George Mathews (Georgia) - American Revolution

American Revolution

Mathews was named the Colonel of the 9th Virginia Regiment in early 1777. Soon after he led them north to join the Continental Army, but met with serious reverses. In the Battle of Germantown on October 4, 1777 his entire regiment was killed, captured, or scattered; Mathews himself laid wounded on the battlefield and was nearly stabbed by an Englishman with bayonet raised before the soldier was reprimanded by his commander. Mathews became a Prisoner of War, at first held at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When the British withdrew from there, he was moved to a prison ship, anchored in New York harbor.

By 1779 he was granted a limited parole and permitted to live in New York City. He wrote to Governor Thomas Jefferson and to the Continental Congress urging a prisoner exchange, but exchanges were limited and he was overlooked. Jefferson wrote to Mathews to explain his decision to leave him in New York City to instead exchange for others still on the prison ships:

"Your situation indeed seems to have been better since you were sent to New York, but reflect on what you suffered before that and know others of your countrymen to suffer and what you know is now suffered by that more unhappy part of them who are still confined on board the prison ships of the enemy."

Mathews was finally exchanged in 1781, at which point he went south with General Nathaniel Greene, campaigning in South Carolina and Georgia. He was named commander of the 12th Virginia Regiment, but this was only a nominal command, since his new regiment had been prisoners since the fall of Charleston in May 1780.