Washington's General (2 page)

Greene was at Washington's side from the liberation of Boston to the long retreat through New Jersey in 1776; from the disappointments of
Germantown and Brandywine to the terrible months at Valley Forge; from the unexpected victory under a merciless sun at Monmouth to the snowdrifts of Morristown. For more than half this time, not only did Nathanael Greene command troops in the field and offer Washington important strategic advice, but he also served in the unglorious and unappreciated role of quartermaster general–the purchaser and transporter of the army's supplies. It was work he loathed; it was a duty he fulfilled. He complained about it. But he did it.

His service to his nation and to his commander in chief was distinguished by its remarkable competence and admirable for its sacrifice, for like every other American rebel, Nathanael Greene was a volunteer who left behind family and private interests when his country called. Until late 1780, however, Greene seemed destined to be remembered, if at all, merely as one of several competent major generals who served on Washington's staff. He never had the chance at independent command and never emerged from Washington's considerable shadow. He told Washington, in a phrase filled with self-pity, that history does not remember quartermaster generals.

And he wished, desperately, to be remembered. He wished for the glories he imagined when, as a young adult, he put aside Quaker texts in favor of Caesar's
The Civil War.
But circumstances seemed to dictate that such fame would not be his. With undisguised envy, he bitterly complained of the undeserved laurels heaped upon Horatio Gates, a man he despised, after the Battle of Saratoga. They would never be his, these tributes and orations, not as long as he dutifully served in Washington's shadow.

In the summer and fall of 1780, however, as the army edged closer to the abyss of defeat and failure, Nathanael Greene saw an opporunity to gain what had been denied him. The hated Gates had suffered a catastrophic defeat outside Camden, South Carolina. It was the second time in four months that the Southern Army of the United States had been shattered. With Gates's defeat, organized resistance in the South ended. The British under Lord Cornwallis began the process of reannexing Georgia and the Carolinas, while casting covetous eyes on Virginia,
the home of George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.

For the Continental army and the nation itself, there had been many crushing moments since 1775, and Greene had been an eyewitness to all of them. But in 1780, the blows to American arms and morale were ceaseless. Blizzards in January turned winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, into a frozen horror, far worse than Valley Forge. The Continental dollar became nearly worthless by spring, and so Americans declined to sell their goods to the army that was fighting in their name. The southern army, then under Benjamin Lincoln, surrendered en masse in Charleston in May. In August, Lincoln's successor, Gates, was annihilated. Prospects for victory never seemed dimmer. Equally disturbing for Greene, his infant son and vivacious young wife were ill back home in Rhode Island, and his own health was precarious–asthma left him gasping for breath most nights.

Then, after defeat, came treachery. In late September, Greene's friend Benedict Arnold nearly succeeded in handing over West Point, the key American stronghold on the Hudson River, to the British. Greene, who was temporarily in command of the main American army while Washington conferred with the French in Connecticut, did not shield his troops from the gravity of the moment. Had Arnold succeeded, he told them, the cause surely would have been lost. Even before Arnold's treachery, Washington had warned Congress that the army might be forced to disband for want of money and supplies.

In the fall of 1780, the American cause was as close to collapse as it had ever been, even during the fateful closing weeks of 1776. Rumors now spread through the American army: Horatio Gates, it was said, would be sacked for his loss at Camden. A new commander would be sent south to take his place, with nothing less than the fate of the cause, of the country, of the army, weighing on his shoulders. Who would it be? Congress reserved for itself the right to make such promotions, suspicious as it was of the motives of even so great a man as George Washington. But Congress had sent Benjamin Lincoln to the South, and Congress had sent Horatio Gates to the South, and both had been
soundly beaten. Would a chastened Congress abide by Washington's wishes in choosing the southern army's third commander in six months? Washington's capable young aide Alexander Hamilton earnestly hoped so. He told a friend in Congress that if it was intent on removing Gates, “for God's sake . . . send Greene.”

There was little question that Nathanael Greene wanted Horatio Gates's job, doomed though it seemed to be. He wanted it even though the possibility horrified his wife, Caty, who was a favorite of Washington's. Back home with the Greene family in Rhode Island, Nathanael's brother Jacob wrote that Caty was “much alarmed” by rumors that her husband might be sent south, and Jacob himself warned Nathanael against pursuing the post. “Nothing but Disgrace and Disappointment has Attended Every Commander in that Station,” he wrote, accurately. Greene knew that Caty, the mother of four children born since the Revolution began, was at her wit's end with anxiety and fear. “Poor Girl,” Greene wrote, “I am afraid it will prove almost fatal to her, as she is very fond of domestic life, and has a most horrid Idea of the war to the southward.”
Horrid
would hardly do justice to the American plight in the South and would not begin to describe the bloody civil war between American patriots and American loyalists in the backcountry of Georgia and the Carolinas.

