"Did British or Hessian regiments receive drafts of...?" Topic

Or did the regiment soldier on with its original strength, slowly dwindling?

I know the survivors of Trenton were amalgamated into a single provisional battalion. How long did it last?

Also most regiments could NOT be combined, due to regimental traditions, politics etc.

So, how was the strength of a regiment 3000 miles from home maintained?

Yeah. I know. I'm trying to get the title fixed.

"Did British or Hessian regiments receive reinforcements?"

Yes and yes. They were often sent recruits from the home depots. Sometimes they even ended up in the unit they volunteered for. Also, when under strength regiments were about to be sent home the remaining men were often drafted into other regiments staying on service.

I always thiok its funny that about half the Hessian P.O.W.'s settled in The U.S.A. after the war.

Yes they did . Check my 2005 special issue on German Auxillariesin the American Revolution. What made it to the units varied a lot due to where the ships were headed and if they made it past French and Spanish interceptors. If captured and not being British, it is my belief they were offered position in the armies of their captors.
The replacement numbers were not all that high compared to other countries. Also replacements changed to the needs of the crown. For example the numbers of sent Jagger's were consistent or even higher each of the following years.later for H-C units there were no difference in musketeers and fusiliers.
One item of note is that Hessian drops in daily rolls because they had been formed in small company/troop under the provisional banner.

The captured German troops were often encouraged to remain or desert by placing them in immigrant German communities like Central PA.

The German units received one or more (depending on their origin) drafts of reinforcements during the war. However, in 1776, numerous British units also received small drafts of 20-40 German recruits; this only happened the one time, though.

To put a little more flesh on the bones, British regiments received recruits three ways:-
1) direct engagement of men who turned up on their doorstep – mostly these were Americans (officially illegal), but occasionally they were men from the Saratoga regiments who had escaped;
2) drafting of the rank-and-file from weakened regiments whose officers, senior NCOs and music were then sent home to recruit back to full strength;
3) drafts of reinforcements from Europe, usually recruited by the regiment itself, but occasionally groups of men who had been recruited for service in other corps, but were diverted (the receiving unit would then reimburse the original recruiting unit for its costs).

Technically, there was a fourth method: men who had deserted but had not served with the enemy (except under duress) were received back. Token punishments were handed out, but it all seems to have been handled quietly – usually, these were men who were either very drunk, or lovesick, or who had gotten into bad company but were otherwise good soldiers.

The captured German troops were often encouraged to remain or desert by placing them in immigrant German communities like Central PA.

And do to an oddity in demography, many of those communities had a surplus of marriageable females. For some reason, the birth rate in the 1760's was skewed in favor of girls.

Another factor is that one of the German Princes (the Duke of Brunswick, IIRC) offered his men discharge (with full pay) in America at the end of the war if they asked for it.

Some British units also recruited locally – by the end of the war they weren't very "British" in some cases.

I'd be interested in seeing any evidence for this. The odd recruit I can understand, but more than that? Never seen any evidence of it myself.

For example, the 23rd Foot served in America from 1773 to 1783, collecting about a dozen recruits in those 10 years who might (emphasise might) have been Americans. That would equate to less than 1% of the rank-and-file who served throughout the war (about 1,300 all told).

My own understanding is that between the Loyalist units – and perhaps even more, the Loyalists privateers, there wasn't much left to go into the British army.

Certainly not after the war started and the British left Boston.

That many served in the 23rd?

Give or take, yes; there are a few duplications, but that's about it for rank-and-file. Over 1/3 were discharged (age and/or medical grounds); over 1/3 died/deserted of which fewer than 100 were killed in action/died of wounds*, and the remaining 2-300 were still with the regiment at the end of the war. Admittedly the regiment was more heavily engaged than most, but it lost about 80-90 men in each of the 10 years it was in N America.

[* It's hard to determine this figure exactly; there were periods when "killed" and "died" clearly mean different things and the former is definitely KIA, but other times when "dead" is used for all forms of demise, regardless. ]

Rall's former regiment was down to under 300 men at the Siege of Savannah in 1779. When the regiment was evacuated from Charleston in 1782 it had over 500. This indicates they were getting new troops from somewhere.

Did many Canadians serve as British Regulars?

Short answer: no.

From what I've read, despite the best efforts of the "seigneurs" (who saw from the Quebec Act that the British were more tolerant of their Catholicism than the Americans would be), the rank-and-file "habitants" were none too keen on the war and barely more anti-American than they were anti-British. However, ex-soldiers born in France actually joined Livingston's 1st Canadian Regiment (which was originally organised as a French line infantry unit) in some numbers at the start of the war, less so once the invasion of Canada had been thrown back and a further attempt in 1778-79 came to naught.

