Washington's aides-de-camp

[4] The 19-year-old artist John Trumbull, who was skilled at drawing maps, was appointed an aide-de-camp on July 27,[5] and served three weeks before being transferred.

"[11] Some were the sons of his friends and relatives, but above all he valued talent:The Secretaries and Aid De Camps to the Commander in chief ought not to be confined to the line for plain and obvious reasons.

But a consideration still more forcible is, that in a service so complex as ours, it would be wrong and detrimental to restrict the choice; the vast diversity of objects, occurrences and correspondencies, unknown in one more regular and less diffusive; constantly calling for talents and abilities of the first rate, men who possess them, ought to be taken, wherever they can be found.

[12]On the battlefield, the aides-de-camp were couriers, delivering Washington's orders on horseback and gathering or relaying intelligence on enemy troop movement.

[16] The commander-in-chief's headquarters staff was disbanded on December 23, 1783, when General Washington resigned his commission to the Second Continental Congress, which was then meeting at Annapolis, Maryland.

[3] In 1906, Worthington Chauncey Ford, chief of the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress, published a list of Washington's 32 military secretaries and aides-de-camp.