Battle of Hampden and Capture of Castine

The British expedition against the Penobscot Bay region in September 1814 was a model of combined operations — an amphibious campaign that captured Castine, defeated the militia at Hampden, occupied Bangor, and established British control over the entire coast of Maine east of the Penobscot River. The operation was conducted with professional efficiency and suffered a total of two killed and eight wounded across three days of operations covering sixty miles.

Lieutenant General Sir John Sherbrooke, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, personally commanded the expedition. His force comprised approximately 2,500 regulars — including the 29th, 62nd, and 98th Regiments of Foot — supported by Royal Artillery and a naval squadron under Rear Admiral Edward Griffith. The objective was to occupy the territory that some British officials were already calling “New Ireland,” with a view to either annexation or use as a bargaining chip at the Ghent negotiations.

Castine, the principal fortification at the mouth of the Penobscot, was captured on 1 September with minimal resistance. The garrison evacuated before the British arrival, and the town was occupied without a fight.

The only significant resistance came at Hampden, thirty miles up the Penobscot, where Captain Charles Morris had taken USS Adams (a 26-gun corvette that had been damaged and was undergoing repairs) and where approximately 1,400 local militia had assembled. The Battle of Hampden on 3 September was brief: the militia fired one or two volleys before breaking and dispersing. Morris, recognising that Adams could not be saved, burned his own ship to prevent her capture — an act of professional necessity that nonetheless represented the destruction of an American warship by her own captain.

The British continued upriver to Bangor, which was occupied without resistance. The town was required to post a bond of $30,000 as a guarantee against hostile action — essentially, protection money. The bond was paid.

The Penobscot occupation lasted eight months. British administration was efficient and, by the standards of military occupation, relatively benign. Customs duties were collected. Law and order were maintained. The local population, predominantly Federalist and opposed to the war, largely cooperated. The revenue collected — approximately $11,000 — was subsequently used to help found Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Maine campaign is often omitted from American accounts of the war, for understandable reasons. The occupation of a substantial portion of American territory for eight months, with minimal resistance from a population that largely acquiesced, does not fit the narrative of national unity and patriotic resistance. But it happened, and it demonstrated, as clearly as the burning of Washington, that the United States could not defend its own territory against a determined British offensive.