The Westchester County Historical Society has launched the long-awaited digital collection, Experiencing the Neutral Ground of the American Revolution: The McDonald Interviews, on the Westchester County Digital Archives. Named after the compiler of the documents, The McDonald Interviews consists of over 1,100 pages of hand-written interviews conducted between 1844 and 1851 with eyewitnesses to the seven long years of the Revolutionary War in Westchester and parts of Connecticut. A grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, a part of the National Archives, provided funding for professional archivists and the WCHS librarian to transcribe the interviews from long-hand, and digitize the entire collection, allowing for greater accessibility. The WCHS team has also annotated the accounts, (to provide contemporary perspective of place names, for example,) and provided reading guides, indices, search tools, maps, and other complementary materials that provide rich context.
This collection contains rare primary-source information: first-hand accounts of individuals experiencing the American Revolution as it unfolded in the geographically-significant area of the war, which is now Westchester County. These accounts allow researchers and the public to gain a better understanding of life in the late 18th century, and how men and women, from various walks of life, survived the struggle for independence.
The compiler of the documents, John M. Macdonald (1790-1863), was a former attorney who devoted much of his life to the study of the Revolutionary War. Macdonald recorded, by hand, 407 interviews. Although the original papers in Macdonald’s handwriting were lost in the late 1800s, they had been hand-copied into a book by John English. This copy, now in possession of the Westchester County Historical Society, was acquired by local historian Otto Hufeland in 1925.
