by Howard Fast
Most of their names are remembered only in dusty regimental files stored in the basements of various libraries and antiquarian societies, and even the memory of their individual names brings neither profit nor glory to those who died so young. Like most dead, they ask quietly for understanding and for no more than that. No one can speak for them. But one can say that we sin against them if we take their names in vain, and the taking of their names in vain is unfortunately all too easy and glib a part of our day-to-day life in this time in which I write.
However, some of those who were with Washington, particularly among his immediate circle of officers, must be mentioned in terms of their subsequent actions and fate. Nathanael Greene in particular grew in skill and in stature as the war went on. He became perhaps the finest, the most intellectual and the most intrepid military commander on the Continental side. It was owing to his acumen and understanding of the forces he led as well as those he fought against that the great victory at Yorktown in 1781 was achieved.
A word more must be said of John Glover, who led the New England fishermen regiments. The officers of the American Revolution were for the most part educated men who were of the middle class and who owned property. However, among them were many exceptions, as for example, General Greene and John Glover. A shoemaker, later a fisherman, a very plain, outspoken New England man, he was a thorn in the side of the officers of General Washington’s staff. He did not like them; they did not like him. Unlike Lee and Gates he was neither a gossip nor a conspirator. If anything, his tendency was to say very little indeed. But he led a brigade of New England fishermen and sailors who were dependable and efficient in what they knew how to do. And he despised the inefficiency and the foolishness that was a part of so much of the American army’s efforts during the first two years of the war. In particular he made an enemy of the Boston bookseller, Henry Knox, who was general of artillery and who belonged to the inner circle around General Washington.
During the two generations that followed the American Revolution, there was an outpouring of laudatory accounts purportedly describing what had happened. These accounts were concerned far less with the truth of history than with the ennoblement of everyone who took part in the American Revolution and who fitted into the slot that they labeled patriot. It was during this time that John Glover was eclipsed and indeed to some extent read out of history by a new group of Boston authorities who had taken for themselves and for their own historical privilege the history of the American Revolution.
Ultimately a bronze statue of John Glover was erected on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. But even today the histories of the period fail to comprehend fully the role that he and his seamen played. The army that was thrown together in 1775 and 1776 was far from a professional army. Years later the remnants of this army, stiffened by the enlistment of thousands of new men, many of them from Pennsylvania, became the finest military force in the Western Hemisphere. It can be said that in 1783, just before its disbandment, the army of the thirteen colonies was more effective and better trained as a military instrument than the troops of any European country.
This training was the result of the years of war that the American army had endured and that had seen it shaped as a fighting force. Yet these years of war could not have taken place without the role played by Colonel Glover and the regiments he commanded.
John Sullivan, the lawyer who had taken command after the capture of General Lee, was sent by Washington into the Mohawk and Genesee Valleys to meet the threat posed by Butler’s Tory Rangers and the Indians he led. Sullivan held the frontier and comported himself well. After the war, he became governor of New Hampshire. He died in New Hampshire in his fifty-fifth year.
William Alexander, Lord Stirling, remained with the army as long as his health permitted. Then, ill, and despondent at leaving a struggle to which he had committed himself so wholly, he returned to his home in Albany. He died in 1783, the year the war ended.
Like so many of his time, Henry Knox was short-lived, and he died in 1806 at the age of fifty-six. Throughout his life, his girth increased, nor did he ever waver from his single purpose, to serve Washington in any manner the Virginian desired. Perhaps he was fortunate, for few men live most of their lives with an idol that remains unshattered. He became secretary of war under the Articles of Confederation and then served in Washington’s cabinet, hiding whatever inner man there was under a façade of jolly fat-man mirth.
John Cadwalader, the man who turned back after crossing the river, was cleared of charges of treason brought against him and also of charges of cowardice directed at him. In April of 1777 he became Brigadier General of all the Pennsylvania Militia, thus paying a very small price indeed for his desertion of Washington on that morning in 1776.
Of that other man who failed to cross the Delaware, very little is known. Brigadier General James Ewing disappears from history and from the minds of Americans, perhaps a fate that he justly deserved. We know that he fought under Braddock in the French and Indian War and that he was made Brigadier General of Pennsylvania Militia. But who was he actually? In his memoirs, Wilkinson remembers him as General Irvin. William S. Stryker, as puzzled as most historians, quotes a Dr. Gordon who calls the General “Erwing.” Thomas Marshall, an officer of the army, refers to him as Irvine, and Washington refers to him hardly at all.
General Gates went on with his plotting and his cliquism. Even though in 1777 he won national fame for his victory at Saratoga, he could never nurture his soldiers’ admiration into love. The so-called Conway Cabal, which had as its intention the replacement of Washington with Gates as commander in chief, came to nothing. In 1780 Gates suffered a bitter defeat at the Battle of Camden. He was removed from his post of commander of his army and replaced by Nathanael Greene. Two years later a congressional committee was organized to investigate him but then canceled the investigation before it ever took place. Forgotten, he died in New York City in 1806.
