To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  But there was more than money at stake in a potential mercenary contract with Britain. Hesse’s size, wealth, and geography placed it in a dicey position. Squeezed between France and Prussia, Hesse found itself too often the battleground between ambitious and bellicose great powers, pressured to take a side in the seemingly endless conflicts that plagued central Europe or pay the price. To maintain its autonomy as a small state in a world of giants Frederick George III, like his ancestors before him, turned to his British kin. George III of Britain was a member of the German House of Hanover and Elector of Hanover, Hesse’s neighbor to the north. He was also Frederick George’s uncle, strengthening with ties of blood an age-old strategic alliance. A mercenary contract thus served two important purposes for Hesse: it provided much-needed financial relief, and it strengthened a relationship with Britain and Hanover that helped keep the principality free from the grasp of France and Prussia.

  This balancing act between solvency and autonomy was not a unique concern among smaller states in eighteenth-century Europe. In his role as head of the War Commission of the Duke of Weimar, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe saw this struggle to maintain both sovereignty and neutrality first-hand. Pressured by Prussia to provide troops for a war with Austria, Goethe found himself, and Weimar, with two choices, neither of them good. He could refuse Prussia’s request for troops, at which point Prussia might well seize them anyway, eroding Weimar’s sovereignty, or he could acquiesce, and supply Prussia with soldiers, thus voiding Weimar’s neutrality and making it a target of Austria in the coming war. Goethe’s recommendation of prevarication and the creation of a confederation of small states came to naught, and Weimar was forced to recruit troops for Prussian service, for Goethe, “an unpleasant, hateful, and shameful business.” For Hesse and its neighbors, the situation in 1775 was much the same, and many eventually decided that British money and British protection were an unfortunate, even hateful, necessity.19

  The reaction to the convention of 1775 was decidedly mixed. The Hessian people largely accepted the practice of mercenary alliances, and their armies had fought for the British before, but the American War was something altogether different. In previous wars, they had been asked to fight for the British against their traditional enemies, France foremost among them, nations they feared would one day engulf their tiny principalities and force them to convert to the Roman Church. Fighting as mercenaries in such defensive wars thus made good sense both financially and strategically. Sailing across the sea to put down a rebellion of British subjects, on the contrary, made little sense to German soldiers and German elites alike. For the intelligentsia of Germany the war was indefensible. Those influenced by the Enlightenment thought just war was only possible when it was a defensive necessity. A war of conquest and repression, especially one against the Enlightenment-inspired American colonists, was almost impossible to support. Kant, Schiller, Herder, and other prominent intellectuals opposed the war, as did the enlightened but often war-hungry Frederick the Great of Prussia, who told Voltaire that the German princes had sold their “subjects to the English as one sells cattle to be dragged to the slaughter.” The Comte de Mirabeau went further, urging the German people, and German soldiers in particular, who had been “betrayed . . . oppressed, sold and humiliated” to open their eyes and “quit this country sullied by despotism, cross the ocean, flee to America. Embrace your brothers, defend that noble nation against the arrogant greed of its oppressors!”20

  Frederick II of Hesse was caught off guard by this outpouring of opposition, especially as the response from the wider population was also decidedly mixed. Although it is unclear whether large numbers accepted the position of the philosophes about the justness of the war, many soldiers and their families clearly did their best to avoid participating in it. Scores of soldiers quickly deserted, and potential recruits emigrated to other nearby states to avoid conscription. Families encouraged their sons to desert or hid them before they were supposed to depart. In a desperate attempt to prevent his son from being sent to America, one old man, already bereft of a wife, amputated one of his son’s fingers. When the authorities discovered the ruse, father and son alike were arrested. In prison, with all his options seemingly gone, the widower took his own life, an early casualty of someone else’s war.21

  It was not the prospect of warfare itself that frightened so many off, but rather the widespread fear of a perilous Atlantic crossing, rumors of the dangers of the Americas, and uneasiness at the prospect of a long separation from families at a time when every hand was needed to stave off famine and ruin. With few volunteers and plentiful deserters, Frederick and his fellow princes often had to turn to new methods for raising the troops they were now contractually bound to supply. In some areas, individuals who would normally have been exempt from military service due to their vital importance to their families’ income were enlisted, as were many who were technically too old or too physically weak to serve. One Hessian salt transporter claimed to have been grabbed in a church and forced into the army, and was only released after a government review of the past nine years of his business records revealed that his impressment would unduly harm the collection of the salt tax. Although impressment was officially illegal, reports were regularly received of Hessian recruiters not only impressing Hessian subjects, especially vagrants and criminals, but also seizing foreign travelers and kidnapping peasants living just across the border. Indeed, Frederick received numerous diplomatic requests for the release of foreign abductees throughout the period.22

