When it came to army discipline, George Washington had some definite opinions. The punishments we hear about were rather harsh by modern standards, but Washington had some problems with his recruits that modern armies don’t tend to have.

Specifically, (and we’ve mentioned this before), the Continental Army had a relatively short enlistment period, which meant that soldiers were constantly turning over and by the time someone was finally in good shape as a soldier, they were gone and replaced with the next guy who had little idea of what he was doing. So Washington was constantly beset by soldiers who didn’t know how to be soldiers. This often meant that he had to lay down some harsh punishments to help ensure that his message got across.

The punishments themselves weren’t especially unique; discipline of this nature was meted out in many places. In fact, today’s cover art is actually taken from a British flogging nearly a hundred years later. But Washington and other military leaders of the Revolution cut their teeth on British army discipline, and it didn’t look a lot different: the prisoner was strapped to a frame of some kind; the other soldiers were required to witness; and the drummer boys (at right in this image) did their best to drown out the cries of the man being punished. We had to crop this image to fit the space, but you can also see a pair of legs sticking out from the bottom right: that’s a soldier who has fainted from the stress of watching. And the man at left is a doctor, who is actually monitoring the prisoner’s health to ensure that the punishment isn’t fatal. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

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