by Terry Golway
It was too late. A few hours after he wrote to Wadsworth, Greene received a message from General Washington. Congress, Washington wrote, had given him the power to appoint a new commander for the southern army. “It is my wish,” he wrote, “to appoint you.” He asked Greene to leave for the South immediately.
Nathanael Greene, the self-taught soldier from Rhode Island, had been offered the most important command of the war, short of becoming commander in chief. The enemy’s finest general, Lord Cornwallis, was marching through the South, returning Georgia and South Carolina to the king’s rule and preparing to do the same in North Carolina. He already had annihilated two American armies and ruined the reputation of two generals, Lincoln and Gates. There was little reason to believe the Americans could stop him from marching north to Virginia and cutting the fledgling Republic in half.
Greene accepted the impossible assignment, as Washington knew he would. Greene had been at Washington’s side since Boston in 1775, and he had yet to disappoint his commander in chief. But he did have one request: he asked Washington if he could put off his journey to the South for a short time. He wanted to return home to Rhode Island for a few days to attend to his “domestic concerns.” His youngest child, eight-month-old Nathanael Ray, was recovering from a serious illness that almost killed him. He knew that Caty would be distressed, to put it lightly, to learn that he would not be spending the winter at West Point. And through the long years of war, he had yet to see all four of his children together in the same room.
And he knew this opportunity might never come again.
He handed his letter to a waiting messenger and then reflected on the stunning turn of events. Before long, he had second thoughts about his self-indulgent request. Who was he, after all, to ask for family time at such a critical moment in the nation’s history? Who was he to ask George Washington, of all people, to grant him such an indulgence? Hadn’t Washington himself sacrificed everything, without complaint? Greene quickly sent his commander a letter withdrawing his request for a short leave. It didn’t matter; Washington denied Greene’s original request. The war hinged on the battles to come in the South. There was no time for “domestic concerns.”
Greene would have to break the news to Caty that there would be no winter camp this year, no socializing, no parties with some of the New Jersey patriots they had come to know so well after three winters in that pivotal state. He composed a “my dear Angel” letter to his wife, breaking the news in language that suggested he, too, was heartbroken: “What I have been dreading has come to pass. His Excellency General Washington . . . has appointed me to the command of the Southern Army. . . . This is so foreign from my wishes that I am distressed exceedingly.” This is an odd sentiment from a man who had lobbied for the post, but Greene had just received a heartrending letter from Caty in which she poured out her “suffering in such a feeling manner as melt[ed his] soul into the deepest distress.”
Perhaps after receiving Caty’s letter, Nathanael Greene yet again had second thoughts about his new assignment. But it was too late. The fate of the nation now rested primarily on his shoulders. He made plans to send his baggage to North Carolina, dispatched a flurry of letters to colleagues and family, and paused for a few moments to read a letter from an old friend, Thomas Paine. Greene and Paine had marched side by side through New Jersey in the dreadful fall of 1776. Now, Paine wrote from Philadelphia: “Though I do not write much I pray often, if fervency of hoping and wishing can be called prayer, and these will constantly attend you on your expedition.”
As he prepared to leave, Greene realized that Caty might well have left Rhode Island as soon as she heard that he was to be commandant of West Point. If she had, she wouldn’t know of the change in plans. So he crossed to the east bank of the Hudson in hopes of finding his wife on the road to West Point. She never showed; in fact, as it turned out, she hadn’t left Rhode Island at all. But he could delay his mission no longer. He could not wait to hold her once more, to spend another night with her.
“Could I leave you happy I should go with a heart as light as a feather,” Greene wrote in one of three farewell letters he sent to Caty, “but the thought of leaving you in distress renders me exceeding wretched.”
After stopping for a conference with Washington, this wretched man began his journey to the South in late October 1780 to take charge of a shattered army.
If he failed, all was lost.
2 A Downright Democracy
Nathanael Greene was born into the raucous, iconoclastic colony of Rhode Island on July 27, 1742. His father and namesake lived with his second wife, Mary Motte, and their expanding family in a two-story house overlooking Potowomut Creek near East Greenwich on the western shore of Narragansett Bay. The sounds and sights of Yankee enterprise and industry surrounded them, from the mills, from the forge, from the well-tended orchards, from the furrowed fields.
The Greenes came to America from Britain because of religion, or more precisely, because of disputes over religion. The future general’s great-great-grandfather, John Greene, was a surgeon who left his hometown of Salisbury to cross the Atlantic with his wife and five children in the mid-1600s. At the time of his departure, he was a disciple of the charismatic preacher Roger Williams, who had just left England in hopes of founding a purer church in the virgin forests of New England. This was the age of sectarian splits in the once formidable monolith of Western Christendom, the residue of Martin Luther’s dramatic challenge to the papacy in the early sixteenth century. Dissent inspired more dissent, and even dissent within the dissenters themselves. In England, men like Williams questioned the sanctity of the established Church, itself the product of Protestant rebellion against Roman Catholicism. The religious unity of Europe was shattered, with nations defining themselves as much by their denomination as by their language and culture, and willing to go to war with heretical neighbors. Independent clerics were emboldened to preach their individual versions of holy truths and gathered around them communities of fellow believers.
