Leopold Zindle: The Story Behind the Story
Why we keep doing research after we think we found all the answers
Last week, we revisited a story about my 6th-great grandfather, a Hessian soldier who was captured by General Washington’s troops and sent to work in Mount Hope, New Jersey, for John Jacob Faesch, who needed laborers to continue making ammunition for the Continental Army.
In 2014, I posted a compelling and dramatic story to my old Mightier Acorns blog: “Me No Go; Me Die First”. The source attributed that story to a neighbor, Mr. William F. Wiggins, who claimed to know Leopold after he died in 1820, but I needed more information to prove the connections between Leopold and his children, and to try to trace Leopold’s origins in Germany.
While digging for this information, I found evidence that the story attributed to Mr. Wiggins in the History of Morris County, New Jersey1 might not reflect events as exactly as they played out.
So what did happen to Leopold Zindle, exactly?
Leopold enlisted in the Hesse-Kassel Regt. Erbprinz, 1. Comp., and was reported on the unit’s muster roll in August 1779. The prisoner lists I referenced last week show a Leopold Zuendel (Zindell) from the Kassel Regt. Erbprinz, including a remark saying “Captured at Paulus Hook 8-20-79.” Then, after John Jacob Faesch from Mount Hope, New Jersey, requested German prisoners of war as laborers he received thirty-five men (not 250) from the Commissary of Prisoners in Philadelphia on April 29, 1782, and put his furnace into blast. Among the soldiers sent to work for Faesch were two men from the Hesse-Cassel Erbprinz (“Prince Hereditary”) Regiment captured at Paulus Hook in 1779: Adolph Assmann and Leopold Zuendel.
The rest of the story comes from two sources: an article published by Daniel Krebs2, and Peter Lubrecht’s book, “New Jersey Hessians”3, both of which I will try to summarize:
The month after Faesch received his 35 laborers, several Continental leaders decided that German prisoners of war could either be recruited for the Continental Army, ransomed for 80 Spanish dollars, or sold into indentured servitude. Brigadier General Moses Hazen, whose regiment already guarded the prisoners of war, was sent to tell the prisoners of their new options. Accounts of what happened next differ between the American authorities and the correspondence of the German soldiers.
Both sides agreed that officers from Hazen's regiment arrived in Mount Hope in November 1782 to announce the new policies. One of the American officers, Captain Selin, a German immigrant, told the prisoner laborers that they could choose between enlistment, ransom payment, or a return to the New Gaol in Philadelphia. The men refused to serve as soldiers but asked for more time to consider the other proposals.
In February 1783, some of the German prisoners in Mount Hope attempted to escape to British-occupied New York. They made it as far as Newark, New Jersey before they were caught. At the beginning of March 1783, officers from Hazen's regiment returned to Mount Hope. When the prisoners refused to enlist in the army and refused to ''redeem'' themselves, Selin began to march them back to Philadelphia. After one day’s march, the German soldiers demanded to talk to Faesch and supposedly “entered into a voluntary agreement with him” to become indentured servants, with the intention to pay their ransom of 80 Spanish dollars (or 30 pounds of Pennsylvania currency) and then become citizens of New Jersey. Not all thirty-five prisoners signed their indentures with Faesch for three years, and on March 11, 1783, Faesch returned two prisoners of war to Hazen.
In a letter dated March 20, 1783, to General von Lossberg, commander of the Hessian troops in America, the remaining German soldiers told a different story.
"The Captain told them they were at his disposal, because they were Continental Servants, to which they replied, that they were no Servants, but the King's Soldiers. Upon which the Captain drew his sword, put it to their breasts threatening to kill them, and struck them, till he broke it upon the head of one of them. He then carried them off, and that night put them into a house surrounded with sentries, and allowed them neither bread not water."
(Krebs, pg. 134)
Jacob Peter, a prisoner of war in Mount Hope, who was able to pay the ransom with his wages on June 23, 1783, added in his account that Captain Selin was the officer who struck the soldiers. According to Peter, the two were Leopold Zindel and Valentin Landau. Peter stressed that the German soldiers gave up and agreed to the contracts with Faesch only because of American pressure and lack of provisions. Peter also claimed that he and his comrades did not know that they signed an oath of allegiance and an indenture for three years because nobody explained the English documents or translated them into German.
