Allan Maclean (1725-18 February 1798) was a general of Great Britain who commanded the 84th Regiment of Foot at the battle of Quebec in 1775 during the American Revolutionary War.
Biography[]
Allan Maclean was born in 1725 in Torloisk, Bute and Argyll, Scotland. Maclean joined the Jacobites in the 1746 uprising that culminated in the Battle of Culloden, and he would serve in the army of the Kingdom of France for four years during the War of the Austrian Succession before joining a Scots brigade of the British Army and fighting at Bergen-op-Zoom in 1747, where he was captured. The French general Count Lowendal told Maclean and his comrade Francis Maclean that, if all of the defenders had conducted themselves as Maclean's corps had done, Bergen-op-Zoom would not be in French hands; he paroled the two men. In 1750, Maclean returned to Edinburgh, and he joined the East India Company at the time of the Seven Years' War.
When the American Revolutionary War broke out, Maclean was given command of the 84th Regiment of Foot, a regiment consisting of Scottish emigres. His regiment was stationed in Quebec, Canada, and he was made the second-in-command to Guy Carleton when Benedict Arnold launched an invasion of British Canada in the winter of 1775. During the long siege from the winter of 1775 to the summer of 1776, Maclean was injured in the leg at the Plains of Abraha while leading 1,178 troops against Arnold's Continental Army, and on 11 May 1776 he was promoted to Adjutant-General of the British Army in Canada and Colonel. After Quebec, his regiment would see garrison duty in Canada for the rest of the war, and he was promoted to General in 1783. Maclean headed to England instead of returning to Scotland, and he died in 1798.