Washington's General

by Terry Golway

  Ward’s language did not go unnoticed. Other colonial radicals cheered his sly maneuver, noting that no other governor had yet asked for God’s intercession on behalf of American liberty.

  In late December, Stamp Master Johnston resigned. Governor Ward informed London of Johnston’s resignation and further asserted that the tax was “inconsistent with” Rhode Island’s “natural and just rights and privileges.” As for the act itself, Ward reported that he couldn’t enforce it because, after all, he had no stamped paper.

  It was sitting in the cargo hold of a British ship in Newport Harbor, and nobody dared unload it.

  The hated Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but tensions between the colonies and Parliament continued, and Rhode Islanders in particular kept a wary eye out for further limitations on their liberty and their commerce. There was no shortage of them: the Townshend Acts imposed taxes on glass, lead, imported paper, and, most famously, tea, while the Declaratory Act asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for and tax the colonies. The Townshend taxes inspired throughout the colonies an agreement to stop importing British-made goods, but for some of Rhode Island’s merchants, love of commerce trumped love of liberty. They continued their trade with Britain, just as other Rhode Islanders traded with the French during the French and Indian War. Merchants in Boston and Philadelphia sent messages to Newport suggesting that the Rhode Islanders reconsider their position, lest they find themselves with no markets within the colonies. The British were not alone in bemoaning Rhode Island’s iconoclasm and sense of independence.

  Nathanael Greene spent the turbulent 1760s in Potowomut, continuing his work in the family business and trying to find some balance between the Quaker tradition of his family and his own intellectual curiosity. He took a small step into the colony’s civic affairs when he joined three other men, including his tutor, Adam Maxwell, in petitioning the Rhode Island Assembly to relocate Rhode Island College from the town of Warren to East Greenwich, not far from the family homestead. Greene very likely wrote the petition, which described East Greenwich as “abounding with Every necessary supply to render the Scholars Comfortable.” Included among the town’s amenities, Greene wrote with impressive earnestness, was “a post office.”

  The petition failed, and the college was moved to Providence and eventually renamed Brown University. Greene’s involvement in the campaign, however, further illustrated how far he was straying from the parochial, insular traditions of his faith and family. The distance became a good deal greater in November 1770, when Nathanael’s father died in Potowomut at the age of sixty-three. The surviving sons inherited the family business, but Nathanael continued to shake loose other parts of his father’s legacy. It is in letters written after his father’s death that Nathanael begins to complain about his lack of education and about his father’s hostility toward literature and the world of ideas.

  There are few indications of any radical political activity on his part during his twenties, but he continued to visit Newport on business and he could hardly have missed the new spirit of the times in that city, where rioters had taken to the street to protest the Stamp Act and other British policies. And as an avid reader, he surely must have devoured the flowery denunciations of Parliament regularly available in the Newport Mercury, which briefly sported a front-page slogan reading, “Undaunted by TYRANTS–We’ll DIE or be FREE.”

  Greene’s regimen of self-improvement continued, too, and he found himself attracted to military histories, beginning with Caesar’s. While the Roman’s book had a narrative flow and battlefield descriptions designed to capture the reader’s imagination, Greene’s further reading showed that he had moved beyond mere narrative and was looking for actual instruction in the art and science of war. In his letters, Greene mentioned that he read Instructions to His Generals by the Prussian militarist Frederick the Great, and Mes Reveries, by Maurice de Saxe, the famed French marshal. Greene’s unlikely interest in warfare, along with his general thirst for secular knowledge, nurtured his private rebellion against religious traditions he regarded as unreasonable and arbitrary. Tales of great battles and triumphant generals offered him an exciting glimpse of glory beyond the Quaker meetinghouse and the gristmill. And these books did not simply stir his imagination; they also offered him instruction in battlefield tactics and strategy. As he would demonstrate in later years, Greene learned these lessons well, however irrelevant they might have seemed at the time.

  For the moment, however, Greene’s only personal knowledge of combat was restricted to that fought on legal battlefields. He and his brothers were frequent visitors to the Court of Common Pleas in East Greenwich, usually in pursuit of an unpaid debt. Court documents from the era show numerous legal actions, some involving family squabbling, related to foundry and forge. Nathanael Greene began his studies of Blackstone’s Commentaries because of the number of lawsuits involving the family business.

