Authors: Bernard Cornwell
The British, on the other hand, were very well led by two professionals who trusted each other and cooperated closely. McLean’s tactics, which were simply to go on strengthening Fort George while constantly irritating his besiegers with Caffrae’s Light Company, worked perfectly. Mowat donated guns and men whenever needed. The British, after all, only had to survive until reinforcements arrived, and they were fortunate that Sir George Collier (who really did write the musical presented at the Drury Lane Theatre) beat Henry Jackson’s regiment of Continental Army regulars to the Penobscot River. Brigadier-General Francis McLean was a very good soldier and, even by the estimate of his enemies, a very good man, and he served his king well at Majabigwaduce. Once the whole affair was over McLean went out of his way to ensure that the wounded rebels, stranded far up the river, were supplied with medical necessities and had a ship to convey them back to Boston. There are rebel accounts of encounters with McLean and in all of them he is depicted as a humane, generous, and decent man. The two regiments he led at Majabigwaduce were every bit as inexperienced as the militia they faced, yet his young Scotsmen received leadership, inspiration, and example. Peleg Wadsworth did not meet Francis McLean during the siege, so their conversation is entirely fictional, though the cause of it, Lieutenant Dennis’s injury and capture, was real enough. It was Captain Thomas Thomas, master of the privateer
Vengeance
, and Lovell’s secretary, John Marston, who approached the fort under a flag of truce to discover Dennis’s sad fate, but I wanted McLean and Wadsworth to meet and so changed the facts.
I changed as little as I could. So far as I know, Peleg Wadsworth was not asked to investigate the charge of peculation against Revere, an accusation that faded away into the larger mess of Penobscot. I telescoped some events of the siege. Brigadier McLean spent a couple of days exploring Penobscot Bay before deciding on Majabigwaduce as the site for his fort, a reconnaissance I ignored. There were two attempts to lure the British into ambushes at the Half Moon Battery, both of them disastrous, but for fictional purposes one seemed sufficient, and I have no evidence that John Moore was involved in either action. The final immolation of the rebel fleet stretched over three days, which I shrank to two.
The total casualties incurred at Penobscot are very hard to establish. Lovell, in his journal, reckoned the rebels lost only fourteen dead and twenty wounded in their assault on the bluff, while Peleg Wadsworth, in his written recollection of the same action, estimated the number of rebel killed and wounded at a hundred. The militia returns are not helpful. Lovell’s men were reinforced by some local volunteers (though Lovell noted a general reluctance among the militia of the Penobscot valley to take up arms against the British) so that, on the eve of Sir George Collier’s arrival, the rebel army numbered 923 men fit for duty as against 873 three weeks before, and this despite combat losses and the regrettably high rate of desertion. The best evidence suggests that total British losses were twenty-five killed, between thirty and forty seriously wounded, and twenty-six men taken prisoner. Rebel casualties are much harder to estimate, but one contemporary source claims fewer than 150 killed and wounded, though another, adding in the men who did not survive the long journey home through thickly forested country, goes as high as 474 total casualties. My own conclusion is that rebel casualties were about double the British figures. That might be a low estimate, but certainly the Penobscot Expedition, though a disaster for the rebels, was blessedly not a bloodbath.
Lieutenant George Little’s angry confrontation with Saltonstall at the end of the expedition is attested by contemporary evidence, as is Peleg Wadsworth’s encounter with Paul Revere during the retreat upriver. Revere, asked to rescue the schooner’s crew, refused on the personal grounds that he did not wish to risk his baggage being captured by the British and on the more general grounds that, the siege being over, he was no longer obliged to obey the orders of his superior officers. Some sources claim that he landed the baggage, then sent the barge back for the schooner’s crew. That may well be true, and the crew was rescued even though the schooner itself probably became a third British prize, but afterwards Revere simply left the river without orders and, abandoning most of his men, made his way back to Boston. Once home he was suspended from his command of the Artillery Regiment, placed under house arrest, and, eventually, court-martialed. Peleg Wadsworth had threatened Revere with arrest, and it was Revere’s truculent insolence on the day that Wadsworth ordered him to rescue the schooner’s crew that was to cause Revere the most trouble, but other major charges were leveled by Brigade Major William Todd and by Marine Captain Thomas Carnes. Those accusations were investigated by the Committee of Inquiry established by the General Court of Massachusetts, which was convened to discover the reasons for the expedition’s failure.
