Early American History: Hessians in the American Revolution; British Prison Ships

There were nearly 300 sovereignties and over 1,400 estates of Imperial Knights in Germany in the late 1600’s to the early 1700’s. Every one had its own financial, commercial and manufacturing systems and its own regulations and laws, and they were all governed by their own duke or prince who, with the privileged classes, his court and his army, ruled supreme. A map of the era would show the Kingdom of Prussia on one end, Austrian lands on the other, and hundreds of duchies, free cities, landgraves, principalities, electorates and bishoprics between and around.

From the Middle Ages to the English Civil War, German mercenaries were hired and incorporated into the English Army. In the 16th century, Henry VIII of England officially hired German Landesknechts for his campaigns in France and Scotland.The English hired Hessian soldiers during the War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. In 1745 during the Scots Rebellion, 7,000 Hessians were hired. With the American rebellion, England once again turned to the German princes, dukes and margraves who wanted extra money and were willing to sell their soldiers. Germans would end up constituting about one-third of all the land forces fighting for the king in North America.

The Hessian regiments sent to America remained in their own units with their own unit commanders, and often in their own brigades. King George III of England hired units from the German states of Braunschweig, Hesse Hanau, Waldeck, Anhalt-Zerbst and Hesse-Cassel, all commonly all called “Hessians,” to assist with bringing the colonist’s rebellion to order and he needed even more. The financially troubled Margrave of Ansbach-Bayreuth, burdened with debt, committed 1,160 of his troops, receiving £100,000 sterling in exchange, much to the disgust of his uncle, Friedrich the Great of Prussia who could not fathom selling one’s own men.

It was difficult, if not impossible, for the troops to avoid this service. Usually, no subject could leave his country or even marry without permission. Drunks, debtors, political trouble makers and rebels were forced into the ranks along with peasant farm boys if not more than sixty years old and “of fair health and stature.” About 18,000 “Hessian” troops arrived in North America in 1776,

Among the mercenary soldiers stationed in Canada was the German poet J. G. Seume, who had been kidnapped by recruiting officers and forced into foreign military service against his will. Seume’s autobiography, “Mein Leben,” records his experiences in America closing with 1784, and many of his best poems dating from this period. He described his experiences on shipboard with the Hessians: “The men were packed like herring. A tall man could not stand upright between decks, nor sit up straight in his berth. To every such berth six men were allotted, but as there was room for only four, the last two had to squeeze in as best they might. This was not cool in warm weather. Thus the men lay in “spoon fashion,” and when they were tired on one side, the man on the right would call “about face,” and the whole file would turn over at once; then, when they were tired again, the man on the left would give the same order, and they would turn back on to the first side.

The food was on a par with the lodging. Pork and pease were the chief of their diet. The pork seemed to be four or five years old. It was streaked with black towards the outside, and was yellow farther in, with a little white in the middle. The salt beef was in much the same condition. The ship biscuit was often full of maggots. This biscuit was so hard that they sometimes broke it up with a cannon-ball, and the story ran that it had been taken from the French in the Seven Years’ War, and lain in Portsmouth ever since. Sometimes they had groats and barley, or, by way of a treat, a pudding made of flour mixed half with salt water and half with fresh water, and with old, old mutton fat. The water was all spoiled and thick with filaments as long as your finger that had to be filtered through a cloth before drinking. They held their noses while they drank, and yet it was so scarce that they fought to get it. Rum, and sometimes a little beer, completed their fare. Thus crowded together, with close air, bad food, and foul water, many of them insufficiently clothed, these boys and old men, students, shopkeepers, and peasants tossed for months on the Atlantic.”

The regiments were generally allowed six female camp followers, none of whom were unattached women, and all of whom had a duty, either paid or unpaid, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry or hospital work. They received 1/2 of a man’s ration and the children received 1/4 ration. If they were wives and their husband died, they generally had to either remarry within an allotted time or return home. When the 236 men of the 1782 Ansbach-Bayreuth replacement recruits came to the colony they had 9 women with them, all of whom eventually returned to Germany and took their children home with them. These were not camp followers engaged in promiscuity, but “honorable women of sound moral character.”

They were in several Battles, and by 1778 were fighting the French by sea and the American by land. They endured seasikcness and severe storms at sea, and exhaustion and freezing conditions on land. When General John Sullivan’s forces besieged Newport,R.I., for example, the British & German soldiers were exhausted and crowded together in the town like caged cattle.

