Facing Washington’s Crossing: The Hessians and the Battle of Trenton

BOOK REVIEW: Facing Washington’s Crossing: The Hessians and the Battle of Trenton by Steven Bier (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2025) $35.00

Steven Bier’s Facing Washington’s Crossing: The Hessians and the Battle of Trenton recounts the tale of the Hessian regiments during the American Revolution as they leave their home of Hessen-Kassel, crossing the Atlantic to assist Great Britain in its war against the United States. Where most histories of the Revolution give the Hessians their due opposite Gen. George Washington’s army at the Battle of Trenton in December 1776, those retellings cast the Germans as secondary to the more prominent roles of the British or the Continental Army. Bier, alternatively, has them to center stage to shed more light on these soldiers in name along with their Landgrave Frederick II who hired them out to King George III.

Bier’s work is one that humanizes an otherwise nameless force that has largely been invoked in service of bolstering Gen. Washington’s heroism at Trenton. His preface orients the retelling of the war around three soldiers: Pvt. Johannes Reuber, Lt. Jakob Piel and Lt. Adreas Wiederhold.

The title of Bier’s work may prove misleading. His book is not exclusively about the Battle of Trenton, nor is most of it dedicated to that battle. He begins with the conditions that led Frederick II to send his soldiers on a treacherous journey across the Atlantic, For those well-versed readers on matters of the war, Bier’s early chapters will prove the most beneficial in forming a more holistic view of world affairs in the revolutionary years. Frederick is put to the reader, as chapter two reads in its title, as a despot or an enlightened prince. He was exposed to the Swiss Enlightenment for five years of his education and became a friend of French philosopher Voltaire. In protestant Hessen-Kassel, Frederick became a secret Catholic convert, something his people did not receive well, nor did his father Wilhelm VII. It was his hope to be, as Bier writes, “a Catholic, liberal, enlightened prince,” but as a lieutenant general in the Seven Years’ War under Frederick the Great he fell into the familiar patterns of his father and grandfather, “militarism and absolutism.” “He was determined to combine the two contradictory philosophies. He would reform the archaic Hessian government, improving the lives of his subjects, but would do it while retaining total power,” Bier states.

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The tale of the Hessian’s experience at war puts them in 1776 as Bier documents General Washington’s campaign against British Gen. William Howe in New York. To reiterate, those chapters, which are detailed accounts from the Hessian and British side of the campaign, are not directly paying off Bier’s title.

Bier is seemingly building to this climatic moment at Trenton which the reader finds only in the last forty pages. It is here we find important insight and clarification about those decisions made by Hessian Col. Johann Rall, the commander subsequently blamed for his army’s defeat after the fact, an accusation he could not defend himself against having been mortally wounded at Trenton. Bier offers a detailed account of Colonel Rall’s decisions prior to the battle itself and proceeds through how it unfolded, leading to Washington’s much needed victory to end a year that nearly saw the war lost.

Given the scope of Facing Washington’s Crossing: The Hessians and the Battle of Trenton, the book would more appropriately be titled in a way that communicates its retelling of 1776 for the Hessians, not just Trenton. Even so, it can be a beneficial history in understanding the army often put on the periphery of the Continental Army’s commander-in-chief.

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