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Straw Men No Longer: A Hessian Usable Past for an Era of Coalition Warfare

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2015.0076

1080-6628

Wayne Bodle,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Straw Men No Longer: A Hessian Usable Past for an Era of Coalition Warfare Wayne Bodle (bio) Daniel Krebs. A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. xv + 376 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). German mercenary soldiers serving in America’s Revolutionary war (generally lumped as “Hessians”) have not fared well in American culture in any century or any context. In 1792 in The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine pointedly recalled a Brunswick prisoner “in the late war” who told him “if the prince says Eat straw, we Eat straw.”1 In Pennsylvania in late 1967—on the eve of the Tet Offensive!—some clueless high school students tried to enliven a Christmas Day commemoration of George Washington’s 1776 “Crossing of the Delaware” by donning official girlfriend-sewn “Hessian” uniforms and swarming onto that river in small boats to give some equally clueless “Continental” reenactors a two-centuries-late taste of their own medicine. Reported the next day in a Philadelphia newspaper as “Hessians Attack Washington” on pages under gloomy headlines screaming “Reds Again Use Cease-Fire to Move Troops,” and “Viet War Viewed as Dominant Issue in 1968 Election,” this youthful prank presumably did not explain very well in the nearby school district superintendent’s office the next week.2 In the twilight of John McCain’s and John Kerry’s political careers, in the late stages of bitter national debates over the Guantanamo detention facility, and in the middle of the Bowe Bergdahl spectacle, though, Daniel Krebs at least has some very different cultural ground to work on. Krebs begins by pouring calming linguistic oil on the harsh waters of patriotic memory by trading the always-pejorative term “mercenary” for the more technical and neutral ones of “subsidy soldiers” and “auxiliaries.” Many Central and Eastern European polities in Enlightenment Europe still had almost medieval obligations of peasant military service to the landlord, but only the intermittent incidence of actual warfare in which to use them. Modernizing Atlantic-front states, meanwhile, were creating “standing armies” that shared personnel needs with growing navies that sprawled over increasingly hemispheric or global “empires.” [End Page 441] Bourgeois, tax-adverse Western civil societies had the constitutional ability—or at least the incentive—to resist permanent state militarization. These circumstances created a market, and temporarily surplus soldiers from Central European principalities were opportunistically transferred to Atlantic-rim monarchies. Georgian Britain was one of the most active buyers in this market, while German princes were among the most willing sellers. Viewed in this admittedly retrospective analytical context, news of the impending arrival of thousands of German adjunct soldiers in America in 1775—however unwelcome a tactical problem it may have presented to would-be revolutionaries—hardly sounds like a prime candidate for inclusion in the “Declaration of Independence” as a cruel innovation that was dangerous to liberty itself. Thomas Jefferson and his contemporary message-shapers, of course, made sure that it was not viewed in any such light. If the practice of supplementing state soldiers with temporaries was normative in early modern Europe, Krebs shows that the men who were recruited for American service were more ordinary than the seven-foot-tall, baby-eating “myrmidons” of fearful civilians’ imaginations. He disputes the stereotype that subsidy troops were recruited from the “dregs of [European] societies” (p. 39). The erosion of partible inheritance in Hesse-Kassel, the hope of post-military bureaucratic preferment for civil employment, a desire to see other parts of the world, and/or a “thirst for adventure” drove most individual decisions to enlist. There were also disincentives in the compensation structure for recruiters to discourage them from signing up men who might reflexively desert their comrades on the battlefield or drag their units into disastrous actions. Local communities scrambled to secure exemptions from service for “indispensable” citizens in ways that bear interesting comparison with what we now know about the creative tactics of late colonial New England towns pressed to meet recruiting quotas decreed by provincial authorities. From demographic data that are not comprehensive or systematic, Krebs estimates that private soldiers...