A Defence of the Hessians

by J. G. Rosengarten

The contrast between the two cousins and namesakes was a very marked one, for Elector Frederick was an orthodox Christian, King Frederick a follower of Voltaire. The Swiss historian, Müller, republican as he was, wrote from Cassel to his Swiss home in terms of strong praise of the Hessian corps of officers, of their scientific and social culture; the Hessians, he said, are sound, honest folk, warlike and courageous,—all the peasants have served in the army, and in every village the men show the good effects in their manly strength and love of discipline. Almost every one can speak of his own or his father’s service in Sicily, in the Morea, in Scotland, Flanders, Hungary, or Germany, under Morisini or Prince Eugene or Maurice of Saxony or Ferdinand of Brunswick.

And now in the New World the Hessians showed their old valor and discipline,—one regiment surrounded in a forest by eight thousand Americans fought its way out. After a march of five hundred miles, without bread or wine or brandy, almost barefooted, in burning heat, after fording seven streams, often up to the neck in water, the Hessians fought so well that Lord Cornwallis praised them beyond all his other troops; and such a preference from the British commander reconciled his Hessians to all their trials. Müller, as a faithful historian, loved to record their brave deeds. He says the country is poor, but that is due to the never ending German wars. The Seven Years’ War had left the country waste to a degree that the Swiss, always living in peace, could hardly realize. But the Hessians are industrious, and the country flourished in 1781 under the Elector Frederick, a man of kindly nature and the best intentions, and yet many foreigners criticise him unfairly. Why should a Swiss object to a crowned head? The government is as well suited to the country as a republic to Switzerland, and even there no one has more personal freedom than the Hessian citizen. People and country are unusually attractive. No men were ever finer than the Hessian soldiers; they are worthy of their ancestors, made famous by Tacitus. It is thus that a republican describes the country of this excellent prince, who had healed the wounds inflicted by the Seven Years’ War, encouraged arts and sciences, and supported, when he did not found, many charitable institutions, and not only did not enrich himself, but during and through the American war was able to relieve his country of many millions of taxes, and to lay the foundation of a large reserve for the expenses of the government. The administration was so painfully careful that, in spite of the interruption of Napoleon’s kingdom of Westphalia, the accounts were so kept as to show satisfactorily just what proportion of the revenue belonged to the nation and what to the sovereign.

All that Hesse has of material as well as intellectual advantages it owes to Elector Frederick, from hospitals to art galleries. In his day the visitor might think that Cassel was equal to Sparta and Athens. He died all too soon for the honorable love of his faithful subjects. He never ceased to mourn over the long absence of his army, his dear subjects. Instead of a year’s service, it lasted for nine years, although the last years of the war were comparatively free from bloodshed, and spent in occasional skirmishes and in marching to and fro through vast regions. The Elector often wanted to put an end to the alliance with England, but his ministers and his Parliament held firmly to it. He did insist on replacing the losses of the Hessians by foreign enlistments, to which he had once so patriotically objected, but now men from beyond his borders poured in with the hope of joining the Hessian army and thus seeing the wonderland, America. Anxiety, years of longing and quiet grief, weighed on his noble heart, so that a few months after the return of the last of his soldiers he died suddenly. He saw once more the old victorious flags that had waved in triumph at Minden and Crefeld, at Flatbush, White Plains, Fort Washington, and Gildford [sic] Court-House; he saw them once again and died.

The circumstances of the enlistment of the Hessian troops may be explained thus: German and other European countries had for centuries strengthened their armies by enlisting men. Hesse, and later Brandenburg Prussia, made service compulsory, and thus, in the years that followed the Thirty Years’ War, filled their armies with their own subjects. Still, voluntary enlistments continued and do so still. But no country cared for the enlisted man and for his protection from acts of violence at the hands of officers as Hesse-Cassel did, and yet no country has been so much blamed for its dealing with its soldiers. Personally, the Elector was opposed to all enlistments, both at home and from outside, and he tried hard to limit it after the close of the Seven Years’ War. When, however, in 1777, the Hessian Parliament concluded its treaty of alliance, which provided for Hessian troops to serve in the British army, it was necessary to increase the force, and there was a rush of volunteers from all parts of Germany, and the Elector republished an order of December 16, 1762, substantially as follows: “Officers guilty of enlisting men by force or unfair means will be dismissed the service; non-commissioned officers and privates for the like offence will receive corporeal punishment, and the orders of their superiors will not protect them. Soldiers enlisted by force or trick shall be released at once without expense to them or any charge for food or pay, which shall be collected from the officer responsible for such illegal enlistment.”

No foreign subject was ever retained in the Hessian service against his will. All those who voluntarily enlisted for the American war were, on their return, regularly and honorably discharged, and received as a reward half a month’s pay at the high English rate as the personal gift of the Elector. All of this is proved by the official records. During his whole reign the Elector made a steadfast effort to prevent forcible enlistment, and went so far in opposition to neighboring sovereigns, who acted differently, that once, at least, this led to a formal declaration of war.

His conduct was met by false reports industriously spread abroad to his injury. Frederick of Prussia knew that the Hessian government neither could nor would allow Hessian subjects to be enlisted against their will in foreign service. With consent of the Parliament, Hessian troops could serve as allies for a time regulated by treaty with any friendly power, but the State could never sell its individual citizens into foreign service. King Frederick could never introduce in Hesse the servitude that put his Brandenburg and Pomeranian subjects at his beck and nod. As early as 1760 the Hessian troops took the oath under the Hessian constitution, but the Prussian and Brandenburg people were helplessly bound to the nobility and princes as chattels down to 1808, and it was not until 1848 that the Prussian constitution, as the outcome of a revolution, gave the people the protection which the Hessians had always enjoyed.

