Prologue The Castle

The Rebel guns on Dorchester Heights were trained squarely on the British occupiers of Boston below. Henry Knox had completed his fifty-­six-­day journey through the winter snows from Ticonderoga, and by March 5, 1776, the sixth anniversary of the massacre at Boston, an impressive battery of mortar and cannon had been silently hauled into place and bore down on His Majesty’s forces. “I know not what I shall do,” reported General William Howe. “The rebels have done more in one night than my whole army would have done in one month.”1

The consequences of inaction were painfully clear to Howe—either the guns had to be removed, or the British would be forced to evacuate the town. Wishing to avoid the consequences of another Bunker Hill—a nominal victory, but at terrible cost to his troops and morale—Howe attempted only a meager naval effort to dislodge the continental positions from the heights. As severe weather and high winds moved into the harbor, however, navigation became treacherous and the attacking fleet was forced aground. As one historian aptly noted regarding the turn of events, “Leaving or not leaving was no longer a matter of choice.”²

Boston found herself in the crosshairs of a vanquished army in full and frustrated retreat. Though General Howe and the earlier departed governor, Thomas Gage, each had long understood the folly of permanent occupation in the hotbed of American rebellion, exit from Boston was anything but orderly. Despite vague and conflicting orders not to destroy the town, hordes of British personnel accompanied by Tory sympathizers looted and devastated private homes and businesses, leaving the streets and harbor docks littered with barricades, animal carcasses, and tree limbs.³

By the early morning hours of March 17, 1776, General Howe had begun the final evacuation of his forces from the shores of Boston. Under the escort of Admiral Molyneux Shuldham of the Royal Navy, the departing fleet skirmished its way through the mesh of harbor shoals, pausing specifically to engage the fort at Castle Island. British engineers mined strategic sites within the garrison and ultimately burned every structure on the island. They summarily spiked the cannons serving the fort and tore the trunnions, which allowed aim and maneuverability, from their mounts to further hinder any thought of repair. As the flotilla exited the harbor, Boston Light, the first lighthouse established in the American colonies, was blown up as a parting nod.4

Within days of the British departure, General George Washington entered the town and scanned the wreckage left behind. He visited the Common, Fort Hill, Faneuil Hall, and other prominent locales within Boston and promptly ordered that the houses and streets be “cleansed from infection” to avoid an influx of diseases such as smallpox.⁵

On March 20, the Continental Army reentered Boston and took control of the town’s defensive positions.⁶ Recognizing the strategic importance of the now burned fortress on Castle Island, Washington quickly commissioned the refortification of the site and ordered the swift repair of the armaments damaged during the British departure. Though the task of general reconstruction would ultimately fall on two military engineers, Richard Gridley, who oversaw the bulwark of Dorchester Heights,⁷ and William Burbeck, who was then keeper of the ordnance on Castle Island,⁸ the Town of Boston would turn to “that ace of versatility,”⁹ Paul Revere, to assist in the immediate repair of the island’s cannon.

Neither statesman nor soldier, by 1776 Paul Revere nonetheless had earned the reputation as a talented artisan and an ardent champion for the cause of American liberty. Though he had served briefly in the French and Indian War, Revere had become known more for his political, creative, and entrepreneurial talents than for battlefield prowess. As a resolute envoy among the colonies through Boston’s Committee of Correspondence, Revere was well-­known throughout the town, and therefore it was not surprising that this “Messenger of the Revolution”¹⁰ would be relied on for the weapons restoration work at Castle Island.

Originally constructed in 1634 as a small stone and mud redoubt designed to protect the burgeoning Town of Boston, “the Castle,” as it was simply known, had undergone a period of renovation, and by 1701 a more comprehensive structure had been erected on the island, to be christened “Castle William” in honor of King William III.11 As revolution brewed in the streets and taverns of Boston in the 1770s, the island had become a place of safe haven for weary British officers against unruly and rebellious citizens.¹² With the evacuation of the British from Boston, however, and Washington’s eventual removal of the Continental Army to New York, the task of defending the town would fall on her populace, and Castle Island would be seen as an important element of that defense.

Upon the British departure, the strategic garrison was renamed “Fort Independence” by the colonials and the project of restoration began in earnest. The island’s fortress guns were, in fact, badly damaged during the exodus, but not beyond preservation. Revere’s talents as a silversmith and engraver may have served him well as he and others fashioned repairs and even employed a newly designed gun carriage specifically invented to suit the need.¹³ Revere’s appointment to the restoration work on Castle Island would be the earliest in his long and often chaotic engagement at the site.