Todd and Revere, as the novel suggests, had a long history of animosity which certainly colored Todd’s accusations. Brigade Major Todd claimed that Revere was frequently absent from the American lines, a charge that is supported by other witnesses and by Lovell’s General Order of July 30th, 1779 (quoted at the top of Chapter Nine), and he cited various times when Revere had disobeyed orders, specifically during the retreat. Thomas Carnes echoed some of those complaints. I know of no reason why Carnes, unlike Todd, should have harbored a personal dislike of Revere, though perhaps it is significant that Carnes had been an officer in Gridley’s Artillery and Richard Gridley, the regiment’s founder and commanding officer, had fallen out with Revere over Masonic business. Carnes complained that when the Americans landed Revere was supposed to be leading his artillerymen as a reserve corps of infantry, but instead went back to the
Samuel
for breakfast. Carnes’s basic charges, though, concerned Revere’s fitness as a gunner, a subject on which Carnes was expertly equipped to comment. Revere, Carnes said, was not present to supervise the construction of the batteries and gave his gunners no instruction or proper supervision. In cross-examination Carnes, an experienced artilleryman, claimed it was extraordinary that Revere “should make such a bad shot and know no more about artillery.” It was Carnes’s written deposition that accused Revere of behavior “which tends to cowardice.” Wadsworth testified that Revere was frequently absent from the rebel lines and described Revere’s refusal to obey orders during the eventual retreat. Wadsworth also noted that Revere, when offered a chance to vote on whether or not to continue the siege, consistently chose against continuance. That is not evidence of cowardice, but the minutes of those councils do reveal that Revere was by far the most vehement of the men urging abandonment of the siege.
The Court of Inquiry published its findings in October 1779. It concluded that Commodore Saltonstall bore the entire blame for the expedition’s failure and specifically exonerated Generals Lovell and Wadsworth, yet, despite all the evidence, it gave no judgment on Paul Revere’s behavior. George Buker convincingly argues that the committee did not want to dilute its absurd charge that the Continental Navy, in the person of Dudley Saltonstall, was solely responsible for the disaster.
Revere was dissatisfied. He had not been condemned, but neither had his name been cleared and Boston was rife with rumors of his “unsoldierlike” behavior. He demanded to be court-martialed. Revere, it seems to me, was a difficult man. One of his most sympathetic biographers admits that it was Revere’s “personality traits” that weakened his chances of gaining a Continental Army commission. He was quarrelsome, exceedingly touchy about his own reputation, and prone to pick fights with anyone who criticized him. He had a separate spat with John Hancock, who, inspecting Castle Island during Revere’s absence at Penobscot, dared to find fault with its defenses. The General Court, however, did not grant him a court-martial, but instead reconvened the Committee of Enquiry, which was now charged with investigating Revere’s behavior, and a crucial piece of evidence was the “diary” Revere had ostensibly kept at Majabigwaduce and which, unsurprisingly, shows him to be a model of military diligence. I have no proof that this “diary” was manufactured for the inquiry, but it seems very likely. Revere also produced many witnesses to counter the charges against him, and his vigorous defense was largely successful because, when the committee reported in November 1779, it cleared Revere of the charge of cowardice, though it did mildly condemn him for leaving Penobscot without orders and for “disputing the orders of Brigadier-General Wadsworth respecting the Boat.” Revere’s only defense against the latter charge was that he had misunderstood Wadsworth’s orders.
Yet, though he had been cleared of cowardice, Revere was still dissatisfied and once again he petitioned for a court-martial. That court finally convened in 1782 and Revere at last received what he wanted, exoneration. The suspicion is that people were tired of the whole affair and that, in February 1782, four months after the great rebel triumph at Yorktown, no one wanted to resurrect unhappy memories of the Penobscot Expedition and so, though the court-martial weakly chided Revere for his refusal to rescue the schooner’s crew, they acquitted him “with equal Honor as the other Officers” which, in the circumstances, was very faint praise indeed. The controversy over Revere’s behavior at Majabigwaduce persisted with a bitter exchange of letters in the Boston press, but it was long forgotten by 1861 when Revere was abruptly elevated to the heroic status he enjoys today. Other offenses such as Revere’s delay of the fleet’s departure, his petty refusal to allow anyone else to use the Castle Island barge and his failure to withdraw the guns from Cross Island are all attested by various sources.
