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.

I say this, not to detract from Lafayette or from the many brave Frenchmen who eventually fought for us, but to show why those of us in the Continental Army were filled with a hatred of this vacillating, blundering, wrong-minded Congress—a hatred that grew and grew with each passing month, until it turned into something worse than hatred. We knew at last that in spite of all our strivings and sacrifices to be free, those muddle-headed men, by piling blunder on blunder, were forcing us closer and closer to chaos and to the eager arms of France—closer and closer to the grip of a nation whose rule would be more tyrannical and infinitely more oppressive than that of England.

Our desperation and distrust were shown to be justified at the end of the war, when public and private credit collapsed because of the lack of confidence in Congress. Parts of the army mutinied. The states, yielding to the temptation to issue paper money, became bankrupt. The farmers of western Massachusetts revolted. Tennessee was in insurrection against North Carolina. Vermont, led by that blustering demagogue Ethan Allen, dickered with the Governor of Canada, preparatory to becoming a separate principality under England. Every state, hating its neighbor, was on the verge of raising tariff walls against every other state; and at last Congress, headless, spineless, impotent, utterly baffled and at sea, collapsed.

The French minister reported to the watchful French Government that there was now, in America, no general government—neither Congress, nor President, nor head of any one administrative department. So far as could be seen, the Union of States was dissolved, and our eight years of war had gone for nothing. We were defeated—not by England, but by Congress.