Cornwallis surrendered the Yorktown garrison on October 19, 1781. Captured Hessian troops were exchanged and released from captivity in May of 1783. George Washington himself made it a point to inform people to treat the Hessians kindly because they were “brought to fight against their will.”By the end of the war in 1783, 17,313 of the total “Hessians” returned to their homelands. Of those who did not, about 7,700 died: 1,200 of whom were killed in action and 6,354 from illness or accidents. About 5,000 total Hessians settled in North America, both in the United States and Canada.

What was the fate of a Hessian deserter when he was caught? Severe mistreatment. 75% of the prisoners aboard British prison ships: patriots, Hessian deserters and even some of their women and children, died agonizing deaths from starvation, disease, flogging and other punishment. The ships which once ferried horses and supplies were converted to these prisons, their portholes nailed closed and covered with iron bars, leaving only small peepholes for air. Each six men received the ration equivalent to one man. The water they were given was contaminated and provided to them in large, filthy “troughs” and the men soon raged with thirst. Their clothing was inadequate, there was no bedding and they were either frozen in cold weather or parched and feverish in the heat. The ships were infested with insects and rats, and dysentery, pox and yellow fever spread wildly, taking a horrible toll. The abuse was so bad it is said that on one occasion the prisoners set fire to their own prison ship, preferring a quicker death to the torture and starvation inflicted upon them by the British.

More Americans died on British prison ships in New York Harbor than in all the battles of the War, and there were at least 16 of these horrible hell-holes anchored in the waters around New York City, the most notorious being the Jersey which held more than a thousand men. Captured officers were put in a former gun room on the ship, sailors were kept in two compartments below the main deck and Hessian deserters, French and Spanish prisoners got stuck in the hellish hold. They died with such regularity that when the British jailers opened the hatches in the morning, they yelled down: “Rebels, turn out your dead!” The estimated 8,000 dead bodies were pulled ashore in clumps and later dumped into shallow pits only 1 or 2 feet deep together.

“Their sickly countenances and ghastly looks were truly horrible,” ship escapee Robert Sheffield later wrote. “Some swearing and blaspheming; some crying, praying, and wringing their hands, and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving, and storming; some groaning and dying – all panting for breath; some dead and corrupting – air so foul at times that a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the boys were not missed till they had been dead ten days.”

At the war’s end in 1782, the bitter and defeated British took it out on a crew of one such ship and, when the prisoners began cheering and celebrating victory, the guards came below and mercilessly hacked at, stabbed, cut, and wounded every one of the weakened prisoners within their reach, then ran up and closed down the hatches so the prisoners would bake in the heat without any water. These floating British death camps killed around 13,000 prisoners, triple the number of Americans who died in all the battles of the entire revolution.

There is a Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument designed by Stanford White in New York City which was built shortly before World War One and dedicated to the 11,000 prisoners who died aboard the British prison ships that once anchored nearby in the Wallabout during the Revolutionary War.

For years, the prisoners’ bones would surface from their shallow dumps around the Wallabout and regularly wash up along the shores of Brooklyn and Long Island. They were collected by various New Yorkers in hopes someday to honor the sacrifice made by the unfortunate prisoners. The first monument was erected in the early 1800s by the Tammany Society of New York and located near the Brooklyn Navy Yard waterfront. In 1873, the old monument was in disrepair, and a large stone crypt was constructed in the heart of what is now Fort Greene Park and the bones were re-interred in the crypt with a small monument erected on the hill above it.

But the architectural firm of McKim, Meade and White was commissioned to design a grander 148 foot tower which stands, albeit in relative obscurity, today. It was unveiled in 1908 with President Taft present at a grand ribbon-cutting ceremony. It’s popularity soon diminished when pro-British sentiment was drummed up by those pushing for American involvement in World War One. By World War Two, the monument’s importance took an even greater backwards leap. While it once housed a staircase and elevator to an observation deck which featured a beacon of light which could be seen for miles, by now it was pretty much ignored.

One of the best known burial grounds of Hessian soldiers from the American Revolution is in Runnemede, New Jersey, where some 40 to 50 Hessians who died of wounds received at Fort Mercer are buried. Another grave, nearer to the fort held an equal or greater number. When World War One anti-German hysteria seized a few locals, they unearthed the remains in the graves and dumped them into the Delaware River.