Penobscot Expedition, explained: Paul Revere court-martialed? Say it ain’t so! But it was. Last Tuesday marked the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775. Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Revere’s midnight ride to warn militia commanders that some 800 British regulars had marched out of Boston to seize contraband armaments secreted at Concord. A ragtag line of militiamen confronted the redcoats on Lexington Green before the shot heard ‘round the world rang out during a clash between minutemen and the regulars at the North Bridge in Concord.
Thus commenced the War of American Independence.
Fast-forward to the summer of 1779 in coastal Maine, a pleasant land where I had the privilege of spending a week teaching at Maine Maritime Academy and the University of Maine earlier this month. That June a British force landed on the Penobscot Peninsula, now home to the village of Castine, and constructed a fort on the heights overlooking the east side of the peninsula. (It’s now right across the street from the Maine Maritime campus.) The Castine Historical Society ascribes several motives to the Penobscot Expedition’s masterminds: they meant for Fort George to serve “as a possible Loyalist haven, as a source of timber for the King’s Navy, and as a strategic naval base and coastal trading post.”
Constructing a standing fortification within your enemy’s territory is a time-honored troublemaking strategy, reaching all the way back to the Peloponnesian War and in all likelihood long before. At the time Maine remained part of Massachusetts. Alarmed at the news that redcoats had ensconced themselves in Penobscot Bay, the Massachusetts General Assembly ordered an expeditionary force fitted out to evict them from Fort George. Nineteen ships of war and 24 transports, some borrowed from the Continental Navy, carried a force numbering over 1,000 troops to Maine by July 25. The assembly entrusted Commodore Dudley Saltonstall with overall command of the expedition, while Brigadier General Solomon Lovell headed the ground contingent. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere oversaw the force’s ordnance train.
