The Court-Martial of Paul Revere by Michael M. Greenburg

The Court-Martial of Paul Revere by Michael M. Greenburg

Author:Michael M. Greenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ForeEdge from University Press of New England


Chapter 10 Outrage and Allegations

GEORGE LITTLE could not believe his eyes. Hours earlier, he had brazenly scolded Commodore Dudley Saltonstall on the deck of the Warren, pressing him to take any defensive action against the approaching enemy. Now, as the timbers of the entire American fleet burned behind him, the young lieutenant watched with incredulity and contempt as Saltonstall committed his last act as commodore—slinging his pack over his shoulder and setting out on foot into the wilderness—abandoning his command, and with it the last chance of expelling the British from Majabigwaduce.

The defeat had been absolute and overwhelming. In a letter of August 23 to General Henry Clinton, the commander in chief of British forces in North America, Francis McLean wrote, “I am happy to inform your Excellency that their destruction has been complete not one having escaped being either taken or burnt.”1

What had begun as a concerted effort to remove a single British outpost from the strategically valuable coastline of Maine had become a military and economic disaster for the Province of Massachusetts and the Rebel cause. With the rout complete, the ugly process of retreat would become the final affront to the doomed mission.

Though Generals Lovell and Wadsworth continued in their attempts to rally the troops, Saltonstall joined more than one thousand Rebel soldiers and sailors in a desperate trek through the Maine woods. Rank and military honor rapidly disintegrated into a battle of personal survival. The escape from the blazing ships and exploding armaments had left them little if any opportunity to gather provisions for the journey home. Though the Kennebec River—the route south to Boston—lay forty miles due west of the Penobscot, confusion and lack of guidance caused many who were unfamiliar with the area to walk aimlessly for days through marshes and thick brush, some barefoot and without food, searching for routes homeward.

“Our retreat,” wrote one soldier, “was as badly managed as the whole expedition had been. Here we were, landed in a wilderness, under no command; those belonging to the ships, unacquainted with the woods, and only knew that a west course would carry us to the Kennebec.”2

Even before the final destruction of the American fleet, Paul Revere had set up camp with a small group of his artillerymen in the relative safety of the woods about a mile from shore. The men cursed the commodore and, lamenting the loss of the entire naval fleet, convinced themselves of the hopelessness of a further stand. There was no sense, they rationalized, in risking lives and property when most of their comrades were giving up the fight and disappearing into the wilderness.

Huddled among the defeated Rebel soldiers, Revere’s thoughts no doubt turned to home and to the comforting arms of his wife, Rachel. A year earlier, while in Newport for the second Battle of Rhode Island, he had written to his “dear girl” how “very irksome [it is] to be separated from her, whom I so tenderly love, and from my little lambs.”3 With eleven young mouths to feed back in Boston, Revere’s priorities were starkly clear.



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