God Knows All Your Names

Christopher Ludwick must have been very disturbed to see German-speaking soldiers from his ancestral homeland fighting against German-speaking Americans.  There were two ways to skin a panther, or in this case, lessen the leased Hessian forces: defeat them or entice them to desert from the army, move to the peaceful Pennsylvania countryside and start a new life.  While General Washington struggled with  the former, the baker-general deftly handled the latter.

The skilled propagandist named Ludwick convinced numerous Hessian prisoners of war to desert from the army and take up residence among a welcoming German community only a few miles away.  ‘Farm, don’t fight’ would have been the bumper sticker, if they had such a thing.  How many he persuaded will never be known, but it worked.  It worked for the reason Ludwick explained to the Continental Congress:  “The many Hessians…are so well pleased with this country…that at all events they would rather prefer to settle here than to return to the dreary abodes of bondage from whence they came.”

In addition to the POWs, the audacious Ludwick, posing as a deserter, snuck into the Hessian Camp at Staten Island and made the same quality of life spiel. Pennsylvania offered, according to one historian, “a complete farm except for the frau.”  Sometimes, as shown in one Hessian’s diary, the product sold itself: “America is a wonderful land, where the industrious hand of the worker never goes unrewarded, and those who work never want.”  This particular soldier seemed surprised with early American recreation: “The Americans, from their youth on, participate in vigorous body exercise, and when nothing else is to be done, they hit a ball.”

In July 1776,  Pennsylvania started hiring Hessian POWs to make ammunition.   A month later, the federal government formed a committee to “encourage Hessians…to quit [their] iniquitous service.”  Rewards would be offered to those who “choose to accept lands, liberty, safety, and a communion of good laws and mild government in a country where many of their friends and relations are already happily settled, rather than continue exposed to the toils and dangers of a long and bloody war.”   By 1778, the Americanization of Hessians was at full boil: the government offered 50 acres for any Hessian to desert.  The pot was sweetened for captains who brought 40 Hessians with him: 800 acres, four oxen, one bull and two cows. 

Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of our nation’s Founding Fathers, praised Ludwick for showing the Hessians “the difference between the privileges and manner of life of an American freeman and those of a Hessian slave,” and for providing “the most captivating descriptions of the affluence and independence of their former countrymen in the German counties of Pennsylvania.”   George Washington believed that well-treated Hessian POWs, “so fraught with a love of liberty,” who were returned to the enemy would “create a disgust to the service among the remainder of the foreign troops and widen that breach which is already opened between them and the British.”