Pennsylvania Line Mutiny

When the negotiations proved satisfactory, many of the soldiers returned to fight for the Continental Army, and participated in future campaigns.

In previous years, both Washington and Wayne had cited corruption and a lack of concern on the part of state governments and the Continental Congress in fostering the poor conditions.

However, desperate to maintain the army's manpower, the Line's officers reckoned the enlistment terms to mean that soldiers were bound to serve for the duration of the war if it lasted more than three years.

Captain Adam Bitting, commander of Company D, 4th Pennsylvania Regiment, was fatally shot by a mutineer who was trying to kill a lieutenant colonel.

That same day, George Washington issued a circular letter to the Continental Congress and the governments of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, begging once again for material aid for the army, citing the soldiers' deplorable conditions that lead to the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line.

Knowing the mutineers would have public sympathy on their side (including the Pennsylvania militia), the government had no choice but to negotiate.

Also on January 7 John Mason, an emissary from General Sir Henry Clinton, British commander in New York City, arrived in Princeton.

The agent brought a letter from Clinton offering the Pennsylvanians their back pay from British coffers if they gave up the rebel cause.

Reed heard testimony to the effect that officers had coerced soldiers to stay in the army or reenlist with unfavorable terms, even employing corporal punishment to that end.

He found the testimony compelling and agreed to their terms, even allowing that the many soldiers whose enlistment papers were unavailable could simply swear an oath that they were "twenty dollar men" and be discharged.

In a 2 February 1781 letter to Major General Nathanael Greene he stated: "[T]he affair of the Pennsylvania Line [was] compromised, by the intervention of the Civil Authority of the State: This (tho perhaps the only measure that could have been adopted in our circumstances) has been productive of ill consequences, by inducing other Troops to follow the same example—I mean a part of the Jersey Line, who mutinied in the same manner on the 19th."

Washington dealt with the Pompton mutiny quite differently: he immediately dispatched Major General Robert Howe from West Point to Pompton, where Howe "surrounded the Mutineers by surprize in their Quarters, reduced them to unconditional submission & executed two of their Instigators on the spot.

"[7] The mutiny is depicted in historical novels, including The Proud and the Free (1950) by Howard Fast, told from the perspective of an enlisted man, and A Ride into Morning (1991) by Ann Rinaldi.