It is a difficult literary style, choppy to the modern ear, many clauses whose length was dictated by the amount of ink that could be held by a quill pen. Readers of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, are still driven to distraction by this sort of construction. Go with it - the message is worth it, and Washington and Gibbon would have understood one another perfectly.
The issue was pay for the army, promised but never delivered. The case was justified. Washington makes two points here - first, that patience was in order and that the new Congress would fulfill its obligations eventually (and, as it turned out, incompletely), and second, that there was nowhere to run; that wrecking the nascent nation and hoping to do better further west out of a sense of grievance was short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. It was a bitter pill but he was right.
I think we can take something away from this. We have to fight it out here. There is no better place to go to, no haven, no utopia over the horizon; it's here and it's up to us to stand and make it happen. Hope is not in the hand of the perfumed demagogue, it is in the hand on the plow, or the gun at need, and their - our - gift to country may be more than they can ever hope to be repaid for. Gratitude is an illusion, but the country, the nation - that is not.
Thank you. I agree.
I can just see Washington huddled with his officers, asking whether they want to go on, there in a freezing room and low light, his sight fading.
His measured leadership and solid presence led by example.
So many of them did. So very many. And soldiers wrapping their feet in rags, eating little, continuing on. It’s humbling when you really think of what this was for them, and, as a result, for us. We are Children of the American Revolution, if not by descent, then by inclination and conviction.