"Swords in Their Hands: George Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy," is the first book-length account of a plot that can be described as the closest thing to a coup that the United States has ever experienced. In the autumn of 1782, many Revolutionary War officers in the Hudson Highlands have grown angry and frustrated that they have not been paid in months or even years. With victory over the British within sight, they begin to fear that they will never get their back pay and promised postwar pensions, because the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, meeting under the Articles of...

Swords in Their Hands: George Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy, is the first book-length account of the closest thing to a coup that the United States has ever experienced.

In the autumn of 1782, many Revolutionary War officers in the Hudson Highlands have grown angry and frustrated that they have not been paid in months or even years. With victory over the British within sight, they begin to fear that they will never get their back pay and promised postwar pensions, because the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, meeting under the Articles of...