For many years all of the charges discreditable to the Hessians have been drawn from the “Autobiography” of Seume. Much of it was invented by his friend and editor Clodius. It is from beginning to end a false and libellous production. Seume became a friend and admirer of the French Jacobins and repented his service against the Yankees, so he invented the story that he had been forced into the ranks against his will. The fact is that no such compulsion could have been exercised in the face of the orders of the Elector, nor could any young man of Seume’s intelligence have failed to know and exercise his rights.
Seume tells another falsehood in reference to affairs at Ziegenhain. There was a garrison at that place of two companies of infantry and some artillerymen, and four hundred recruits, part of the Eighth Division, on its way from Cassel to America, and a handful of yägers under instruction. Some of the recruits planned a mutiny, and intended to kill a sentry and steal the regimental funds. Their plan was discovered and reported by one of the yägers. A court-martial sentenced two of the mutineers to the gallows and others to chains. Elector Frederick, whose weak point was kindness, reduced the sentence of a dozen of the offenders to whipping, and that of the men sentenced to be hung to imprisonment. This is record evidence, yet Seume says there were fifteen hundred recruits who were all at once charged with intending to rob and run away, among them old service men. Some of them had been sergeants and corporals in the Prussian army, yet Seume, nineteen years old and who had never carried a musket, was chosen robber captain. A worthless tailor from Göttingen betrayed the plot rather than help carry the plunder to the next village. The Elector did show mercy to some, but only to enjoy the protracted misery of the men in jail. Now, if Seume knew of any such plot, he perjured himself by violating his oath in failing to report the fact.
In May, 1782, he says there was an outbreak among the troops at Cassel. A body of recruits from Ziegenhain was increased by an equal number from the then Hessian fortress at Rheinfels, all on their way to America. At that time there were complaints of the poor quality of the recruits sent to the Hessian regiments serving in America, where the war had been going on from 1776. These new recruits were worn-out old soldiers and mere tramps, tempted by the large bounty offered by the American recruiting officers and the high wages promised by Pennsylvania farmers. They were a discredit to the old Hessian regiments with their faithful soldiers, sons of the soil. But the Elector took these strangers in order to relieve his own people of the stress and burden of the war. To satisfy himself, he inspected these new recruits and told them that any man who wanted his discharge could have it on returning the clothing and money given him. Seume could have had his release then if he had asked for it, but he stayed by the colors. Then the troops were sent to the port of embarcation,—at Bremerlehe, not at Münden, as Seume says. The recruits were transferred to General Faucit, of the English army, and put on English transports. Seume says that he said at Rinteln, on the way, that he was a Prussian subject, and was afraid that at Münden he would be recognized, and, as it was Prussian territory, he would be arrested, and he therefore asked to be allowed to march by another route. Why was he so much afraid of the Prussians? Presumably because there was a warrant out for his arrest for some violation of law while he was a student at Leipsic. As to his account of his voyage, it is taken almost word for word from the diary of a Waldeck corporal, Steuernagel, who had six years earlier made the journey to India and America, and was a great story-teller.
The official reports of Colonel Hatzfeld, in command of the detachment to which Seume belonged, and of Commissary Harnier, contain the real facts. The squadron consisted of six vessels for the Hessian recruits, two transports for freight, and eight more troop-ships, and two more with stores, and three frigates as convoy. The names of the ships and the directions as to the care and food of the men are all recorded. There were over one thousand men and a great number of women, wives of the soldiers with their children, all part of the Hessian force,—this was the ninth year of the war and the eighth and last detachment. Next in command to Colonel Hatzfeld was Major von Prüschenk; of captains, lieutenants, and ensigns there were ten,—among them two Münchhausens. The younger one took a friendly interest in Corporal Seume at Halifax. The fleet left the Weser on June 9 and 10, 1782, and the landing at Halifax, in spite of storms and fog and French men-of-war, was made on August 13 without any noteworthy incident, according to the official reports. Seume, however, made the voyage last twenty-two weeks, when in fact that is thirteen weeks longer than it actually lasted, and he declares they never sighted land nor got fresh food, yet there was no unusual death-rate, although Steuernagel complains of the close quarters in the over-crowded ships. On August 19 Colonel Hatzfeld inspected the men with a view to distributing the recruits in the companies and regiments for which they were needed, and not a man was missing from the lists made out when the men embarked and when they disembarked. Just about as true is Seume’s account of the return voyage, which took twenty-three days to England and forty to the German port of Cuxhaven. Seume had a very comfortable time in America, thanks to the help of Lieutenant von Münchhausen. He might have become a Hessian officer, and yet he says it was difficult for any one not a nobleman to get a commission. A glance at the Hessian army list shows that this was not true, for a large proportion of the officers were plain citizens, not of noble families. At this very time Frederick of Prussia said publicly that plain citizens had not the proper feeling of honor necessary to make good officers. Seume’s own colonel, Hatzfeld, and Huth, Rall, Kellermann, Ewald, all men of note and high command, were not nobles, but plain citizens. Seume’s whole service as a Hessian soldier was only for two years. During this time he rose from the ranks to corporal, then to quarter-master, and finally to sergeant, and as he took his discharge in that grade, his complaints are much more discreditable than if he had remained in the ranks,—he perjured himself trebly by deserting. Why did he desert? When the returning troops landed at Bremerlehe they heard that the soldiers who were not natives of Hesse must either re-enlist or be discharged with half a month’s pay. The Hessian soldiers, of course, returned to the pay and allowances of the peace footing.
