landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, who kept the cast-off mistress of a French duke, welcomed French adventurers, and maintained a French theatre and corps de ballet.1 He agreed to furnish twelve thousand men, and it is to be said for him that he took a real interest in his men, insisted that they be kept together, and reduced the taxes of his remaining subjects. The least of these petty despots was the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, monarch of twenty thousand subjects, with whose affairs he refused to be troubled. His army was chiefly on paper, and of the six hundred men he agreed to send to America the majority were recruited outside of his own dominions. He was extremely sensitive to the troubles of his own ilk, and died with melancholy a few years later over the death of Louis XVI.-dying as he had lived, a "caricature of a royal martyr." Of the nearly thirty thousand soldiers furnished by these princes during the war over a third never returned to Germany. Some lost their lives, but many remained among the people against whom they were sent. The character of the so-called Hessians is therefore of special interest. It is well illustrated by the autobiography of one of them, a wandering theological student, on his way to Paris." He was seized by the recruiting officers of the landgrave of Cassel-that "great broker of men." 1 Lowell, Hessians in the Revolution, 5, 6. "No one was safe from the grip of the seller of souls." Recruits came in from the plough, the highways, and from the neighboring states. Persuasion, cunning, deception, force-all served, and the net caught political malcontents, spendthrifts, loose livers, drunkards, restless people "an indescribable lot of human beings." Strangers of all kinds were arrested. There was "a runaway son of the muses from Jena, a bankrupt tradesman from Vienna, a fringemaker from Hanover, . . . a monk from Würzburg," and a "Prussian sergeant of hussars." How willingly they all went, Schiller has pictured for us in his "Kabale und Liebe": "A few saucy fellows stepped out of the ranks and asked the colonels at how much a yoke the prince sold men; but our most gracious master ordered all the regiments to march onto the parade-ground, and had the jackanapes shot down. We heard the crack of the rifles, saw their brains spatter the pavement, and the whole army shouted, 'Hurrah! to America!" A defence was not wanting for this selling of men "to be dragged," as Frederick the Great wrote Voltaire, "like cattle to the shambles." Had not men in all ages slaughtered each other for hire? The Swiss had long been wont to fight as mercenaries; Xenophon's ten thousand Greeks did the same. was a natural instinct of mankind. To Mirabeau's charge that it was "the greatest of crimes," "an offence against the freedom of nations," to send them to fight the freedom-seeking Americans, it was asserted It that America's boasted liberty was "a deceitful siren." Some of the princes had made a pretence of offering their aid to George III. without compensation, presaging the "Holy Alliance," the banding together of kings to suppress one another's rebellious subjects. As for the "dirty selfishness" of the princes, as Frederick called it, they intended to use the money to pay their princely debts. Foreign money would flow into their poor realms, and the troops would thus be fighting their ruler's worst enemies his debts. The soldier would be paid, and would return with his savings, "proud to have worked for his country's and his own advantage.' In the English Parliament the treaties with the princes were violently attacked. They were denounced as "downright mercenary bargains for the taking into pay of a certain number of hirelings, who were bought and sold like so many beasts for slaughter." 'Let not the historian," plead Alderman Bull, "be obliged to say that the Russian and German slave was hired to subdue the sons of Englishmen and of freemen." Though there was a natural human sentiment against this hiring of soldiers, yet the opponents of the treaties had precedent against them. Mercenaries had been used to suppress the Highland rebellion, and a regiment containing many "hirelings" had been used in the American colonies-indeed, the colonies had not been loath to accept the aid of such troops themselves. The strongest argument brought against the treaties was that, if Great Britam formed alliances and hired foreign troops, the colonies.would feel justified in seeking like aid, and France, Spain, or Prussia might conceive that it had as good a right as the petty German princes to interfere in a domestic quarrel.' But all the Whig opposition-the eloquence of Fox and Barré and Burke-was in vain against this method of recruiting men, as it was against the bill for raising the strength of the army. The German soldiers were hired and shipped for America. 'Parliamentary Register, 1st series, V., 174-216. CHAPTER VII CONTEST FOR NEW YORK CITY (1776) OLLOWING the ministerial plan of a cam FOLLOWING paign for the possession of the Hudson, Howe, who after his evacuation of Boston had waited helplessly three months at Halifax for his provision ships, left, June 7, for New York. Within three weeks he and his transports were off Sandy Hook.' His brother, Lord Howe, whose naval preparation in England had been delayed by a severe winter, arrived a few days later, convoying his transports loaded with German soldiers and a British regiment.2 Howe decided to land at Staten Island, where he could watch the American attempts to blockade North and East rivers. Howe's ships, therefore, came up the Narrows between Staten and Long islands (July 2) with a fair wind and rapid tide, a spectacle very alarming to the Whig inhabitants of New York. The city was in an uproar-the alarm-guns firing, the troops repairing to their posts, and everything "in the 1 Kemble, Papers, I., 76, 79, 383. |