  Still, many Germans were clearly willing to take the risk and fight for the British across the ocean. Although he often had to scrape the bottom of the barrel or resort to dirty tricks, Frederick was in the end able to meet his quota of 12,000 men as well as the 1,000 additional men sent every year between 1776 and 1782 to replace the numbers lost to injury, death, and desertion. For most, the greatest appeal was financial. For the younger sons of impoverished landholders, for young peasants who were surplus to the needs of their families, or for those who just could not make the land pay—the enlistment bonuses and wages were paid at British rates, well in excess of usual German military pay—an army life was worth the risk. For others, who had heard of the bounty of the Americas, the military offered free passage to a new life, and many joined the army with the express plan to settle in America once the colonies had been firmly put back in their place. Whatever the reason, over the next seven years of war, 30,000 soldiers, and countless wives, children, and other dependents who could not survive the long separation, made the journey from central Europe, traveling downriver on the Rhine, the Main, and the Weser to the great ports on the North Sea before crossing the tempestuous Atlantic and landing on the troubled shores of North America. As one soldier later remembered the melancholy departure from Hesse, “when the drums beat all of us had to hurriedly continue our march. However, the good people felt sorry for us, and young and old accompanied us to the edge of the city and bade us farewell with tear-filled-eyes.”23

  After tear-drenched goodbyes and a long and perilous ocean crossing, the German mercenaries landed on American shores to the accompaniment of considerable colonial venom. They knew they were there to put down a rebellion, but they still must have been surprised by the vehemence of American rhetoric, its dehumanizing language and the persistent rumors of Hessian brutality. Before they even arrived, there were reports that as many as 60,000 German mercenaries, many of them specially trained marksmen, were on their way to suppress the revolution. Stories quickly spread of their inhuman, animalistic appearance and their merciless behavior. In the American press they were described as “ugly devils,” “orang-outang murdering brutes,” “sons of Belial,” and compared to other foreign boogey-men, including Lord Dumore’s army of freed slaves. They were, it was rumored, to be part of a new 90,000 man strong army of conquest, including all the uncivilized villains of the Patriot imagination, “Hessians, Tories, Negroes, Japanese, Moors, Esquimaux, Persian archers, Lapland
ers, Feejee Islanders.”24

  Elsewhere, Hessians were accused of digging up graves to expose bodies and indiscriminately plundering the countryside. “If they see anything they want,” one newspaper reported, “they seize it, and say, ‘Rebel food for Hesse man.’ ” The Pennsylvania Evening Post warned its readers that because they stood up to the tyrannical George III, “we will have our towns burnt, our country desolated, our fathers, brothers, and children butchered . . . by Hanoverians, Hessians, Brunswickers, Waldeckers, Canadians, Indians and Negroes.” It was “a mercenary army, more venal than a court favorite, more savage than a band of Tatars, more spiritless than the sorry, sooty sons of Afric.” A poem titled “To Virginia”, published in Freeman’s Journal in July 1776, encapsulated many American views of German mercenaries as a ravaging horde of foreign oppressors:

  And now, when Britain’s mercenary bands

  Bombard our cities, desolate our lands,

  (Our pray’rs unanswer’d, and our tears in vain,)

  While foreign cut-throats crowd th’ ensangui’d plain.25

  Nevertheless, many of those who served opted to remain in America when the war ended. Some hoped eventually to return to Europe, but as officer after officer recorded in the last days of the war, many had no thought of resuming their old lives. Ten privates in New York told an officer that “they have no desire to return to Germany and that they wish to seek their fortune in America.” Settling in America had been the ultimate goal of many who signed up to fight for King George. For others, it was the experience of the verdant American landscape that inspired them to remain in the New World after the fighting was over. For men such as Emanuel Hausmann, inured to the poor soil of their native land, America seemed a paradise. In Friedrich von Urff’s autograph book he drew a sketch of a Pennsylvania farm, nestled among juniper bushes on the banks of a shimmering river, accompanied by the words, “As beautiful as a rose may be, it still withers on the vine/But a true friend remains true to the end of time!” With this vision of an American life haunting his dreams, Hausmann would remain in America, foregoing old friends for the new vine.26

  The cost of the American War for the mercenary regiments was steep. The army from Hesse-Kassel, which sent 19,000 men to America over the course of the war, lost 535 men in battle, but a total of nearly 5,000, more than a quarter of those who served, to all causes, primarily disease. An additional 3,000 men deserted or chose to remain behind in America after the war. The casualty rates and rates of desertion for the mercenary contingents from other German states were similarly high.27

  For such small states, the loss of so many men was a difficult burden to bear. Of the 12 per cent of Hesse-Kassel’s able-bodied male population who left for America, nearly half never returned. The American War, for the Hessians, however, was a family affair, and large numbers of wives and children accompanied the soldiers to North America, a fact amply illustrated by the church books of the regimental chaplains, packed full of records of marriages and births among the troops. Many of these wives and children died over the course of the war, or remained with their husbands to settle in America, and a large proportion of the young population of Hesse was lost in the war.28

