Nathanael Greene

American military leader

• Born: August 7, 1742
• Birthplace: Potowomut (now Warwick), Rhode Island
• Died: June 19, 1786
• Place of death: Mulberry Grove plantation, Georgia

Greene was one of George Washington’s most trusted military leaders throughout the Revolutionary War, playing significant roles as a field commander and as the Continental army’s quartermaster general.

Early Life

Nathanael Greene was one of the numerous descendants of the Quaker John Greene, who followed Roger Williams to Rhode Island in 1636 in search of religious freedom. He was born in Potowomut (modern Warwick), Rhode Island. Because of his father’s suspicion of learning, Greene was largely self-educated, his early reading being directed by a chance meeting with Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale College. The young Greene was five feet, ten inches tall and well built, with an oval face, blue eyes, a straight nose, a full and determined mouth, a large forehead, and a firm double chin. A stiff right knee gave him a slight limp, but neither this nor periodic bouts of asthma prevented him from engaging in normal physical activity.

Like his brothers, Greene spent most of his youth working in the prosperous family forge and mills. In 1770, his father gave him control of the family forge in Coventry, Rhode Island, where he built his own house, including a library of 250 volumes. From early youth he had shown a fondness for dancing and an interest in things military; some time after his father’s death, the Quaker meeting in Coventry dismissed him for attending a military parade.

Greene lived as a typical young man of his class, being elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1775. On July 20, 1774, he married Catharine Littlefield, and the two had two sons and three daughters. Greene was aware of the growing tensions between the American colonies and the mother country, becoming convinced as early as October, 1775, that a break with Great Britain was necessary to preserve American liberties. He was instrumental in the formation of the Kentish Guards, a militia company organized in response to the Boston Port Act of 1774; he served as a private when some members indicated that a captain who limped would be a blemish on the company.

Life’s Work

Nathanael Greene’s military career, which occupied the rest of his life, began when he was commissioned brigadier general of Rhode Island’s three regiments on May 8, 1775. He took his troops to Boston, where he first met George Washington, and, on June 22, was appointed one of the eight brigadier generals of the Continental army. He commanded in Boston after the British evacuation in March of 1776; by May, he was supervising the building of fortifications on Long Island, though a three-week bout with fever kept him out of the battles there. He was made major general on August 9 and by mid-September was commanding his division during the retreat from New York. At this point, as commander of Forts Lee and Washington, Greene was confident that both could be held, and Washington took his advice. However, on November 16, Fort Washington surrendered, Fort Lee had to be evacuated, and Washington’s army retreated through New Jersey.

Greene’s division crossed the Delaware River with Washington, and Greene led the left column against Trenton, capturing the Hessian artillery. In early January, he delayed Lieutenant General Cornwallis while Washington made his night march to Princeton. At the Battle of Brandywine on September 10, Greene’s division covered four miles in forty-five minutes to aid the right wing, covered the retreat, and saved the artillery. Arriving late at the October 4 dawn attack on Germantown, Greene’s left column fought in the two-hour battle and then protected the rear for five miles of the retreat, without losing a gun. On December 19, 1777, the army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge.

On February 25, 1778, Greene reluctantly agreed to become quartermaster general (officially appointed on March 2). A difficult job at best, it was much involved with the politicking and intrigue swirling around Washington and in the Continental Congress; the eddies alone could destroy a reputation, and Greene preferred military activity. Yet his realization of the importance of the work and his strong sense of obligation to Washington and the revolutionary cause kept Greene in the position for eighteen months. During this time, he set up a system of supply depots and required monthly reports from his deputies. He was as effective as congressional politics, intercolonial squabbling, and inadequate financing allowed. On the march to Monmouth, for example, he picked good campsites and had them prepared with wood, straw, barrels of vinegar, latrines, and stone-walled springs, while seeing to the repair of equipment and the collection of fodder.

