Writing to Hancock, who had remained in Baltimore with the Congress, Robert Morris remarked that the filthy prisoners looked so benign that “most people seemed very angry they should ever think of running away from such a set of vagabonds.” German officers would march on to confinement in western Virginia. The enlisted troops—former weavers, tailors, carpenters, masons, and butchers, according to a prison roster—traveled mostly to Lancaster and other German-speaking precincts of Pennsylvania. Washington had long advocated “a gentleness even to forbearance” toward prisoners, notwithstanding
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