The man who has been called the “father of his country” was certainly that. He led the successful rebellion. He was president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which rewrote the Articles of Confederation and produced the World’s best and most enduring foundational document for a nation. After being unanimously elected as country’s first president, he set standards of restraint, behavior and decorum that endure to this day.

But before he was the father, he was the defender. On March 15, 1783, in Newburgh, N.Y., Washington saved the country in its infancy from a rebellion from within. And he did so by showing his vulnerability.

His soldiers were unpaid and unappreciated. Petitions had circulated criticizing the Continental Congress. Washington’s officers were ready to march on congress to demand their back pay and the fulfillment of a multitude of broken promises. They were prepared to use force to have their demands met.

They were on the precipice of a mutiny that would have undone everything they had fought long for. It would have made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence and undo the ideals expressed in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and “The American Crisis.” It would shatter the public’s confidence in the military and confirm Great Britain’s skepticism about the American experiment.

Washington was mortified. He had repeatedly assured his men that he would get their grievances satisfied. That made this burgeoning mutiny a vote of no confidence in Washington himself.

Washington needed to meet this threat head on. In a letter to Alexander Hamilton after the incident, Washington wrote “I was obliged … to rescue them from plunging themselves into a gulf of civil horror from which there might be no receding.”

Washington started his appeal to his officers by returning to familiar themes. He spoke of the importance of duty, honor and civic virtue. He attacked a petition that had been circulating among his officers that encouraged direct action to relieve their grievances. Washington said the document’s author “had another plan in view, in which candor and liberality of sentiment, regard to justice, and love of country, have no part.”

While his words were received with mild agreement among those assembled, he wasn’t breaking through. Reason wasn’t enough. He needed to reach them emotionally.

While his troops were bubbling with discontent, they still revered Washington. He was the superstar of his era. Huge, robust, athletic and charismatic, his men held him in the highest esteem.

So when, at a strategic moment, Washington fumbled into his pocket and pulled out a pair of glasses that no one had seen before, they were taken aback.

When he announced, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have grown not only gray but almost blind in the service of my country” They were moved to tears.

Having shown that he shared their sacrifices and had made his own, his words were given even greater gravitas,

“Let me entreat you, gentlemen,” Washington said. “Not to take any measures which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.”

When Washington had finished, so had the mutiny. The Army endured and with it, the revolution. Less than six months later, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the war.

The United States, which could have been thwarted in Newburgh, was preserved.