For the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, Greene resumed his line command and led the right wing, pushing back Sir Henry Clinton’s line. Sent to Rhode Island to further a projected French-American push, Greene commanded the right wing on August 11, when American troops were defeated while count d’Estaing refused to disembark his four thousand French soldiers. Greene acted as peacemaker in the subsequent arguments and again as right wing commander in an unsuccessful engagement on August 29. The ensuing military lull did not extend to the quartermaster department, Greene administering approximately $50 million in 1779; his effectiveness at supply helped to support the army during winter quarters in Morristown and to keep it mobile during the summer’s maneuvering. When Congress adopted a plan to reorganize the department, Greene’s resignation (the last of several) was accepted, on August 3. During September, while performing quartermaster duty until his successor took over, Greene also presided over the board of general officers that condemned Major John André to be hanged as a spy.

The war in the North wound down after 1778 as the British shifted their major operations to the South, taking Augusta and Charleston and setting up a chain of interior posts. After General Horatio Gates’s defeat at Camden, Washington appointed Greene to the Southern command on October 14, 1780, and Congress ratified this to include control of all troops between Delaware and Georgia. In Philadelphia, Greene arranged for a medical department, engineers, artillery, clothing, horses, and equipment; in Richmond, he established cooperation with Governor Thomas Jefferson; in North Carolina, he ordered the building of boats and established cooperation with the patriot organizations.

On December 2, in Charlotte, he took formal command, which was marked almost immediately by cooperation with the partisan leaders General Andrew Pickens, General Thomas Sumter, and Colonel Francis (Swamp Fox) Marion, and by his use of able subordinates such as General Daniel Morgan, Colonel Otho H. Williams, and Colonel William Washington, with General Henry (Light-Horse Harry) Lee’s Legion as his intelligence arm. Throughout his tenure as the commander of the Southern Department, Greene made effective use of these brilliant and independent-minded leaders while maintaining good relations with political leaders in several states and paying his usual careful attention to the logistical details that made his strategy possible. A nationalist, the Rhode Islander felt no constraint in the South; more diplomatic as commander than he was as quartermaster general, he was able to get maximum cooperation from detached and independent forces.

American losses at Charleston and Camden had seriously reduced both numbers and morale, so Greene appointed good quartermaster officers and added to the strength of his forces, having about two thousand Continentals and between five hundred and one thousand partisans. Moving his camp to the Cheraw Hills, South Carolina, on the Pedee River, he once again faced Lieutenant General Cornwallis. Like Greene, Cornwallis did not have enough men to control the South, and his serious supply problems were never solved; although popular with his troops (with whom he shared privation and hardship) and fearless in battle, he did not plan in detail for long campaigns and often blundered.

Greene took the initiative and divided his army, sending off half under Morgan to the victory at Cowpens on January 17, 1781. Cornwallis burned his baggage and set off in pursuit. Both armies raced for the Dan River, but Greene had provided boats and Cornwallis had not. Greene, maneuvering while waiting for reinforcements, took a strong position near Guilford Courthouse on March 15; he used his 4,200 men well, but few were veterans. Cornwallis attacked with two thousand veterans, but although Greene retreated after three hours of hard fighting, Cornwallis lost a quarter of his force and had to withdraw toward the coast, unable to resume the offensive in the Carolinas.

Greene was physically exhausted after six weeks with little sleep and no change of clothing, but after some rest he planned the best use of his limited resources: He was left with about 1,450 troops and the partisans. Cornwallis’s subordinate Lord Francis Rawdon attacked Greene’s new position (near Camden) on April 25; because of Colonel John Gunby’s injudicious order to fall back, Greene was forced to make a general retreat from Hobkirk’s Hill. Rawdon, however, his communications and supply lines threatened, was forced to move off. Greene’s detachments took the British posts and Lee’s Legion took Augusta; Greene besieged Ninety-six but Rawdon relieved the garrison on June 19. This was Rawdon’s second Pyrrhic victory, for he had to abandon the post. Thus, by July, Greene held nearly the entire lower South, having forced Cornwallis to leave the theater of operations. After the campaign’s long marches and short rations, Greene took his army to camp at the High Hills of Santee for six weeks of recuperation, drill, and discipline.

