SOCIETY OF THE CINCINNATI

In May 1783 officers of the Continental Army, led by Henry Knox and Frederick von Steuben, created a veterans organization named the Society of the Cincinnati, after Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the legendary general and patriot who led the Roman army to victory, then returned to his farm. Their aim was not only to preserve the fraternal bonds between the officers, but also to pursue their common interest in outstanding pay and pensions during peacetime. George Washington, while uninvolved with the society's formation, agreed to serve as its president. Soon, the Cincinnati numbered over two thousand members, including many prominent figures such as Alexander Hamilton, George Clinton, and James Monroe.

The society was open to all officers of the Continental Army who had served for three years or, regardless of length of service, to those who had served to the war's conclusion or had been rendered supernumerary. It also offered hereditary membership from father to eldest male offspring. The original charter provided for a general society with annual meetings in Philadelphia and thirteen state societies with local chapters. It also permitted membership for selected officers of the allied French army and navy, who soon formed a French society of their own. Furthermore, the society provided for a charitable fund, honorary memberships, and a commemorative medal, which Peter Charles L'Enfant changed into a bald eagle decoration to be worn.

The society proved highly controversial. In Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati (1783), Aedanus Burke of South Carolina denounced the Cincinnati as a nascent hereditary nobility that would inevitably subvert the American Republic and possibly establish a corrupt monarchy. Burke's pamphlet was spread nationwide, and soon others joined in the outcry. John Adams despaired that nobility would replace republicanism in America, Elbridge Gerry feared the Cincinnati would rule the nation covertly, Thomas Jefferson urged Washington to separate himself from the organization, Stephen Higginson feared that the society was a tool of the French, and Benjamin Franklin mocked the officers for mimicking European nobility. Congress declared that the Cincinnati was not an official knightly order of the United States.

The Cincinnati were not even a political faction, much less an aristocratic conspiracy, yet they had to react. Washington persuaded the general society in 1784 to propose a reform dropping hereditary membership and other controversial features. This revised charter was well publicized and did much to muffle criticism, but it was never ratified. Only a few state societies endorsed the reform, others insisted on retaining hereditary membership. Consequently, largely unnoticed by the public, the revised charter never took effect. Still, the general society practically ceased to function in the following years, and in subsequent decades several state societies withered. The Cincinnati came close to vanishing, but revived in the late nineteenth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, the general society, the thirteen state societies, and the French society are alive and well, the oldest of American patriotic societies.

At times the anti-Cincinnati rhetoric, which was especially widespread between 1783 and 1785 but persisted sporadically until 1790, verged on conspiracy theory. It resembled the anti-Illuminati hysteria of the late 1790s and the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s. Why did one part of the Revolutionary leadership effectively accuse another of antirepublican subversion? The answer lies in the difficult situation of the mid-1780s, when it often seemed that America had won the war but might lose the peace. For American politicians who had been reared on radical Whig ideology and thus had learned to distrust concentrated power, the machinations of ambitious men, and all things military, the society seemed a threat to the Republic. The members of the Cincinnati, while innocent of the crimes they were accused of, had made themselves vulnerable by adopting the unegalitarian principle of heredity.

As the young American Republic stabilized, the most dire accusations against the Cincinnati faded. By the 1790s, many Democratic Republicans, including historian Mercy Otis Warren, continued to associate the largely unpolitical society with conservative Federalist politics. However, the controversy never regained its old strength.

See alsoAnti-Masons; Patriotic Societies; Soldiers .

bibliography

Burke, Aedanus. Considerations on the Society or Order of Cincinnati. … Charleston, S.C.: Timothy, 1783.

Meleney, John C. The Public Life of Aedanus Burke: Revolutionary Republican in Post-Revolutionary South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

Myers, Minor. Liberty without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution. Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805. Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988.

Markus Hünemörder