Question

What is a mercenary? Who served as mercenaries in the American Revolution and for which side?

Answer 1

Hint: i) A mercenary is an individual who fights in wars for monetary gain. They are uninvolved with any political party.
ii) A mercenary's primary goal is to protect their client's properties, such as resources (oil, diamonds, and mines), or to bring/keep people in power (supporting a faction to rule or keep on ruling a country).

Complete answer:
Mercenary – A mercenary, also known as a "lucky soldier," is a person who participates in military conflict for personal gain, is otherwise unaffiliated with the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military force. Instead of fighting for political reasons, mercenaries battle for money or other forms of payment. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, mercenaries have been viewed as having less rights to immunity under the laws of war than non-mercenaries.

Indeed, according to the Geneva Conventions, mercenaries are not recognized as legitimate combatants and are not entitled to the same legal rights as captured regular army personnel. In practice, determining whether or not someone is a mercenary can be a matter of degree, as financial and political interests can collide, as they have in the past.

Mercenaries in the American Revolution -
German Hessians fighting for the British were the principal mercenaries of the American Revolution. On both sides, several American Indian tribes were hired, and when the French allied with the Colonies, some of their troops were mercenaries as well.

During the American Revolutionary War, Hessians were German soldiers who acted as auxiliaries to the British Army.

Hessians were legally and politically distinct from mercenaries, who served a foreign government on their own volition; unlike mercenaries, who served a foreign government on their own volition, auxiliaries were soldiers hired out to a foreign party by their own government, to whom they remained in service.

Note:
i) A mercenary is someone who only cares for money and is willing to act unethically in order to obtain it. A mercenary is someone who is only motivated to do a job because of the money they will be paid. A professional soldier is an example of someone who can be classified as a mercenary.
ii) There are more mercenaries in the world today than ever before. The US government is the largest employer of mercenaries; they call them "private military contractors," but they are unmistakably mercenaries under international law and the Geneva Conventions.