ngress 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. On
his return from the meeting, he called on me again, and related to me
the course the thing had taken. He. said, that, from the beginning,
he had used every endeavor to prevail on the officers to renounce the
project altogether, urging the many considerations which would render
it odious to their fellow-citizens, and disreputable and injurious to
themselves; that he had at length prevailed on most of the old officers
to reject it, although with great and warm opposition from others, and
especially the younger ones, among whom he named Colonel W. S. Smith
as particularly intemperate. But that in this state of things, when he
thought the question safe, and the meeting drawing to a close, Major
L'Enfant arrived from France with a bundle of eagles, for which he had
been sent there, with letters from the French officers who had served
in. America, praying for admission into the order, and a solemn act of
their King permitting them to wear its ensign. This, he said, changed
the face of matters at once, produced an entire revolution of sentiment,
and turned the torrent so strongly in an opposit