I am currently reading Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington, in order to present a simplified and abridged version to my student. Weems is oft-remembered for having made Washington appear to have said and done various impressive things which were not actually the case — for example, his confession of having chopped down a purely notional cherry tree. But there are words in Weems’s Life that stand out as transcending their time and author, and as applicable today.The Hessians were German mercenaries who fought on the side of the Crown during the Revolutionary War, and they committed what today might be called “war crimes.”

Weems:

“To make them fight the better, it seems they had been told that the Americans, against whom they were warring, were not (like the Europeans) Christians and gentlemen, but mere savages, a race of Cannibals who would not only tomahawk a poor Hessian, and haul off his hide for a drum’s head, but would just as lieve barbecue and eat him as they would a pig. “Vat! Vat!” cried the Waldeckers, with eyes staring wild and big as billiard balls, “Vat! eat Hessian man up like vun hock! Oh mine Got and Vader! vot peoples ever been heard of eat Christian man before. Vy! shure des Mexicans mush be de deble.”

“This was Hessian logic: and it inspired them with the utmost abhorrence of the Americans, to whom they thought the worst treatment much too good.”

I think we can see both British and Hessians in our own community — our community of Americans, who were the butt of such logic and such treatment centuries ago. So soon we all forget.