Mirbach sent home during the first sixteen months of his service in America savings to the amount of 6000 thalers. Indeed, the older officers left at home complained bitterly of their hard fate in losing this advantage, and the total gain of the Hessian troops from extra English allowances may well be estimated at more than 2,000,000 thalers. Schlieffen reported to the Elector in 1779 that up to that time, about three and a half years from the outbreak of the American war, the Hessian enlisted men had sent home through the pay officer almost 600,000 thalers, and the mechanics accompanying the Hessian army to America over 637,000 thalers. Kapp’s book is full of rumors that the Hessian troops in America were unfairly treated, but that is absolutely untrue.

The English government dealt directly with the Hessian government; the Hessian soldiers fought alongside the English soldiers as their allies; their pay was regulated by the treaties made by the Hessian sovereign and approved by the Hessian Parliament. These provided fully for the pay and food and equipment and care of the Hessian troops at the expense of England, but on the basis provided by the treaties with Hesse and other allies. Mr. Kapp asks for particulars of the taxes released by the Elector. These amounted to 2,170,140 thalers, besides 56,000 thalers in the reduced interest on loans to public institutions,—the reduction of allowances to Hessian princesses of 159,466 thalers, and a reduction of war taxes of 204,000 thalers. Appropriations for the relief of the people injured by storms amounted to anywhere between 500 and 740,000 thalers; then there were paid for forage 147,000 thalers, for servants 90,000 thalers, and for arrears of 1,090,827 down to 1785, 300,000 were allowed and cancelled, and a debt of 116,000 for the administration was paid.

Mr. Kapp denies that he charged the Elector with putting 60,000,000 in his pocket, for the whole amount received by him for his troops was only 22,000,000. This charge is found in the writings of Vehse, Löher, Menzel, Scherr, Weber, and others who have tried to discredit the Elector Frederick. Kapp does say that the Elector left an estate of 60,000,000,—made partly out of the profits of the lottery founded in 1777, but mainly out of the American war. But the lottery only earned in all the fourteen years of its existence 93,000 thalers, which were paid over to the War Office; the only other source was the sale of soldiers to England.

Kapp says that pay for wounded soldiers began in the treaty with Brunswick in 1776, although it was implied in the Hessian treaty at the time of the war of the Spanish Succession that three wounded men counted the same as one dead man, at about 51 thalers at modern rates. It is true that there were such provisions in the earlier Brunswick and Hanau Treaties, but Schlieffen had them struck out of the new Hessian Treaty of 1775. Dead men were replaced by living men and the injured and disabled by well men, while the latter went into the Invalid Corps and were duly cared and provided for.

The contemporary accusations are perpetuated by Schlosser, who says in his history that England paid a premium that went into the Elector’s pocket for every limb that was lost,—and this is absolutely false. The Elector to the last day of his life made provision for the disabled soldiers. Such charges are made by Germans who ought to go to the Hessian archives and there find the truth. A fair statement ought to satisfy the modern reader that the great majority of American citizens of our own day have little in common with the perjured Yankees of the Revolution, and are, indeed, descendants of the men who fought against, rather than of those who fought for independence. The rebels turned against England and denounced it as a tyrant, although to it America owed Magna Charta and the Habeas Corpus Act. The treatment of the Indians by American governments shows how far they departed from the example of the mother country. The English Whigs in and out of Parliament were allowed a license and freedom of speech which were denied the American Tories by their brethren who proclaimed liberty. The Hessians had for two hundred years been allies of England and naturally helped it against the hostility of France and Spain. Hessians fought at the side of English troops against Louis XIV. of France, and helped to put down the Stuart rising in Scotland, and in the Seven Years’ War; the American Revolution was but another outbreak of the same hostility to England, and if Hessian troops had not served in America, it would have been a missing link in the chain of the wise, real German policy of close alliance with old England. The story of the American Revolution that ended in the independence of the American Colonies is largely drawn from French writers, yet they never seem to regret their own loss of Canada. American writers attack the German allies of England, forgetting or ignoring the fact that this was no new relation, but one that had existed for two centuries, and that England and all European states paid for the foreign troops in their service. The Yankees, used to making money by hook and crook, could not but look on the subsidies provided by regular treaties as a sale and bargain of the soldiers of one country to another which paid for them at so much a head. The Yankee fairy stories about the superiority of their native troops may be easily answered, for the famous Virginia cavalry were completely defeated and driven from the field by Hessian foot yägers, mounted for the occasion, and not cavalry at all. In good old times no German would have falsified the facts as to his own countrymen when he could have verified them from the official records. These show that at one time it was proposed to surrender the subsidies in exchange for a large stretch of land in Canada, where a Hessian settlement was to be established. If that had been carried out, Hesse might have been spared the sorrows of 1806 and 1866.

For many years all of the charges discreditable to the Hessians have been drawn from the “Autobiography” of Seume. Much of it was invented by his friend and editor Clodius. It is from beginning to end a false and libellous production. Seume became a friend and admirer of the French Jacobins and repented his service against the Yankees, so he invented the story that he had been forced into the ranks against his will. The fact is that no such compulsion could have been exercised in the face of the orders of the Elector, nor could any young man of Seume’s intelligence have failed to know and exercise his rights.

Seume tells another falsehood in reference to affairs at Ziegenhain. There was a garrison at that place of two companies of infantry and some artillerymen, and four hundred recruits, part of the Eighth Division, on its way from Cassel to America, and a handful of yägers under instruction. Some of the recruits planned a mutiny, and intended to kill a sentry and steal the regimental funds. Their plan was discovered and reported by one of the yägers. A court-martial sentenced two of the mutineers to the gallows and others to chains. Elector Frederick, whose weak point was kindness, reduced the sentence of a dozen of the offenders to whipping, and that of the men sentenced to be hung to imprisonment. This is record evidence, yet Seume says there were fifteen hundred recruits who were all at once charged with intending to rob and run away, among them old service men. Some of them had been sergeants and corporals in the Prussian army, yet Seume, nineteen years old and who had never carried a musket, was chosen robber captain. A worthless tailor from Göttingen betrayed the plot rather than help carry the plunder to the next village. The Elector did show mercy to some, but only to enjoy the protracted misery of the men in jail. Now, if Seume knew of any such plot, he perjured himself by violating his