Barbarous Strangers

ALTHOUGH THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY has always been a popular theme among American historians, no examnple has inspired us more than our own experience in the War of Independence. In comparing American with English society at the outbreak of the Revolution, we have never lost sight of the picture first drawn by the patriots themselves of New World equality and freedom challenging the inequities of a typical Old World mnercantilist oligarchy. Yet perhaps the greatest contrast with American values is provided by the government and society of Hesse-Cassel, the German state that supplied the British with most of their German mercenaries. In the last two centuries, we have moved little from the image first projected by Mercy Warren of the Hessians as barbarous stran-gers' who committed atrocities against the American freedom fighters but who were themselves the slaves of a typically corrupt and greedy despot. Contemporary American historians have been somewhat more sympathetic to the mercenaries themselves, portraying them as naive and oppressed peasanits, simple farming people who were either unwilling or unknowing pawns of their sovereign. There has, however, been far less reinterpretation of the regime that dispatched them to America. Only in this century have we acknowledged the bogus origins of Benjamin Franklin's Uriasbrief, in which the Hessian landgrave Frederick II purportedly decried the death of only 1,465 of his subjects at Trenton because the British paid him appreciably more for soldiers killed in action than for those who were merely wounded or captured.) Contemporary American historians still portray him as a greedy petty despot who sought British subsidies in order to finance a decadent court life and the needs of his one hundred bastard offspring. In retelling the old but unfounded story of the landgrave's bastards, respected

American studies · Hessian matrix · Oligarchy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · European Political History Analysis · Historical Economic and Social Studies

• Patrimonial” Bureaucracy and “Rational” Policy in Eighteenth-Century Germany

  Open Access•Peter K Taylor•Central European History•1989

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