost approved by Congress. Under the absurd constitution imposed on the country by the Articles of Confederation, which required every state to agree to any and all forms of federal taxation, this meant there would be no federal money for the commutation of the officers’ half pay for life.
Quartermaster General Timothy Pickering volunteered to do the writing. His essay had only minimal praise for General Washington, whom he exonerated from allowing Congress to defraud the officers. “Causes” beyond the general’s control were the culprits. But that did not rescue Washington from portrayal as a silent spectator to the massive malfeasance committed by Congress and the states. One historian has described the text as a “snarl of self pity and defiant outrage.” Although hand delivery would have been a simple matter, apparently no one was willing to give the order. So they put it in the mail.13
Meanwhile, Washington was exchanging polite letters with General Sir Guy Carleton about when he and his troops would evacuate New York. Finally, a date was set: November 25. It turned out to be a clear, cold day with a brisk northwest wind. Washington sent General Knox and some eight hundred Continentals into the city to ensure order. When Knox returned to report all was peaceful, Washington rode beside Governor Clinton to the city line. There numerous civilians joined them. Ahead of them rode a uniformed militia cavalry regiment. Behind Washington and Clinton trudged numerous civilians, many of them New York state officials. Then came Washington’s remaining officers. Once more the civilians eagerly played down the Continental Army’s role in the victory.
Washington made no attempt to contest this policy. He had more than made his point about the Continentals’ contributions in his farewell orders to the army. While the British ships in the harbor, loaded with troops and loyalists, awaited a wind that would enable them to depart, Washington spent the next week attending dinners and receptions at which he was showered with praise. Only someone who understood the power of New England’s hostility to a regular army would have been able to understand his acceptance of the situation. Washington, long since determined not to clash with Congress about fundamental issues, made no attempt to combat it.
Finally winds carried the British fleet and army into the open sea for their long voyage home. Washington sent word to his officers that he would welcome a chance to exchange a personal good-bye with them at Sam Fraunces’s tavern on the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets. He did not realize that he was about to experience emotions that he and his officers would never forget.