Hessian soldiers were so well treated that in the last century there was no other army with so few deserters. Why, then, did Seume desert? Why, eight days before the return to Cassel, did he throw away his good name and his pay and his property? Because in a fit of drunkenness he had made himself liable to sharp punishment for his neglect of duty as commissary sergeant, and for fear of the consequences he fled. In ordinary conditions he would never have abandoned the Hessian colors. He makes his fault worse by lying,—pretending that he and others enlisted from Prussian territory were afraid that they would be returned to Prussia and be forced to the hard service in its ranks, and this he says although he knew perfectly well that there was an order published at Bremerlehe which was perfect protection for him and men in exactly his position. Having told one falsehood as to his reason for deserting, he adds another to justify the first, and thus puts himself clearly beyond the pale of credit for any of his statements. He wants to pose as a martyr, and to do so vamps up unfounded charges against the Elector of Hesse.
Between 1783 and 1810 Seume thought it more to his credit to try to forget and make others forget that he voluntarily entered the Hessian service, and pretended that he had been forced into it, as a palliation for serving against the Yankees, and boasted of his desertion, as if that, too, was to his credit. He pretends to give the replies he—an utterly unknown, unimportant enlisted man—made to captains, colonels, and generals. Any such answer would soon have brought down the punishment prescribed by the articles of war for insubordination.
In later life Seume paid dearly for the sins of his youth,—and he did not atone for them by publishing his own autobiography. He had no reason to find fault with the Hessian service; it was only after he had left it that his real troubles began. It is well known how Prussia for eighty years tyrannized over Northern Germany, weighing heavily on its overburdened people, threatening them until Hanover, Brunswick, Hesse, Saxony, and Poland were all forced to forbid its enlistment of men within their borders. It was during these trying times that Seume was taken by force to Emden, in East Prussia, and there put into a Prussian regiment as a common soldier. Twice he deserted,—once when he was on duty as a sentry,—and he was condemned by court-martial to the awful penalty of running the gauntlet, the whipping by a whole line of soldiers. He escaped, finally, by violating his parole. In his Prussian uniform he paid the penalty for the oath to the Hessian flag which he had broken first.
Note.—This pamphlet is a disguised attack on the Prussia of 1866 for seizing and holding Hesse-Cassel, along with Hanover and Brunswick, as part of its own kingdom, driving the Elector of Cassel and the King of Hanover into exile. The author is clearly a champion of the lost cause, and seeks to justify it by rewriting the history of Hesse and Prussia of a hundred years before. He aims at elevating the claims of the Hessian electoral family in the eyes of their former subjects and of the rest of the world, and in depreciating the part taken by Prussia both at the time of the American War of Independence and in enlarging its own borders and increasing its power at the expense of the small sovereign states of Germany, whose princes opposed the aggression of Prussia and its claim to control the whole of Germany. It was the beginning of that series of advances which culminated in the establishment of the German Empire as the outcome of the war with France in 1870. Having crushed out all opposition within and near its borders, having driven the Elector of Hesse away and forced the King of Hanover into a hopeless resistance, Prussia granted its permission to Baden and Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt and Wurtemberg and Saxony and Weimar and a few petty local princes to live on just as long as its own supremacy was recognized and extended. The Franco-German War consolidated the power of Prussia, and its king became the German emperor. Naturally the exiled sovereigns had friends, and they sought to make their claims known. A former Hanoverian Prime Minister wrote novels in which the kind King of Hanover and his allies figured in most heroic guise. The friend of the exiled Elector of Cassel defended his prince by showing the real nature of the alliance between Hesse-Cassel and England a hundred years ago, and thus throwing on Prussia the burden of the responsibility of driving away a prince whose ancestors had done great service to his people. For American students of history this pamphlet has a certain value and interest as throwing a new light on part of our own history, and as showing that there is justification for the Hessians in their alliance with Great Britain and in their service in this country in the resistance made by the mother country to the claim of the colonies to independence. The successful outcome of the American Revolution made it difficult to secure a patient hearing of the other side. Even at this late day, therefore, the foregoing abstract of the “Defence of the Hessians” may not be without value and interest. The authorship of the pamphlet is not as yet made public, but it is evidently the work of a man loyal to the Elector of Hesse-Cassel and earnest in defending his ancestors.—J. G. R.