My First Blog Post - Bio of von Senden

Among the German soldiers who served in John Burgoyne’s invasion force was a young ensign who abandoned the study of law at the University of Goettingen to join the Freiherr von Riedesel’s Corps. In 1815, he was a Prussian Infantry General, Ritters des rotten Adlers. Ordens erste Klasse, and the Order Pour le Merite, and former commandant of the city of Breslau. His name was Ernst Johann Friedrich Schueler von Senden, and he kept a Tagebuch, or diary, which I hope by sometime during 2014 to have translated and edited.

He began with an account of the march to take ship for North America and the voyage to the continent in which, incidentally, he hoped to settle after Britain defeated its colonial rebels. Because he was fluent in French, he was assigned the mission of dealing with Canadian Habitants during General Sir Guy Carleton’s 1776 invasion of the northern frontier. He then participated in Burgoyne’s expedition, was captured at Saratoga, went to Boston as a prisoner of war, and with the rest of the Convention Army, marched 700 miles to its internment camp near modern-day Charlottesville, Va. Von Senden was an articulate, intelligent, observant, and humane man who wrote about the people, terrain, towns, and events of his seven-year American experience.