This article grew out of a chapter of my dissertation “The Household's Most Expendable People: The Draft and Peasant Society in Eighteenth-Century Hessen-Kassel.” It was presented and discussed as a paper before the Miami Valley Early Modern History Colloquium in February 1989. Drafts of it have been criticized by Hermann Rebel, Henry Horwitz, Edgar Melton, and Kathy Taylor. All mistakes remain my own.

1. This reputation emerged out of the English and German literature of what has become known as the “Soldatenhandel Kontroverse” or soldier trade controversy. Originating in the war propaganda of the American Revolution, in the fiscal controversies between the Hessian Landgraves and the Hessian Diet, and finally in a nationalist Prussian historiography attempting to justify Prussian annexation of Kurhessen after 1866, this version has acquired an odor of polemic. For good examples see Kapp, Friedrich, Der Soldatenhandel deutscher Fürsten: Ein Bcitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1874)Google Scholar, and Lowell, Edward J., The Hessians and Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War (New York, 1884)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a summary of sources and arguments as well as a strong counter argument see Losch, Phillip, Soldatenhandel (Marburg, 1976).Google Scholar

2. For the enlightened reforms of Hessian Landgraves see Berge, Otto, “Die Innenpolitik Landgraf Friedrich II.” (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Mainz, 1952)Google Scholar; Philippi, Hans, Landgraf Karl von Hessen: Ein deutscher Fürst der Barokzeit (Marburg, 1976)Google Scholar; Vogel, Hans and Both, Wolf von, Landgraf Wilhelm VIII.: Ein Fürst der Rokokozeit (Munich, 1964)Google Scholar, and also their Landgraf Friedrich II. von Hessen-Kassel: Ein Fürst der Zopfzeit (Munich, 1973)Google Scholar. In English see Ingrao, Charles W., The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II 1760–1785 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar. The latter two works make some effort to reconcile the earlier picture of petty tyranny with later progressive image. For a helpful overview of questions concerning the “modernity” and “rationality” of eighteenth century absolutist princes see Melton, James Van Horn, “Absolutism and ‘Modernity’ in Early Modern Central Europe,” German Studies Review 8 (1985): 383ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Staatsarchiv, Hessisches, Marburg, , Sammlung fürstlicher hessische Landesordnungen und Ausschreiben, 8 vols. (Kassel, 1760–1816)Google Scholar, hereafter cited as StaM, HLO, Kantonordnung 16. 12. 1762.

4. For general attempts by the Hessian to imitate the Prussian see Berge, “Die Innenpolitik Landgraf Friedrich II.,” Vogel and von Both, Landgraf Friedrich II. von Hessen-Kassel, Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State, 13ff. For similarities between the Prussian Kanton system and the Hessian compare the documents in Frauenholtz, Eugen von, Entwicklungsgeschichte des deutschen Heerwesens (Munich, 1940), 4: 40ff.Google Scholar, with those in Auerbach, Inge, et al. , eds., Hessische Truppen im amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg (Marburg, 1976), 4: 36.Google Scholar

5. Krieger, Leonard, Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789 (New York, 1970), 282–83Google Scholar; Wolloch, Isser, Eighteenth Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715–1789 (New York, 1982), 242Google Scholar, Raeff, Mark, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983), 3–4.Google Scholar

6. Weber, Max, Economy and Society (Berkeley, 1978), 2: 976ff.Google Scholar

7. Wolloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, 249.

8. Weber, , Economy and Society. 2: 1088ff.Google Scholar, establishes the ideal type for a patrimonial official dom in which office is still embedded in a household nexus as a kind of private property either of the ruler or the office-holder. Patronage relations are the glue and the driving force that make such institutions work. This ideal type is juxtaposed to another—modern, legal-rational bureaucracy—which excludes all of the above characteristics through hiring on the basis of merit, specialization of tasks, commitment to abstract standards, and formal repeatable procedures among other things. “Rationalization” as an ideal-typical process moved officialdoms from the patrimonial pole to the bureaucratic one. However, Weber was perceptive enough to see that in historical situations—particularly eighteenth-century Europe-officialdoms usually mixed characteristics of both poles and rationalization as a process did not move in straight lines.

9. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State, 14ff., on reform strategies and their origins for Frederick II, and 22ff, on the extent of education and professionalization among Hessian officials.

10. Ibid., 29, n. 56, for the universities attended by the Hessian officialdom. See page 31, for the influence of cameralism on the officials and particularly the influence of Christian Wolf. A very helpful description and analysis of tensions and contradictions within cameralist theory appears in Walker, Mack, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate 1648–1871 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), 145ff.Google Scholar

11. Walker, German Home Towns, 150–51.

12. Ibid., 164ff., Walker uses Johann Justi as an example of a cameralist who was an activist reformer. Suggesting the difficulty of being both a cameralist and an activist, Justi went well beyond simply trying to preserve the harmony in corporate diversity and in fact felt compelled to use reform to create harmony. In so doing he subordinated the value of corporate diversity to harmony. Justi appeared to leave the Baroqueness of cameralist theory behind in the quest of “rational” (harmonizing?) policy.

13. To be charitable to Frederick II, one might see the law of 1762 not as the institution of conscription, but merely as an attempt to insure that only targeted groups in the Hessian population would come to serve in the standing army which he leased to Europe's major powers to fight their battles. Such an interpretation seems strained since even the most sympathetic German authorities on the Hessian military system—Losch, Soldatenhandel, and Böhme, Hans Georg, Die Wehrverfassung Hessen-Kassels im 18. Jahrhundert bis zum siebenjährigen Kriege (Kassel, 1954)Google Scholar—are unwilling to grant this concession. Losch excludes Frederick II from his defense of Hessian subsidy practices precisely because of the involuntary military service required by the Kanton law. Böhme argues in a more positive vein that the law is one of the first in Germany to establish effectively a universal military obligation. On the other hand, Ingrao, Charles W., “‘Barbarous Strangers’: Hessian State and Society during the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (1982): 1087ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is apparently willing to finesse the issue of involuntary military servitude.

14. Oestreich, Gerhard, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodemen Staates (Berlin, 1978), 290ff.Google Scholar, discusses Imperial military legislation of the 1650s as establishing this obligation on the population. See also Böhme, Die Wehrverfassung Hessen-Kassels, 29ff. for discussion of the basis of military service.

15. Rosenberg, Raincr Freiherr von, Soldatenwerbung und militärisches Durchzugsrecht im Zcitalter des Absolutismus: Eine rechtgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Berlin, 1973), 87.Google Scholar

16. For details see Vogel and von Both, Landgraf Wilhelm VIII. von Hessen-Kassel, 116–18.

17. Thies, Gunther, Territorialstaat und Landesverteidigung: Das Landesdefensionswerk in Hessen-Kassel Landgraf Moritz (Marburg, 1973), 81.Google Scholar

18. StaM. Best. 17e, Orstrepositur, Langenstein nr. 67, March 6, 1776, the minutes of a meeting of village headmen from the Kirchain area held at the Landrat's seat in Schweinsberg reported complaints that the headman of the village of Langenstein was referring very few people for inclusion on the Kanton lists. He had made the mistake of telling someone verbally that there were more such people in his village. He was subsequently removed from office for his “unruhige Lebensart.” From Bellnhausen nr. 23, June 1777 we have a petition to the same Landrat von Schenck zu Schweinsberg from the village of Bellnhausen that the headman he had appointed had only taken the job to protect his son from recruitment.

19. For examples see StaM, Materialsammlung 9, Abt. II/A/4/K, Rubr. 34, Ordinance of 1688 and HLO 30.12.1733, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

20. Philippi, Landgraf Karl von Hessen, 647, 655.

21. StaM, HLO 24.12.1702.

22. StaM, HLO 16.12.1762 provided for the cashiering of senior officers and physical punishments (Leibestraffen) for non-commissioned officers who violated recruitment procedures.

