Eaton a colorful general> Man granted County land

I AM GENERAL EATON! by Philip Turner, Acadia Publishing Co., softcover, 246 pages, $20.

When a title search of the author’s property in Caribou showed that the land was part of the original Eaton Land Grant, Turner asked himself what many a new property owner might under the circumstances: Who was this Eaton fellow, and what ever did he do to merit the award of a sizable portion of the acreage that now constitutes present-day Caribou?

Unlike the average prospective landowner, however, Turner did something about his curiosity. He conducted extensive research and learned that this man, Eaton, born in Connecticut in 1764, was part patriot, part self-promoter and all-around colorful character who had been a nemesis of the infamous pirates of the Barbary Coast some 200 years ago. So Turner wrote a book about him.

In 1805, Eaton, a former Army officer, was a civilian working for the U.S. State Department which hoped to put an end to the odious demands of the Barbary pirates for the payment of tribute in exchange for safe passage of U.S. merchant ships along the North African coast. Eaton pushed his makeshift army, without a guide, hundreds of miles westward through the trackless North African desert from Alexandria to Derne. There, they engaged in a short, ferocious battle with the forces of the dey of Tripoli. Eaton’s men, including a few good Marines, emerged victorious and hoisted the American flag for the first time over a captured foreign city.

A grateful Congress awarded Eaton the title of brigadier general and gave him a large tract of land deep in the Aroostook wilderness in the Province of Maine, then part of Massachusetts. There, Eaton had hoped to build a monument to himself to rival the splendid Montpelier, the Thomaston mansion of Gen. Henry Knox, George Washington’s secretary of war, whom he much admired. But things didn’t pan out in the inhospitable north country. Soon, he left Aroostook for the more comfortable environs of Brimfield, Mass., where he died and was buried in 1811 at age 47.

Turner, who has written two other books based on the early history of his native Aroostook, employs his trademark storytelling device: While sticking to historical fact, he nonetheless puts words in the mouths of his characters to make their deeds come alive. All of his characters are real, however, which is to say that they once were flesh-and-blood creatures as opposed to figments of an author’s imagination.

Thus, we have a retired Gen. Eaton telling his story in his “own” words during well-publicized nightly sessions at a Boston tavern. An enthralled audience that includes a cross section of that historic city’s population of nearly 200 years ago hangs on every word until, at last, the story becomes old and a sickly Eaton goes home to die.

During the course of his wine-fueled ramblings we hear enough about Eaton’s exploits in the Barbary States to make us consider the possibility that the general’s biggest admirer may well have been the general. (“Oh, he was full of himself,” agrees Turner, which explains the book’s title and it’s unusual exclamation mark.) As well, we learn that this friend of presidents whose Tripoli adventure is reflected in the opening lines of the Marine Corps Hymn was a bit of a rake, a serious womanizer. His public debauchery during the sedition trial of Aaron Burr in Richmond, in which he testified against Burr, did considerable damage to his reputation and got him kicked out of his church.

Despite Eaton’s extracurricular record, however, Turner’s book shows that this man of action served his country well. Had he stayed the course in Eaton Land Grant, who knows what he might have accomplished there?