## What the Discharge Papers Said
When General Henry Knox signed Deborah Sampson’s discharge at West Point on October 25, 1783, the papers described the discharge as honorable. The documentation of the honorable character of her discharge is significant because it establishes that the circumstances of her discovery — a woman serving under a male alias — did not result in the military’s treating her service as criminal or fraudulent.
This is worth stating clearly because it would have been possible for the Continental Army to treat her case differently. She had enlisted under a false name and a false identity. The army could have characterized this as fraud, deception, or a violation of military order. The fact that it did not — that Knox signed an honorable discharge — represents a choice, however informal, not to punish her for having served.
The reasons for that choice are not documented with specificity. Paterson appears to have been the key actor: he received the disclosure of her identity, gave her discharge papers rather than a court martial, and reportedly provided her with money for travel. Whether Paterson was moved by respect for her service, by the awkwardness of prosecuting a woman who had served without causing any documented harm to her unit, by advice from Binney, or by some combination of these factors is not established in the record.
What is established is that by the time the discharge was signed, the war was formally over. The Treaty of Paris had been concluded in early September 1783. The Continental Army was demobilizing. Men throughout the army were receiving their discharges. The decision about how to handle Deborah Sampson’s case was being made in a context where the calculus of what the army needed to do and what it needed to model for the future was already shifting.