Digital databases and spreadsheets are useful tools to help historians analyze large quantities of data in their pursuit of making sense of the past. Historians of the American Revolution, particularly those who study the military history of the American War for Independence, have long sought to collect information about military service to better understand the experiences of soldiers serving in the field on both the British and American sides. Until now, much of that information has come from a variety of sources, including orderly books, training manuals, military regulations, diaries, and memoirs. But extracting metadata from those sources and using quantitative analysis has proved difficult. Now a database is being developed to collate all relevant information relating to more than 3,200 courts martial held in the Continental Army to accomplish that very goal. From the analysis of the data collected, faculty and cadets at the United States Military Academy hope to answer a variety of questions until now only tangentially investigated. For example, how prevalent was the problem of desertion among American soldiers? Was execution of soldiers common during the war? And did the transition of American military laws from a more permissive military code to one based on British military regulations result in harsher punishments of American soldiers over the course of the war? These questions and many more will be the focus of cadet research over the coming years.
Timeline
In 2015, Colonel Seanegan Sculley (the current Director of the DHC) built an initial database utilizing a secondary source that identified all the defendants in court-martial proceedings by their last name, organized in alphabetical order. Starting in the fall semester of 2018, cadets began editing the database, reviewing the primary sources from which the information was originally collected to refine the data and add additional data points, including the exact dates and locations for each court-martial. The result thus far has been the completion of a database guidebook, one paper presented at the 2019 Society for Military Historians Conference in Louisville, KY, and three cadet theses. The database refinement is currently ongoing and will take a further three years to complete, though the database will be published in its current form and be updated as edits are made over time.
