The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War

The history of the German auxiliaries, who fought for Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, has not received from American writers the amount of attention which its importance would seem to deserve. Much has been made of the fact that 7,000 French soldiers and 19,000 French seamen assisted the United States in the siege of Yorktown, but we have forgotten that a force of between 15,000 and 20,000 Germans served for seven years against us; that more than 29,000 were brought to America for this purpose; that more than 12,000 never returned to Germany. The author, in preparing this work, consulted the voluminous records contained in the libraries and archives of Germany, and found original German accounts of every important engagement, and of almost every skirmish of the Revolutionary War, from the year 1776 to the conclusion of the War, except of some of those battles which occurred in the Carolinas and Georgia, and in which few, if any, Germans were engaged. The book begins with the political situation in Hesse-Cassel, the formation of military units, and continues to America and the end of the Revolution. The reader will find many personal and biographical passages, as well as stories and adventures of comparatively unimportant persons through the author’s attempt to give an idea of what sort of people the auxiliaries were, and of what impression America and the Americans made upon them. This is a fascinating depiction of the American Revolution from the German point of view. Softcover, (1884), repr. 2011, Maps, Plans, Appendix, Index, 354 pp.