But the prisoners of war at Mount Hope almost certainly talked to Captain Selin in German. To later claim that they did not understand what they heard and signed is unconvincing, even when you consider the fact that some sources say that Captain Selin spoke Swiss German (or “Schweizerdeutsch”). It is also worth considering that while the newspapers and local histories often refer to him as a “Dutchman,” Jacob Faesch appears to have been born in Hesse himself4, so he would have been able to speak to Hessian soldiers in their mutual native language.
Not all of Faesch’s German prisoners of war returned from Mount Hope when Lossberg bought their freedom from Faesch in the summer of 1783. Leopold Zindel and Adolph Assmann (both of the Erbprinz Regt.), and Georg Schmidt (of the Knyphausen Regt.) are the only settlers known to have remained in New Jersey and to have left records behind.5 All of this suggests that these prisoners knew what they wanted after the end of the war - to remain in America and build a new life - and played the German, British, and American officers off of each other to get it.
What Does This All Mean?
Now that we know more facts from contemporary witnesses, and can compare differences between somewhat official accounts, a few things become clear about the story I found in 2014:
The officer who abused Leopold was American, not British.
The townspeople of Mount Hope may not have been present, and if they were, their interference did not make it into the formal report.
William F. Wiggins got those details wrong when he repeated his story to Halsey for the History of Morris County.
Wiggins’s version of the story is still important evidence because we can compare the stories and learn something from the differences. Krebs relates several examples in his article where German prisoners of war told their German commanders an altered version of the truth to avoid the consequences of desertion. On page 135, Krebs describes one group that agreed to enlist as marines aboard an American frigate, the South Carolina. When captured, they were interrogated and claimed they had enlisted on the American ship only because they had heard from Loyalists that the South Carolina would be captured and sent back to New York. They all left out the fact that they had fought hard to resist being captured by the British.
The story Wiggins tells suggests an element left out of the reports: the reaction of the local population. Eyewitnesses, especially younger ones, probably wouldn’t have known the difference between an American officer (who, if it was Selin, was probably speaking German to his prisoners) and a British or Hessian officer. Townspeople would probably be unaware of the details of the policies being explained to the prisoners, and it seems reasonable that they would have misunderstood the dynamics of the situation.
That could explain why, in Wiggins’s story, it was a British officer beating Leopold, and why he thought the officer’s anger was due to the cost involved in Leopold remaining behind. It was due to the cost - but that cost was to the Continental Congress, and not the British Crown.
To my mind, the most important part of Wiggins’s tale is that he captured the sentiment that Leopold was welcomed into the community despite being an “enemy soldier” - and that was probably because many of the inhabitants of Mount Hope were German immigrants themselves, and knew Leopold from his years as an indentured man at Faesch’s iron works.
So, whether or not Leopold ever said, “Me no go; me die first!” to the abusive Captain Selin, he did stay in Mount Hope, and in 1820, after raising a family of seven children, he did die there.
I hope that you find a story in your family history that you love as much as I loved Leopold’s story. And I hope that just because you love a story, you are open to accepting new evidence and changing what you thought you knew - because the “story” part of “history” is always fluid and elusive.
Halsey, Edmund D., “History of Morris County, New Jersey…”, W.W. Munsell & Co., New York, 1882, page 337.
Krebs, Daniel, "German Captives in the American War of Independence", from Krieg, Militär und Migration in der Frühen Neuzeit. Germany, Lit, 2008; pg. 121-135.
Lubrecht, Peter, New Jersy Hessians; Truth and Lore in the American Revolution; The History Press, Charleston, SC, 2016.
Lubrecht; pg. 107: “His handwriting in the old German script and his word choices indicate a Hessian background.”
Lubrecht; pg. 112.
Great research. You've inspired me to find out more about my own Hessian ancestor, who somehow ended up in the Gaspé.
This is so cool! Great job finding all those details and weaving them together. I can see why this is a favorite story.
As an aside--my grandmother is from Wiesbaden, Hesse. :-)