I've been on a bit of a Revolutionary War kick lately and have been reading some about how Congress went basically bankrupt during the Revolutionary War and owed lots of back pay to soldiers. My question is simple in nature but I suspect the answer may be complicated: were they ever compensated?
Yes. Some 80,000 Revolutionary War vets applied for pensions over the years. Congress passed various acts for war vets. At first, the pensions on offer just covered disabled soldiers, but they eventually covered everybody and their widows. Here are some of those original records:
The other, more immediate way that war vets were compensated was through "land bounty rights". As you correctly pointed out, Congress was broke at the end of the war. So, what they did was confiscate land from known "Loyalists"/"Tories", i.e., Americans who fought on, or gave aid to, the British side during the war, which was not an insignificant number of fighting-aged Americans at the time. Congress took this land and awarded it to local Patriot soldiers for services rendered, in lieu of a cash payment.
On the other side, "Tories" who could prove they had served the crown during the war were offered free land by the British government in what remained of British North America, that is, Canada. These "United Empire Loyalists" ended up in what are now called New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Quebec, and Ontario.
At that point, "Quebec" had just been split into two territories called "Lower Canada" and "Upper Canada", the former being modern day Quebec and the latter being modern day Ontario. Ontario was still sparsely populated at that time, mostly by French fur trappers and native populations. With the arrival of the United Empire Loyalists from the former Thirteen Colonies, Upper Canada/Ontario rapidly transformed into a land dominated by English speakers. The post-war years in Canada were transformative and helped usher in the French/English dichotomy we have in Ontario and Quebec today.