McLane, Allen

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McLane, Allen

McLANE, ALLEN. (1746–1829). Continental Army officer. Delaware. McLane was born in Philadelphia, the son of Allan McLeane, a leather breeches maker who had come to America in 1738 from Scotland. In 1767–1769 young Allen traveled to Europe and visited cousins in Scotland. By 1770 he had settled at Smyrna, Delaware. In July 1775 he changed his name to McLane "to avoid confusion with that renegade Scot serving the Hanoverian King," a reference to Allan MacLean, who had just reached Canada to recruit his Royal Highland Emigrants. His father died about this time, leaving Allan property worth more than fifteen thousand dollars.

After fighting as a volunteer at Great Bridge, Virginia, on 9 December 1775 and at Norfolk on 1 January 1776, McLane served with Washington's army in New York as lieutenant and adjutant of Caesar Rodney's militia regiment. At Long Island on 27 August 1776, he captured a British patrol. After fighting at White Plains on 28 October, he was with the rear guard in the retreat across New Jersey, took part in the attack on Trenton, and was promoted for gallantry at Princeton on 3 January 1777. He was promoted to captain in Colonel John Patton's Additional Continental Regiment in early 1777. After seeing action at Cooch's Bridge and the Brandywine on 3 and 11 September 1777, he was detached to raise in Delaware his own company of about one hundred men, to which task he dedicated his personal fortune.

After serving as advance guard for Washington's main column at Germantown on 4 October 1777, McLane on 7 November was given the mission of screening the army as it prepared to take up winter quarters at Valley Forge. On 3 December he warned Washington of a large-scale sortie from Philadelphia, intelligence that contributed to the Continental Army's successful defense of its concentration around White Marsh a few days later. McLane's company harassed enemy convoys and foraging parties so successfully during the winter that they earned the nickname of "market stoppers." During January and February 1778 his men gathered livestock in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland to supply Valley Forge and Smallwood's command at Wilmington. Rejoining the main army with 100 to 150 mounted men, he resumed his reconnaissance missions, reinforced on occasion by 50 Oneida Indian scouts. As the Mischianza was breaking up in Philadelphia, around dawn of 19 May, his company, supported by a company of dragoons, brought many a red-eyed redcoat running to repel an "attack" he simulated by galloping along the enemy's outpost line dropping iron pots full of gunpowder and scrap metal. The next night his scouts detected the movement to surprise Lafayette at Barren Hill, a piece of good outpost work that saved a large portion of the army from ambush. On 8 June he himself narrowly escaped an ambush. He may well have been the first American to reenter Philadelphia when the British evacuated the city ten days later. He apparently had an instinctive dislike for Benedict Arnold; soon after Arnold took command in Philadelphia, McLane went to Washington to expose Arnold's profiteering. For his pains he received a rebuke from Washington.

During the Monmouth Campaign of June-July 1778, McLane's company operated with Dickinson's militia, and he claimed to have lost only four men killed in taking more than three hundred stragglers. The company was attached to Henry Lee's new "Partisan Corps" on 13 July 1779. Under Lee's command he had an important role in the events leading up to Wayne's capture of Stony Point on 16 July, and he figured prominently in Lee's raid on Paulus Hook on 19 August 1779. McLane envied Lee, however, and Washington solved the problem by sending McLane to reinforce Lincoln at Charleston. Fortunate in not reaching the city in time to be captured, he came under Steuben's command and was promoted to major.

Early in June 1781 he left Philadelphia carrying dispatches that urged de Grasse to come from the West Indies to support Washington and Rochambeau. On the return voyage he commanded the marine company on the privateer Congress (twenty-four guns) during its capture of the British sloop of war Savage (sixteen guns). During the Yorktown campaign he scouted New York City from Long Island to keep Washington informed on the essential point of whether the British were detaching strength to reinforce Cornwallis. He retired on 9 November 1782, a brevet major.

His personal fortune gone, McLane entered a mercantile venture with Robert Morris. In 1789 Washington named him the first federal marshal for Delaware and in 1797 made him collector for the port of Wilmington, a post he retained for the rest of his life. He commanded the defenses of Wilmington during the War of 1812, observed the British capture of Washington, and commented that with the three hundred men he had led at Paulus Hook he could have saved the capital.