by Terry Golway
It is unnecessary, and might be deemed improper on this occasion, to enumerate the many trying scenes we have passed, of the suffering you have sustained. It is sufficient for the General that they have now subsided. It is his happiness that he has had the honor to command an army no less distinguished for its patience than bravery. . . .
United by principle and cemented by affection, you have exhibited to the world a proof that elevated souls and persevering tempers will triumph over every difficulty. The orders of government now separate us, perhaps forever. Our great object is answered; our first wish obtained. The same considerations which led us to the field, will now call upon us to retire. In whatever situation the General may be placed, it will afford him the highest pleasure to promote your interests; and it is among the first of his wishes to see you as happy as you have rendered millions of others.
He left Charleston on August 11, accompanied not by Caty–who was pregnant again and already well on her way home–but by several aides. Although he was eager to see his children in Rhode Island, he took his time, looking up friends along the way and soaking up tributes to himself in Wilmington, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; Baltimore, Maryland; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He crossed the Delaware into Trenton, the site of that desperate, glorious gamble so many years ago, and was briefly reunited with Washington, in the home of a mutual friend. They had first met on the hills overlooking Boston in the summer of 1775, when neither man, nor anybody else, could imagine what the future might hold. They had suffered together, despaired together, and now they were triumphant together.
And together, in victory, they glimpsed the problems that awaited their infant nation. From Trenton, Washington and Greene traveled to Princeton, where Congress was meeting in exile after fleeing the capital once again. This time the threatening army was not British but American: hundreds of soldiers, most from the perpetually disgruntled Pennsylvania regiments, had marched on Philadelphia to demand back pay. When Pennsylvania’s state government declined to protect Congress, delegates chose discretion over valor and crossed the Delaware to be closer to Washington and the troops he had brought with him from Newburgh, New York.
Although both Washington and Greene understood the plight of men who had suffered in service to the Revolution, neither sympathized with troops who wished to use or threaten force against civil leaders. Washington had quashed a near mutiny of officers in Newburgh in March, and Greene himself had negotiated his way out of several near or small mutinies in the spring of 1783. The Princeton exile reminded both men that even though the war was over, peace would bring little respite from confict, particularly in matters of money.
More uplifting were the expressions of gratitude that the embattled Congress offered to the South’s liberator. The lawmakers voted to present Greene with two brass cannon to commemorate his southern campaign, although it was left to Washington to ask Greene where, exactly, Congress might find two brass cannon.
Greene formally requested that Congress accept his resignation as major general, and asked that he be allowed to go home to Rhode Island. His military career was over. Congress allowed him to proceed to Rhode Island as a civilian.
Nathanael Greene was not at Fraunces Tavern on that night in December 1783 when George Washington said farewell to some of the men who served him for so long. Greene, eager to see Caty and the children, already was home.
He had left Rhode Island in 1775 to fight for a new nation. After a brief reunion with his family, he would soon leave home again, this time to build a new life.
14 Unfinished Business
Through the long years of conflict and hardship, Nathanael Greene yearned for his return to civilian life and the pleasures of what he invariably called “domestic felicity.” Now, at last, he was a civilian again; what’s more, he had the fame he had been seeking ever since joining the Kentish Guards in 1774.
He had every right to be satisfied and joyous. The cause he had served so well for so long had ended in a spectacular triumph, one he had helped mightily to achieve. Through talent and determination–not family and heredity–he had made himself a part of history. He had helped defeat a great empire and now would play his part in building a new nation.
Just as important, he was free to introduce himself to the four children born during his absence, to enjoy the constant company of Caty, and to await the birth of their new baby. Years later, their daughter Cornelia recalled these memorable days when the Greene children got to know this stranger who was their father. Although used to command and discipline, Nathanael Greene easily made the transition to doting and forgiving parent. “He was our boon companion and playfellow,” Cornelia wrote, “who winked at every atrocity we perpetrated.” The Greene family happily established itself in Newport, with the old house in Coventry handed over to Nathanael’s brother Jacob.
Still, Nathanael Greene was not at peace. Disillusion, the inevitable residue of revolution, already had left its mark, even before he left the South. He had urged the South’s politicians to approve a 5 percent tax on trade to help pay off the new nation’s enormous debt. Congress, which did not have the power to tax, could only urge each state to implement the levy. Ever the nationalist in a region that would champion the notion of states’ rights, Greene saw the tax as an obligation to be shared equally by all in the name of the new nation. He told the governor of Georgia, Lyman Hall, that the “united efforts of a free people may accomplish great things; but the endeavors of a few will be weak and [ineffective].”
His arguments, however, failed miserably. Georgia did not approve the tax, and South Carolina withdrew its initial support for the plan. Even more embarrassing for Greene, Rhode Island followed suit after he returned, rejecting the measure to the despair of its most famous native son. Greene was appalled as individual states acted as if they were sovereign countries and not part of a united enterprise. He told Washington of his fears for the future: “Many people secretly wish that every State should be completely independent, and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, Congress should be no more–a plan that would be as fatal to our happiness at home as it would be ruinous to our interest abroad.”
