"New Light on Battle Casualties: The 9th Pennsylvania ..." Topic

…Regiment at Brandywine.

"Recognizing the contributions and sacrifices of all combat veterans from any war is a meaningful American tradition. On June 2, 2015, the President of the United States awarded Medal of Honor to Army Sgt. William Shemin and Private Henry Johnson, both World War I soldiers. The President remarked, "We know who you are. We know what you did for us. We are forever grateful."The same thanks should be offered to the thousands of soldiers who served, died, were wounded or suffered the stress of intense combat during the American Revolution, but accurate personnel records and casualty numbers for various battles and engagements of the era remain elusive. Even more problematic is the challenge of identifying individual casualties by name. This article recognizes some of the soldiers who served in the 9th Pennsylvania Regiment at the Battle of Brandywine so that, to echo the President's comments, for at least a few of these soldiers, we may know who they were and what they did.

The war's dynamic operating environment made accurate record keeping difficult, many localized engagements went unrecorded, and surviving records lack continuity even for larger engagements involving Continental Line units. Howard H. Peckham's 1974 work remains the most comprehensive study of Revolutionary era American casualties and outlines the death, wounding, capture or disappearance of over 53,000 Americans. Each of those individuals and many others who suffered both physical and psychological wounds associated with a savage civil war had a name and a story to tell. The surviving primary records and access to them facilitated by modern digitization and collaboration allow researchers with interest in specific units to study the activities of individual soldiers and generalize these actions as trends. One unit with relatively complete surviving muster and pay records is the 9th Pennsylvania Regiment during a fifteen month period, May 1777 to July 1778. A study of this unit sheds new light on the unit strength, leadership, roles in key battles, and most importantly casualties suffered, specifically at the Battle of Brandywine, the unit's first major engagement.

John B. B. Trussell's 1977 study of the Pennsylvania Line attempts to quantify unit losses while acknowledging the tumultuous nature of the regiments that composed this part of the army. Trussell outlines the creation, expansion, contraction, reorganization and reduction of twenty-seven different regimental-sized units between 1775 and 1783. He relied heavily on the Pennsylvania Archives for primary source material, and qualified his research "… not as conclusive information, but as representing the best information which it has been possible to assemble." The Pennsylvania Archives contain many point-in-time records or fragments rather than comprehensive muster or pay records which, for many units, simply did not survive the challenges of time. Most authors reference the Pennsylvania Archives when presenting casualty numbers and names. Analyzing individual pay and muster records for the 9th Pennsylvania Regiment provides greater detail and surprising results when compared to Trussell's findings…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Good piece. This is discussed in the Harris book as well and reflects one of my eternal gripes about the period--losses in general were inaccurately reported and, in the case of the Rebels, often egregiously so.

Hence, there is a continuing belief that the Crown Forces routinely suffered higher losses than the Colonials based on faulty, whether by accident or design, loss reports.