  Through his twenties, Greene’s health began to show signs of afflictions he would later suffer on the battlefield. He complained of asthma attacks that kept him awake at night, and his right eye was slightly scarred after he was innoculated against smallpox during a visit to New York. The scar, which occasionally became infected, was nothing compared to the disease itself, one of the most prolific killers of the era. Greene’s willingness to risk innoculation further demonstrated his free-thinking, independent spirit, for even in progressive Rhode Island in the early 1770s, smallpox innoculation was illegal.

  Just before his father’s death in 1770, Nathanael had moved from the Greene homestead to Coventry, about ten miles to the west, where Nathanael Greene & Company opened a new foundry. The twenty-eight-year-old bachelor built himself a new house, which he called Spell Hall, and made sure that it included a splendid library and study. And while he enjoyed the company of his growing collection of books, he was hoping for more animated companionship, too. He had fallen in love with Anna Ward, a daughter of Samuel Ward, the colony’s occasional governor and leader of one of Rhode Island’s political factions. But Anna, known as Nancy to her family, apparently wasn’t attracted to the young Quaker gentleman. Nathanael was crushed when it became apparent that Miss Ward had no intention of returning his affections. The humiliation became all the more intense when one of Nathanael’s younger brothers, Christopher, married another one of Samuel Ward’s daughters, Catherine, in 1774, formally linking the Greene family to the politically powerful Wards.

  The aborted relationship between Nathanael and Nancy was not in vain, at least not for posterity’s sake. Nathanael became friendly with her young brother, Samuel Ward Jr., who was precisely half Nathanael’s age and, at age fourteen in 1770, already was a student at Rhode Island College. Nathanael and the lad he called Sammy corresponded through the early 1770s, and Nathanael’s letters have survived. They are filled with spelling mistakes and earnest pronouncements about the world, like this offering from 1771: “To pursue Virtue where theres no Opposition is the Merit of a common Man, But to Practice it in spight of all Opposition is the Carrector of a truly great and Noble Soul.”

  What’s striking about Greene’s early letters to Sammy is the absence of any discussion of Rhode Island politics or the raging controversies of the day. He used the opportunity to lament his formal education, while offering Sammy advice about life and learning. “Study to be wise and learn to be prudent,” he told Sammy. “Learning is not Virtue but the means to bring us an aquaintance with it. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and Dreadful. Let these be your motives to action through Life, the relief of the distressed, the detection of frauds, the defeat of oppression, and diffusion of happiness.”

  At the age of thirty, Nathanael Greene was absorbed in introspection, self-improvement, and the misery of unrequited love. But great events would soon offer him the opportunity to put his words of wisdom to the test.

  3 The Making of a Rebel

  Lieutenant William Dudingston, commander of the Briti
sh navy schooner Gaspee, was a man who took his job very seriously. He and his ship were part of the navy’s crackdown on the colonial smuggling racket, and he had a reputation as a particularly aggressive enforcer of His Majesty’s revenue laws. Several years earlier, in 1769, he had assaulted fishermen in Pennsylvania for no apparent reason. Not surprisingly, then, customs officials in Boston decided he was just the man to send to Rhode Island, the colony that had turned smuggling and evasion into an art form.

  Rhode Islanders, of course, had some experience in dealing with customs and revenue officials who had no appreciation for their local traditions. And, like Dudingston, they were not shy about expressing their feelings. In the summer of 1769, the warship Liberty had sailed to Newport to enforce laws against smuggling and evasion of duty. After several confrontations with vessels suspected of carrying contraband, the Liberty opened fire on a particularly quarrelsome captain and his crew. The next day, the Liberty’s captain was introduced to the ways and means of angry Rhode Islanders. As he set foot on a wharf in Newport, the captain was surrounded and was told to order his crew off the ship. He had little choice but to comply. A select committee of Newport citizens boarded the vessel, cut it loose, and scuttled it. A few days later, the Liberty made for a fine bonfire. Nobody was ever prosecuted for this daring display of dissent. Rhode Island authorities later described the suspects merely as “Persons unknown.”

  Lieutenant Dudingston would put an end to this kind of insolence.

  Dudingston and the Gaspee arrived in Narragansett Bay in early 1772, and Rhode Island’s merchants quickly discovered that he was a man who meant business. He disdained the tradition of presenting his commission to Rhode Island’s governor. He demanded that all ships lower their colors in tribute as they passed the Gaspee. Vessels of all sizes were subject to search, and Dudingston’s well-armed crew made sure that their searches were thorough.