23. Ibid.

24. StaM, Best. 4h Kriegssachen, nr. 3503, Geheimenrats Protokoll, 24.3.1772, recommended that recruitment and other military matters be handled directly with local officials.

25. Ibid., Landständische Desirdirium gegen die Kriegs Collegio geschehene Erlassung “Landesherrlichen Vcrordnungen und Befehle ins Land,” is an expression of this fear.

26. Büsch, Otto, Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussm 1713–1807: Die Anfänge der sozialen Militarisierung der preussish-deutschen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1981), 67ff.Google Scholar, indicates that noble Landräte and military commanders collaborated to use recruitment to attack tenured and independent peasants through their heirs.

27. Kopp, Uhlrich Friedrich, “Von Landräthen: Vorzüglich in Hessenkasselischen,” Teutsches Staats-Magazin 1 (1796): 108ff.Google Scholar

28. For examples of recruitment negotiations see StaM, Best. 23b, Alte Lokalbehörden, Ebsdorf nr. 870, Report of Landrat von Schenck zu Schweinsberg to the General Directory 28.10.1782 where von Schenck expresses frustration over the outcome of several sets of such negotiations.

29. Büsch, Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussen, 156ff. The Prussian king found himself intervening against noble officials to protect peasants from the rapacity of Junker land engrossers because these peasants were an important source of soldiers. One strategy of nobles under these circumstances had been to manipulate recruitment so that heirs of substantial peasants served while propertyless peasants working on Junker estates were exempted. Intervening in inheritance decisions in this way naturally rendered the peasant tenure more vulnerable to engrossment.

30. StaM, HLO 16. 12. 1762. These phrases are also a good indication of the attempt on the part of the Landgrave to eliminate the influence of the personal consideration that was so characteristic of the patrimonial officialdom he was trying to put to his use.

31. StaM, HLO 18. 1. 1734, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

32. StaM, HLO 16. 12. 1762.

33. Ibid.

34. To change parish registers would require altering entries made years before to verify baptisms, confirmations, and even marriages. Such alterations would leave obvious footprints since entries were made in registers as they occurred, so that scratching them out and placing them elsewhere would make a mess of the book. Nevertheless Alfred Hock, a local historian in Marburg who is broadly familiar with sources in many Hessian localities, told me a story about a pastor who tried to preserve parish children by altering their gender in the records. There would be hell to pay in this circumstance when it came time to register the child's marriage.

35. Strippel, Karl, Die Währschafis- und Hypothekenbücher Kurhessens, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Rechtsgeschichte des Katasters (Marburg, 1914), 49ffGoogle Scholar, is a very adequate account of both the development of the Kadaster of 1740 as well as the inadequacies of past documents of this sort from an administrative and legal point of view. Recent research on these documents by Greve, Klaus and Krüger, Kersten, “Steuerstaat und Sozialstruktur: Finanzsoziologische Auswertung der hessischen Katastervorbeschreibung für Waldkappel 1744 und Herleshausen 1748,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (1982): 295–332Google Scholar, used regression analysis to establish their documentary reliability and administrative neutrality.

36. StaM, HLO 16. 5. 1763, Regierungs Ausschreiben, reiterates a law of 1737, the text of which I was unable to locate.

37. StaM, Best. 4h, Kriegssachen nrs. 3553, 1784–1796, 3557, undated, 3558, 1735, 3565, 1770, all have cases of deserter confiscations. See Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State, 161, for an analysis of the surviving records of confiscations which strongly suggests that poorer soldiers were most likely to desert and most likely to suffer confiscation.

