Who were the German soldiers the british hired in the revolutionary war?

History records that "Hessians" were the German mercenaries who fought the colonists. However, they were not mercenaries in the modern sense. The term comes from soldiers in service to the state of Hesse-Cassel, which like Hanover was not yet part of a unified German state. To utilize the standing military forces, King George III paid a fee to his uncle, Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. This was not the only time soldiers from German regions were used in the British Empire. More than 1/4 of about 24,000 of these soldiers died during the war.

The term "Hessian mercenary" is somewhat of a generalization, as a number of the German-British soldiers fighting under King George III came from the German region of Hanover, which was a British holding at the time. King George III was descended from the House of Hanover, which was a royal German family, and many of the Germans who fought for him during the American Revolution were actually his legal subjects, meaning they weren't mercenaries at all. There is no doubt many German mercenaries, particularly from Hesse, also fought in support of the British Crown, but Germany was not a united country at that time in history, as much of it was known as the Holy Roman Empire, and different Germans had different allegiances. "Hessian mercenary" was more or less a general term that denoted all German mercenaries, be they from Hesse, Prussia, or any where else in the German speaking lands.