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The Penobscot Expedition: Commodore Saltonstall and the Massachusetts Conspiracy of 1779
Although a seminal event in early U.S. naval history, the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition of 1779 remains one of the least studied aspects of the American Revolution - and one of the most controversial. As part of the largest fleet ever assembled by the fledgling American navy, the vessels comprising the expedition were expected to swiftly defeat the British at Fort George on Maine's Penobscot Bay. But the armada lost some forty ships during the battle, suffering a defeat the magnitude of which would not be seen again until Pearl Harbor. Blame for the debacle was placed on Commo. Dudley Saltonstall, who was accused of cowardice and court-martialed.
In this book George E. Buker provides a compelling defense of Saltonstall. Bypassing historical speculation, he analyzes concrete factors that might well have caused the American defeat, namely the limitations of square-rigged ships in restricted waters, the geographic setting, and the British defensive alignment.
Thorough in his research and his arguments, Buker presents evidence that the Massachusetts Committee of Inquiry and the General Court conspired against Saltonstall and interfered with the commodore's court-martial proceedings to ensure a finding that would allow the state to assess Congress for part of the expenses. In 1793 Massachusetts did, in fact, receive $1.2 million from the federal government. Buker's conclusions, which solve a mystery that has puzzled generations of historians, are certain to foster a reassessment of Saltonstall and his actions.
In this book George E. Buker provides a compelling defense of Saltonstall. Bypassing historical speculation, he analyzes concrete factors that might well have caused the American defeat, namely the limitations of square-rigged ships in restricted waters, the geographic setting, and the British defensive alignment.
Thorough in his research and his arguments, Buker presents evidence that the Massachusetts Committee of Inquiry and the General Court conspired against Saltonstall and interfered with the commodore's court-martial proceedings to ensure a finding that would allow the state to assess Congress for part of the expenses. In 1793 Massachusetts did, in fact, receive $1.2 million from the federal government. Buker's conclusions, which solve a mystery that has puzzled generations of historians, are certain to foster a reassessment of Saltonstall and his actions.
207 pages, Hardcover
First published March 12, 2002
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October 28, 2025
I always try to leave five star reviews because I know how difficult it is to publish an academic work and I am always grateful for anything in print. But good Lord this was excruciating to read. For a book of two hundred pages it seemed like it took much longer than it did, and this is a strong contender for the most boring book I've ever read.
It pains me to say that, but this book is dull and repetitive. It starts out with the decision to sail to Penobscot, the British attempts to fortify the port, and the American fiasco in trying to take it.
The narrative involving these events is solid, and I learned a good deal about this operation and about the limitations of the American force. One thinks of Gallipoli here, because the Americans landed and the British were preparing to surrender when the Americans mysteriously stopped and started digging in.
Had they pressed the attack from the beginning the British commander, McLean, said they almost certainly would have carried the British position. But they did not. They dug in and wasted themselves away in a fruitless siege.
This is where the text bogs down, because there was no overall commander so that Commodore Saltonstall and General Lovell had to share command of the naval and army forces, respectively, and could agree on nothing.
Buker's thesis is that Saltonstall's refusal to sail into the harbor at Bagaduce and destroy the three British ships under Mowat was sensible and justified. He explains that difficulties of sailing in that era with those ships. To move against the wind one had to tack repeatedly angled into the wind, so that moving one mile forward is calculated by Buker as requiring five miles of zig-zagging, and requiring to tack numerous exhausting times.
This meant that the American ships would have been under enemy fire for a number of hours, and Saltonstall argued that as he had no base nearby in which to effect repairs, he could not risk it.
All of this is interesting and welcome information. But then we got bogged down in the endless councils of war. No less than eleven were held to decide what to do after the Americans failed to overrun the British position at the outset.
We are forced to sit through every one of them, none of which were decisive and none of which led to anything. Finally the two agreed to attempt to storm the British by both land and sea, but it was called off as a British squadron arrived under Sir George Collier.