  Dudingston had nothing but contempt for the colony and its merchants. He complained that Rhode Islanders acted as if “they have every right to carry on” their illicit trade “without interuption.” He was not wrong. But he was determined to change the way this irrascible colony conducted its business affairs. On February 17, 1772, he seized an opportunity to make his point.

  The merchant vessel Fortune was anchored in Narragansett Bay, its hold filled with fourteen hundred gallons of rum, a hogshead of brown sugar, and forty gallons of “Jamaican spirits.” At the vessel’s helm was Rufus Greene, a young cousin of Nathanael Greene and his brothers. The firm of Nathanael Greene & Company owned the Fortune.

  An officer from the Gaspee set out from the mother ship and boarded the Fortune, instructing Rufus Greene to retreat into the cabin while the vessel was searched. Greene asked the officer under whose authority he was acting. “If you do not go into the cabin, I’ll let you know,” the officer replied. The officer’s drawn sword indicated the source of his authority, and Rufus Greene was hustled off toward the cabin, where he was roughed up and thrown against a chest of drawers. The Gaspee towed Greene’s ship into Newport Harbor.

  Dudingston decided to send the Fortune and its cargo to Boston, where an Admiralty Court–and not a local jury–could decide its fate. By law, however, the case should have been tried in Newport, but Dudingston decided that this was one evasion of the law that the Crown would support.

  Word of the Fortune’s seizure and of the rough treatment cousin Rufus suffered quickly made its way to Conventry. Nathanael Greene was furious. He put aside his pining for Nancy Ward and his endless exercises in self-improvement to win some measure of justice and compensation for what he regarded as an act of officially sanctioned piracy. In a letter to his friend Sammy Ward, Greene wrote that he was in pursuit of a “Searover,” or pirate, who had taken “a quantity of Our Rum and carried it round to Boston (contrary to the Express words of the Statute).” The “illegality of [the] measure,” he went on, “created such a Spirit of Resentment That I have devoted almost the whole of my Time in devising and carrying into execution measures for the recovery of my Property and punishing the offender.”

  Those measures would include a lawsuit against Lieutenant Dudingston himself, demanding that he compensate the Greenes for their losses. The case of Greene v. Dudingston became a legal sensation in Rhode Island, a notable act of defiance, and indicated that Nathanael Greene was emerging from his forge and his library to take an active role in his times. The suit forced Dudingston to spend months evading Rhode Island officials, who were authorized to arrest him as part of the Greene family’s complaint.

  Even as Nathanael Greene prepared his case, the Gaspee became the terror of Narragansett Bay through the spring and summer of 1772. Dudingston and his crew not only harassed all manner of vessels but regularly raided farms and businesses. Dependent on seaborne trade, Rhode Island’s economy suffered as Dudingston’s aggressive searches and willingness to open fire on uncooperative vessels made the very act of entering Narragansett Bay a dangerous proposition. One prominent Rhode Islander and a future member of the Continental Congress, Henry Marchant, described Dudingston as a “very dirty low fellow” who ordered his crew “to commit many Outrages upon the Possessions and Property of the Inhabitants on Shore.”

  Rhode Island’s governor, Joseph Wanton, dispatched a letter of protest to Dudingston’s immediate superior, Admiral John Montagu, who was based in Boston. The admiral defended Dudingston and then issued a blunt warning to Wanton: “I am ... informed the people of Newport talk of fitting out an armed vessel to rescue any vessel the King’s schooner may take carrying on an illicit trade,” Montagu wrote. “Let them be cautious [about] what they [do] for as sure as they attempt it and any of them are taken I will hang them as pirates.”

  Wanton’s written reply was simple and utterly in keeping with Rhode Island tradition: “I do not receive instructions for the administration of my government from the King’s Admiral stationed in America.”

  Lieutenant Dudingston’s aggression continued into late spring. On June 9, 1772, the Gaspee fired a shot across the bow of the merchant ship Hannah in Narragansett Bay. The Hannah’s captain, Benjamin Lindsay, chose defiance rather than surly compliance. He decided to try to outrun the Gaspee. Dudingston immediately gave chase, but this time his zeal betrayed him. Lindsay moved into shallow waters off Namquit Point, and the Gaspee ran aground. Lindsay and the Hannah got away and sailed for Providence. When the Hannah arrived in port, Lindsay spread the news: the hated Dudingston and his despised ship were stuck and vulnerable in shallow water about six miles away.

