Above all else, Arnold despised the traits that forever threatened to nullify the labors and sufferings of brave and patriotic men. Those traits were pettiness, timidity, inefficiency, futility and hesitation; and it was exactly those traits that were the principal assets of the American Congress in the days when we fought England. Eventually the inefficiency and the cowardice of Congress came to be a more dangerous enemy than England; and Arnold had cause to know it better than any of us.

That fumbling, muddle-headed Congress was our only government. There was no President to assist it: no Senate to control it: no Supreme Court to guard and direct it: no Cabinet to inform it. It grew daily weaker and more witless. Each year it was composed of men of smaller calibre—pettifogging lawyers from benighted homes: blatherskites in fustian, whispering knowingly in corners; exchanging fears that the army, in righteous rage, might turn and rend them for their shortcomings: dwarf-brained creatures, shallow, bigoted, opinionated, contrary, unreasonable, hidebound, time-serving: strong only in their unyielding ignorance: in their determined avoidance of intellectual integrity. They forced Schuyler from the army. They demanded the resignation of Knox and Sullivan and Greene for questioning Congress’s appointment of a Frenchman, DuCoudray, over their heads. They would have banished Washington to Virginia if he had not eternally deferred to them with the endless patience of a saint. By their persistence in wasting bounties on the militia, they wrecked our finances. They were pigmies whose every act was contrary to common sense, to courage and to the welfare of the nation.

This wretched Congress had no power to tax—no control, in short, over the different states, which did as they pleased most of the time. Yet it exercised control over our army, and so it was our government, even though the states would not admit its authority. Since it could raise no money from the states, and since the currency which it printed had no value, it was obliged to turn somewhere for money, and so it turned to France; and by so doing it put a sort of desperation into the hearts of those of us who knew France and the French.

Congress was insane on the subject of the French. Any French officer who came to Congress, demanding a commission, received it at once, no matter how little his ability and experience. The follies of that nature perpetrated by this unspeakable Congress of ours were beyond belief. It would have made DuCoudray a major general in command of our artillery, except for the protests of Greene and Sullivan and Knox. In July of 1777 it gave to the nineteen-year-old Lafayette a major general’s commission, for no reason on God’s earth save that he was a wealthy, amiable boy of influential family. At the same moment it still withheld from Arnold the major general’s rank his brilliant efforts had so amply earned.