Col. John M. Harrell, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 10.2, Arkansas
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

‘ [95] part, going into the private apartments of ladies and opening trunks and drawers and ransacking everything and taking away what they wanted. If these excesses are permitted, we cannot wonder at guerrilla warfare.’

Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, says, in his recent ‘Story of the Revolution,’ of the employment of the Hessians by King George in 1776: ‘George meant to be a king, and the idea of resistance to his wishes was intolerable to him. It was something to be crushed, not reasoned with. To carry out his plans, ships, expeditions and armaments were being prepared, and the king, in order to get men, sent his agents over Europe to buy soldiers from the wretched German princelings, who lived by selling their subjects, or from any one else who was ready to traffic in flesh and blood. It was not a pretty business, nor overcreditable to a great fighting people like the English, but it unquestionably meant business.’ He also writes that the English ministry ‘resorted to the inhuman scheme’ of intriguing with Indians to ‘incite this savage warfare’ against the colonists, and in the North their Indian allies fought for them diligently, and damaged their cause irreparably.

In the war of 1861-65 the Pin Indians were the first to be turned loose upon our frontier by the Federal government. The Germans in the Federal army were purely mercenaries, as much so as those hired by King George to overrun and pillage the colonies in the earlier struggle for independence. The bounties paid them upon enlistment, the gross favoritism and extenuation granted their errors and breaches, promotions to high military positions of waiters and bartenders to conciliate the German emigrants, constituted them a distinct and privileged element in the army of the Union, without restraint and yielding to the degraded instincts of an insolent hireling soldiery. They were hardly more accountable to the rules of civilized warfare than the Indian savages enlisted by Blunt and Herron under Canby.