What do we know about the collective lives and military service of the American soldiers, sailors, and marines who served in the Revolutionary War? The unfortunate answer to this question is not very much at all. While more has been discovered about individual soldiers, less is known about the men on a large scale. For instance, where were they born—in America or Europe? How long did they serve? Were they volunteers, reluctant draftees, or substitutes? Were they literate? What were their occupations? How much, if any, property did they own? In which battles did they fight? Where did they live after the war? Fortunately, all of these questions can be answered, in part, from within the vast body of Revolutionary War pension and bounty land application files which reside in the National Archives and Records Administration. Revolutionary War Soldiers of the Southern States: A Demographic View by Douglas R. Dorney Jr. is a comprehensive study of more than eight thousand American Revolutionary War soldiers, sailors, and marines from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia who filed pension applications after the war. Compiled and summarized in this volume are 130,000 individual pieces of information collected from pension applicants. Presented in the chronological order of a soldiers life, the books explores where and when soldiers were born, what units they served in, where and how they enlisted, their ages, how long they served, how many times they enlisted, the battles in which they fought, prisoner of war status, and where they lived after the war. Also quantified in the work are summaries of minority pension applicants: free men of color, Native Americans, and indentured men. In addition, there are hundreds of individual soldier experiences described, nearly all of these being previously unpublished. The end result is the largest statistical-demographic study of southern state Revolutionary War soldiers ever published, a major contribution to our understanding of the Revolutionary generation.
