The garrison at West Point, where she spent part of her service, was among the fixed points around which the Hudson Valley activity organized. West Point had become one of the most important American fortifications after the near-disaster of Benedict Arnold’s 1780 attempt to hand it to the British. By 1782 it was the headquarters of what remained of the Continental field army, a significant military installation that required garrison troops as well as the mobile light infantry units.
Some accounts of her service include a detail: that one of the duties she performed in the garrison involved men who were suspected of Loyalist sympathies or other military offenses. If accurate — and the provenance of this detail is not independently corroborated — it would place her in the military-justice operations of the garrison as well as in field duty. That kind of work would have required trust from her commanding officers and a capacity to function in the administrative machinery of military life as well as in field operations.
The late-war environment also meant the army was in an uncertain and in some respects demoralizing condition. Pay was irregular or absent. Soldiers who had served for years were being held in service past the terms they had expected. The unrest over unpaid wages that eventually sent General Paterson’s unit to Philadelphia — and that contributed to the circumstances of Sampson’s discovery — was a genuine and significant problem in the Continental Army’s final years. She was not serving in an institution that was functioning smoothly. She was serving in an institution under sustained internal stress, which added a layer of difficulty to the already difficult work of maintaining her identity.