Our papers consider how labor created spaces for violation and draw on court-martial records as an archive of everyday resistance to military violence. Sean Gallagher’s paper explores the coming of the Continental Army onto a plantation as a moment of tension and violence for Black people. He examines assaults on enslaved people by Continental soldiers and how it shaped Black resistance during the war. Nicole Breault’s paper examines a series of assaults on Boston’s local night watchmen by the British Army in the winter of 1775. She examines how the legal proceedings that followed functioned to challenge uses of violence against local institutions and to protect the rights of ordinary laboring men under occupation. Sarah Pearlman Shapiro’s paper considers how women, regardless of political affiliations, sought support through medical communities to mitigate wartime violence. She draws on court-martial records to examine how laboring in close domestic quarters created caretaking dynamics that drew on marital notions of consent and consequently made healers vulnerable to sexual assault.

This panel seeks to recast military records as repositories of a Revolutionary Era struggle for bodily autonomy. Close studies of court-martial records can evince how women, free and enslaved persons, and ordinary men articulated a body politics of peace. Copious amounts of documentation have been preserved through court-martial records, and military records more broadly, however, these remain an underutilized source for non-military historians. These underutilized sources illuminate the liminal spaces in which the incidents occurred: civil and military; public and private; local and imperial. Court-martial documents offer an opportunity to uncover marginalized voices, quotidian experiences, violent events, and aspects of order and care.