Brigadier General Peleg Wadsworth

Peleg Wadsworth was born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1748 and educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1769. He entered the Revolution as a junior officer and rose steadily through the Massachusetts military establishment, demonstrating particular aptitude for the administrative and logistical challenges of sustaining forces in the field. By the time of the 1779 Penobscot Expedition he had reached the rank of brigadier general and was entrusted with command of the land forces in what Massachusetts hoped would be a decisive blow against the British garrison at Majabigwaduce — the promontory the British called Fort George, in what is now Castine.

The Penobscot Expedition collapsed in August 1779 when a British relief fleet arrived and destroyed the American naval force before a combined assault could be launched. Wadsworth survived the retreat through the Maine wilderness and subsequently accepted command of the Eastern District, working to defend the long Maine coast from continued British incursions. In February 1781, British raiders struck his headquarters at Thomaston in a swift night operation specifically designed to capture him, catching Wadsworth asleep. He was taken prisoner and transported to Fort George at Castine — the same fortification the 1779 expedition had failed to reduce — where he was held under relatively comfortable but close confinement. After months of captivity, Wadsworth executed a daring escape, boring through the floor of his room and slipping away in the night with a fellow prisoner.

Wadsworth's capture and escape gave his Revolutionary career a dramatic personal dimension that his earlier service had lacked. After the war he settled permanently in Maine, representing the district in Congress during the 1790s and building a prosperous family life in Hiram. His grandson Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who bore Peleg's surname as a middle name, immortalized Revolutionary themes in verse, and the general's own story — imprisonment at the fort his expedition had tried to take, followed by a bold escape — was itself the stuff of the adventure narratives the era produced in abundance.