The English-speakers seem to have been mostly New Englanders and New Yorkers who arrived post-F&IW. The bulk of those who got involved went into the 2nd Canadian Regiment, with only a few Quebec and Montreal "Anglos" serving in the Loyalist militias in those places. The exception was Nova Scotia where the half-Yankee/half-Yorkshire population decided that wealth trumped war, and allowed the Royal Navy use of the only deep-water harbour (at that time) on the east coast of N America, whilst broadly remaining neutral.

According to the rolls of the 17th foot they recruited Americans (numbers unclear) and so many Germans (presumably also living in the colonies) that they formed a German Company. They served throughout the war and received very little in the way of drafts from home. They were stationed in New York for some time so may have been in a better position to recruit locally than other regiments.

GT – Unless the rolls specifically say so, I would be very surprised of the Germans were local, not least because the German communities – at least those the British came in contact with – were predominantly Rebel. Even the German regiments did not recruit local Germans on any scale.

As I said in an earlier post, in 1776 all British regiments in America – including those in Canada – received a draft of about 20-40 Germans, all recruited in Europe. Most regiments spread them around to prevent desertion, encourage them to become bi-lingual, and generally aid integration; but a few units like the 17th created a separate company from them. This was a one-off reinforcement, and was never repeated; gradually, these men mostly died or deserted, but a few remained at the end of the war. One or two per regiment became NCOs (mostly corporals, though one became the 23rd's bandmaster post-war), but the vast majority remained privates.

That draft of Germans was raised by Hanoverian Col. Albrecht von Scheither, and anyone who knows his 7 years war personalities, yes, it's that Scheither. He was to raise 2,000 recruits, and if successful, another 2,000. The first 2,000 (actually a couple hundred less) was raised by September 1776, but Scheither had such difficulty finding recruits that he gave up trying to find any more.

In anycase, I have numbers for the Hessians (as opposed to the other German contingents) as follows:
1st Division, April 1776: 8,647
2nd Division, June, 1776: 4,327
Jaegers, March 1777: 352
Recruits and jaegers, April 1777: 497
Recruits and jaegers, May 1777: 604
Recruits and jaegers, December 1777: 398
Recruits, April 1778: 283
Recruits, May 1779: 960
Recruits, June 1780: 931
Recruits, April 1781: 937
Recruits, May 1782, 1,084

How this all played out across the regiments, we actually complied all entries in the HETRINA (HEssische TRuppen Im Nord Amerika) catalog (compiled by the University of Marburg just before the American Bicentennial) for the Regiment von Donop, and found something aound 1100 men had cycled through the regiment during the course of the war. 5 KIA and Died of wounds (it was a very lightly engaged regiment), some 90+ deserters, and additional 55 "discharged in America" and somewhere around 220 dead of "other causes" i.e. sickness.

Sorry SM – must have missed that post. The rolls are very non-specific but the Germans are pretty much all from 1776 though the regiment landed on New Years Day so these Germans(as suggested above) must have been sent en masse specifically. Perhaps the other post 1776 recruits are also from drafts sent from home (no record of this) or from other regiments (I guess if they were disbanded owing to high casualties?). It isn't the best documented era and the documents were nowhere near as specific as I recalled – could be we misinterpreted them back then (2005) and i remembered what we came up with as gospel…

GT – I worked on the MRs of the 23rd Foot for Mark Urban when he was researching "Fusiliers" and the regiments that stayed in America for any length of time generally got recruits from the following sources:-
1) a batch of Germans in 1776
2) a share of the R&F of any unit "drafted" and sent home
3) new recruits from England – not necessarily recruited for/by the 23rd, but just the regiment's "share" of what arrived
4) re-assigned Convention Army escapees (eg Roger Lamb)
5) local recruits – ie Americans (pre-war only)
6) returning deserters (about one a year over the course of the war)

You're quite right that accurate paperwork was not the norm in this period – the 23rd had all its MRs for 1781 through to early 1783 completed (in the same hand) after the Yorktown men returned from captivity. I also recall the word "entertained" being the contemporary euphemism for recruited.

SM – interesting stuff. The work on recruiting in the 17th was done by a colleague at the museum who was looking largely at the post 1781 period to establish the extent to which there was any county connection after the regiment became 'Leicestershire'. The only AWI MR we had was for 1776-77 and is interesting in itself (smattering of deserters – lots of "prisoner of ye rebels" entries so we had assumed they must have recruited in New York to recoup the numbers as we had no record of them receiving drafts from home but your research is more convincing. Be interesting to see some of the later war MRs…