Thomas Jefferson, writing the list of 27 grievances against King George III included in the Declaration of Independence, did not hesitate to speak of Britain’s decision to send foreign troops to fight in the American colonies.
“He is at this time transporting great armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and treachery scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and utterly unworthy of the leader of a civilized nation.”
This damning language was intended to drum up support for the American Revolution at home and abroad (particularly in France) and to portray the hired foreign fighters – ethnic Germans known collectively as “Hessians” – as brutal. , cruel and less than human.
A total of 30,000 Hessians fought for the British during the Revolutionary War, but they were not bloodthirsty “mercenaries” driven by greed, says Friederike Baer, a history professor at Penn State Abington and author of Hessians: German soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.
“The Hessians were what we call ‘auxiliary forces,'” Baer said. “These are not individual soldiers who signed up with Britain to make money. They were troops raised by their respective German rulers, and then those rulers contracted with Britain to essentially lease complete military units with their own commanders.
Promised for a short deployment and an easy victory, the Hessian armies eventually spent seven long years in the colonies, fighting from frozen Canada to swampy Florida, and losing thousands to disease, musket balls and of desertion.
Britain needed troops, Germans needed money and influence
‘The Battle of Trenton’, by John Trumbull, in which American troops crossed the Delaware River to defeat Hessian mercenaries and British forces at Trenton, New Jersey.
Archives Hulton/Getty Images
Germany was not a unified kingdom or country in the 18th century, Baer explains, but a fragmented whole of more than 300 states, cities and territories, each with its own ruler. They were all “German” in the sense that they were ethnically German and spoke essentially the same language in different dialects.
When war with the Americans broke out in the spring of 1775, British commanders quickly realized they needed many more ground troops, and they needed them fast. King George and his advisers knew they couldn’t raise tens of thousands of troops in Britain or Scotland in a few months, so they started shopping.
“The hiring of foreign armies was common and accepted practice in Europe,” Baer explains. “A lot of great powers have done it all the time. Britain had been doing it for a century. There was nothing unusual about this arrangement.
Empress Catherine the Great rejected King George’s request for 20,000 Russian troops, and the Netherlands, home to a famous regiment of fighters called the Scottish Brigade, also refused the British.
Several German territories required less conviction, Baer says. “They want to have a say in European affairs, and one way to have influence is to have a strong army. These territories do not have the resources to maintain a large standing army. In order to have a strong army and to wield that power and influence, they hired their army.
German armies had fought for the British as recently as the 1760s during the Seven Years’ War with France.
The six territories which signed contracts with King George in 1775 and 1776 were Hessen-Kassel, Hessen-Hanau, Braunschweig, Anhalt-Zerbst, Ansbach-Bayreuth and Waldeck. Since more than half of the troops came from the two provinces of Hessen-Kassel and Hessen-Hanau, they were grouped together in America under the catch-all nickname “Hessians”.
Professional soldiers, petty criminals and scientific explorers
The German soldiers who left for America came from many different backgrounds, but none are branded “mercenaries”, an insult used by Britain’s political enemies to demonize Hessians and King George, Baer says.
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Some were professional soldiers who served their home armies on a “reserve” basis, spending 11 months of the year farming and a few weeks on active military duty or training. Others were forcibly recruited if they fit a certain age range, were physically fit, and determined by local authorities to be “expendable,” Baer said. This list included petty criminals, “drunks” and the unemployed.
“At that time, if you were identified as eligible to serve, you didn’t really have a say.”
Some Germans were enthusiastic about the idea of traveling abroad. The pay was good, passage was free, and they could explore a whole new part of the world. Among this group were naturalists, poets and even amateur paleontologists.
Baer says a young man named Christian Friedrich Michaelis volunteered for the Hessian Corps to search for mastodon bones in New York. Another, Friedrich Adam Julius von Wangenheim, published books on the trees and shrubs he cataloged during his service in America.
A group of German soldiers, known as the Jäger or “hunters” were prized fighters who learned their sniper and tracking skills as hunters and rangers. During the war they fought in particular Jägercorpscarrying guns instead of muskets, and won the respect and fear of the enemy.
How Americans and Germans saw each other
While hiring foreign armies was common practice in the 18th century, British critics in Europe and the American colonies viewed King George’s actions during the Revolutionary War as unforgivable.
“What was different this time was that Britain was committing foreign troops not to defend its own borders or interests,” Baer explains, “but to fight against other British subjects on another continent”.
In the colonies, the Hessians were reviled as ruthless mercenaries hired to do King George’s dirty work. The word “Hessian” has become a racialized slur used interchangeably with “Catholics,” “savages” and “niggers,” Baer says. “All of this was meant to imply that these are violent, uncivilized, non-white people that the king is sending across the ocean to fight against us.”
This characterization began to change after the Battle of Trenton in 1776, when George Washington crossed Delaware a day after Christmas and captured nearly 1,000 surprised Hessian soldiers. Face to face with German soldiers, the Americans saw them not only as humans, but as “victims” themselves of tyrannical governments who “sold them out” to war.
“That’s when you see settlers writing resolutions and circulating posters offering land and freedom to German soldiers willing to desert,” Baer explains.
For his book, Baer read hundreds of letters and diary entries written by German soldiers about their experiences in America and their opinions of Americans. The beauty and bounty of New York and New Jersey blew German soldiers away, along with the wealth and prosperity that even the humblest Americans seemed to enjoy.
“The Germans quickly concluded that the Americans were ungrateful,” says Baer. “Since everyone was doing so well, why the hell were they rebelling? Why would you rise up against a king under whose rule you were able to become so prosperous?
On August 31, 1776, a German soldier by the name of Andreas Wiederhold wrote to his family: “The heart beats in the body of an honest man to see such a lucky land and ruined dwellings, which have been pillaged by rebels wicked and disobedient, who are displeased with their unmerited goodness from heaven, and who are unfaithful to God and to the king. But God will give us fortune and give them remorse, so that everything is not destroyed by their illusions.
German soldiers also frequently commented in their letters and diaries on the condition and treatment of blacks, both slaves and free, in the American colonies. In stark contrast to the prosperity of white Americans, black men, women, and children were “oppressed and abused, often very cruelly by white people,” Baer explains.
After the war, some Hessians choose to stay
For most of the Revolutionary War, at least a third of the British regular army was made up of Hessian soldiers. German troops fought in all major British victories and defeats from 1776 to 1783, and the cost was high.
Baer says that of the 30,000 German soldiers sent to the colonies, about a quarter of them, or 7,500, died. Only about 1,200 German soldiers died in combat. Disease was the most ruthless killer.
Of the 23,000 German soldiers who survived the war, the vast majority were sent back to their home provinces, but between 5,000 and 6,000 Hessians decided to stay. Many of them settled in Canada under British rule, but others were welcomed by German-American communities in the mid-Atlantic states.