The whole time I had to slog through these councils of war, I could not help but recall Napoleon quoting Prince Eugene that councils of war are useless except in the event that you want an excuse to do nothing.
Surely none of these councils resulted in any positive action. The Americans debated and discussed while the clock ran out. The arrival of Collier was the end of the American expedition because the American ships were hopelessly outmatched.
A few of them were captured by the British, while the rest escaped upriver into the Penobscot where they were burned and the men returned to Massachusetts overland on foot. Lovell sought to recruit the local Native Americans as a consolation for the failure of the expedition, and eventually everyone ended up back where they started.
The second half of this book then involves the trials and blame-game played by the participants. The author argues that Lovell was a liar and he deliberately manipulated the evidence to suggest that the Navy had not adequately supported him, and that Saltonstall was derelict in his duty.
Buker suggests that Massachusetts was only too willing to accept this because it found Saltonstall to be a convenient scapegoat. This is convincing.
But Saltonstall's conduct was not cowardly or negligent. He commanded a heterogeneous squadron made up of mainly private ships whose crews had no stomach for fighting the Royal Navy, filling out the crews proved difficult, and the ships were in no shape to engage the King's ships.
In effect the expedition hinged on taking the British forts before any relief could be sent from Halifax. This was, obviously, not achieved. Lovell believed that Saltonstall might have done more, but it's hard to see what else he could have done except lose the ships to the British and have many men killed in a hopeless attempt to break through the British squadron.
An interesting side note throughout the book is also the involvement of Paul Revere in these operations. The famous hero of Paul Revere's ride is not often brought up in other contexts, but here he was a colonel of infantry and it came about that he was court-martialed for disobeying orders and for cowardice.
He was ultimately absolved of these charges, and ironically the general who brought them forward, Wadsworth, had a grandson who would celebrate Paul Revere in his poem Paul Revere's Ride. Wadsworth, it might be worth mentioning, was originally in command of the Continental Army until replaced by George Washington early in the war.
I was drawn to this title because this is another one of those historical episodes that got swept under the rug, like the English Armada of 1589. It an inconvenient memory to blight the success of the American rebels, and the nationalist histories of the nineteenth century were surely in a hurry to dismiss it.
But these incongruous events should be studied and give us pause for reflection. The Americans had much to learn during and after the revolution, and this amphibious operation could provide a useful lesson for those who study combined operations. Most salient among these lessons is the necessity for unified command both afloat and ashore in one person, and that councils of war have a paralyzing rather than stimulating effect, as Prince Eugene had noted almost a century before the fleet left for Penobscot.
All of this I found useful and enjoyable, but it seemed to me that it could have been said, and these points made, in much less text. It is frustrating reading about the operation, and then having basically the entire narrative repeated as the author explains the motivations for various decisions in defense of Saltonstall.
We hear over and over again about the Half Moon Battery, about the Narrows, about Mowat's ships. Much of this repetition could have been edited out. This book is worth reading due to the importance of the Penobscot Expedition in itself, but this book will test your patience and will drag on.
It pains me to say that, but this book is dull and repetitive. It starts out with the decision to sail to Penobscot, the British attempts to fortify the port, and the American fiasco in trying to take it.
The narrative involving these events is solid, and I learned a good deal about this operation and about the limitations of the American force. One thinks of Gallipoli here, because the Americans landed and the British were preparing to surrender when the Americans mysteriously stopped and started digging in.
Had they pressed the attack from the beginning the British commander, McLean, said they almost certainly would have carried the British position. But they did not. They dug in and wasted themselves away in a fruitless siege.
This is where the text bogs down, because there was no overall commander so that Commodore Saltonstall and General Lovell had to share command of the naval and army forces, respectively, and could agree on nothing.
