In the war’s waning days, the American Revolution neared collapse when Washington’s senior officers were rumored to approach the edge of mutiny.

After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on, and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. The government was broke and paid its debts with loans from France. Political rivalry among the states paralyzed Congress. The army’s officers, encamped near Newburgh, New York, and restless without an enemy to fight, brooded over a civilian population indifferent to their sacrifices.

The result was the Newburgh Conspiracy, a mysterious event in which Continental Army officers, disgruntled by a lack of pay and pensions, may have collaborated with nationalist-minded politicians such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Robert Morris to pressure Congress and the states to approve new taxes and strengthen the central government.

A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution tells the story of a pivotal episode of General Washington's leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, political unrest, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between soldiers and civilians so strong that peace almost failed to bring true independence.
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David Head is a history professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, whose research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by George Washington's Mt. Vernon. His prior academic books benefited from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, and a Lord Baltimore Fellowship at the Maryland Historical Society. Head's previous work in the academic community has been honored with several awards and prizes, including Mystic Seaport Museum's John Gardner Maritime Research Award and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic's Ralph D. Gray Article Prize.