Friday, August 13th, but abandoned that attack because of the arrival of Sir George Collier’s relief fleet. The aborted land-sea attack might well have eliminated Mowat’s sloops, but Lovell’s forces would surely have been decimated by the fort’s defenders. It was all too little too late, a fiasco caused by atrocious leadership and lack of decision.
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
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
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
