Scoped number · Episodes 3–4–5–6
Smallwood's Maryland recruit sample
308 recruits; detailed demographic data for 299
- Scope
- A cohort recruited for the Maryland Line in 1782 and reconstructed from a detailed muster roll, census, tax, and pension records—not a sample of Washington's army in 1776 or of Continental soldiers across the war.
- Uncertainty
- The unusual survival of records makes this cohort unusually visible. Its late-war date, Maryland recruiting law, local economy, and selection into service all limit generalization.
- Interpretation
- The sample demonstrates what social history can establish when the denominator is explicit, and why vivid findings from one regiment and year must remain bounded.
Papenfuse and Stiverson use the sample to connect recruiting policy with lived conditions: voluntary bounties, distrust caused by poor payment, inadequate clothing and medicine, sickness, furlough, and desertion. Those mechanisms illuminate the longer institutional problem introduced in Episode 3.
The date is load-bearing. These men were recruited in 1782, not during the New York retreat or Trenton crisis. The record therefore appears as a comparative case about how the army’s manpower system developed, never as a direct measurement of the 1776 rank and file.