The army moved out on August 23 and on September 8 surprised Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stuart at Eutaw Springs, fighting a bloody battle against an army of equal size. The militia fought well, British regulars were pushed back in open fighting, and an American bayonet charge was successful. When, however, Lee’s Legion and the artillery advanced beyond troops who stayed to enjoy the food and rum in the abandoned British camp, Greene was forced to leave the field. This indecisive battle, at best a draw, marked the end of the fighting in the lower South, as Stuart withdrew to Charleston. Congress later voted Greene thanks for the victory, along with a gold medal and a British standard, and Washington congratulated him in a letter.

With the onset of the cool season, Greene brought his army down from the Santee camp to besiege Charleston on January 2, 1782, holding a superior British force in the city until the end of the war. Supplying his army, aiding the restoration of civil government, and attempting to prevent mistreatment of Loyalists occupied Greene until all troops began to leave in July of 1783. The legislatures of Georgia and of North Carolina and South Carolina had voted to grant him land in gratitude. Greene rode home to Rhode Island in November, but in 1784 had to return and sell the South Carolina plantation to settle claims made on him stemming from his arrangements for supplying the army before Charleston. (Congress granted, to his widow, the financial relief for which he had asked, in June, 1796.)

In the autumn of 1785, Greene moved his family to the Mulberry Grove plantation granted him in Georgia. He settled in to the life of a gentleman farmer, but on June 14, 1786, after walking in the afternoon sun, he developed head pains and inflammation, and he died five days later. He was buried in the cemetery of Christ Episcopal Church in Savannah, and in 1902 was re-interred under the Greene monument in Johnson Square in that city. The Marquis de Lafayette, a longtime friend of Greene, educated his son George Washington Greene in France until 1794; shortly after his return, at the age of nineteen, the boy drowned in the Savannah River. On June 28, 1796, Greene’s widow married Phineas Miller; she died in 1814.

Significance

In many respects, Nathanael Greene exemplified the American experience. Descended from early English settlers fleeing religious persecution, he was continuing the economic and educationally upward mobility that characterized colonial society when the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775 interrupted an essentially undistinguished life. Appointed a brigadier general despite an almost complete lack of experience, Greene quickly demonstrated his military value to Washington. Throughout the revolution he held important commands, in all of them giving his country unstinting service despite personal and financial hardships.

On many points he was somewhat ahead of general public opinion. Early in the conflict, he urged independence as a goal. He saw the need of a strong central government, and, equally in vain, advocated a large regular army, enlisted for the duration, with central command and adequate supply and financial support. In this he differed from both contemporary and historical opinion, which was that the traditional militia was an effective military force expressing the popular nature of American society without endangering American liberties. Military historians have come to see the revolutionary patriot militias as a cross section of the colonial yeomanry, the “nation-in-arms” proficient with weapons and familiar with its home terrain, fighting well with its own officers and in its own way. For example, its usual casual “desertions,” to deal with farm and business needs, produced not only a constantly fluctuating troop strength but also far less pressure on slender resources than a consistently large regular army would have.

Yet a commander and quartermaster general was bound to concentrate on the militia’s weaknesses, even when planning them into his tactics, as Greene placed mostly raw militia in his first two lines at Guilford Courthouse: He wanted then to retreat after a few volleys, knowing that militia usually broke and ran in the face of an enemy advance, particularly of a bayonet charge, “grim lines of scarlet-coated men emerging from the mist and heading straight toward . . . them with naked steel,” wrote historians Mary Wickwire and Franklin Wickwire. As quartermaster general, Greene was too preoccupied with shortages and inefficiencies to feel grateful that he had to provide for forces that were smaller than they would have been, had militiamen been metamorphosed into duration-of-the-war Continentals.

Quartermasters general, however efficient, are rarely remembered except by the troops whom they contrive somehow to supply. Even secondary commanders, however much relied upon by their chiefs, do not decide strategy: While Washington accepted Greene’s assurance that Fort Washington could be held, it was Washington’s own decision to attempt to block British operations in New Jersey. As commander of the Southern Department after the Camden debacle, Greene came fully into his own, demonstrating great abilities in tactics and strategy, as well as what in a military leader is called “character”: courage, determination, dominating one’s opponent, and taking the psychological initiative. Greene chose his subordinates well, dealt diplomatically with both political and partisan leaders, and achieved results truly remarkable in the light of his command, which consisted of a small and inadequately supplied army supplemented by independent partisan groups and undisciplined militia.

