February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The intertwining lives and careers of George Washington and Nathanael Greene did mostly work. And America lives because of it.
What if Washington had stopped a British musket ball early in the war for America’s independence? What if the great man had caught a fatal chill crossing the Delaware?
Who would Congress and its Continental Army have turned to as a replacement? Some would doubtless argue for Horatio Gates. Perhaps even Benedict Arnold might have been diverted from the path of treason.
Many then, and now, would have plumped for Major General Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker who discarded his family’s pacifism in favor of the campaigns of Julius Caesar and the satire of Jonathan Swift.
Nathanael Greene, the subject of an impressive new biography by Terry Golway, “Washington’s General: Nathanael Green and the Triumph of the American Revolution,” was born on May 27, 1742. The Greenes were a founding family in the tiny colony that tended — then and in subsequent historical works — to fall under the shadow of its larger neighbor to the immediate north, Massachusetts.
Some children are born to the family business, some look beyond. Greene, as he grew into early manhood, stared well beyond the family milling and forge business in the Rhode Island settlement of Coventry, and even farther beyond a Quaker heritage that, at the time, considered learning over and above the three Rs to be a selfish extravagance.
Green’s practical abilities and his evident love of knowledge did not escape notice. The Quaker religious authorities disapproved but ultimately remained appropriately passive in the face of the young man’s determination.
In 1770, Greene was elected to the General Assembly of Rhode Island. He did not confine himself to polemics as discontent with English rule, and particularly English taxes, steadily bubbled to the surface of Rhode Island life. He quickly became a member of a militia company called the Kentish Guards.
In July 1774, Greene married Catharine “Caty” Littlefield. A placid domestic life would have to wait, however. The new Mrs. Greene had Lexington and Concord to blame.
War leads to rapid promotion. In Greene’s case it was a leapfrog to major general in the newly expanded militia from the state of “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” the state’s full name then and to this day.
Greene was reduced in rank to brigadier general in the new Continental Army. It mattered little to the man, or to the new army commander, George Washington. The two became fast friends and remained so for the rest of their lives. Before the war was out, Greene was back up to major general anyway.
Greene, like Washington, saw the fight for the independence of the colonies in the broadest terms. It was far more than a series of disconnected rebellions by individual colonies intent on going their separate ways. It would be war on a continental scale.
Even the most familiar conflicts can appear in a different light when the focus is on the commander less treated, the campaign trails less traveled by other historians.
Author Terry Golway does the historical record a service by throwing full light on a figure who might stand in Washington’s shadow, if the story is about Washington, but one who quickly emerges as a significant historical figure in his own right when studied in respectful isolation.
The very title of this book suggests respect. But its account of Greene’s military career, clear and compelling that it is, has little trouble in convincing the reader that here is a figure who might be a little more than just second tier behind the man who adorns the one dollar bill.
Greene served as quartermaster general of the Continental Army and commander of West Point. But it was his command of the continental forces in the southern states that was to propel him into the front rank of Revolutionary War heroes.
As the Ides of March loomed in 1781 — having read Caesar they doubtless preyed on Greene’s mind — the young American leader faced the formidable Redcoat army of General Cornwallis at Guildford Court House in North Carolina.
It was far from being a decisive victory for the Americans, far from being a crushing defeat for the British. But the seemingly inexorable British forward momentum in the southern colonies was halted. At the very least it was a crucial psychological victory for the Americans and a turning point in the campaign that would ultimately lead to American control of the Carolinas and beyond.
History is news to every new generation and every generation needs new historians.
Golway, city editor of the New York Observer and columnist for the Irish Echo, is steadily emerging as a historian for his generation, Irish-American, Irish and plain American.
As with “Irish Rebel,” Golway’s earlier biography of the Fenian leader John Devoy, “Washington’s General” is immensely readable and wide ranging enough in its scope to present the reader with the broader historical canvas upon which the author paints the detailed portrait of his primary character.
Nathanael Greene died young. He was just 44. Much of what might have been his story was never run. But what there was of it, and that was considerable, has been given its rightful place in history in Golway’s work.
(“Washington’s General: Nathanael Green and the Triumph of the American Revolution,” by Terry Golway. Henry Holt and Company. $26.)