What followed, however, is better established. Paterson gave her discharge papers rather than a court martial or public punishment. He reportedly gave her money for travel. The discharge was honorable.
## October 25, 1783: The Discharge at West Point
On October 25, 1783, Deborah Sampson was formally discharged at West Point, New York. The discharge was authorized by General Henry Knox.
She had served approximately seventeen months in the Continental Army.
The Treaty of Paris had been signed the previous month, on September 3, 1783. The war was formally over. Other soldiers were also being discharged in this period as the Continental Army demobilized. Her discharge, in terms of its timing and circumstances, was consistent with the broader pattern of demobilization, with the significant exception that she was denied the back pay she was owed.
The denial of back pay was not a formal punishment. No court martial had occurred. The discharge was honorable. But the wages owed to Robert Shurtliff for seventeen months of service in the Continental Army were not paid because she was a woman, and the mechanisms for addressing that absence of payment would occupy parts of her subsequent life for decades.
She returned to Massachusetts. The army she had served in, the war she had fought in, was behind her. What lay ahead was the longer and less heroic struggle to be recognized as having been there at all.
## Return to Massachusetts and the Silence That Followed
The immediate period after Deborah Sampson’s discharge is not richly documented. She returned to Middleborough, to her mother, and then to Stoughton, where she stayed with relatives. The Baptist community that had withdrawn its fellowship when her first enlistment attempt was exposed does not appear to have immediately welcomed her back, though the record on her church relations after the war is incomplete.