The two young aides of General Washington, James Monroe and Alexander Hamilton, made their own mark on history, the one to become President of the United States, the other to achieve a short but brilliant career that was terminated finally by Aaron Burr.
Young Captain William Washington, that distant cousin—possibly—of the commander in chief, fought brilliantly through the war. A big, easygoing, good-natured young man, with the open cherubic face of a well-fed boy and the body of a professional athlete, he established no claim for service and drifted out of history easily and comfortably.
General Charles Lee, that one-time companion of General Gates, was exchanged for a British officer and given his command again. At the Battle of Monmouth he led a retreat that George Washington intercepted, and there on the battlefield Washington cursed him roundly, beat him with the flat of his sword and to all effects brought his career to an end. Subsequently, documents came to light that revealed a treasonable relationship between General Charles Lee and General Howe, the British commander, in which Lee would aid Howe to capture the city of Philadelphia.
Lee was court-martialed for disobeying orders and suspended from service for a year. His abuse of Washington caused John Laurens, an admirer of Washington, to challenge him to a duel, out of which they both emerged alive. In 1780, he was dismissed from military service by Congress, and from there on his life moves into the shadows; little is known of the two years remaining to him before he died.
General Hugh Mercer, Washington’s best and closest friend, died of a bullet wound a few days after the Battle of Trenton at the Battle of Princeton, for Washington had paused only to regroup his forces and then had crossed the river again to attack and defeat the British garrison at Princeton.
Johnny Stark of Vermont lived on to be ninety-four years old. Perhaps more than any of his companions, he lived a life of fullness and fulfillment. He died in the twilight of his years in his beloved Vermont.
And finally that most colorful of the young officers serving under George Washington, James Wilkinson, whom I took
the liberty of paraphrasing frequently, deserves some space; for his certainly was the strangest of all careers. After the Battle of Trenton, he rejoined General Gates and with Gates plotted against his commander in chief to an extent where even Congress censured him publicly. In spite of this censure Congress promoted him to the rank of brigadier general in 1777, when he was only twenty years old according to some records and twenty-three according to others, for nothing concerning Wilkinson was ever the absolute truth.
He was the confidence man supreme, and so eloquent in conveying his own virtues that in 1778 the Continental Congress made him secretary of the board of war. He had to resign this post because of the scandal of his involvements with General Gates in the Conway Cabal. By 1779 he had become clothier general of the army, a position he held for two years. During that time he had apparently stolen so much money in his connivances with tailors that he was forced to resign. Finally, feeling a need to remove himself from the public eye, Wilkinson went to Kentucky, and by 1782 he was accepting bribes for the purpose of making the state of Kentucky a bastion of Mexico. He built a most notorious reputation among the western conspirators who were intriguing for a connection with Mexico and secession from the new United States of America as a way to gain Spanish ports for American shipping.
The most remarkable feature of Wilkinson was his adroitness. By 1791 he had slid his way out of the scandals and conspiracies he had been involved in and reentered the army. When Anthony Wayne died in 1796, Wilkinson became the ranking officer of the American army. He was still taking pay from the Spaniards when as governor of the Louisiana territory in 1805 he entered, with Aaron Burr, into a scheme for dividing the western half of the United States from the mother country. Then after some plotting and further consideration, Wilkinson decided that it would be more profitable to betray Burr than to befriend him. Having made this decision, Wilkinson went to Thomas Jefferson and revealed to him all the details of Burr’s conspiracy. Wilkinson then became the prosecution’s chief witness at Burr’s trial. The defense attorneys argued, and with some justification, that Wilkinson had spent his life betraying every trust that was ever reposed in him. In spite of all this he managed to have himself cleared by an army board of inquiry. The rest of his life played out like a comic opera of fraud and deceit. Many of his contemporaries remembered him with delight as the scoundrel par excellence.
The Hessian officers were less fortunate in their future, and they were less easily forgotten. The court-martial that they all eventually had to face was far more stringent in its verdicts than the Congress of the United States in its judgments of American officers who had failed in their efforts. The Hessians succumbed to the common human characteristic of blaming the dead, since the dead are voiceless, and the accusation against Colonel Rahl by his fellow officers was “dereliction of duty.”
Lieutenant Piel, one of the officers who fought with the Hessians and who took part in the court-martial, eventually wrote his story of what had occurred in Trenton. Here is the Hessian lieutenant’s account, translated by Washington Irving:
For our whole ill luck we have to thank Colonel Rall [sic]. It never occurred to him that the rebels might attack us; and, therefore, he had taken scarce any precautions against such an event. In truth, I must confess we have universally thought too little of the rebels, who, until now, have never on any occasion been able to withstand us.
Our Brigadier [Rahl] was too proud to retire a step before such an enemy, although nothing remained for us but to retreat.