Buker's thesis is that Saltonstall's refusal to sail into the harbor at Bagaduce and destroy the three British ships under Mowat was sensible and justified. He explains that difficulties of sailing in that era with those ships. To move against the wind one had to tack repeatedly angled into the wind, so that moving one mile forward is calculated by Buker as requiring five miles of zig-zagging, and requiring to tack numerous exhausting times.
This meant that the American ships would have been under enemy fire for a number of hours, and Saltonstall argued that as he had no base nearby in which to effect repairs, he could not risk it.
All of this is interesting and welcome information. But then we got bogged down in the endless councils of war. No less than eleven were held to decide what to do after the Americans failed to overrun the British position at the outset.
We are forced to sit through every one of them, none of which were decisive and none of which led to anything. Finally the two agreed to attempt to storm the British by both land and sea, but it was called off as a British squadron arrived under Sir George Collier.
The whole time I had to slog through these councils of war, I could not help but recall Napoleon quoting Prince Eugene that councils of war are useless except in the event that you want an excuse to do nothing.
Surely none of these councils resulted in any positive action. The Americans debated and discussed while the clock ran out. The arrival of Collier was the end of the American expedition because the American ships were hopelessly outmatched.
A few of them were captured by the British, while the rest escaped upriver into the Penobscot where they were burned and the men returned to Massachusetts overland on foot. Lovell sought to recruit the local Native Americans as a consolation for the failure of the expedition, and eventually everyone ended up back where they started.
The second half of this book then involves the trials and blame-game played by the participants. The author argues that Lovell was a liar and he deliberately manipulated the evidence to suggest that the Navy had not adequately supported him, and that Saltonstall was derelict in his duty.
Buker suggests that Massachusetts was only too willing to accept this because it found Saltonstall to be a convenient scapegoat. This is convincing.
But Saltonstall's conduct was not cowardly or negligent. He commanded a heterogeneous squadron made up of mainly private ships whose crews had no stomach for fighting the Royal Navy, filling out the crews proved difficult, and the ships were in no shape to engage the King's ships.
In effect the expedition hinged on taking the British forts before any relief could be sent from Halifax. This was, obviously, not achieved. Lovell believed that Saltonstall might have done more, but it's hard to see what else he could have done except lose the ships to the British and have many men killed in a hopeless attempt to break through the British squadron.
An interesting side note throughout the book is also the involvement of Paul Revere in these operations. The famous hero of Paul Revere's ride is not often brought up in other contexts, but here he was a colonel of infantry and it came about that he was court-martialed for disobeying orders and for cowardice.
He was ultimately absolved of these charges, and ironically the general who brought them forward, Wadsworth, had a grandson who would celebrate Paul Revere in his poem Paul Revere's Ride. Wadsworth, it might be worth mentioning, was originally in command of the Continental Army until replaced by George Washington early in the war.
I was drawn to this title because this is another one of those historical episodes that got swept under the rug, like the English Armada of 1589. It an inconvenient memory to blight the success of the American rebels, and the nationalist histories of the nineteenth century were surely in a hurry to dismiss it.
But these incongruous events should be studied and give us pause for reflection. The Americans had much to learn during and after the revolution, and this amphibious operation could provide a useful lesson for those who study combined operations. Most salient among these lessons is the necessity for unified command both afloat and ashore in one person, and that councils of war have a paralyzing rather than stimulating effect, as Prince Eugene had noted almost a century before the fleet left for Penobscot.
All of this I found useful and enjoyable, but it seemed to me that it could have been said, and these points made, in much less text. It is frustrating reading about the operation, and then having basically the entire narrative repeated as the author explains the motivations for various decisions in defense of Saltonstall.
We hear over and over again about the Half Moon Battery, about the Narrows, about Mowat's ships. Much of this repetition could have been edited out. This book is worth reading due to the importance of the Penobscot Expedition in itself, but this book will test your patience and will drag on.
October 1, 2016
Very thorough but could have used more maps to illustrate ship and troop movements.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews