The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War - xaviantvision

Saltonstall to attack certainly did not believe that the circumstances were so dire that no attack was feasible. Saltonstall's ships would have suffered, butthey would have won. The three British sloops would have been captured or sunk, and then what?That question has never been answered, and it was not in the interest of Massachusetts to answer it. George Buker's book is subtitled CommodoreSaltonstall and the Massachusetts Conspiracy of 1779, and its main argument is that the government of Massachusetts conspired to place all theblame on Saltonstall, and in that ambition they were brilliantly successful. The expedition was a Massachusetts initiative, undertaken without consultationwith the Continental Congress, and almost wholly funded by the state. Massachusetts insured all the private ships; paid the crews; supplied the militia;provided weapons, ammunition, and stores; and lost every penny. British money was still in use in Massachusetts in 1779 and the official inquiry was toldthat the loss amounted to PS1,588,668 (and ten pence!) and the real figure was probably much closer to two million pounds. Discovering the equivalencyof historic monetary sums to present values is a difficult and uncertain task, but at a most conservative estimate that loss, in 2010 U.S. dollars, amounts toaround $300 million. This enormous sum effectively bankrupted the state. However, Massachusetts was lucky. The Warren had been in Boston Harborwhen the news of the British incursion arrived, and it had made sense to use that powerful warship, and the two other Continental Navy vessels at Boston,and so permission to deploy them had been sought and received from the Continental Navy Board. This meant that a small portion of the defeated forceshad been federal and if the blame could be placed on that federal component then the other states might be made to recompense Massachusetts for theloss. That required, in turn, for Saltonstall to be depicted as the villain of the piece. Massachusetts argued that it had been Saltonstall's behavior whichhad betrayed the whole expedition and, supported by mendacious evidence (especially from Solomon Lovell), that argument prevailed. It took manyyears, but in 1793 the federal government of the United States of America largely reimbursed Massachusetts for the financial loss. So placing the entireblame on Saltonstall was politically motivated and very successful as the American taxpayer ended up paying for the mistakes of Massachusetts.So why did Saltonstall not attack? He left no account, and if his court-martial ever took place then the records have been lost and so we do not possesshis testimony. It was certainly not cowardice that stayed his hand because he proved his courage elsewhere in the war, and the suggestion that he was inBritish pay is unsupportable. My own belief is that Saltonstall was unwilling to sacrifice his men and, quite possibly, one of the few frigates left to theContinental Navy in an operation which, though successful, would not have advanced the aim of the expedition. Yes, he could have taken the three sloops,but would Lovell have matched his achievement on land? I suspect Saltonstall believed that the Massachusetts Militia was inadequate, for which belief hehad much evidence, and that destroying the sloops was irrelevant to the expedition's purpose, which was the capture of Fort George. If the sloops weretaken or sunk, the fort would have survived, albeit in a less advantageous situation, whereas the capture of the fort irrevocably doomed the sloops.Saltonstall understood that. This is not to exonerate the commodore. He was a difficult, prickly man and he was obdurate in his relations with Lovell, andhe failed miserably to stop or even attempt to slow the British pursuit during the retreat upriver, but he was not the man who ruined the expedition. Lovellwas.Solomon Lovell has been forgiven for the expedition's failure, yet it was Lovell who did not press the attacks on Fort George which, on the day histroops landed, was scarcely defensible. It does seem true that McLean was fully prepared to surrender rather than provoke a ghastly hand-to-hand fightover his inadequate ramparts (at that moment McLean still believed, probably based on the number of rebel transport ships, that he was outnumbered byat least four to one). But Lovell held back. And went on holding back. He refused Peleg Wadsworth's eminently sensible suggestion that the rebels shouldprepare a fortification upriver to which they could withdraw if the British should send reinforcements. He made no attempt, ever, to storm the fort, butinstead called endless councils of war (which made decisions by votes) and insisted, in increasingly petulant tones, that Saltonstall attack the sloopsbefore the militia moved against the fort. It is evident that the Massachusetts Militia were poor soldiers, yet that too was Lovell's responsibility. Theyneeded discipline, encouragement, and leadership. They received none of those things and so they camped forlornly on the heights until the order cameto retreat. It is true that once Fort George's walls were raised sufficiently high