until 1822. That year he secured command of
the small bomb vessel HMS Infernal,which
he held for two years. Barclay finally made
captain in October 1824, but he failed to se-
cure another active command for the next 13
years. He died at Edinburgh on May 8, 1837, a
heroic and all but forgotten naval figure from
an overlooked war.
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Battle of Lake Erie.Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1991.BAUM, FRIEDRICH
Baum, Friedrich
(d. August 18, 1777)
Hessian Army Officer
B
aum, a tough professional soldier, was
entrusted with the vitally important
mission of securing food and trans-
portation for the British army in New York
during the early stages of the American Revo-
lution. However, he underestimated the deter-
mination of the New England militias to resist
his designs and came to grief at Bennington,
Vermont.
By 1775, the government of Great Britain
realized that even though it possessed a well-
trained, professional army, its numbers were
far too small to crush the rebellion in Amer-
ica. It therefore resorted to the time-honored
and typically European expedient of hiring
foreign auxiliaries to augment its military
strength. In strictly legal parlance, foreign
auxiliaries were distinct from mercenaries
inasmuch as they were hired directly from the
government of a willing state (i.e., the soldiers
were not hired individually). At this time, Ger-
many consisted of more than 300 states and
principalities, each with its own dynasty and
army. Various princes, eager to raise money
for their own purposes, gladly rented out sol-
diers at a fixed rate. Moreover, monarchs
were entitled to recompense for each soldier
wounded in action, greater sums if one were
killed. Therefore, between 1775 and 1782, the
British hired an estimated 30,000 soldiers
from Germany for service in America. They
originated mostly from six small principali-
ties: Hesse-Cassel, Hesse-Hanau, Brunswick,
Ansbach-Bayreuth, Anhalt-Zerbst, and Wal-
deck. As a group, German soldiers were sav-
agely disciplined in the strict Prussian man-
ner, bravely led, and they acquired a
reputation for coolness and ferocity under
fire. Regardless of their state of origin, all be-
came collectively known as “Hessians” by
their adversaries and were hated as symbols
of tyranny.