On the Square Today

In his latest On the Square column, Russell E. Saltzman remembers that history is made of common people :

Hans and Inga, fictional names, got married. It happened so often hardly anybody took much note of it which is maybe why you never heard about it either. Hans and several thousand others like him were young soldiers from Hesse, Germany employed by the British to battle George Washington’s army in the American Revolution.

The Hessian wartime predations were exaggerated by American war propaganda. The cruel, violent, merciless, fearsome mercenary Hessians who scared the crap out of honest hard-working American patriots early in the Revolution were by and large all good Lutheran boys—some of whom were known to sing Lutheran hymns when advancing on American lines.