1775 (68 page)

In July 1775, a score of British recruiting parties were active in Ireland, but with only slight success. Then Irish Catholic nobles, gentry, and prospering merchants stepped forward to help. In Dublin, influential Catholics advised authorities of their support and offered to encourage Catholic enlistment even though it was nominally barred, and the Catholics of Limerick put up half a guinea per volunteer for the first 200 to enlist.
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The Roman Catholic hierarchy went so far as to urge local clergy to preach fast-day sermons on behalf of the British war effort.
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Recruits were also given to expect that they would receive land in America when the rebels were beaten. One Catholic spokesman, Charles O’Connor, looked forward to British victory paving the way for restoring Maryland to Catholic rule as in the seventeenth century. Then it could “act as a bridle here-after on the Republican provinces north and south of them.”
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At first, no new regiments were formed in Ireland, so that existing units could recruit and “top off.” As a result, supposedly “English” regiments became 30 to 40 percent Irish and Scottish. One such, the 48th, with a county tie to Northamptonshire, within a few years turned out to be 29 percent Scottish and 31 percent Irish.
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Few of the Catholic Irish enlistees liked Britain much better than they had a decade earlier, and desertions were common. However, the thinned ranks of many regiments had been filled out.

British War Planners Turn to the Continent

The king’s grandfather, George II, had sent both Scottish Highlanders and German soldiers to America during the French and Indian War—the Black Watch and Montgomerie Highlanders and Hanoverians in the 60th (Royal American) Regiment. Both fought Indians and French, winning colonists’ plaudits. By contrast, little but enmity was forthcoming in 1776 and 1777 when Hessians and Highlanders marched, marauded, stole, and battled through New Jersey counties named for Essex, Middlesex, Somerset, and Monmouth.

That was when New Jersey, in circumstances often chaotic, became the military “cockpit” of the Revolution. In late 1776, as Washington retreated in disarray, lines of command broke down, as did regard for the rules of European-style war. Hessians bore the brunt of criticism. British officers, Loyalists, and aides on General Howe’s staff concurred with some of the Patriot protests. Major Stephen Kemble, the British deputy adjutant general, called the Hessians “outrageously cruel and licentious to a degree.” Pennsylvania Tory Joseph Galloway described Hessian behavior at the Battle of Trenton as “more attentive to the safety of their plunder than to their duty.”
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However, British, Loyalist, and Patriot forces, who also behaved poorly on occasion, had the advantage of blaming Hessians in a common language. It was not surprising that European soldiers, unused to being fired upon by nonuniformed peasants, reacted brutally. English speakers in general, but American Patriots in particular, won what was an important propaganda war.

The British government’s resort to European auxiliary and mercenary soldiers for American coercion may date back to 1774. Gage advised hiring them that autumn, around the time when George III banned the export of munitions from Britain to the restive American colonies. Perhaps sensing that the mercenary business was about to heat up again, Hesse sent an official to London in October to press for a payment still owed from 1756–1763. Countering belief that actual negotiations with Hesse had not begun, one historian contends that “reports of the French envoy Grais make it clear that secret preliminary negotiations began at Hofgeismar during the winter of 1774–1775,” with remaining details being resolved during the weeks after Bunker Hill.
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In any event, bloodstains were barely gone from June’s Massachusetts battlefield before Lord North and his colleagues had multiple mercenary irons in the fire. They had no choice. In 1775, Dutch authorities were
approached to see if the “Scottish Brigade,” in Holland’s service for almost two centuries, could be returned to Britain. That July, Colonel Albrecht von Scheither of the army of Hanover was commissioned to recruit several thousand soldiers in Germany to fill empty places in British regiments in America. King George, in his other role as Elector of Hanover, also began ordering battalions from the Electorate to take over from British units stationed in places like Gibraltar and Minorca, freeing those redcoats for service in North America. And most grandly, in that summer of 1775, Sir Robert Gunning, the British ambassador in St. Petersburg, who counted himself influential with Catherine the Great, began assuring his superiors in London that next year would see 20,000 Russian soldiers sail for Canada and New York.
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The notion of sending soldiers to America who could not speak English struck a chord in Whitehall. Unlike privates and corporals from Hertford or Hampshire, they would not respond to shared political values or to colonial insistence about seeking nothing more than the rights of Englishmen. One British captain wrote home that Russians would not be “seduced by the artifice and intrigue of these holy hypocrits [sic].” General Henry Clinton preferred Russians as unable to communicate or desert.
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Holland’s “Scottish Brigade” was more a mixture of Dutch and soldiers of fortune, albeit with many officers of Scottish descent. When George III requested in 1775 to borrow the brigade, the Dutch prince, Stadtholder William IV, agreed. However, the commercially preoccupied province of Holland objected, preferring complete neutrality that would maintain Amsterdam’s American trade. The Revolution also tapped a central split in Dutch politics between the reform-minded Dutch “Patriot” faction and the pro-British Orangists allied with the stadtholder. One major Patriot leader, Baron Johan van der Capellen, took up the colonies’ cause, and in November 1775, the States-General resolved the issue. The brigade could be made available, but only if it would not be sent out of Europe. Lord North understood that to be a polite rejection.

