' Now
this expression also was perfectly understood by General Washington. He
knew that I meant it for the Cincinnati generally, and that, from what
had passed between us at the commencement of that institution, I could
not mean to include him. When the first meeting was called for its
establishment, I was a member of the Congress then sitting at Annapolis.
General Washington wrote to me, asking my opinion on that proposition,
and the course, if any, which I thought Congress would observe
respecting it. I wrote him frankly my own disapprobation of it; that I
found the members of Congress generally in the same sentiment; that
I thought they would take no express notice of it, but that in all
appointments of trust, honor, or profit, they would silently pass by all
candidates of that order, and give an uniform preference to others. On
his way to the first meeting in Philadelphia, which I think was in the
spring of 1784, he called on me at Annapolis. It was a little after
candle-light, and he sat with me till after midnight, conversing, almost
exclusively, on that subject. While he was feelingly indulgent to the
motives which might induce the officers to promote it, he concurred with
me entirely in condemning it; and when I expressed an idea that, if the
hereditary quality were suppressed, the institution might perhaps
be indulged during the lives of the officers now living, and who had
actually served; 'No,' he said, 'not a fibre of it ought, to be left, to
be an eye-sore to the public, a ground of dissatisfaction, and a line
of separation between them and their country': and he left me with a
determination to use all his influence for its entire suppression.
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