38. For examples of such treaties see StaM, HLO 23.2.1762, Chur-Mainz, and 8.2.1792, Hessen-Darmstadt, and many others.

39. Ibid.

40. StaM, HLO 20.6.1777, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

41. StaM, HLO 21. 8. 1767, 19. 3. 1773, 18. 4. 1774, 19. 9. 1777, all of which are Regierungs Ausschreiben that enjoin village officials to be more careful about checking passports. General passports had been a fact of life for Hessian youth at least since the institution of HLO 11. 6. 1739, Grebenordnung which required them to carry letters of recommendation from past employers as well as the headmen of their home villages.

42. StaM, HLO 23. 2. 1764, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

43. This issue was raised in StaM, Best 23b, alte Lokalbehörden, Rodenhausen nr. 1503, undated but probably from the 1770s or 1780s as was most of the material in this collection. The Greben of Rodenhausen complained that there had been an attempt to draft Johann Jakob Schäffer in the village of Oberweimar where he was serving Johann Jakob Diefenbach. The Greben was relying on the law that stated that draft status was determined in the village of birth and that soldiers belonged to the Kanton of their birth rather than that where they worked. It is not clear from the sources whether the headman finally succeeded in protecting the young Schäffer, who came from Rodenhausen rather than Oberweimar.

44. StaM, HLO 16. 12. 1762. In spite of this law, draft avoidance remained a matter of moving on once again after leaving one's village of birth. It was also possible if one had the protection of village officials who could inhibit the flow of accurate information about the whereabouts of individuals.

45. StaM, HLO 19. 3. 1773.

46. Ibid.

47. StaM, HLO 29. 8. 1747, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

48. Büsch, Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussen 1713–1806, 56ff., has already pointed out how the policy of Bauernschutz, or peasant protection, worked out to be the protection of the classes which bore much of the brunt of Frederick II's military recruitment policy. This was done primarily by protecting their property from the rapacity of Junker land engrossers.

49. See note 34 above for the story of an eighteenth-century pastor from Eschweg who altered the gender of children in the parish register and went so far as to dress them up as girls when muster time came around. The story may be true but it could not provide a massive basis for escaping the draft in any case. Complaints about inaccurate information provided by officials are to be found in StaM, HLO 1.5. 1741, Verordnung which required the presence of officials at the spring musters to help prevent such problems.

50. StaM, HLO 16. 1. 1766.

51. StaM, HLO 16. 12. 1762.

52. Böhme, Die Wehrverfassung in Hessen-Kassel im 18. Jahrhundert, 31, reports the prohibition of marriage as strategy to avoid military service and the institution of licenses to marry which were purchased from military authorities in the late seventeenth century.

53. See Taylor, Peter Keir, “The Household's Most Expendable People: The Draft and Peasant Society in 18th-Century Hessen-Kassel” (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Iowa, 1987), 238ffGoogle Scholar, for a detailed discussion of the increasing Landgravial control over peasant marriages through Consistorial legislation and the increasing frequency with which marriage was used as a strategy (failed or otherwise) to avoid the draft.

54. StaM, HLO 16. 9. 1788, Verordnung.

55. StaM, HLO 19. 11. 1773, Hüfenordnung.

56. StaM, HLO 15. 7. 1784, Regierungs Ausschreiben.

57. StaM, Best. 5, Geheimenrat nr. 14737, Landtag Desirdirium Communi, 12. 3. 1779 contains the complaints of the Hessian Ritterschaft on this matter in the 1770s.

58. Peasant complaints about the exemption of adelige Hintersassen were publicly and formally voiced in the Landtag during the year 1815. For the formal complaint see Sakai, Eihachiro, Die Kurhessische Bauer im 19. Jahrhundert und die Grundlastenablösung (Melsungen, 1967), 133.Google Scholar

59. StaM, Best. 4h, Kriegssachen, nr. 3700, Correspondence between von Baumbach and the General Directory, 1778.

60. Ibid.

61. Prussia was a much larger territory to begin with and had a much more independent aristocracy than did Hesse-Cassel. Hans Rosenberg has shown how royal domain lands were gravitating into the hands of Junkers and the king's officials throughout the eighteenth century. See his Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1968), 53, 155.Google Scholar