Nevertheless, on October 3, 1780, Greene wrote to a friend in Congress, where Gates's fate would be decided. If, he told John Mathews of South Carolina, “you find it necessary to appoint another officer to [the southern command], and think I can be useful in that quarter, my best endeavors will not be wanting to protect the people and serve my Country.”

When he heard that Gates might not be sacked after all, Greene wrote to General Washington to ask for Benedict Arnold's old job as commandant of West Point. Even with its limited prospects for glory, West Point was a vital post, and its next commander would have the chance to rebuild its defenses and revive the garrison's morale. Not glorious work, but necessary work all the same. And while Nathanael Greene was not adverse to self-pity and complaint, he had never shirked the call to duty,
however unpleasant or unglorious. Washington granted his request, writing to him on October 6: “I commit this important Post to your care in full confidence in your prudence, vigilance, activity and good conduct.” But the commander in chief added a caveat: everything could change, including Greene's assignment, because of the army's “uncertainties.”

Greene invited Caty to join him at the garrison for the coming winter. He knew she would be relieved to hear that he was not going to the South after all. “I shall be happy to receive you to my arms, as soon as you can render it convenient to come,” he wrote. Caty and Nathanael had been together through every winter of the war, and they had the children to prove it. They were very much in love, for all their difference in age (she was twenty when they married in 1774; he was thirty-two) and in demeanor. He was solid and dependable. She was lighthearted and vivacious. He was a voracious reader determined to prove to his social betters that he was just as smart as they were. She relied on her charm and stunning appearance, which were more than enough to win attention from not only her husband but his friends, too. Nathanael rarely seemed to mind her preference for the company of men, and she bore with patience his exhortations to improve herself. War and separation surely had taken a toll on their marriage; he once conceded to her, “Our felicity is not perfect.” Greene, insensitive to his wife's loneliness and anxiety, regularly wrote home with tidbits about the pretty young women he met while staying in the homes of fellow patriots in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When she called him on it, though, Nathanael beat a hasty retreat, in phrases husbands have used before and since. “I declare upon my sacred honor,” he wrote, “. . . as much as I respect them as friends, I should never be happy with them in a more intimate connection. ... I will venture to say there is no mortal more happy in a wife than myself.”

And he was, in fact, happy to be married to Caty and often told her so. “O, sweet angel how I wish—how I long to return to your soft embrace,” Nathanael once wrote to her from camp.

As Nathanael settled into his new assignment, Caty prepared for her annual trek to winter quarters. The prospect of months away from the extended Greene family, and even her own children, thrilled her. She
was not a typical officer's wife, content with her place in life as a companion and mother. She longed for the company of friends like Martha Washington, for the attention of young officers like the Frenchman Lafayette, whose language she spoke. Even in Valley Forge and Morris-town, where winter was cruel and deadly, there were parties and balls and dancing once the snows melted. And nobody enjoyed them more than Caty Greene. Winter camp, even with its burdens and deprivations, was her refuge from dreary domestic life.

While she sometimes left her children with relatives in Rhode Island for months at a time, this year she would not travel alone. Four-year-old George Washington Greene, born during the siege of Boston, would travel with her, no doubt to the delight of the father young George barely knew.

Nathanael Greene was at West Point less than a week when a letter arrived from his friend, the roly-poly artillery specialist Henry Knox. He told Greene that Gates was about to be fired after all, and that Congress had decided to let Washington name a new commander in the South. “Who will that person be?” Knox wondered. “You may ask me the same question, but I protest I know not.”

Neither did Greene, although he was certain it would not be him. He had badly miscalculated, angling for and receiving the West Point command because he believed Congress would not dare recall Gates. But now Congress had done the unexpected, and where was he? Stuck at West Point. How long he had dreamed of a chance to win battlefield glory, and how often it had been snatched from him! And now the fortunes of war had conspired against him once again. On October 15, from his desk at West Point, he wrote a letter to a longtime friend and business partner, Jeremiah Wadsworth. Noting that Gates had been relieved of his command, he speculated on several candidates for the post, none of whom was named Nathanael Greene. “Perhaps I should have gone, had I not come to this place; but being fixed here it will be difficult for the General to call me away immediately without giving umbrage to some of the rest of the General officers.” Greene was not angry, and his concern about what the other general officers might be thinking was typical
of a man who spent a great deal of time and energy monitoring what was being said (or not being said) about him. He seemed resigned to his fate, so much so that he told Wadsworth that he didn't really want the southern command after all.

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.”