  Rural areas were the hardest hit. Peasants made up the bulk of the army, and their absence caused a dramatic labor shortage in many areas. Some farmers attempted to hire foreign laborers to make up the shortage, but government-instituted price ceilings, designed to protect urban areas, prevented them from offsetting increased labor costs. As was usual, the poor suffered the most. Larger farms had been exempted from military service, so the burden fell most heavily on small farmers, who could not do without the labor of the men sent to America. So dire was the predicament that many such families petitioned the government to release their husbands and sons from the army, to no avail. As a result, the numbers of people, especially women, listed on the poor rolls rose dramatically. In Marburg, for instance, 100 soldiers had been sent to America. As a result of this loss, eighty-two new individuals were placed on the poor rolls, including thirty soldiers’ wives. When the war ended and British subsidies stopped, many in Germany must have looked around and wondered what it had all been for. As Dana rode through an increasingly empty countryside he must have been astounded that the effects of the war were everywhere to be seen. Even in Germany, thousands of miles from the battle lines of North America, the effects of the war, the deep poverty and the depopulation of the countryside, were manifest.29

  Dana and young John Quincy Adams arrived in St. Petersburg on August 27, 1781, after a bone-jarring trip from Frankfurt through the impoverished hills and patchwork principalities of central Germany to the university town of Leipzig before heading north to Berlin. Traveling in haste through the night, his carriage had overturned, “broken into pieces” in the “midst of a Forest” on the uneven road. Dana found Berlin much more to his taste than the other German cities he had passed through on his journey. “Berlin is the prettiest City I have anywhere seen,” Dana enthused, particularly admiring its wide, well-ordered streets and elegant buildings. But the regimented character of Berlin was also a dark reflection of the character of its ruler and the nature of his rule. Dana, by now no stranger to the tragic effects of the German military state, had no time for the harsh militarism of Prussia or the despotic tendencies of the supposedly “enlightened” Frederick the Great. The king was detested by his subjects, Dana reported, considered to be as “unfeeling a Tyrant as ever existed” and his people “born down by the enormous weight of his Stupendous Military System.” His celebrated reforms were no better in Dana’s republican eyes, “the arbitrary and capricious regulations of as complete a despot as has ever been sent into the world to curse mankind.” The charms of Berlin and his own illness and exhaustion notwithstanding, Dana would have preferred to make for Russia immediately, but the need for a new carriage meant a delay of several days.30

  The journey from Berlin to St. Petersburg was more than 1,000 miles long, on rough, rudimentary roads, with only the occasional rustic inn to break the dreary slog. Dana was driven by a sense of mission, however, a belief that he had a vital part to play on the world stage at a critical moment in the birth of his country. With friends and family putting their lives on the line back in America, he could brook no delay, afford no physical weakness. From Berlin he journeyed north-east into Poland, stopping at the port city of Danzig with its tree-lined streets and “Dutch stile” buildings before continuing to Konigsberg, home of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant, finally arriving in Russian territory at Riga on August 17. Three days later, Dana and his party began the last leg of their journey, continuing north-east through Estonia to Narva and St. Petersburg. When he finally saw the outskirts of the Russian capital after 50 days of rugged travel, Dana must have been exhausted, but he was also impatient to begin the crucial business of diplomacy. For all his haste, Dana would find no warm welcome in the land of the tsars, no diplomatic reception, none of the desperate urgency that coursed through his own weary body.

  St. Petersburg was a new city by European standards, nearly a century younger than Dana’s beloved Boston. In 1703 Tsar Peter the Great had ordered the construction of a new city to match his modernizing ambitions, a city that would allow him to escape the stale confines of Moscow. In the years since 1703, Peter’s new capital had risen out of the marshes of the River Neva like a Slavic Brigadoon, an Enlightenment city of stone buildings, spacious squares, and scenic canals laid out in a logical grid pattern. By the time of Dana’s arrival in 1780, St. Petersburg had a new ruler, but one no less driven to demonstrate her enlightened bona fides in bronze and marble. Catherine had not been born to rule. A princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, she had married into the Russian royal family in 1745 when she wed the future Emperor Peter III. Clever, strong-willed, and utterly ruthless, Catherine was not content with standing in her husband’s shadow for long, especially when it appeared that the unstable and much-despised emperor was plott­­­ing to remove both Catherine and her son. In J
uly 1762, with the aid of her lover Grigory Orlov, Catherine secured the support of the army and marched on the Winter Palace, outmaneuvering the duplicitous tsar and forcing his resignation. To the nation Catherine presented the coup as a necessary action to preserve Russia from the tsar’s mental instability. When Peter III was soon thereafter poisoned and strangled by Orlov and his brothers, Catherine publicly declared the death to have been a “bloody accident,” the result of piles and “cholick.”31

  The St. Petersburg Dana encountered in 1780 was in many ways a direct result of Catherine’s contentious rise to power. Catherine would always be sensitive about her legitimacy as tsar, a fact that fueled her desire to transform Peter the Great’s capital into the magnificent jewel in her own crown. From the early years of her reign, Catherine embarked upon myriad projects of urban improvement, transforming St. Petersburg into a cultural showcase, a model city of the European Enlightenment. Streetlights were added, streets were paved, rivers embanked, and a city of wood slowly transformed into a metropolis clad in stone. It was not merely for show. There was genuine intellectual heft behind Catherine’s modernizing endeavors. She corresponded with many of the towering cultural figures of the age and brought celebrated intellectuals, architects, and artists to her city on the Neva. She championed printing and periodicals, painting and sculpture, and sent an army of agents to the capitals of Europe to amass an art collection befitting a world capital.32