"If severity and hardships mark the line of your conduct, painful as it may be to me, your prisoners will feel its effects. But if kindness and humanity are shown to us, I shall with pleasure consider those in our hands only as unfortunate, and they shall receive from me that treatment to which the unfortunate are ever entitled."
The reply of General Gage was characteristic of a conceited, ambitious, and domineering officer of the king, and Washington closed his reply to it with these words:
"I shall now, sir, close my correspondence with you, perhaps forever. If your officers, our prisoners, receive a treatment from me different from that which I wished to show them, they and you will remember the occasion of it."
Subsequently, Washington ordered British officers at Watertown and Cape Ann, who were at large on parole, to be confined in the jail at Northampton, explaining to them that it was not agreeable to his feelings of humanity, but according to the treatment of Americans whom the officers of the crown held as prisoners. But he could not tolerate even this mild form of retaliation, and therefore in a short time he revoked the order, and the prisoners were at large again.
"I was never more distressed in mind than I am now," remarked Washington to a member of his staff.
"Why so?"
"Within a few days this army will be reduced to less than ten thousand men by the expiration of enlistments," answered Washington; "and when we can ever attack Boston is a problem. For six months I have been waiting for powder, fire-arms, recruits, and what-not; and here we are with the 1st of January, 1776, right upon us, when several thousand soldiers will leave."
"A very discouraging fact indeed," answered the staff officer; "and how will you fill the breach created by their going?"
"That is what troubles me. We shall be forced to require soldiers whose term of enlistment expires, to leave their muskets, allowing them fair compensation for the same. And to encourage their successors to bring arms, we must charge each one of them who fails to bring his gun one dollar for the use of the one we provide."