The Elector was libelled as no prince was ever before in history. He spent freely and largely of his own private means to help his subjects, yet an American, in his “History of the Trade in Soldiers by German Princes,” tries to show that the Elector of Hesse enriched himself by many millions out of the treasury. The German historian Schlosser, with equal indifference to the truth, charges the Elector with putting in his own pocket the money earned with blood and wounds and life by the brave Hessians in the Seven Years’ War, and that given as compensation for the injury done his country and its capital, making no return to the poor sufferers, and that the American war produced still worse results,—neither the English pay nor the money for wounds received by the soldiers enriched anybody but the Prince. This charge is utterly baseless. The fact is that compensation for wounds was first introduced in the wars of Napoleon, and the money paid for dead and wounded soldiers under all the treaties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was given as compensation for the bounty lost by the enlisted men, and was used for the military hospitals, and never intended for the soldiers. The Elector, whose statue still stands in Cassel, was worthy of his great ancestors, and kept alive the grateful memory of his and their subjects. They have always been free men, without any trace of bad government. Their conduct during the French Revolution showed their patriotism.

After this “Defence” was first published, it was submitted to Mr. Frederich Kapp, the Prussian American, who had attacked the Elector of Hesse in his books, and his charges were referred to the leading authority on Hessian history, who fully refuted them. To further substantiate the character of the Elector, reference is made to the funeral sermon of the Free Masons’ Lodge of Cassel on the death of the noble prince. Kapp’s books, especially his “Soldaten-Handel” [Dealing in Soldiers], are full of sneers at him and at his son, and although Kapp disproves and discredits the “Urias”[1] letter, it is on technical and not moral grounds that he relieves the Elector of the disgraceful charge of dealing in the blood and bones of his subjects out of avarice. He does not contradict Mirabeau’s appeal to the Hessians, full as it is of party hostility. Kapp repeats the false charge that the Elector made money by false lists, so as to draw pay for more soldiers than were really in service, overlooking the fact that the annual and semi-annual muster-rolls made this impossible. He says the expenses of fitting the soldiers for the field were not paid by the Elector, although the money was taken from their pay. He charges the German princes whose soldiers were in the English army with cheating the contractors for supplies. He accepts the apocryphal story told by Seume of the illegal violence with which men were forced into the service, yet in all of these and many other matters Kapp is altogether wrong.

No less an authority than Moser, the historian, long ago pointed out that the Americans, with Franklin at their head, had perjured themselves. The Hessians wrote home their contempt for the leaders and the people of America from actual personal observation. From Washington down the greatest unfairness was shown to the “Loyalists,” who were driven into exile, stripped of all their property. He it was who tried to tempt the Hessians to desert, who proposed to burn New York, who ordered the execution of Andre, who wanted Aspill [Asgill], an entirely innocent man, put to death, and connived at the robbery of the Hessian prisoners of their English pay, prevented their exchange, and kept the stores and clothing sent for them. In Schlözer’s “Letters” are found the unfavorable opinions of the Americans written home by Captain Wagner, wounded at the side of Count Donop; in Wiederhold’s “Diary,” Philadelphia is described as a “confluenz canaillorum,” as bad as Sodom and Gomorrha, those who had escaped the gallows in Europe being warmly welcomed in the New World. Ewald warned the people of a suburb of Philadelphia that there was no honor among them; and Bauermeister, a British adjutant-general, was equally emphatic. Pfister, in his “History of the American Revolutionary War,” gives many details of the bad conduct of the leaders and people of the young republic.

Dr. Kapp’s false charges relate to (1) the enlistment and service of Hessian troops; (2) the frauds practised on them on their discharge; (3) the approval by the Hessian Parliament of the treaty with Great Britain; (4) the payment by England of the amount claimed on account of the Seven Years’ War; (5) the distribution of English pay among Hessian soldiers; (6) the relief of Hessian taxes; (7) the charge that the Elector received for troops enlisted in the British service some 60,000,000 thalers; (8) and “blood” money for the wounded. Much of our [the pamphleteer’s] information is of a confidential kind, but there are plenty of printed books, etc., that, he says, bear him out—biographies of the Elector, sermons on his death, by Raffius, Roques, Rommel, and Pfister, the resolutions of the Guilds on the accession of his successor, all expressing grief for the death of his father; Schlieffen’s “Memoirs,” “Ephemera” of 1785, with Lith’s “Campaigns of the Hessians,” Schlözer’s “Correspondence and Annals,” John Müller’s “Letters,” the “Military Library of 1789,” Ewald’s “Life” in Manvillon’s Military Journal for 1821, Pfister’s “North American War of Independence,” Eelking’s “History,” the Hessian papers of the time, the papers of the Hessian Historical Society, v. Och’s “Observations,” Valentini’s “Recollections,” “Debates of the Parliament of Hesse,” the treaties with England, the rewards and honors paid by the King of England to German officers and soldiers, even Kapp’s writings. There are many unpublished documents, diaries of officers and enlisted men, of pay and quarter-masters, and journals in the archives and offices of Hesse, public and private.