George Washington Papers
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General Orders, 2 February 1779

General Orders

Head-Quarters Middle-Brook Tuesday Feby 2nd 1779.

Parole Rothwell—C. Signs Foy—Pekin.

All the non commissioned officers and soldiers quartered upon the inhabitants are immediately to join their respective regiments in camp & none in future to lodge out of it.

A General Court-Martial of the line to sit next friday the 5th instant, 10 ôclock A.M. at the Court Martial room for the trial of all such persons as shall come before it.

Colonel C. Hall is appointed president; Lieutt Colonel Gaskins,1 Major Mentges, two Captains from Woodfords, two from Muhlenberg’s two from the 1st Pennsylvania and one from each of the other brigades on the ground to attend as members.

The Brigade Majors of the Virginia & Maryland line are furnished with the names of such men belonging to those States who are now in the Hospitals at Albany but are unable to return to camp for want of clothes;2 The commanding officers of their respective Regiments will send clothing to the Court Martial room next friday ten ôclock for their men agreeable to the lists, where a waggon will be ready to take them in—An officer from the Virginia line to superintend the conveyance of the cloathing and deliver them to the men at Albany and conduct the men to camp—He is to call at the Orderly-Office for instructions.

Varick transcript, DLC:GW.

1Thomas Gaskins (c.1742–1800), who had been named captain of a Northumberland County, Va., minute company in 1775 and then a captain in the 5th Virginia Regiment in February 1776, was promoted to major of that regiment in November 1777, and in September 1778 he became lieutenant colonel of the 3d Virginia Regiment with a commission backdated to 16 May 1778. Gaskins was not with his regiment in May 1780 when it was captured with the rest of the Virginia line at Charleston, South Carolina. As one of the state’s few remaining Continental officers available for active service, Gaskins in the spring of 1781 took command of a loosely organized regiment consisting mostly of new Virginia recruits mixed with a few Virginia veterans who, like Gaskins, had not been captured at Charleston. Gaskins’s regiment served under Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne in the Virginia campaign of the summer of 1781 and at the siege of Yorktown that fall. Gaskins subsequently returned to Northumberland County, Va., and his regiment was absorbed into Col. Thomas Posey’s Virginia battalion for service in Georgia.

2Brig. Gen. James Clinton had informed GW of this problem in his letter to GW of 18 Dec. 1778; see also GW to James Clinton, 19 January.

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