When the Puritans despaired of reforming the Church of England, they looked westward to a new promised land in America. John Winthrop abandoned England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, setting sail in 1630. Williams followed in early 1631, and the pious Dr. Greene and his family arrived shortly afterward.
The New World, however, quickly proved to be no refuge from the divisions and dissents of the Old. Williams shocked the citizens of Boston when he asserted that political authorities should not have the power to enforce religious dogma. More disputes followed as Williams preached the importance of individual conscience, insisting that the phrase “so help me God” should be removed from the colony’s oath of allegience. It was, he said, offensive to those who didn’t believe in God.
Those who didn’t believe in God? This was too much for the Bay Colony’s fathers, and no doubt its mothers as well. Williams was banished from the colony, and so in early 1736, he and his band of followers, including Dr. Greene, slogged through the snow and ice of a New England winter to found a new refuge, which they called Providence.
The new colony, which eventually was called Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (still the state’s official name), became a sanctuary for all manner of dissenters from the Bay Colony. Included among them was a man named Samuel Gorton, a fiery and uncompromising preacher who taught that men and women were equal. This odd notion and other radical ideas landed him in prison in Providence–his dissents were too much even for Roger Williams–and eventually to exile. Gorton made few friends in Providence, but he did win over Dr. John Greene. When Gorton left Providence to found his own town, Warwick, John Greene packed his bags for the third and last time.
It was not, however, the end of the Greene family’s spiritual journey. By the time Nathanael Greene was born, the family had converted from Gorton’s sect to Quakerism. The plain-living, devout, and pacifist Quakers established a strong presence in Rhode Island in the late seventeeth century, and while they were an insula
r group that believed in only the most rudimentary education for their children, they quickly achieved economic and political power in the colony. Nathanael Greene Sr. was a prosperous entrepreneur who, together with his brothers, owned a business that included a farm, an iron forge, and a sawmill.
The Greenes built an extensive trading network with far-off towns in other colonies. But whatever else those merchant vessels brought to the wharves of Rhode Island, they carried nothing to sway Nathanael Greene Sr. from the unadorned purity of his faith. He became the spiritual leader of the Quaker congregation of East Greenwich, which met two miles from the Greene home. Every Sunday the Greene family, clad in black homespun, tramped the primitive road from their house to the Quaker meetinghouse, where the children sat in silence in rough-hewn pews as the congregation waited for God to inspire Nathanael with his weekly dose of wisdom. The Greene family patriarch was a devout and earnest man determined to pass Quaker dogma to his children. But it was less his preaching than his honorable way of life that made a strong impression on the son who bore his name. “My Father,” Nathanael Greene Jr. once wrote, “was a man [of] great Piety, had an excellent understanding; and was govern’d in his conduct by Humanity and kind Benevolence.”
Nathanael Greene Jr. was his father’s second child by his second wife. Four more boys would follow the eldest, Jacob, and Nathanael Jr., adding to the two boys Nathanael Sr. had with his deceased first wife, Phoebe Greene. The Greenes led a comfortable existence in their fine old house, built in 1684 by Nathanael Sr.’s father. Woods and fields surrounded the home, and a stream babbled its way through the property. The Greenes were not frontier settlers living in rural isolation and ever wary of natives with hostile intentions. They were prosperous merchants in a thriving settlement, and their fortunes continued to improve as Nathanael Sr. bought out his brothers and became the sole proprietor of Nathanael Greene & Co. around the time of Nathanael Jr.’s birth.
The family was not only prosperous but numerous and well-connected, too. Blood relations held an assortment of prominent places in the colony’s government and business life, and they were aligned by interest and eventually by marriage with one of the colony’s two political factions, the Ward family. The Wards and their supporters were bitter opponents of Governor Stephen Hopkins and his supporters, the most prominent being the famous Brown family.
Affluence and influence, however, did not assure the Greene brothers a carefree, luxurious childhood. Quite the opposite. Quaker tradition, not to mention the necessities of running a family business in the New World, demanded an appreciation for labor and industry even among children. So the Greene boys were reared to value hard work for its own sake. They spent their days working in the mills or in the fields, learning the trades they would need when they inherited the business.
Formal education, though, was another matter entirely. Nathanael Greene Sr. shared the Quaker belief that book learning was a worldly luxury that could only lead to temptation, heresy, and other sins. A tutor instructed the Greene boys in their letters, so that they could read the Scriptures and several Quaker-approved books, and in their numbers, so they could work their business ledgers. All else, they were told, was vanity, or worse. “My Father was a man of Industry and brought up his children to business,” Greene wrote years later. “Early, very early, when I should have been in pursuit of Knowledge, I was digging into the Bowels of the Earth after Wealth.”
Although Nathanael Greene Jr. admired his father’s benevolence and piety, he resented the narrow confines of Quaker childhood, and his father’s strict regimen and rejection of books and ideas. The younger Greene wrote that his father “was over shadow’d with prejudices against Literary Accomplishments.” In most Quaker households, those prejudices constituted an unquestioned way of life. But as Nathanael Greene Jr. grew to adolescence–a husky, big-shouldered young man of five feet, ten inches with blue eyes and a thirst for knowledge–he questioned the authority that forbade reading, inquiry, and education. It was, he would later write, a tradition that “has prove’d to be a fine nursery of Ignorance.” On his own, with no mentors to encourage him, he was forming ideas that were very much at odds with his father’s.
He didn’t realize it, but he was beginning to act very much like a Rhode Islander.
The chief justice of New York was astonished by what he found during a visit to Rhode Island in 1773, when affairs between the colonies and Britain were falling apart. He wrote to the earl of Dartmouth in London that Rhode Island’s “government (if it deserves that name) is a downright democracy.” The chief justice, a man named Daniel Horsmanden, did not use the phrase as a compliment. Indeed, he found little about Rhode Island worthy of praise. In most of the other American colonies, including New York, the king appointed the governor. In Rhode Island, however, the governor was elected, and therefore, Horsmanden sneered, he was “entirely controlled by the populace.” Similarly, “all other magistrates and officers” were elected, he complained.
To twenty-first-century eyes, Rhode Island in the eighteenth century would hardly qualify as a democracy, downright or otherwise. The vote was confined to white, adult male property owners, and not all of them at that. Representation in the colonial Assembly was skewed in favor of certain towns, at the expense of others.
To a colonial servant of the Crown in the early 1770s, however, Rhode Island seemed very much like a radical experiment in self-government. Though the colony followed the custom of linking voting rights to property ownership, it was not so difficult for a white, Protestant male in Rhode Island to gain the right to vote. In fact, in a survey of five Rhode Island towns, the historian David S. Lovejoy estimated that in 1757 between 75 and 84 percent of adult males were eligible to vote, a remarkably high figure. Political conflict between the colony’s two dominant factions often was uproarious and chaotic, a harbinger of modern partisan politics. Election of delegates to the colony’s General Assembly took place twice a year, while candidates for positions ranging from governor to justice of the peace were elected every spring. Campaigns were never-ending and often highly personal.
Even more astonishing was the degree to which Rhode Island seemed independent of the king and Parliament. The colony’s charter, granted in 1663 during the reign of King Charles II, gave Rhode Island residents the same rights “as if they . . . were borne within the realme of England.” The General Assembly passed whatever laws it wished, as long as they were consistent with the laws of England. In reality, England interfered very little in the Assembly’s proceedings, leading Governor Stephen Hopkins to say in the 1750s that “the King and Parliament had no more right... to govern us than the Mohawks.” Long before Americans considered the possibility of independence, Rhode Islanders conducted themselves as if they were, if not independent of Britain, then at least a self-governing province under the Crown.
But it was more than just Rhode Island’s sense of independence and its feisty democracy that made the colony so distinct. The legacy of Roger Williams still was very much evident in its tolerance for dissenters, nonconformists, and other outsiders. The colony’s charter promised that no person would be “molested [or] punished . . . for any differences of opinione in matters of religion.” If they were “behaving themselves” and not using their liberty to promote “lycentiousness and profaneness,” members of all faiths were granted freedom of religion. And so French Huguenots, Congregationalists, Quakers, and even Jews streamed into the colony. Though Jews, like Catholics, were barred from voting, the colony’s General Assembly declared in 1684 that they could “expect. . . good protection” in Rhode Island.
In a sense, Rhode Island had no choice but to tolerate the presence of so many people of so many faiths, because only through toleration could Rhode Island develop as a single colony. Its four main towns–Providence, Portsmouth, Warwick, and Newport–risked being divided up piecemeal among its larger neighbors if Rhode Island’s leaders let religious differences get in the way of forming a colonywide government.
The colony’s disregard for convention was played out in business as well as in government. The colony’s economy, in fact, was based on a surly defiance of Britain’s attempts to regulate colonial trade. Rhode Island was a small place without resources or cash crops, without much of anything except Yankee ingenuity and seaports. So it became a prototype for what economists hundreds of years later would call a service economy. Trade, not cotton, not grain, was the core of its economy, and trade was based on molasses. The colony’s seaports became a point of entry for molasses from the West Indies, providing Rhode Island with a commodity it could use to trade for other goods and produce from larger colonies. The molasses trade led to the development of distilleries throughout Rhode Island, which provided rum to the colonies and provided barter for slave traders working Africa’s west coast.
The molasses trade developed and prospered because merchants, government officials, and ordinary citizens had simply ignored an act of Parliament. In 1733, Parliament ordered a tax of six pence on every gallon of molasses imported from foreign countries, including parts of the West Indies not under British rule. The Sugar Act of 1733 was a protectionist measure designed to assist the British-controlled molasses industry, but it soon became clear that collection of these taxes would have made molasses too expensive. So the taxes were ignored, or at very least were collected only sporadically; by one estimate, customs officials were content to collect about 10 percent of the taxes due. Rhode Islanders liked the arrangement, and the Crown’s appointees quickly learned to ask no questions. Three thousand miles away from London, blessed with a charter that offered them a reasonable facsimile of self-government, proud of their tradition of tolerating dissenters, Rhode Islanders took great delight in thumbing their collective nose at dictates of the English government.