62. Weber, , Economy and Society, 2: 1087.Google Scholar

63. This estimate of the military participation ratio was arrived at by using General Günderode's report of 1780 that the army was 22,000 men strong, cited in Vogel and von Both, Landgraf Friedrich II., 98. This was put in relation to George Thomas Fox's Hessian population estimate of circa 303,000 for 1782, in his “Studies in the Rural History of Upper Hesse,” (unpubl. Ph.D. Diss., Vanderbilt, 1976), 20Google Scholar. The figure compares with a ratio of 1:2 for Prussia in 1786. Prussia was one of the more militarized of Europe's states in the eighteenth century according to Corvisier, Andre, Siddall, Abigail T., trans., Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789, (Bloomington, 1979), 113Google Scholar. It must be qualified by the knowledge that an unknown but certainly small percentage of the Hessian soldiers were not Hessian subjects.

64. StaM, Best. 4h, Kriegssachen, nr. 3700, Landrat von Baumbach to the General Directory, 22 Aug. 1781.

65. Ibid., 4 Apr. 1780, and also see in the same file nr. 4023, Landrat Schenck zu Schweinsberg to the General Directory, 7 Mar. 1778.

66. Sabean, David Warren, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984) 20ff.Google Scholar, but most importantly 174ff., as well as Brunner, Otto, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Darmstadt, 1984), 254–72Google Scholar, and Berdahl, Robert M., “Preussischer Adel: Paternalismus als Herrschaftssystcm,” in Puhle, Hans-Jürgen, et al. , eds., Preussen im Rückblick (Göttingen, 1980), 123–45Google Scholar, discuss the exchange relationships involved in exercising authority between lords and peasants. The virtue of Sabean's discussion is that it permits us to extend the process of evoking obedience to relationships between peasant communal authorities and villagers, as well as the heads of peasant households and those who lived with them. It also permits us to talk about the evocation of obedience as an ongoing ever reconstructed political process with individual dimensions that the legal and ideological discussions of Brunner and Berdahl do not.

67. Most instructive in this regard is that this is precisely the formulation used by Weber, , Economy and Society, 2: 959Google Scholar, to characterize how a “rational” bureaucrat may be distinguished from a “patrimonial” one, and it is used in the Kanton ordinance of 1762, StaM, HLO, 16. 12. 1762.

68. Robisheaux, Thomas, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1989), 41ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the Peasant Wars of 1525 in a vein suggestive of this formulation.

69. StaM, Best. 4h, Kriegssachen, nr. 3700, von Baumbach to the General Directory, 19 Nov. 1776.

70. StaM, Best. 340, Adelsarchiv, von Schenck zu Schweinsberg 10a, 1760b–1790b, Gerichtsrechnungen. The rates before 1776 are distorted upwards by the year 1768, in which 40 instances of fines for absence and other failures to cooperate with jurisdictional authority were recorded. This was Karl Kroeschel's first year on the job and we may legitimately surmise they represent a rough patch experienced by the new man attempting to establish his authority.

71. Ibid.

72. StaM, Best. 17e, Ortsrepositur, Allna nr. 18, Greben Bender to von Schenck zu Schweinsberg, Feb. 1782.

73. StaM, Best. 4h, Kriegssachen, nr. 4072, Landrat von Keudel to the Privy Council, Dec. 1785, complains about the frequency of this abuse, which was given explicit recognition in the inheritance legislation of HLO 3.3.1786 Hufenordnung.

74. Taylor, Peter K., “Military System and Social Change in the Hessian Countryside 1700–1800,” (unpublished manuscript, 1989), 30Google Scholar, is a study of marriage patterns in the nine villages of parish Oberweimar based on nominal record linkage between the parish register, census data, and village tax records. It shows that the number of men's first marriages involving the division of small and medium-sized estates not large enough to confer a draft exemption increased from 7 between 1742 and 1753, to 14 between 1764 and 1774. The total number of marriages involving grooms from nonexempt families increased from 44 to 54 over the same span. At the same time, the number of first-time grooms from families able to exempt the heir declined from 18 to 8 with the number of marriages involving division of tenures remaining constant at 2.

