Portland

The Burning of Falmouth: Portland, Maine, and the Revolution That Rose from Ashes

On the morning of October 18, 1775, Lieutenant Henry Mowat of the Royal Navy stood on the quarterdeck of the armed vessel Canceaux and ordered his small squadron to open fire on the town of Falmouth, in what is now Portland, Maine. Mowat had set a deadline of 9 AM for the town's response to his demands; by 9:40, the town appeared to be deserted, so he ran a red flag up the Canceaux's masthead and ordered the fleet to begin firing. For roughly nine hours, a barrage of incendiary shells, cannonballs, and carcasses—hollow iron projectiles packed with pitch and designed to start fires—rained down on one of the most prosperous seaports in northern New England. The bombardment lasted nine hours, during which approximately 3,000 projectiles—one every eleven seconds—were fired at Falmouth.

When the bombardment appeared inadequate, Mowat sent a landing party ashore to set fire to any buildings that had survived. By nightfall, more than four hundred buildings had been destroyed. The historian Donald A. Yerxa, in his detailed study published in the Maine Historical Society Quarterly, documented that the barrage destroyed 414 of the town's 500 buildings. The waterfront, the churches, the town house, the customs house, warehouses full of goods, and block after block of homes lay in smoking ruin. In his report to Admiral Graves, Mowat stated that eleven small vessels were destroyed in the harbor and four were captured, at the cost of one man killed and one wounded on the British side. What had been a thriving commercial hub of perhaps two thousand residents was, in the span of a single autumn day, reduced to a charred skeleton of itself. More than 1,000 people had been left homeless by the raid, including at least 160 families out of an estimated population of 2,500.

The town of Falmouth accounted losses in the raid at over £50,000.

A visitor to the town a month later reported that there was "no lodging, eating or housekeeping in Falmouth."

The destruction of Falmouth was not merely a local catastrophe. It became a pivotal event in the American Revolution, one that hardened colonial resolve, influenced the creation of the Continental Navy, and demonstrated with brutal clarity the price Britain was willing to impose on communities that defied its authority. George Washington was briefed on the attack at his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in a letter to John Hancock on October 24, 1775, described the burning of Falmouth as "an Outrage exceeding in Barbarity & Cruelty every hostile Act practised among civilized Nations."

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress authorized the issue of letters of marque, licensing privateer actions against British ships.

The Second Continental Congress heard of the event just as word arrived of George III's Proclamation of Rebellion. Outraged by the news, Congress recommended that some provinces adopt self-rule and authorized commissioning two ships on October 30 "for the protection and defense of the united Colonies." The Falmouth incident was again mentioned on November 25, when Congress passed legislation described by John Adams as "the true origin of the American Navy."

The reverberations of the attack extended across the Atlantic. When news of the event first reached England, it was dismissed as Patriot propaganda; when the reports were confirmed, Graves' superior, Lord Germain, expressed surprise rather than offense.

Conciliatory factions of the British press warned that harsh measures against the Americans would produce nothing but "Ruin, Misery, and Devastation."

The burning of Falmouth was called "absurd" and "barbaric" by French foreign secretary Charles Gravier, who had been closely monitoring developments in the colonies.

Mowat's career suffered as a result of his actions, and Graves was relieved of his command in December 1775, in part due to his failure to defeat American naval forces.

To understand why Falmouth was singled out for destruction, one must look to the chain of events that unfolded in the spring and summer of 1775—and indeed to decades of simmering resentment before that. Maine had a unique grievance stemming from the British trade in ships' masts: white pine from Maine was critical to the British navy, and the Admiralty had progressively tightened regulations on cutting pine for lumber, giving control over this lucrative trade to politically connected colonial merchants, a source of deep resentment.

During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Falmouth and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were the center of the mast trade.

By 1727, however, the Portsmouth region had been overharvested and the trade moved north and east, establishing Falmouth in Casco Bay as its center.

By Acts of Parliament, all white pine trees measuring over twenty-four inches in diameter were the King's property and marked with the sign of the broad arrow—three axe slashes resembling a crow's foot. Like the tax on tea, the broad arrow came to symbolize the Crown's tyranny, and reactions to the Broad Arrow Policies helped to foment rebellion in the Province of Maine.

Falmouth's resistance to British authority had deep roots. In 1765 a mob seized a quantity of tax stamps at Falmouth (now Portland), and attacks on customs agents in the province became common.

The muffled bells of the First Parish Church tolled from dawn to dusk to protest the closure of the port of Boston by the British government.

A year after the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, Maine staged its own version of that incident when a group of men burned a shipment of tea stored at York.

The immediate chain of events leading to the bombardment began with what became known as Thompson's War. Samuel Thompson, a Brunswick tavern owner elected commander of the local militia in 1774, headed enforcement of the Continental Association boycott on British goods.

In March 1775, a sloop from England dropped anchor in Falmouth Harbor carrying sails and rigging for a ship under construction by local loyalist Thomas Coulson. The local Committee of Inspection debated whether the cargo violated the Continental Association and decided that because the rigging and sails were from England and Coulson's ship was bound for England after launch, the cargo was indeed prohibited.

Coulson appealed to General Gage in Boston, bringing with him a letter from the loyalist sheriff at Falmouth requesting a man-of-war be sent to settle the affair. Gage asked Admiral Graves for a ship, and Graves ordered Mowat to take the Canceaux to Falmouth to allow Coulson protection as he offloaded his cargo.

On May 9, 1775, Thompson's fifty Brunswick militiamen—wearing a sprig of spruce in their hats as a uniform—captured Lieutenant