Hanoverian Colonel Scheither, London’s German recruiter, also came up short. Beginning in September 1775, by mid-1776 he had enlisted only 1,800 men and declined further efforts. Hapsburg officials in Austria, a former British ally now on the French side, opposed Scheither’s activities. Clearly, the Austrians said, George III could recruit in his Hanoverian domain. In the empire’s other states and free cities, Britain’s king had no more right to recruit than a Spanish or Russian ruler would have.
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St. Petersburg also held back. In contrast to 1755, when then-empress
Elizabeth of Russia had agreed to provide a large contingent to fight for Britain in central Europe, Empress Catherine proved uncollaborative. After chilling Ambassador Gunning’s hopes in September, the German-born czarina followed the counsel of Prussia’s Frederick the Great. She sent the British monarch a letter saying that she thought it improper to send Russian troops to another hemisphere to serve a foreign government; better that his majesty put down his own American rebellion. An offended George III complained to Lord North that “she has not had the civility to answer in her own hand, and has thrown out some expressions that may be civil to a Russian ear, but not to more civilized ones.”
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The more coercion minded in Lord North’s Cabinet had welcomed summer’s belief that Russian troops, freed up by the end of the so-called Pugatcheff rebellion in 1774, would ere long do their saber dancing in New York. As we have seen, the Earl of Suffolk was delighted. General Clinton spoke of “my friends the Russians.” Gibbon, the historian of Rome conversant with decadent empires turning to brutish tribes for defense, talked with friends of visiting a barbarian camp should the Russians stop in Britain en route. Edmund Burke deplored any Russian arrangement: “I cannot, at my ease, see Russian barbarism let loose to waste the most beautiful object that ever appeared on this globe.”
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Horace Walpole acidly remarked on the dismissive reply King George got from “Sister Kitty.”

It was more than an amusing episode or simple rebuke to British power. As we will see, Britain faced some degree of backlash against “royal slave-drivers” and the commerce in mercenaries and auxiliaries hitherto broadly accepted across Europe. British finger-pointers had enjoyed some success in 1772 and 1773 comparing Chief Justice Mansfield’s decision ending slavery in England with unrepentant American slaveholding. Now American publicists, including Benjamin Franklin, could impugn Hesse-Cassel and the United Kingdom.

