Lecture: Seanegan P. Sculley, Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army

Name: Lecture: Seanegan P. Sculley, Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army
Start: 2026-03-28T16:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-03-28T17:00:00-04:00
Location: 2332 New Garden Rd, Greensboro, NC 27410

Schedule

Sat Mar 28 2026 at 04:00 pm to 05:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

2332 New Garden Rd, Greensboro, NC 27410 | Greensboro, NC

Concluding the 2026 Revolutionary Lecture Series, Guilford Courthouse National Military Park proudly hosts Dr. Seanegan P. Sculley, author of "Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775-1783."
In the summer of 1775, a Virginia gentleman-planter was given command of a New England army laying siege to British-occupied Boston. With his appointment, the Continental Army was born. Yet the cultural differences between those serving in the army and their new commander-in-chief led to conflicts from the very beginning that threatened to end the Revolution before it could start. The key challenge for General George Washington was establishing the standards by which the soldiers would be led by their officers. What kind of man deserved to be an officer? Under what conditions would soldiers agree to serve? And how far could the army and its leaders go to discipline soldiers who violated those enlistment conditions?
These questions could not be determined by Washington alone. His junior officers and soldiers believed that they too had a part to play in determining how and to what degree their superior officers exercised military authority and how the army would operate during the war. A cultural negotiation concerning the use of and limits to military authority was worked out between the officers and soldiers of the Continental Army; although an unknown concept at the time, it is what we call leadership today. How this army was led and how the interactions between officers and soldiers from the various states of the new nation changed their understandings of the proper exercise of military authority was finally codified in General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben’s The Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, first published in 1779. The result was a form of military leadership that recognized the autonomy of the individual soldiers, a changing concept of honor, and a new American tradition of military service.
Seanegan P. Sculley enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1995 as an airborne infantryman before attending Officer Candidate School in the summer of 1999. He was commissioned as an Armor officer, serving at Fort Hood, Texas before completing his B.A. in History at Texas State University in December 2002. COL Sculley then deployed to the Republic of Korea from 2003-2005, and earned his M.A. in History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2007. From 2007-2012, he served as both an instructor and Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy, during which time he deployed to Mosul, Iraq from 2009-2010. Following his assignment to West Point, COL Sculley served at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in May 2015. He directed the American History Program at West Point from 2015-202 and currently serves as an Associate Professor and the Director for the Digital History Center in the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy. COL Sculley is the author of Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775-1783 (2019).
The event is free. Registration is not required.