Dudley Saltonstall was dismissed from the navy but was able to invest in a privateer, the
Minerva
, with which, in 1781, he captured one of the richest prizes of the whole Revolutionary War. After the war Saltonstall owned trading ships, some of them used for slaving, and he died, aged fifty-eight, in 1796. Paul Revere was also successful after the war, opening a foundry and becoming a prominent Boston industrialist. He died in 1818, aged eighty-three. Solomon Lovell’s political career was not harmed by the Penobscot fiasco. He remained a selectman for Weymouth, Massachusetts, a representative in the General Court, and he helped devise the state’s new constitution. He died aged sixty-nine in 1801. A memorialist wrote that Solomon Lovell was “esteemed and honored . . . respected and trusted in the counsels of the State . . . his name has been handed down through the generations.” A better judgment was surely made by a young marine at Majabigwaduce who wrote, “Mister Lovell would have done more good, and made a much more respectable appearance in the deacon’s seat of a country church, than at the head of an American army.”
Captain Henry Mowat remained in the Royal Navy, his last command a frigate on which he died, probably of a heart attack, off the coast of Virginia in 1798. He is buried in St. John’s churchyard, Hampton, Virginia. Brigadier-General Francis McLean returned to his command at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he died, aged sixty-three, just two years after his successful defense of Fort George. John Moore far transcended his old commander in fame and is now celebrated as one of the greatest, and most humane, generals ever to serve in the British army. He died aged forty-eight at Corunna just as the had fought at Majabigwaduce, leading from the front.
In 1780, a year after the expedition, Peleg Wadsworth was sent back to eastern Massachusetts as commander of the Penobscot region’s militia. The British garrison at Fort George learned of his presence and sent a raiding party which, after a brief fight in which Wadsworth was wounded, captured him. Wadsworth was imprisoned in Fort George, where his wife, allowed to visit her husband, was told of a plan to move Wadsworth to a prison in Britain. Wadsworth and a second prisoner, Major Burton, then devised and executed a daring escape which was wholly successful and today the bay north of Castine (as Majabigwaduce is now called) and west of the neck is named Wadsworth Cove after the place where the two escapees found a boat. Peleg Wadsworth remained in eastern Massachusetts. After the war he opened a hardware store and built a house in Portland that can still be seen (as can Paul Revere’s house in Boston), and he served in the Massachusetts Senate and as a representative for the province of Maine in the U.S. Congress. He became a farmer in Hiram, and was a leader in the movement to make Maine a separate state, an ambition realized in 1820. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had ten children, and he died in 1829, aged eighty-one. George Washington held Peleg Wadsworth in the highest esteem and one of the Wadsworth family’s treasured heirlooms was a lock of Washington’s hair that was a gift from the first president. Peleg Wadsworth was, to my mind, a true hero and a great man.
The British stayed at Majabigwaduce, indeed it was the very last British post to be evacuated from the United States. Many of the Loyalists moved to Nova Scotia when the British left, some taking their houses with them, though interestingly a number of British soldiers, including Sergeant Lawrence of the Royal Artillery, settled in Majabigwaduce after the war and, by all accounts, were warmly welcomed. Most of the sunken cannon from the rebel fleet were retrieved and put into British service, which explains why commemorative gun-barrels bearing the Massachusetts state seal are found as far afield as Australia. Then, in the War of 1812, the British returned and captured Majabigwaduce again, and again garrisoned the fort, where they stayed till the war’s end. It was during this second occupation that the fort’s walls were strengthened with masonry and the British Canal, which is now a marshy ditch, was dug as a defensive work across the neck. Fort George still exists, a national monument now. It stands on the ridge above the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, and is a peaceful, beautiful place. The ramparts are mostly overgrown with grass, and legend in Castine says that on still nights the ghost of a drummer boy can be heard beating his drum in the old fort. One version claims the ghost is a British boy who was inadvertently locked into a magazine when the garrison evacuated in 1784, others say it is an American lad killed in the fighting of 1779. The earliest reference I can discover is in William Hutchings’s recollections where he avers that the boy, a rebel drummer, was killed at the Half Moon Battery. There is a footpath which twists up and down the bluff by Dice Head (as Dyce’s Head is now called), giving the visitor a chance to admire the achievement of those Americans who, on July 28th, 1779, assaulted and won that position. The large boulder on the beach is called Trask’s Rock after the boy fifer who played there throughout the assault. Castine prospered during the 19th century, mostly because of the timber trade, and is now a picturesque and tranquil harbor town, and very mindful of its fascinating history. During one of my visits I was told that Paul Revere had stolen the expedition’s pay chest, an allegation that is not supported by any direct evidence, but indicative of the scorn that some in this part of New England feel for a man revered elsewhere in the region.