In November, 1782, preliminary and eventual articles of peace were agreed upon between the United States and Great Britain, by their plenipotentiaries. Nothing had been done by Congress for the claims of the army, and it seemed highly probable that it would be disbanded without even a settlement of the accounts of the officers, and if so, that they would never receive their dues. Alarmed and irritated by the neglect of Congress; destitute of money and credit and of the means of living from day to day; oppressed with debts; saddened by the distresses of their families at home, and by the prospect of misery before them,--they presented a memorial to Congress in December, in which they urged the immediate adjustment of their dues, and offered to commute the half-pay for life, granted by the resolve of October, 1780, for full pay for a certain number of years, or for such a sum in gross, as should be agreed on by their committee sent to Philadelphia to attend the progress of the memorial through the house. It is manifest from statements in this document, as well as from other evidence, that the officers were nearly driven to desperation, and that their offer of commutation was wrung from them by a state of public opinion little creditable to the country. They recited their hardships, their poverty, and their exertions in the cause; and all that they said was fully borne out by their great commander, in his personal remonstrances with many of the members of Congress. The officers asserted, that many of their brethren, who had retired on the half-pay promised by the resolve of 1780, were not only destitute of any effectual provision, but had become objects of obloquy; and they referred with chagrin to the odious view in which the citizens of too many of the States endeavored to place those who were entitled to that provision. But, from the prevailing feeling in Congress and in the country, nothing better was to be expected than a compromise in place of the discharge of a solemn obligation; and this feeling no American historian should fail to record and to condemn. If these men had borne only the character of public creditors, a state of public feeling which drove them into a compromise of their claims ought always to be severely reprehended. But, beyond the capacity of public creditors, they were the men who had fought the battles which liberated the country from a foreign yoke; who had endured every extremity of hardship, every form of suffering, which the life of a soldier knows; who had stood between the common soldiery and the civil power; and often, at the hazard of their lives, preserved that discipline and subordination which the civil power had done too much to hazard. They were, in a word, the men of whom their commander said, that they had exhibited more virtue, fortitude, self-denial, and perseverance, than had perhaps been then paralleled in the history of human enthusiasm.