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In April 1775, Thompson went to Falmouth to enforce the embargo on British trade because a British merchant vessel had arrived in March with supplies for a vessel being built in the harbor. A British naval vessel, Canceaux, sailed to Portland to protect the merchant vessel.
Thompson and 50 militiamen acted on their threats, capturing the Canceaux's commander, Capt. Henry Mowat, as the ship sought to unload goods, commencing "Thompson's War."
In June 1775 a second crisis took place in the eastern town of Machias, when residents captured the officers of the warship HMS Margaretta and then the ship itself in what came to be known as the first naval battle of the Revolution.
As acts of defiance like these escalated into war, American privateers, including those from Maine, launched raids on British ships and ports in British territory. On October 6 Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, commander of the British North Atlantic fleet, ordered Capt. Henry Mowat, who had been captured in Falmouth, to chastise the colonies by burning towns along the New England coast.
Mowat chose to ignore the Massachusetts North Shore communities, which were located close together and capable of mutual defense, and returned to Falmouth, five months after "Thompson's War." On October 17, he sent a note to town leaders accusing Falmouth of "the most unpardonable Rebellion" and after due warning launched a daylong bombardment of the town, destroying two-thirds of the buildings.
Remarkably, local militia, mostly from the outlying towns, made no effort to defend the town, and in fact stayed to loot the remaining buildings.
Like the Boston Massacre, the burning of Falmouth rallied Americans to proclaim independence. The Continental Congress strengthened its small navy and encouraged privateers, and port towns strung booms across their harbors, built fortifications, and mustered militia.
Mildred Burrage's painted map of 1775 destroyed Falmouth Neck, 1925
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Maine Historical Society
Given sufficient warning, these troops were sometimes able to defend against superior British forces. Still, as others observed, Maine's long and lightly settled coast was virtually undefendable; only its military insignificance stood between Maine and the powerful British navy.
The burning also highlighted the social tensions developing all through the colonies. In Maine these divisions were geographical as much as social, as interior settlers generally pushed for independence and seacoast merchants, aghast at the conduct of Thompson and his militia, fell in with the Loyalists. Tensions like these lingered after the war as Americans debated the government they fought to create.
The Revolution, as one historian famously said, was not just a question of home rule, but a question of who should rule at home. This query helped launch Maine's bid for separation from Massachusetts, once independence from Britain was won.
Offensives in Maine
Maine contributed many small, armed vessels as part of a privateering fleet that disrupted British supply lines, and it served as the staging area for three invasions of British territory. The first and most famous was Benedict Arnold's ill-fated siege of Quebec. With a thousand well-chosen volunteers, Arnold mustered at Augusta in fall 1775 and traveled by bateau up the Kennebec River, across the swampy western tablelands, and down the Chaudiere River to the St. Lawrence across from Quebec.
Having survived exhaustion and starvation, the army, reduced to 675 men, was swept by smallpox, a condition the troops passed on to reinforcements when they arrived from Montreal. Arnold's assault on the fortress on December 31 cost 100 American lives with another 400 captured, and in May, with the St. Lawrence clear of ice, British reinforcements arrived. The decimated American troops retreated to New York State.
Two expeditions of pro-American refugees from Nova Scotia were similarly unsuccessful.
The Penobscot Expedition
Maine was quiet through the middle years of the war, but in 1779 British vessels renewed their offensive against American privateers, and on June 9 the Admiralty at Halifax sent Brigadier General Francis McLean with troops to occupy Bagaduce – today's Castine – at the mouth of the Penobscot River.
The efforts to defend the area, known as the Penobscot Expedition and sometimes called the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor, showed the weakness of colonial coastal defenses as a privateer fleet was badly defeated. For the rest of the war eastern Maine was an occupied territory and a rallying point for Loyalist refugees, who conducted plunder expeditions against coastal towns.
As the war dragged on, a few eastern towns, sensing their abandonment by Massachusetts, circulated proclamations of neutrality. Their frustration was understandable: military drafts had became more demanding, and those left behind on the home front – women, children, and older men – tended farms and businesses as best they could. With taxes high and the British blockading the coast, Maine's situation was desperate.
When peace came in 1783, the Loyalists in Bagaduce moved eastward to Passamaquoddy Bay, but because the Peace of Paris only vaguely drew the border, the small community remained uncertain about which nation controlled its fate.
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Exhibits
Liberty Threatened: Maine in 1775
Maine's coastal position, proximity to Boston and to Canada, and valuable natural resources combined to bring Revolutionary conflict to Maine soon after the opening salvos of war in Massachusetts in April 1775.
A Naval Disaster: The Penobscot Expedition
A fleet of privateers and hastily recruited soldiers failed to stop the British from occupying Majabigwaduce on Penobscot Bay in 1779. The disastrous Penobscot Expedition left the area, later known as Castine, to the British and a loyalist colony called New Ireland.
A Soldier's Declaration of Independence
Soldier William Bayley's letters to his mother in Falmouth reveal some of the hardships endured by those left at home as well as one soldier's growing independence of his family and home.
To Separate or Not to Separate
Maine's separation from Massachusetts was a long process that involved debates over economics, taxes, and political representation, among other issues.
After the American Revolution, settlers on Maine's frontier -- away from the coast -- brought with them religions that were quite different in belief and practice from the traditional New England Congregationalists.
