This data consists of three files:lists of all enlisted applicants, contracts, and accessions to the US military from October 2000 to September 2010, as well as a small Excel file that serves as a data dictionary. Individuals are identified only by 3 digit ZIP codes, and do not contain an individual identifier so they cannot be reliably tracked across stages of enlistment. The data was obtained through Freedom of Information Act request 11-F-0024, filed by Garret Christensen in 2010. The only documentation provided with the request is included here, in the Excel file.

This dataset documents the records of mainly Black people incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in the period directly before, during, and after the Civil War, from 1850-1870. It includes a staggering amount of formerly enslaved Civil War soldiers and veterans who had enlisted in the segregated regiments of the United States Military, the U.S.C.T. This demographic information of over 1,400 inmates incarcerated in an occupied border state allows us to examine trends, patterns, and relationships that speak to the historic ties between the US military and the TN State Penitentiary, and more broadly, the role of enslavement’s legacies in the development of punitive federal systems. Further analysis of this dataset reveals the genesis of many modern trends in incarceration and law. The dataset of this article and its historiographical implications will be of interest to scholars who study the regional dynamics of antebellum and post-Civil War prison systems, convict leasing and the development of the modern carceral state, Black resistance in the forms of fugitivity and participation in the Civil War, and pre-war era incarceration of free Black men and women and non-Black people convicted of crimes related to enslavement.