Lovell's chances of capturing the work were almost nonexistent because hedid not have enough men and his artillery had failed to blast a way through the ramparts, but certainly he had every hope of a successful storm in the firstweek of the siege. My belief is that Dudley Saltonstall understood perfectly well that his destruction of the sloops would not lead to the fort's capture, andthat therefore any attack on the British ships would simply result in unneccessary naval casualties. He was finally persuaded to enter the harbor on 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 eliminatedMowat'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 atrociousleadership 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 weresimply to go on strengthening Fort George while constantly irritating his besiegers with Caffrae's Light Company, worked perfectly. Mowat donated gunsand men whenever needed. The British, after all, only had to survive until reinforcements arrived, and they were fortunate that Sir George Collier (whoreally 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 atMajabigwaduce. Once the whole affair was over McLean went out of his way to ensure that the wounded rebels, stranded far up the river, were suppliedwith 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 isdepicted 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 theirconversation is entirely fictional, though the cause of it, Lieutenant Dennis's injury and capture, was real enough. It was Captain Thomas Thomas, masterof 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 Iwanted 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 accusationthat faded away into the larger mess of Penobscot. I telescoped some events of the siege. Brigadier McLean spent a couple of days exploringPenobscot Bay before deciding on Majabigwaduce as the site for his fort, a reconnaissance I ignored. There were two attempts to lure the British intoambushes at the Half Moon Battery, both of them disastrous, but for fictional purposes one seemed sufficient, and I have no evidence that John Moorewas 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 twentywounded in their assault on the bluff, while Peleg Wadsworth, in his written recollection of the same action, estimated the number of rebel killed andwounded at a hundred. The militia returns are not helpful. Lovell's men were reinforced by some local volunteers (though Lovell noted a general reluctanceamong 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 numbered923 men fit for duty as against 873 three weeks before, and this despite combat losses and the regrettably high rate of desertion. The best evidencesuggests that total British losses were twenty-five killed, between thirty and forty seriously wounded, and twenty-six men taken prisoner. Rebel casualtiesare much harder to estimate, but one contemporary source claims fewer than 150 killed and wounded, though another, adding in the men who did notsurvive the long journey home through thickly forested country, goes as high as 474 total casualties. My own conclusion is that rebel casualties were aboutdouble the British figures. That might be a low estimate, but certainly the Penobscot Expedition, though a disaster for the rebels, was blessedly not abloodbath.Lieutenant George Little's angry confrontation with Saltonstall at the end of the expedition is attested by contemporary evidence, as is PelegWadsworth's encounter with Paul Revere during the retreat upriver. Revere, asked to rescue the schooner's crew, refused on the personal grounds that hedid 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 toobey 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 wellbe true, and the crew was rescued even though the schooner itself probably became a third British prize, but afterwards Revere simply left the riverwithout orders and, abandoning most of his men, made his way back to Boston. Once home he was suspended from his command of the ArtilleryRegiment, placed under house arrest, and, eventually, court-martialed. Peleg Wadsworth had threatened Revere with arrest, and it was Revere's truculentinsolence 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 wereleveled by Brigade Major William Todd and by Marine Captain Thomas Carnes. Those accusations were investigated by the Committee of Inquiryestablished 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 thatRevere 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 Carnesechoed some of those complaints. I know of no reason why Carnes, unlike Todd, should have harbored a personal dislike of Revere, though perhaps it issignificant that Carnes had been an officer in Gridley's Artillery and Richard Gridley, the regiment's founder and commanding officer, had fallen out withRevere over Masonic business. Carnes complained that when the Americans landed Revere was supposed to be leading his artillerymen as a reservecorps of infantry, but instead went back to the Samuel for breakfast. Carnes's basic charges, though, concerned Revere's fitness as a gunner, a subjecton which Carnes was expertly equipped to comment. Revere, Carnes said, was not present to supervise the construction of the batteries and gave his