The Hessians.—The bitter partisan feeling during the war has led to a widespread misrepresentation of the share which the Germans took in the Revolutionary War. The employment by England of some thousands of mercenaries recruited in Anspach and Hessia against the American colonies has been extended to include all Germany, regardless of the fact that there was no more ardent supporter of the cause of the colonists in Europe than the King of Prussia. The Hessians were sold to Great Britain at so much per head by their ruler. Their traffic was scathingly denounced by Frederick and the infamous transaction severely condemned by Schiller in his play, “Cabal and Love.”

Hessia represented to the rest of Germany, at that time composed of Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and other States, about what Delaware represents to the whole of the United States. To blame all Germany for the misconduct of an unconscionable princeling is the extreme of injustice. Counting the German regiments under Rochambeau, nominally designated as Frenchmen, and the large number of German settlers in the ranks of Washington’s army under Herkimer, Muhlenberg, Steuben, Woedtke, Pulaski, etc., the Hessian-Anspach contingent was more than offset by the Germans fighting for the cause of American independence.

Thousands of Hessians were induced by their German countrymen to come over and enlist under the banner of the colonists. Pulaski’s flying squadron was recruited from these deserters. Some of the best troops in Washington’s immediate surrounding were former Hessians, and a Hessian deserter became one of Washington’s most trusted messengers in matters of war.

At the end of the war the country was full of Hessians. Many settled in Lebanon, Lancaster and Reading, Pa., and about 1,600 settled four miles from Winchester, Va., in1781. Some of the sterling troops which made up Jackson’s Stonewall brigade in the Civil War were made up of the descendants of the Germans, many of them Hessians, who settled in the Shenandoah Valley.

If the Hessians, fighting reluctantly for a cause in which they had no heart, must be condemned by public sentiment, what shall be said of the native Americans, the Tory element, 26,000 of whom fled to Canada, while thousands of others fought in the English ranks against their own kin? Among the troops surrendered at Yorktown under Lord Cornwallis and General O’Hara, we find enumerated a body of South Carolina militiamen called “Volunteers,” “the Royal American Rangers,” etc., not counting the American deserters who had joined Cornwallis during the siege. (See “Frederick the Great and the American Colonies.”)