Very interesting and informative.
Thanks for posting.
Hessians were made infamous to militiamen after the Battle of White Plains. They pushed General Washington to the shores of the Delaware and looted and destroyed many of the beautiful homes that dotted New Jersey.
Hession auxiliaries were in Trenton when Washington crossed the Delaware north of them, with private soldier Joe Biden serving gallantly as coxswain. Finally, these men were with Lord Cornwallis as he pushed from Charleston to Guildford and up to Yorktown.
They were not actually mercenaries, as the article points out.
1. They weren’t that kind of mercenary
Today we consider mercenaries individuals who voluntarily get involved with a conflict for their own personal profit. However, the German soldiers who came to fight were established soldiers in their national armies who were required by their country to serve; the Landgrave (Prince) of Hesse-Cassel himself pocketed the money.[1] This was a widely unpopular move. American Patriots and sympathizers in Europe quickly turned this against the British government. Propaganda like the famous Sale of the Hessians, possibly authored by Benjamin Franklin, followed the defeat at Trenton, attacking the use of these soldiers as being cruel to the Germans who had no stake in the war. It also portrayed the Hessian military leaders and Landgrave as cruel and uncaring about their own people in addition to representing King George as hiring men to slaughter his own people.
Excellent article, thank you!
There was a reason Franklin proposed that German be our national language. Many Hessians settled in PA.
The original Connecticut Raggies.
The first Scottish ancestor in my family to come here fought in the Revolutionary War for the British as a mercenary (likely because of the highland clearances) but decided to stay, first in the Mohawk Valley and then Western NY. Of the English colonists, a great, great grandfather fought ion the American side.