In the South, Greene lost every major engagement he personally commanded, usually through the failure of troops at crucial points in the battle, when victory seemed imminent. Frustrating as these situations must have been to him—he had an impulsive temperament and was easily angered—he remained a cautious tactician, never risking a desperate continuation that might have won a battle but might as easily have destroyed his force. Like Washington, he realized the necessity of retaining an army able to fight again; he was willing to retreat, even run, but always to return to the conflict.

Despite his defeats, his Southern strategy achieved all the objectives of his campaigns; Cornwallis and Rawdon won battles but lost control of the lower South. By rapid movement, constant pressure on the enemy, and the use of a variety of methods (raids, harassing supply lines, siege, battles), Greene kept Cornwallis off balance, prevented his controlling the lower South and protecting its Loyalists, and possibly contributed to Cornwallis’s decision to attempt a Virginia offensive rather than one in the Carolinas. That decision brought Cornwallis finally to Yorktown, where he surrendered in 1781.

Bibliography

Alden, John R. A History of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. A basic general history, providing the necessary perspective. Includes a very clear section describing Greene’s campaigns in the South.

Golway, Terry. Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Golway maintains that Greene’s appointment as the commander of the revolutionary forces in the South was the decisive moment of the Revolutionary War.

Greene, Francis Vinton. General Greene. New York: D. Appleton, 1893. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970. A biography as slanted as one would expect from a late nineteenth century descendant of Greene. Nevertheless, well written and reasonably objective, with a nice balance of information on Greene’s personal life and military career, the political background, and the prominent individuals whose lives intersected with his.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Major-General in the Army of the Revolution. 3 vols. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871. The late nineteenth century flavor of this work by Greene’s grandson is amply compensated for by the author’s intuitive grasp of his subject’s character and development. Includes numerous quotations from primary sources. At age seventeen, the author knew Lafayette, was a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and spoke at length with Greene’s brothers and contemporaries in their old age.

Hairr, John. Guilford Courthouse: Nathanael Greene’s Victory in Defeat, March 15, 1781. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2002. One in a series of books about famous American battlefields, this work recounts the military exploits of Greene and Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse. Chapter 1, “The Man from Rhode Island: Nathanael Greene,” provides a brief overview of Greene’s life and military career.

Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence. New York: Macmillan, 1971. A basic work on the Revolutionary War, but with a certain tendency to draw parallels between the revolution and twentieth century warfare, stretching the comparisons slightly. However, the book has an effective presentation of the overall military situation, specific battles, and the general political background of the time.

Ketchum, Richard M. “Men of the Revolution: III.” American Heritage 23 (December, 1971): 48-49. A brief but comprehensive biographical sketch accompanied by Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Greene.

McCullough, David. 1776. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. McCullough focuses on one year in the American Revolution, 1776, describing the battles between America’s ragtag troops and British forces. Using letters, journals, diaries, and other primary sources, he describes the leadership of Nathanael Greene, George Washington, and General William Howe, as well as the heroic struggles of American soldiers.

Miller, John C. Triumph of Freedom 1775-1783. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948. A standard overview of the period, including an effective analysis of both Greene and Cornwallis.

Snow, Richard F. “Battles of the Revolution: Guilford Court House.” American Heritage 24 (June, 1973): 17. A good summary of the military action at Guilford Courthouse, with color paintings of soldiers of the Delaware Regiment and the Seventy-first Regiment of Foot.

Wickwire, Franklin, and Mary Wickwire. Cornwallis: The American Adventure. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. A major study of Cornwallis, this work presents the war from the British perspective, with attention to the problems of the British political and military system. Although in style somewhat reminiscent of nineteenth century literature, thus giving a quaint flavor to the eighteenth century narrative coupled with twentieth century psychological insights, it is quite clear, explaining without explaining away Cornwallis’s failures.