Thomas Mifflin – President of Congress (1783–1784)

Thomas Mifflin’s year in the chair belongs to the narrow space where performance and contrition meet: a politician and soldier with a reputation dinged by whispers from the coldest winter of the war, returned to preside over its official ending and to stage, with fastidious care, the most important act of self-restraint in American military history—the resignation of George Washington’s commission. If you want a single life that shows how the Revolution turned improvisation into ceremony, disorder into paperwork, hurt pride into public ritual, you can follow Mifflin from a Quaker countinghouse on Water Street to the long table at Annapolis where he bowed Washington out of the army and then shepherded the ratification of a peace that would make that farewell more than theater. He was complic ...