75. Taylor, “The Household's Most Expendable People,” 261ff, shows an early eighteenth-century prevalence of impartible inheritance practices in Oberhessen. In parish Oberweimar this practice shifted towards partibility among those not able to acquire draft exemptions.

76. Sabean, Power in the Blood, 167ff., and Cole, Herbert and Wolf, Eric R., The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (New York, 1974), 248ff.Google Scholar, both suggest that such exchanges are characteristic of partible regimes of inheritance in German regions.

77. Taylor, “The Household's Most Expendable People,” 295ff. To divide estates was to disperse resources used to create dowries. Evidence from folktales from this region discussed by Taylor, Peter and Rebel, Hermann, in “Hessian Peasant Women, Their Families, and The Draft,” Journal of Family History 6, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 347ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. also suggests that girls were supposed to accept quietly such renunciations as part of an effort to save their brothers from military service.

78. Taylor, “Military System and Social Change in the Hessian Countryside 1700–1800,” 33, shows that between 1742 and 1753 17.3% of parish girls from non-exempt households who married first-time grooms, married grooms from families who would have been able to exempt an heir by the standards of 1762. This dropped to 3.8% in the period between 1763–74, while over the same periods the percentage of marriages between spouses of equal stature increased from 84% to 94% of all first-time marriages of grooms.

79. Sabean, Power in the Blood, 144ff., speaks of such refashioning of authority relations between classes in villages where kin ties between village rich and poor came to mean less during the eighteenth century. In his villages in Würtemburg the process was characterized by growing verbal and physical brutality.

80. StaM, HLO 16. 12. 1762.

81. Taylor, “Military System and Social Change in the Hessian Countryside 1700–1800,” 25, shows that the percentage of marriages with first-time grooms from families able to exempt their heirs declined from 28% between 1742 and 1753 to 14% after the draft was instituted despite the fact the number of marriages remained relatively constant between the two periods.

82. StaM, Protokolle I & II, Gerichte Kaldern und Reizberg, Eheprotokolle, 1780–1820 provides several examples of settlements providing for the care and feeding of returning veterans so long as they lived quietly and obediently, but expelling them from the homes of their married brothers or sisters if they should come into conflict with them. This shows that military service continued to be a disadvantage even after it had ended.

83. The policy of holding a soldier's wages in the company treasury as a way of preventing desertion was common in eighteenth-century armies. That such funds were released frequently to parents of soldiers is suggested by the surge in improvements to the estates of parents of soldiers which occurred in 1785–86 after troops returned home from America. See StaM, Kadasterl, Allna, 1747ff.

84. Taylor, “The Household's Most Expendable People,” 366, shows that only 27% of the soldiers drafted from the parish of Oberweimar ever married in the parish, while 44% of males born in the parish between 1742–46 who never served in the army married there. These figures were all the more striking because soldiers were more likely to die (76%) in the parish of their birth than were those who never served (38%). Most soldiers who died elsewhere, died while they were still soldiers. Finally those soldiers who did marry did so at a much later mean age (37) than did comparative males who never served (24).

85. StaM, Best. 4h Kriegssachen, nr. 4072, Landrat von Baumbach to the General Directory admitted that this happened frequently but claimed it was because of the great hurry with which preparations had to be made. Given the frequency of complaint by other such officials that they ran short of recruits despite such abuses it seems unlikely that mistakes were really the cause.

86. Rebel, Hermann, “Cultural Hegemony and Class Experience: A Critical Reading of Recent Ethnological-Historical Approaches,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 1 (1989): 117ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who suggested such formulations of these long-standing problems.