I'm Mary Catherine, and I'm celebrating America 250 by reading letters for or by the founders for as many of the days of the year as I can. Today, in 1776, George Washington is in New York setting up for the next front of this war. In the past, the Continental Army has suffered from a lack of gunpowder and experienced troops as the Patriots feared a domestic standing army and therefore served in short stents.

Now Washington is addressing another personnel problem with Congress.

He needs more money to pay his aides to camp.

These officers were treated like family by the general and like the general by troops

as they carried orders on Washington's authority both by Penn and physically across colonies and

battlefields throughout the war. Alexander Hamilton was, of course, most famous of Washington's

AIDS, joining him in 1777. Here's the general saying, they need to get paid.

Sir, in a letter which I had the honor to receive from Congress some considerable time ago,

they were pleased to ask what rank AIDS de Camp bore in the Army, from whence I concluded that they had adverted to the extraordinary

trouble and confinement of those gentlemen with a view to make them an adequate allowance.

But nothing being since done or said of the matter I take the liberty unsolicited by and unknown

to my aides to camp to inform your honorable body that their pay is not by any

means equal to their trouble and confinement. No person wishes more to save money to the public than I

do, and no person has aimed more at it. But there are some cases in which parsimony may be ill-placed,

and this I take to be one. AIDS to Camp are persons in whom entire confidence must be placed.

It requires men of

abilities to execute the duties with propriety and dispatch, where there is such a multiplicity of

business as must attend the commander-in-chief of such an army as ours, and persuaded I am that

nothing but the zeal of those gentlemen who live with me and act in his capacity for the

great American cause

and personal attachment to me, have induced them to undergo the trouble and confinement they

have experienced, since they have become members of my family. I give in to no kind of

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