A court-martial transcript is the closest thing to a recording the nineteenth century made: sworn testimony, question by question, in a room your ancestor stood in. Most families who have a court-martial in the line know only a rumor of it. The record knows everything, and very often it ends better than the family story does, because sentences were routinely softened or set aside on review, and a report that stops at the verdict tells the story wrong.
Navy courts-martial from 1799 through 1867 survive as bound transcripts, fully imaged; Army proceedings are held at the National Archives. A full record runs from the convening order through the charges and specifications, the plea, prosecution and defense testimony taken down verbatim, the documentary exhibits, the findings on each specification, the sentence, and then the part families never hear about: the review, where an admiral, a department, or a president decided whether the sentence stood. We locate the record for you; you don't need to navigate the registers yourself.
Everything in a trial transcript was sworn by someone with a stake in the outcome. Our report quotes the charges and the load-bearing testimony exactly, digests each witness honestly, and never adopts either side's account as fact: it reports who swore what, and what the court and its reviewers actually decided. If the volume in hand is incomplete, the report says so plainly and points to where the rest of the record lives.
Every court-martial ran under a written code: the Army under the Articles of War of 1806, the Navy under its own Articles of 1862. We read those articles whole, so your report names the exact article each charge was brought under, measures the sentence against what that article allowed, and follows the review the way the code required. Desertion was the 20th Article of War, and death for it was lawful only in wartime. A death sentence needed a two-thirds vote of the court, never a bare majority. And the officer who convened the court, or the President for the gravest sentences, could soften a sentence or set it aside, which is why so many verdicts end better than the family story remembers.
So a punishment reduced, remitted, or overturned on review is read as the code's own machinery, not as luck or mercy to puzzle over. The report also knows what the code no longer allowed: flogging was abolished before the war, so no Civil War sentence carried the lash, whatever the old articles still printed. And a trial of a civilian or a guerrilla was a military commission under the Lieber Code, not a court-martial at all, so the report says which one it is reading. More about the statutory backing.
Both samples are real cases, chosen because they are public archival records, not a private family's file: an 1865 Navy proceeding read against the fleet's own code, and a soldier of the 2nd Delaware acquitted of desertion in 1863.
William Braidwood, engineer of the ironclad Chimo, tried at the Brooklyn Navy Yard after he knocked his men off coaling past their supper hour: the charges named against the 1862 Navy code, the dismissal read against what that code allowed, and the missing final review flagged rather than guessed.
Read the report → U.S. Army · Court-martial, 1863 · real fileA private of the 2nd Delaware tried for desertion in the winter after Fredericksburg — the charge, the testimony, the verdict of Not Guilty, and the general's approval, read from the original proceedings.
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