Congress leaves under bayonets

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 73 for his account.

The war was over and the army was unpaid. In June 1783 Continental soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line, about three hundred of them from the barracks at Lancaster, marched on Philadelphia, where they were joined by others from the city’s own barracks. On Saturday, June 21, they surrounded the State House, where Congress and the Pennsylvania Executive Council were meeting, with muskets and fixed bayonets, and sent in a demand to be met in twenty minutes. Citizens cheered them and tavern keepers handed out liquor. Alexander Hamilton, a member of Congress, urged the state’s President, John Dickinson, to call out the militia, and the council would not. Congress adjourned rather than deliberate under bayonets, and its members walked out through the soldiers’ ranks, jeered but untouched. Within days Congress had gone to Princeton, and it later sat at Annapolis. Rothbard counts this as a turn in the politics of the war’s end. Philadelphia was the home of Robert Morris and the public creditors, and with Congress gone from it, he says, opinion shifted from right to left. The young Massachusetts delegate Samuel Osgood said that leaving Philadelphia had killed systems that “would finally have ended in absolute aristocracy.”