  The city’s leading citizens and merchants convened that night in a tavern to plan Rhode Island’s revenge on the Gaspee. They dispatched a man with a drum to parade up and down the town’s streets to spread word of the Gaspee’s misfortune and recruit volunteers for an attack. Sixty-four citizens turned out at the wharf and set out in longboats before midnight, headed toward the stricken warship. They were spotted as they approached the Gaspee, and soon Lieutenant Dudingston appeared on deck, armed with a pistol. He asked the intruders in the longboats to identify themselves.

  A voice replied: “I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you! I have got a warrant to apprehend you, God damn you!” The sheriff, Abraham Whipple, had been trying to serve Dudingston with papers since Nathanael Greene and his brothers filed their lawsuit, naming the lieutenant as a defendant.

  The sheriff demanded that Dudingston surrender. Dudingston declined. A shot rang out, hitting Dudingston in the groin. The Providence men quickly boarded the Gaspee and overpowered its crew. One of the raiders asked the wounded Dudingston if he planned to “make amends” for the rum he had seized from the Fortune. A medical student in the boarding party dressed the lieutenant’s wound, and Dudingston and his crew were herded into small boats and taken to shore. Humiliated, they could only watch as the Providence raiders put their warship to the torch. By morning, the Gaspee was a smoking hulk.

  Once again, Rhode Islanders had committed an outrage against th
e Crown, and British officials and even the king himself were furious. The secretary of state in charge of American affairs, Lord Hillsborough, resigned, and Lord Dartmouth replaced him. His Majesty ordered a royal commission to investigate the crime and bring those responsible to justice. Some British officials, including Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, believed that a few hangings would remind Rhode Island of the price of insubordination.

  Samuel Adams, the Boston rabble-rouser who was closely monitoring events in Rhode Island, regarded the Gaspee insurrection as a glimpse of what was to come. “I have long feared this unhappy contest between Great Britain and America would end in rivers of blood,” he wrote to Rhode Island’s deputy governor, Darius Sessions. “Should that be the case, America, I think, may wash her hands in innocence.” In the meantime, Governor Wanton had little choice but to issue a proclamation on June 12 offering a reward of one hundred pounds “to any Person or Persons who shall discover the Perpetrators of the . . . Villainy.” King George personally raised the amount of the reward to five hundred pounds two months later.

  As was the custom in Rhode Island, the Perpetrators remained at large. The reward went unclaimed. But Rhode Island authorities did catch up with at least one criminal suspect. Three days after the attack on the Gaspee, the Kent County sheriff arrested Lieutenant Dudingston as he lay in a hospital bed. The arrest allowed the case of Greene v. Dudingston to proceed in court.

  The Gaspee affair was a milestone in Nathanael Greene’s life. His letters, which had been apolitical until now–the correspondence contains no reference to the Boston Massacre in 1770 or its aftermath–soon were filled with condemnations of Britain’s rule in America. He continued to press his case against Dudingston, eventually winning a judgment of about three hundred pounds sterling. It’s not certain whether Greene actually received the money from Dudingston, but there’s no question that the family business could have used it. In August 1772, the Greenes’ forge in Coventry burned to the ground. It was a financial and personal disaster. One bright morning just after the fire, Nathanael sat amid the ruins and read a letter from his friend Sammy Ward. He replied quickly, describing the scene around him: “I was surrounded with Gloomy Faces, piles of Timber still in Flames, Heaps of Bricks dasht to pieces, Baskets of Coal reduced to ashes. Everything seemed to appear in Ruins and Confusion.” The calamity, coming even as Greene v. Dudingston was being argued in Kent County courts, had a terrible effect on Nathanael. He suffered through an asthma attack that kept him nearly sleepless for four nights, leading to an inflammation in one of his eyes. He even despaired of his surroundings. “If Coventry ever was tolerable, it has now become insupportable,” he wrote. And once again, his thoughts turned to Sammy’s sister, who remained beyond his reach. He told her he would stop writing if that was what she wished, but he desperately wanted to continue their correspondence. Their letters offered Nathanael hope, however dim, of a future with Nancy.