Lewis Nicola

And you note the multiple times where this has could have happened, and it's not him just taking power, it's people asking him to do so.

And one incident you have here that highlights this, and there's all sorts of stories like this of people saying to him, "Please, can you just solve our problems? If you took power, all this would go away." And there's a letter from Colonel Lewis Nicola in 1782 where he does this exact thing.

He is thinking, "The Continental Army isn't getting paid.

You can solve the problems where Congress is deadlocked." What's going on here? 'Cause this is one of the most important missed bullets that he dodged.

And Washington realized that the fact that his soldiers weren't getting paid was causing great suffering to his soldiers.

The soldiers were disillusioned, and it went to the point at one point that they threatened to coerce Congress, to disobey and coerce Congress into paying them, which would have completely undermined the Republican experiment.

The letter you're talking about is, which I cover in my book, is from Lewis Nicola, and he was a European-born officer who was the head of the Invalid Corps, which was basically the old guys who wanted to serve, but they weren't young enough to fight, so they would help do other things, guard duty, or they would train younger soldiers, kind of like mentors.

And Nicola, who had served in Europe, basically said, "Look..." He, he wrote a letter to Washington and he said, "Look, I'm not one of those people that's attached to the term republic.