Battle of Machias (1777)

The Battle of Machias (August 13–14, 1777) was an amphibious assault on the Massachusetts town of Machias (in present-day eastern Maine) by British forces during the American Revolutionary War. Local militia aided by Indian allies successfully prevented British troops from landing. The raid, led by Commodore Sir George Collier, was executed in an attempt to head off a planned second assault on Fort Cumberland, which had been besieged in November 1776. The British forces landed below Machias, seized a ship, and raided a storehouse.

The result of the raid was disputed. Collier claimed the action was successful in destroying military stores for an attack on Fort Cumberland (although such stores had not been delivered to Machias), while the defenders claimed that they had successfully prevented the capture of Machias and driven off the British.

Background
The small community of Machias, located in the eastern district of Massachusetts that is now the state of Maine, was a persistent thorn in the side of British naval authorities since the start of the American Revolutionary War. In June 1775, its citizens rose up and seized a small naval vessel, and the community had ever since been a base for privateering.

In 1777, John Allan, an expatriate Nova Scotian, was authorized by the Second Continental Congress to organize an expedition to establish a Patriot presence in the western part of Nova Scotia (present-day New Brunswick). Although Congress authorized him to recruit as many as three thousand men, the Massachusetts government was only prepared to give him a colonel's commission and authority to raise a regiment in eastern Massachusetts to establish a presence in the St. John River valley. Allan based his effort in Machias, and had by June landed some forty men in the area. However, British authorities in Halifax had received some intelligence of Allan's intended mission, and a larger British force arrived at the St. John River on June 23. Men that Allan had left at the settlements near the mouth of the river skirmished with the British but then withdrew upriver. Allan was forced to make a difficult overland journey back to Machias after his small force retreated up the river. He was joined on this journey by a number of sympathetic Maliseet Indians that he had persuaded to join the American cause. In early August the Massachusetts Provisional Congress voted to disband forces recruited for Allan's expedition because of the imminent threat posed by the army of General John Burgoyne in upstate New York.