Though posted without a formal military commission, it would not be long before Revere would serve Massachusetts in a more official capacity. Recognizing the grave and immediate need for the defense of Boston and its harbor upon the departure of the Continental Army in March of 1776, the General Court of Massachusetts—the legislative body of the colony—soon began raising companies of militia to defend its ground. Revere ultimately would be commissioned as an officer in the local artillery regiment called the “Massachusetts State’s Train,”¹⁴ and by the fall of 1776, he would find himself in full command of Castle Island.¹⁵

Though clothed with an air of authority, Revere’s post would quickly dissolve into a source of bitter frustration, providing little if any opportunity for distinction and merit. Life at the Castle would prove repetitive and uneventful. The regiment would face only insignificant military action, and Revere’s position, it seemed, served merely to magnify the otherwise mundane existence within the confines of the bleak and isolated fort.

There can be no doubt that Paul Revere had played a pivotal role in the birth of the American Revolution. “He had the keen zest of the citizen whose patriotism is of the lusty type that causes him to . . . take an active part in all movements that make for civic progress,” wrote one historian.16 Yet he was recognized neither as an educated “gentleman” nor as an esteemed military authority. He had collaborated bravely with many leaders of the revolutionary movement in the prelude to war, and he had adapted his skill as an adroit craftsman and entrepreneur for the Patriot cause; yet as hostilities with Britain erupted, he would find himself conspicuously overlooked for service as an officer in the more prestigious Continental Army. “I have never been taken notice . . . [of], by those whom I thought my friends,” Revere wrote to his trusted acquaintance, John Lamb, in April of 1777. “[I] am obliged to be contented in this State’s service.”¹⁷ As Esther Forbes noted in her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, “He could learn a new trade as fast as most men turned around, yet his military record is undistinguished. He certainly had no liking for army life.”¹⁸

Despite the undeniable esteem he had earned for his bold exploits in support of the Patriot cause, Revere appeared restless and generally unsuited for service in the local militia regiment and, over time, developed a somewhat restive and truculent disposition.¹⁹ Circumstances for Revere’s men at the Castle were difficult, and the often surly temperament of their commander led to some enmity in the ranks. A heightened scrutiny by the soldiers and officers in his regiment began to follow his official actions and, in time, political rancor would envelop the unit. Fellow officers began eyeing Revere with rising antagonism, and soon conspiracies began to stir.

In colonial days, the expansive territory of Maine was actually the eastern province of Massachusetts, governed and controlled by the political structures of Boston.²⁰ In 1775 Benedict Arnold had carried the battle to British-­controlled Quebec using this wilderness as his staging headquarters, in an attempt to thwart the possibility of British maneuvers in the areas west of the colonies. The campaign failed, but the strategic importance of Maine to the Crown, as a buffer between British-­controlled Nova Scotia and the rebellious colonies to the south, was unmistakable.21 Though General Howe had departed from the shores of Boston several months earlier, the Crown would continue to eye the rocky coastline of northern New England with eager and covetous eyes.

Early in the summer of 1779, word came to the Massachusetts Council, acting as the interim executive of the colony prior to the adoption of a state constitution, that a British fleet finally had landed in Penobscot Bay, Maine, and had begun work on a fortress on the peninsula known, through its Native American appellation, as Majabigwaduce.²² Such a defensive post would serve not only as a point of refuge for colonial loyalists and a ready source of timber for British warships, but also as protection for the enemy from American invasion of the north.²³ The fort, angry Massachusetts officials resolved, could not stand.

On June 26, 1779, Paul Revere, at long last, received the orders that he had hoped would rescue him from military obscurity:

Ordered—That Colo. Revere hold himself and one hundred of the Matrosses under his command including proper Officers in readiness at one Hour’s Notice to embark for the Defense of this State and to attack the Enemy at Penobscot, under the Command of General Lovell and make Return to this Board upon their being so prepared.²⁴

Revere and his Castle Island artillery train would be part of a combined naval and marine expeditionary force designed to disengage the British from their Maine outpost.

Though a complex and expensive undertaking, the attack was calculated to be massive in force and would most certainly result in victory. Indeed, even Brigadier General Francis McLean, the commanding officer of the British forces at Majabigwaduce, would lament as the battle ensued that surrender of the garrison was all but assured.²⁵

The sober and salient facts spoke otherwise. The Penobscot Expedition, as it would come to be known, would later be described by a noted Maine historian as “[a] prodigious wreck of property—a dire eclipse of reputation—and universal chagrin.”²⁶ The financial hardship and political embarrassment to Massachusetts created by the ill-­fated exercise would leave in its ruinous wake a fiasco of finger pointing and political haranguing.

Soon, outrage would lead to inquiry—and inquiry, to arrest.

On September 6, 1779, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere, dedicated member of the Sons of Liberty, paladin of Concord and Lexington, active participant in the Boston Tea Party—Paul Revere, artisan, activist, and agitator for the revolutionary cause—was summarily relieved of his command at Castle Island and placed under house arrest, his salary and rations suspended.

The charge: “unsoldierlike behavior during the whole expedition to Penobscot, which tends to cowardice.”27