When the case was laid before Washington it stirred him to the deepest wrath.  He submitted the facts to twenty-five of his general officers, who unanimously advised what he was himself determined upon, instant retaliation.  He wrote at once to Sir Guy Carleton, and informed him that unless the murderers were given up he should be compelled to retaliate.  Carleton replied that a court-martial was ordered, and some attempt was made to recriminate; but Washington pressed on in the path he had marked out, and had an English officer selected by lot and held in close confinement to await the action of the enemy.  These sharp measures brought the British, as nothing else could have done, to some sense of the enormity of the crime that had been committed.  Sir Guy Carleton wrote in remonstrance, and Washington replied:  “Ever since the commencement of this unnatural war my conduct has borne invariable testimony against those inhuman excesses, which, in too many instances, have marked its progress.  With respect to a late transaction, to which I presume your excellency alludes, I have already expressed my resolution, a resolution formed on the most mature deliberation, and from which I shall not recede.”  The affair dragged along, purposely protracted by the British, and the court-martial on a technical point acquitted Lippencott.  Sir Guy Carleton, however, who really was deeply indignant at the outrage, wrote, expressing his abhorrence, disavowed Lippencott, and promised a further inquiry.  This placed Washington in a very trying position, more especially as his humanity was touched by the situation of the unlucky hostage.  The fatal lot had fallen upon a mere boy, Captain Asgill, who was both amiable and popular, and Washington was beset with appeals in his behalf, for Lady Asgill moved heaven and earth to save her son.  She interested the French court, and Vergennes made a special request that Asgill should be released.  Even Washington’s own officers, notably Hamilton, sought to influence him, and begged him to recede.  In these difficult circumstances, which were enhanced by the fact that contrary to his orders to select an unconditional prisoner, the lot had fallen on a Yorktown prisoner protected by the terms of the capitulation,[1] he hesitated, and asked instructions from Congress.  He wrote to Duane in September:  “While retaliation was apparently necessary, however disagreeable in itself, I had no repugnance to the measure.  But when the end proposed by it is answered by a disavowal of the act, by a dissolution of the board of refugees, and by a promise (whether with or without meaning to comply with it, I shall not determine) that further inquisition should be made into the matter, I thought it incumbent upon me, before I proceeded any farther in the matter, to have the sense of Congress, who had most explicitly approved and impliedly indeed ordered retaliation to take place.  To this hour I am held in darkness.”

[Footnote 1:  MS, letter to Lincoln.]