What the Prisoners Saw

The Hessian prisoners taken at Bennington — more than 600 of them — were marched through Vermont and Massachusetts to detention camps. What the communities along that route saw mattered: not rumored victories or distant dispatches, but actual men in German uniforms, disarmed, escorted by farmers with muskets. The war that had been happening elsewhere suddenly had a human form.

Hessian accounts of American captivity describe conditions better than expected. A significant number stayed in America after the war, settling in Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic states. They had been contracted as professional soldiers for a conflict they had no personal stake in; America turned out to be more hospitable than the battlefield had suggested.

The 900 casualties at Bennington are an abstraction. The prisoners are not. They were following orders in a war three thousand miles from home, in terrain they had not been trained for. Their defeat was real. Their humanity was also real.