Several factors may have made that choice easier. The war was over. The army was demobilizing. A court martial of a woman who had served honorably for seventeen months, at a moment when the country was attempting to celebrate its Revolutionary achievements, would have been an awkward proceeding at best. The politics of the situation — both within the military and in the broader public sense — may have made the informal resolution more attractive than the formal one.
The assignment of Sampson as Paterson’s aide several months before the discovery is also relevant background. By the time Binney disclosed her identity to him, Paterson had had months of personal proximity to Robert Shurtliff in the trusted role of personal aide. Whatever his assessment of her service quality was based on that proximity, it presumably shaped his response to the revelation.
Paterson went on to a successful post-war career and eventually served as a U.S. Representative from New York. His name appears in the documentary record of the Revolution in ways that go beyond his connection to the Deborah Sampson case. He is not primarily a figure in her story, but the choices he made in October 1783 were among the most consequential single decisions in how her story unfolded.
## The Middleborough Community and the Baptist Church
The Baptist church’s withdrawal of fellowship from Deborah Sampson following the exposure of the Timothy Thayer enlistment attempt in early 1782 is a documented consequence that gives the local social context of her decision to enlist more texture.