The British market for indentured soldiers—
Soldatenhandel,
which included blood money to rulers in compensation for those slain or maimed—evoked new analogies to slavery, lacking only some
mittel europäisch
Harriet Beecher Stowe to pen
Uncle Hans’s Barracks.
The French dramatist Mirabeau authored
Avis aux Hessois,
in which he roused Hessians—“you betrayed people, oppressed, sold, humiliated by your fate”—to turn and instead defend America. The philosopher Voltaire, in correspondence with Frederick the Great, found the Prussian monarch deploring how the Landgrave of Hesse had “sold his subjects to the English as one sells cattle to be
dragged to the slaughter.” Among German thinkers, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Herder, and Immanuel Kant criticized princely practices and greed.
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In his 1784 tragedy
Kabale und Liebe,
Schiller lamented the selling of German youth into foreign military servitude.
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The opposition in Parliament made similar points. During a 1775 debate in the House of Commons, Frederick Bull, a pro-American MP from London, said, “Let not the historian be obliged to say that the Russian and German slave was hired to subdue the sons of Englishmen and freedom.”
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Lord Camden, a former attorney general, told the House of Lords in early 1776 that the so-called treaties with the German states were “a mere bargain for the hire of troops on one side, and the sale of human blood on the other.”
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Benjamin Franklin, the probable author of an incendiary missive (the so-called
Uriasbrief
) imputing blood money practice to Hesse, did make a mistake; those provisions were not in the Hessian treaty. Reimbursements for death and maiming were only included in the troop-hire treaties Britain negotiated with Brunswick, Waldeck, and Hesse-Hanau.
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Moreover, these
Menschhandel
and “slavery” comparisons were confined to the army. An equal or perhaps better indictment can be attached to the impressment practiced by the Royal Navy on a scale far beyond any other. The French used chained galley slaves until the middle of the eighteenth century, and British impressment, although chainless, was so unhealthy for those pressed, as we saw in
Chapter 5
, that three out of four men pressed supposedly died within two years, with just one in five killed in battle. Some of the Royal Navy’s most abusive practices came in New England waters, where impressment took place on a large scale despite its apparent prohibition in America under the so-called Statute of Anne.

To return to Hessians and Brunswickers, Ambrose Serle, the principal secretary to Admiral Lord Howe, voiced the frustration felt by conciliation-minded British officials. It would have been better, Serle wrote, “if the Rebellion could have been reduced without any foreign troops at all, for I fear our Employment of these upon this service will tend to irritate and inflame the Americans…It is a misfortune we ever had such a dirty, cowardly set of contemptible miscreants.” Many Hessian officers, however, felt that it was the British whose misbehavior had embittered the country people.
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Inasmuch as both Admiral and General Howe were simultaneously peace commissioners in 1776, their discomfort was understandable. The king’s decision to hire mercenaries ranked alongside the burning of coastal towns on Admiral Graves’s orders in swaying colonist opinion during the winter of 1775–1776.

No compendium details American press reaction to the various mid-1775 and late-1775 stages of British mercenary recruitment. How quickly did the newspapers react to the Russian refusal or to the first agreement negotiated with Brunswick? We do not know. But Virginians had heard about the Russian possibility by midsummer. In his July 28 issue of the
Virginia Gazette,
printer Alexander Purdy published portions of letters written in London in May. The czarina had “promised the ministry her assistance to reduce (what they call) the rebellious Americans, for which purpose she has 40,000
Russian bears
at their service, to tear us to pieces.” Purdie added that it was dreadful news if true, but possibly just a scare tactic.
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Later analyses of wartime propaganda revisited the mercenary furor. One twentieth-century commentary judged that “the British, not content with their own brutalities, called to their aid the most vicious and savage allies”—the Hessians. But the author did cite a later partial rebuttal by George Washington: “One thing I must remark in favor of the Hessians, and that is, that our people, who have been prisoners, generally agree that they received much kinder treatment from them, than from the British officers and soldiers. The barbarities at Princeton were all committed by the British, there being no Hessians there.”
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If the Hessians have been overabused, Lord Suffolk and his colleagues in the Cabinet’s caustic and belligerent old guard probably deserve their opprobrium. Back in 1769, the Cabinet’s so-called Bedford faction had voted down Pitt supporters by five to four, thereby continuing rather than ending the tea tax that had provided such incitement four years later.
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Heavy-handedness was a Bedfordite characteristic, foolish when they didn’t have the regiments, ships, logistical awareness, and strategic capacity to back it up.

A Military Mismatch:
Soldatenhandel
in an Era of Popular Revolution