Colonel Timothy Pickering

Timothy Pickering was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1745 and trained as a lawyer before the Revolution drew him into military service. He was an early and committed Patriot, authoring a manual of military discipline for Massachusetts militia companies in 1769 that attracted notice among officers attempting to prepare colonial forces for the possibility of armed conflict with Britain. When the war began, he served in various staff capacities, developing the administrative expertise that eventually led to his appointment as Quartermaster General of the Continental Army in 1780, a position that made him responsible for the unglamorous but essential tasks of supplying, transporting, and equipping Washington's forces.

As Quartermaster General, Pickering was intimately aware of the Continental Army's chronic financial problems, including the unpaid wages and promised bounties that had never been delivered to officers and men who had served for years. When the army was cantoned at Newburgh, New York, in 1782-1783, awaiting the conclusion of peace negotiations, these accumulated grievances produced what historians have called the Newburgh Conspiracy, a movement among discontented officers that circulated anonymous addresses calling for collective action to force Congress to address their claims. Pickering had legitimate personal grievances about his own unpaid accounts, and he was not wholly unsympathetic to the argument that Congress needed to be pressured. However, when Washington appeared at the meeting of officers on March 15, 1783, and made his celebrated appeal to their patriotism — pausing to put on his reading glasses and remarking that he had grown old in the service — Pickering joined the overwhelming majority in affirming their loyalty to civilian authority and rejecting extra-constitutional action.

After the war Pickering had one of the most varied post-Revolutionary careers of any Continental officer. He served as Postmaster General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State under Washington and Adams, the last a position from which Adams dismissed him in 1800. He later served in the United States Senate and House of Representatives from Massachusetts, becoming a sharp Federalist critic of Jefferson and Madison's policies. He died in 1829, a figure whose long public career connected the Revolutionary generation to the political battles of the early nineteenth century.