His own financial affairs were in shambles. The family business was in the hands of his brothers, and his secret wartime investment with Barnabas Deane was about to reach an unhappy end, with the company disbanding and Greene collecting nine hundred and sixty pounds sterling for his investment of ten thousand pounds in 1779. Worse yet, he was entangled in yet another complex arrangement that carried an odor of private dealing at public expense. Several months before he rode in triumph from Charleston to Newport, Greene had cosigned a loan to a company that provided his army with one of its final consignments of desperately needed supplies. John Banks, one of the company’s principals, was friendly with two of Greene’s aides, both of whom secretly became partners with Banks. When the firm, Hunter, Banks & Company, defaulted on the loan Greene had guaranteed, there were whispered accusations that Greene himself was a silent partner with Banks. The evidence suggests that he was not, and Banks offered a testimonial to Greene’s innocence, but the suspicions prompted Congress to delay paying Banks’s creditors. The creditors, in turn, dunned Greene for the thirty thousand pounds due them from Hunter, Banks.
“I tremble at my own situation when I think of the enormous sums I owe,” Greene told his wife. “I seem to be doomed to a life of slavery.”
And so, in a desperate attempt to pay off his debts and avoid the life to which he thought he was doomed, he turned to slavery itself.
In principle, Nathanael Greene, like many raised in Quaker traditions, opposed slavery. He told an audience in Philadelphia in 1783, “Nothing can be said in [slavery’s] defense.” But even as he spoke those words, Greene already was in the business of buying human beings and had found a way to justify it. Slaves, he told that same audience in Philadelphia, were “as much attached to a plantation as a man is to his family.”
He put that terrible ju
stification into practice on the plantation he received from South Carolina. The land and its slaves were once owned by the state’s royal governor, Thomas Boone, but the new patriot government had confiscated Boone’s property. Greene wanted to buy the slaves who had worked the plantation under Boone, and he convinced himself that somehow this was a humane thing to do. He told his Philadelphia audience that the slaves would “not be worse but better” under his ownership.
He also believed he had no choice. If he were to become the rich and influential person he wished to be in postwar America, he first had to clear himself of debt. Turning his gifts of southern land into profitable plantations would help him achieve that goal. He decided he could not do that, however, without using slave labor.
But slaves were expensive, and Greene didn’t have a great deal of cash. He told the Speaker of South Carolina’s House of Representatives, “[It will be] entirely out of my power” to buy the slaves who had worked the Boone property “unless the State will make the conditions for pay favorable to my wishes.” He apologized for making such a request, explaining that he had “a dependant family and children to educate.” The state and Greene eventually came to terms.
He had similar plans for the estate he received from Georgia, Mulberry Grove outside Savannah, which was to become his new home. Not long after his return to Rhode Island, Greene told Robert Morris, the new nation’s superintendent of finance, “I find I can get my Georgia plantation stocked with good Gangs of Negroes at about £70 a head and the payments made mostly by installment.” Greene borrowed money from Morris and from his friend and former commissary general Jeremiah Wadsworth to buy slaves and equipment for the estate. He betrayed no sense that his conscience was troubled as he made the transition from Yankee businessman to slave-owning southern plantation owner, although he later wrote of his wish for the “demolishing” of slavery and an end to the slave trade.
The months following Greene’s return to civilian life offered a hint of the role he seemed destined to play in the new nation’s government. In March 1784, Congress appointed him to a commission formed to negotiate “Treaties with the different Nations and Tribes of Indians.” Ironically, Greene learned of his appointment through a letter from his old antagonist and fellow fallen Quaker Thomas Mifflin, now the president of Congress. He turned down the appointment, not out of any personal resentment but because Caty was recovering slowly after giving birth to their fifth child, Louisa.
The urgency of family and business concerns, however, was no match for personal appeals from Greene’s former commander in chief. When Washington asked him, in late March 1784, to travel to Philadelphia for the first meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati, Greene put aside every-thing else for the sake of his friend and hero. The society was made up of former officers of the Continental army and was designed to “perpetuate” the friendships forged during the war and to celebrate the Revolution’s ideals. Washington served as its president, but his presence did not shield the organization from complaints that it reeked of Old World, antirepublican privilege: critics, including Benjamin Franklin and the Adams cousins, were appalled that membership in the exclusive club could be passed down to the eldest sons of members. Washington fairly begged Greene to play an active role in the society, telling him that he wanted “the best abilities of the Society” at its initial meeting. “I cannot avoid expressing an earnest wish that yours may be among them,” he added. Greene did not let down Washington but was shocked to discover, as he told Washington, that “the current of public prejudice is directed against the Cincinnati.”
The Indian commission appointment, though declined, and his membership in the Cincinnati indicated that Greene could have a place among the new nation’s leaders. But his personal finances remained his first concern. Creditors continued to bombard him with bills run up by Hunter, Banks, and he received little help from Congress. In the fall of 1784, after a bitter summer that saw half his crops ruined in a hurricane, Greene rode from Rhode Island to Virginia to confront John Banks in person. He was too late. He informed his lawyer in Charleston, “I arrived and found John Banks dead and buried.” He asked his lawyer to file a claim against Banks’s estate.