General Howe had judged this man from a wrong point of view, or he would hardly have entrusted such an important post as Trenton to him. He was formed for a soldier, but not for a general. At the capture of Fort Washington he had gained much honor while under the command of a great general, but he lost all his renown at Trenton where he himself was General. He had the courage to dare the hardiest enterprise; but he alone wanted the cool presence of mind necessary in a surprise like that at Trenton. His vivacity was too great; one thought crowded on another, so that he could come to no decision. Considered as a private man, he was deserving of high regard. He was generous, open-handed, hospitable; never cringing to his superiors, nor arrogant to his inferiors; but courteous to all. Even his domestics were treated more like friends than servants.
My own judgment of Colonel Rahl would be more generous than Lieutenant Piel’s. From all I can gather from various conflicting statements about the battle, Lieutenant Piel, who was close to or in the guardhouse that was attacked by William Washington and James Monroe, more easily lost his nerve and his presence of mind than did Colonel Rahl. In fairness, it should be remembered that Colonel Rahl kept his head and that as long as he was alive the tide of battle appeared to have turned in favor of the Hessians.
Rahl was buried in Trenton in the graveyard of the Presbyterian church. On his gravestone it was written:
“Hier liegt der Oberst Rahl
Mit ihm ist alles all!”
(“Here lies Colonel Rahl
For him, all is over.”)
The Hessian officers were exchanged for American officers who were captives of the British. Eventually all of those who survived the Battle of Trenton returned either to various commands in the Hessian units that were with the British army in America or back to Hesse to retire from the service.
Time has decked the Hessians with a great many characteristics that have little relationship to the truth. We are all too ready, under the influence of the First and Second World Wars, to compare the Hessian mercenaries to Hitler’s troops, but such a comparison is totally fallacious. The Hessians were professional soldiers of the eighteenth century, and they had all of the best and all of the worst features of such mercenaries. It was not until the French Revolution that the notion of a man fighting for the defense of his own nation as a volunteer matured into a justification of a military career for enlisted men.
In truth the Hessians were no different from the British or French soldiers or the soldiers of any other German state. The Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel had developed a small but well-trained army that was considered one of the very best on the European continent. The army was in great demand for mercenary service by the various European sovereigns. The men in this army were not slaves but volunteer soldiers, who sought mercenary status as a means of bettering their condition. This is not a moral judgment but simply a statement of fact. When the King of France sent his troops to America to fight on the side of the Americans, they were mercenaries like the Hessians who were fighting on the side of the British. This must be seen clearly in order to understand the position of the Hessians in America.
Certainly King Louis of France was far more of a tyrant than the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, and certainly French soldiers had as little interest in the American cause as the Hessian soldiers had in the British cause. The fact is that in 1776, except for the Americans, every army in the Western world was made up of mercenaries. Small nations like Switzerland or Hesse, unable to engage in blood baths of their own devising, hired out their soldiers to larger nations who could better afford the brigandage of war. But it is unrealistic to believe that the British regular—who would fire his musket in any direction ordered—gave one small damn as to whether the Continental soldiers were free or a part of the Empire.
The Hessians were well paid and outfitted and usually well fed. If married and without child, they were allowed to bring their wives on campaign with them, and this was the case with hundreds of Hessian soldiers in America. Man for man, they were superior both in the quality of their soldiering and in their pride in their service to the British soldier of the line.
Though the Hessian officers were exchanged for American officers and went back into the ranks of the British army or home to their own land, no such good fortune awaited the Hessian soldiers, that is, the Hessian rank and file who were taken prisoners at Trenton. Hundreds of them were sold into servitude as chattel slaves, to do forced labor in the iron works at Durham, the same iron works that ha
d created the Durham boats that Washington used to cross the Delaware. They were bought by the forge owners for thirty Spanish dollars per man, and others were sold to the Pennsylvania charcoal burners to clear forests and create fuel for the furnaces. Still other Hessian soldiers were indentured to American farmers at the price of eighty Spanish dollars per Hessian couple, man and wife. This indenture was for a period of three years, and during those years the Hessians were virtual slaves, their lot in no way superior to the fate of any black slave in America at that time.
They were, however, given an alternative. They were told that as prisoners of war they were free to enter the American army, where their military knowledge would be valued and respected. Hessian officers were offered one hundred acres of land if they would enlist in the American ranks.
Many Hessians availed themselves of this opportunity. Others, who were sold into indentured servitude, escaped. There is in German a very considerable literature of the adventures of these Hessians in the American forests as they sought their way back to their own regiments and of the hardships they endured. Many, including some with their wives, made their way through the wilderness and survived to rejoin their regiments and eventually returned to Hesse-Cassel.
The records show that a total of 16,992 Hessians were brought to America. Of this number, 10,492 returned to Europe in 1783. No exact figures are available. However, we can take it as very close to the historical fact that 6,500 Hessians who came to America remained. Some of them were killed or wounded, and perhaps some of them died of their injuries, but most of them became American citizens and made their lives here.
Bibliography
Adams, James Truslow. Revolutionary New England. Atlantic-Little Brown; Boston, 1923
Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Period of American History. 4 vols. Yale U. Press; New Haven, 1934, 1938
Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization. Macmillan; N.Y., 1930
