"How long will you be gone?" "A season. Maybe two."
That was roughly the expectation when the first German regiments stepped off transport ships at Staten Island in August 1776, professional soldiers handed over by their rulers to the British Crown under a series of subsidy treaties that were, extremely good for the rulers and considerably less good for the soldiers.
The word 'Hessian' became a catch-all, but it was never accurate. Yes, the largest contingent, around 17,000 men, came from Hesse-Cassel, whose Landgrave Frederick II negotiated a rate of roughly seven pounds per soldier per year, plus a bonus for every man killed or wounded. Frederick reportedly cleared enough from the arrangement to avoid taxing his own subjects for the duration of the war. Efficient, if you weren't the one carrying a musket through New Jersey in January.
The remaining 13,000 came from five other German states: Brunswick, Hesse-Hanau, Waldeck, Ansbach-Bayreuth, and Anhalt-Zerbst. They were not mercenaries in the technical sense, mercenaries sell their own swords. These men were subjects whose sovereigns sold their labour by treaty. The distinction mattered to military lawyers. It probably mattered less to the men themselves.
And the posting stretched. Eight years, roughly 12,500 casualties, killed, wounded, captured, or deserted. Desertion became its own subplot: somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 German soldiers simply declined to go home when the war ended, settling instead in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York, where several of their descendants can presumably be found arguing about baseball today.
They weren't villains. They weren't heroes. They were professional soldiers doing what professional soldiers do, serving whoever held their contract, in a war that outlasted everyone's original timetable by about seven and a half years.
Was their sovereign's arrangement exploitation, pragmatic statecraft, or simply the normal operating procedure of 18th-century European power? Tell us where you land.