to receive what I have mentioned in a more public letter of this
date, and in the manner there expressed. And surely this may be
effected with proper exertions. Or what possibility was there of
keeping the army 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