We’ve all heard of Paul Revere; we’ve all heard the poem. But I had never heard about the rest of his military career. Turns out, he was already working with the Committee of Correspondence before his famous horse ride. But there was even more after that, that I had not learned before. The subtitle of this book is “A Son of Liberty & America’s Forgotten Military Disaster”. And the military campaign described in this book is also something I had never heard of. People from Maine may learn about it in school, but I don’t think it makes it into many other curriculums. Probably because it was an unqualified disaster. Basically, every ship in the Massachusetts fleet was lost.
So, after the beginning of the war, Revere was stationed as a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts militia with the artillery division at Castle Island, which was an island with a small fort, located in Boston Harbor. While he apparently wanted to be at the front (things were pretty quiet on Castle Island), he was also known to take a boat into Boston, and spend the night at his own home. Not something most soldiers were able to do. This worked pretty well for Revere, until the British decided to build a fort on an island just off the coast of the province of Maine. Since Maine was then part of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts leaders decided that they should be the ones to deal with it, and decided not to involve the Continental Army.
The campaign had problems from the beginning. There were not as many soldiers as needed, and the commander of the naval portion of the campaign kept refusing to engage the British troops. Basically, they got up to Maine, started a siege of the new fort the British were building, but instead of attacking, waited around until reinforcements for the British arrived. Most of the book describes both the military campaign, and the subsequent testimony about it. While Revere didn’t exactly cover himself with glory, he was not the reason the expedition ended in complete defeat. He actually insisted on a court-martial to try to clear his name.
If this was your family, how would you research them? Most of the information in this book comes from court testimony. There was an enquiry into how and why the military loss happened, which generated a lot of records. While Revere is a well-known, and well-researched, individual, there are a few people mentioned in these records who are not as famous. While we look for land records and probate files, we should probably remember to look into other court records as well.