Officers from the Continental Army and Navy formed the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783. It was to be an honorific and hereditary society to support patriotic fellowship. Americans who prized social equality worried that the group was creating a new, hereditary privileged elite. Public controversy caused the society to temporarily abandon the requirement that membership be limited to descendants of original members in 1784. George Washington, president of the society, signed this certificate of membership for William Clark of Virginia in 1787.
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