Count Carl Emil von Donop was at the pinnacle of his military career as his corps of Hessians marched victoriously south into New Jersey in the fall of 1776. Von Donop’s professional ambition had been to obtain an appointment to the Prussian Army, widely considered the best in Europe, yet his previous service in the […]
Several years ago, I set out to understand the movements of the British army through Delaware and into Pennsylvania in early September 1777. It was a small piece of the Philadelphia campaign of Gen, Sir William Howe, who led a combined army of about 16,000 that landed on Elk Neck on August 25 and captured […]
The 1776 campaign season had ended badly for General George Washington and the Continental Army as the dejected Patriots struggled through foul weather over primitive New Jersey roads as they marched toward Trenton in early December. To compound matters, Washington was faced with certain termination of the conflict if the situation did not dramatically improve. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor James M. Deitch on whether Hessian commander Johann Rall’s failure at Trenton was due to tactical or personal negligence. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can […]
“When a man chooses a calling, he must do everything that can be done in that calling so that he can never suffer reproach for having done only half of his duty. On this account, I keep among the mottoes in my portfolio, to serve at times as a reminder, the following from Boileau: ‘Honor […]
BOOK REVIEW: Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War by Friederike Baer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) Writing a detailed, authoritative account of the British Army’s German troops has always been a tough climb requiring a combination of several advanced skills. Much of the source material has remained untranslated into English either in whole or […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews author and JAR contributor Todd W. Braisted on Israel Putnam and William Tryon trying to influence Hessian forces around Kingsbridge, New York, with dueling proclamations. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the […]
As the year 1777 drew to a close, the region around the city of New York had been under British control for a year. Although the British position was strong, the recent surrender of a British army at Saratoga dramatically changed the prospects of the war ending any time soon. Troops in the New York […]
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the twenty-seven grievances against the King listed in the Declaration of Independence, he did so with the intention of encapsulating the sentiment and objections that colonists felt about their current situation. It was a collective account of their grievances and their interpretation of the unfairness of how they were being treated […]
Nestled amid factories, automotive shops and diners in an industrial section of southern New York, just a short walk from the Bronx boundary, sits a little-known gem of the American Revolution, St. Paul’s Church. Partially completed at the time of the Revolution, the church served as a hospital first for American soldiers and, after the […]
Their feet were leaving noticeable imprints in the grassy field. It was another two hundred yards to the hedgerow, and then a steep climb up the narrow footpath that snaked around the rising slope of hill in front of them. If they could make it without injury, perhaps there was a chance to dig in […]
James W. Whitall (1717-1808) was a prominent Quaker businessman and farmer in the southern region of New Jersey. In 1739 he married Ann Cooper (1716-1797), a devout, no-nonsense Quaker, and together they built a house situated on a farm consisting of over four hundred acres of land along the Delaware River in Red Bank, New […]
Aside from Gen. Anthony Wayne’s successful assault upon a British garrison at Stony Point in July, military activity in the first eight months of 1779 had been rather limited. Major Henry Lee, known as Light Horse Harry Lee to future generations, sought to change this in mid-August with a raid upon a British post less […]
Born in Straw Dungiven, County Londonderry, Ireland,[1] thirty-year-old John Haslet was the young, widowed minister of Ballykelly Presbyterian Church. Arriving in America in 1757, he became a captain in the Pennsylvania militia and participated in the November 26, 1758 action at Fort Duquesne. Twenty years later, he would be killed at the Battle of Princeton. Russ […]
A motorist travelling northbound through New Jersey along Interstate 295, which tracks the east bank of the Delaware River from the Delaware Memorial Bridge, passes opposite Philadelphia, and ends a short ways beyond Trenton, might think he or she is in Europe, based strictly on fleetingly observed exit signs rather than any resemblances evoked by […]
The year 1776 opened with the overall promises of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet seemingly coming to fruition; however, the ensuing months were anything but militarily triumphant for General Washington’s army. Even before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence, American forces were on the defensive on all fronts and in a deplorable […]
In recent decades, scholarship on the American Revolution has grown to include those largely excluded from the main narrative. Women, Native Americans, those of African descent (enslaved and otherwise), and especially loyalists have all been the subject of the some of the best and most recent studies. For example, Kathleen duVal’s Independence Lost: Lives on […]
Book Review: Hessians: Mercenaries, Rebels, and the War for British North America by Brady J. Crytzer (Westholme Publishing, 2015). Students of the American Revolution are at least superficially familiar with the soldiers sourced by the British who were principally from the Hesse-Cassel state of Germany and dubbed “Hessians,” however their many contributions, varied roles and […]
In December 1775, British Colonel William Faucitt and Hessian minister Martin Ernst von Schlieffen drafted a treaty promising the Hessian Landgraf Friedrich II a large sum of money in return for soldiers.[1] The British had spent the fall of 1775 offering subsidies to German states of the Holy Roman Empire they were allied with in […]
Since 1874 a growing assumption, indeed an assumption expanding to the status of “fact,” has arisen that a document known as “The Sale of the Hessians” was a piece of propaganda written by Benjamin Franklin. A quick online search using the search terms of “Sale of the Hessians” and “Franklin” will bring up many books, […]
By the start of the American Revolution, the British military was spread thinly across their global empire. Despite having tens of thousands of troops in America throughout the war, it was still necessary to supplement their numbers by hiring foreign troops. By 1776 thousands of soldiers from Hesse-Cassel were pouring into New York. They served […]
