General Orders, 16 January 1777
General Orders
Head-Quarters, Morristown, Jany 16th 1777.
Parole: Amboy.Countersign: Brunswick.
General Court Martial to sit to morrow at 9 o’Clock, for the trial of Capt. Fister and Lieut: Rallwaggon, of the German Battalion. Col. Stricker and such officers of his Regiment, as can give information of the above Gentlemen’s Conduct, for which they were confined, will attend the Court, for that purpose.1
The Captain of the Provost is ordered to warn one Serjeant, and 25 Privates, as his guard. Prisoners confined for capital offences will hereafter be committed to his charge, and be by him reported.
Varick transcript, DLC:GW.
1. Henry Fister, a captain in the German Regiment since July 1776, was tried and found guilty of being absent without leave, and he was dismissed from the army on 31 Mar. 1777 (see General Orders, that date). Frederick Rowlwagen, who had been appointed a lieutenant in the German Regiment on 12 July 1776, was tried and cashiered for “making a great Noise among the Soldiers going to Trenton, contrary to General Orders” (see General Orders, 15 April 1777). Lt. Col. George Stricker (1732–1810), an innkeeper born in Winchester, Va., who had resettled in Frederick, Md., in 1774, commanded a Maryland light infantry company of militia that was taken into Col. William Smallwood’s Maryland Regiment on 3 Jan. 1776. Stricker was named lieutenant colonel of the German Regiment on 17 July 1776 and served until 29 April 1777, when he resigned after GW questioned his ability to command in a letter to Maryland governor Thomas Johnson (see GW to Johnson, 9 April 1777, in DLC:GW). Stricker represented Frederick County in the lower house of the Maryland assembly in 1779 and 1780. He moved to McMechen’s Bottom near Wheeling, Va., in the early 1790s, and became collector of revenue for the district of Wheeling in 1796.