It wasn’t just money woes that dogged the hero of the southern campaign. Victory and freedom apparently were not enough to convince some soldiers to forget or forgive old resentments. While visiting Mulberry Grove in the spring of 1785, Greene was confronted by a former officer named James Gunn, who challenged Greene to a duel over a disagreement the two men had had in 1782 regarding a horse. (Gunn believed he was entitled to a new horse courtesy of the Continental army and so helped himself to one. An enraged Greene demanded that Congress intervene, and, to Gunn’s chagrin, it sided with Greene.)
Proud men did not easily ignore or decline such challenges at the time, but Greene did. Washington congratulated him for defying convention. He told him that his “honor and reputation” were enhanced by “the non-acceptance of [Gunn’s] challenge.” Undeterred, Gunn promised to kill Greene without the careful rituals of the duel Greene would not fight. Greene began carrying a pistol with him at all times.
Peace, for Nathanael Greene, was more elusive than he had ever imagined.
Mulberry Grove, Greene’s plantation in Georgia, finally was ready for the family. “The prospect is delightful and the house magnificent,” Greene wrote of the estate. “We have a coach house and stables, a large . . . kitchen, and a poultry house. Besides these are several other buildings convenient for a family.” The main house was a fine two-story Georgian building with a library. In the late summer of 1785, Greene left behind the South’s heat and humidity and sailed to Rhode Island to collect his wife and children. Together, they would sail back to their new home and their new lives.
Heartbreak waited on him. While he was gone, Caty had given birth to their sixth child, conceived during a short visit to Rhode Island in late 1784. Named for her mother, baby Catherine developed a terrible cough during the summer. She died despite Caty’s loving but futile care.
Still in mourning, the family left Rhode Island for the last time in October. After a short stay in Savannah, they rode out to their new home in November. Though his financial troubles persisted and he still feared for his reputation because of the Banks affair, Nathanael Greene at last allowed himself a sense of contentment. His wife and children were with him, and they seemed happy. In April 1786, Greene offered an idyllic word portrait of his new life.
It is a busy time with us. We are planting. We have upwards [of] sixty acres of corn planted, and expect to plant one hundred and thirty of rice. The garden is delightful. The fruit trees and flowering shrubs form a pleasing variety.
We have green peas almost fit to eat, and as fine lettuce as you ever saw. The mocking-birds surround us evening and morning. The weather is mild, and the vegetable kingdom progressing to perfection.
Wartime friends were frequent visitors. Anthony Wayne lived nearby, following Greene’s example by moving from the North–in his case, Pennsylvania–to the South. Several onetime aides and fellow officers also lived in the vicinity. But Greene’s pleasant portrayal of life as a gentleman farmer in the pleasant southern spring was not complete. Privately, he continued to fear for the future. “I am overwhelmed with difficulties and God knows when or where they will end,” he admitted to Henry Knox. Greene petitioned Congress to relieve him of the debts owed to John Banks’s creditors, and friends like Knox were agitating on his behalf.
All the while, tragedy and setback continued to stalk his doorstep. He lost fifty barrels of rice in a fire, and another forty-five sank in an accident on the Savannah River. Worse yet, in April, Caty–returned to her familiar state of pregnancy–fell, and she went into labor. The baby was premature and died soon after birth.
About two months later, the Greenes paid a social call on the general’s former aide Nathaniel Pendleton in Savannah. They stayed the night and then set out for Muberry Grove the following day, June 12. It was a brutally h
ot day, more like August than late spring, but when they stopped at a friend’s house for lunch, Greene insisted on inspecting his friend’s plantation.
Hours later, he complained of a headache. He went to bed, but his condition only worsened. His doctors decided that Greene was suffering from sunstroke, and they bled him. Of course, their efforts were in vain. As Greene slipped in and out of consciousness, friends like Wayne and Pendleton rushed to see him, joining Caty at his bedside.
As the southern sun rose on June 19, Major General Nathanael Greene died in the company of his wife and friends. He was forty-four years old, still deeply in debt, still worried about the future prospects of his children. Anthony Wayne, his wife’s future lover, was distraught. “My dear General Greene is no more,” he told a friend. “Pardon my scrawl; my feelings are but too much affected, because I have seen a great and good man die.”
Word quickly made its way northward. Richard Henry Lee, who resumed his political career in Congress, immediately sent word to Washington. “Your friend and second, the patriot Greene, is no more,” he wrote from Philadelphia. “Universal grief reigns here. How hard is the fate of the United States to lose such a man in the middle of life! Irreparable loss!”
Washington grieved, not only for the man who had served so capably by his side but also for Caty, for his friend’s children–including his namesake–and for his country. He told Jeremiah Wadsworth, Greene’s friend and business partner, that he mourned “the death of this valuable character, especially at this crisis, when the political machine seems pregnant with the most awful events.”
Lost was a voice for unity and purpose at a time when sectional and state differences threatened the young Republic. Lost was a war hero who, despite his proclaimed distaste for politics, certainly figured to play a prominent role in guiding the nation through its infancy. “The sudden termination of his life,” Alexander Hamilton said, deprived the country of a “universal and pervading genius which qualified him not less for the Senate than for the field.”
