Washington's General (30 page)

Nathanael Greene was one of many American officers who spent the war years attending to both military and financial strategies. Most of the top deputies in the quartermaster general and commissary general departments were businessmen and merchants who simply would not forfeit the right to earn and invest money privately while serving the struggling new nation. They saw nothing wrong with such behavior. The patriot-merchant Robert Morris, a member of Congress, said, “[I will] discharge my duty faithfully to the Public and pursue my Private Fortune by all such honorable means as the times will admit.” Patriots like Morris and others emerged from the war richer than they were before, thanks to shrewd investments.

Greene's stewardship over the quartermaster's office came under growing criticism from Congress not because he was in business with some of his department's contractors or because his own company, Jacob Greene & Company, did business with the department, but because of his lack of accountability. The quartermaster's department was spending colossal amounts of money–its monthly payroll was nearly five hundred thousand (highly depreciated) dollars for about three thousand employees–and some of its agents unquestionably were corrupt, inefficient, or both. Yet when Congress asked for an accounting of the department's spending, Greene bristled, as if by merely raising the issue Congress somehow was questioning his virtue.

In mid-1779, Congress sought to reign in the department's spending, authorizing individual states to dismiss agents who were suspected of either corruption or incompetence. Familiar by now with Greene's sensitivity, Congress made a point of expressing its confidence in the quartermaster general's honor and integrity. But Greene understood that
Congress was undermining his authority, and he protested vigorously but to no avail.

These bureaucratic and political tangles reminded Greene, as if he needed such reminders, how much he hated his job. His limited engagement on the front lines in Rhode Island allowed him to forget about politics and logistics for a few weeks, and he yearned for a return to the seeming simplicity of strategy and tactics. He launched a concerted campaign to prepare Washington, and himself, for the day when he would be a line officer once again.

Greene joined Washington and more than a dozen major generals and brigadiers for a council of war at West Point on July 2, 1779. The topic of the meeting was Washington's request for advice about a new offensive campaign. But as Greene greeted old friends like Steuben, McDougall, Wayne, and Knox, he was forming an agenda of his own. If they agreed with him that he was entitled to a field command even while serving as quartermaster general, he might begin to cut the shackles that chained him to his desk. After the meeting, Greene wrote letters to a dozen colleagues, asking them a simple question: did he not have “the same right to command in a time of action ... as if [he] did not hold the Quarter Master General's Office”? There was an implied threat in his letter, for he stated, “[If holding the quartermaster's job would] exclude me from the honors of the line, I shall know how to take my measures.” He asked the other generals to respond quickly; he would take their answers to His Excellency, the commander in chief.

The replies he received, however, surprised and saddened him. While half of the generals agreed with his assertion that he had a “right” to command, they were either his friends or generals with more seniority than he had; in other words, they would not lose their command if Greene were to assert his “right” to a position in the line. But others disagreed profoundly, chief among them Lord Stirling. Greene brought his case to Washington anyway, and, worse yet, Washington agreed with Stirling and the other dissenters. Firmly but gingerly, the commander in chief told Greene that while he retained his title of major general, he did not have a right to a field command.

The military reason which prevents a Quarter Master General from exercising command in ordinary cases I take to be this: that whatever may be the fact, the presumption is, that both in action and out of action, he has, generally speaking, sufficient employment in the duties of his office, and circumstances alone can decide when these are compatible with actual command.

To soften the blow, Washington deftly praised Greene for having “executed” his duties with “ability and fidelity.” Nathanael Greene's shackles grew tighter still.

Adding to his burdens were new concerns about the health of Caty and the children. George had a sore on his chest, Martha still was suffering from rickets, and eleven-month-old Cornelia remained small and frail. Caty herself, now four months pregnant, was suffering from stomach pains and, alarmingly, bleeding from her mouth. Nathanael Greene had achieved some measure of the glory he had dreamed of in his childhood, when he first imagined himself a soldier, but now he was powerless to help his ailing family far away in Rhode Island. He had left hearth and home willingly, even eagerly, to heed his country's call, but with his family in need, calling out to him for help, he could not come to their aid.

Frustrated, angry, and frightened, he blamed himself for Caty's illness. She had been reluctant to come to camp the previous winter, and he had used every method of persuasion he dared–even citing George Washington's wishes–to put her on the road to Middlebrook. Now they both were paying a price for that visit. He should not have allowed her to dance so soon after Cornelia's traumatic birth; he should have insisted that she rest. “Many times I was almost ready to say Caty you shall not dance again,” he told her in a letter dated August 16, “but my resolution as often failed me.” He feared Caty would regard him “more the tyrant than the husband” and would “lessen her affection” for him. And so he allowed her to dance. If nothing else, Greene's attitude reveals an
uncommonly open-minded view of marriage. Other husbands surely would have played the tyrant's role and expected their wives to obey.

He wished desperately to shove aside his paperwork and chores and ride to Rhode Island. “How tenderly would I nurse you,” he told Caty. “How attentively would I watch my sweet Angel.”

By the end of August, he was in a deep depression. He tried to write Caty again on the night of August 29, but his anxieties overcame him. “I therefore laid down my pen and went to bed,” he told her when he finally summoned the energy to write the following day.

It was beginning to occur to him that Caty's ill health might be related to a familiar condition: pregnancy. As if the thought might not have occurred to Caty, by now a pregnancy veteran, Greene noted: “Methinks you can [determine your condition] from a number of female circumstances.” Indeed, those “circumstances” had already told Caty all she needed to know. Greene was not without a helpful suggestion if her symptons continued and she was not pregnant. “I strongly recommend your going into salt Water, not once or twice, but every day or two for a month to come,” he wrote. He was vague about how this would relieve her distress, although he added that a doctor friend of his was by his side as he wrote, and the doctor himself recommended this cure.

I wish to hear from you every hour, but while your health is on the decline, [I] don't wish you to write long Epistles. . . . How is the sore on Washington's breast? Does it increase or decline? . . . Has Cornelia got better? How is Patty [i.e., Martha]? I suppose a great chatter box. Is she frequently put into the cold bath? Nothing will perfect her shapes but the continuation of that practice. I beg you therefore not to omit it.

Caty apparently did not respond to her husband, at least not quickly enough for Greene. He wrote another letter accusing her of neglect, which inspired Caty to write a long letter (alas, lost to history) in which she poured out her heart. She must have felt overwhelmed: not only was she pregnant for the fourth time since 1775, she was not getting along
with her in-laws. Complicating matters, she knew that the timing of her pregnancy might preclude her annual visit to winter quarters–her baby was due in midwinter. After her pleasant stay in Middlebrook, filled with dances and the company of Martha Washington, Caty would have been distressed to contemplate winter in Rhode Island with a newborn and three other small children. Besides, this time there would be little chance of getting pregnant, not so soon after her January delivery.

Caty's letter chastened her husband. “I am exceeding unhappy to have added to your distress by complaining of your [neglecting] me,” Greene wrote. And as much as he would miss her company over the winter, he strongly advised Caty to stay home this year.

Caty ignored her husband's pleas. She was determined to join him once he decided where the army would spent the winter. She soon had an answer. After months of little activity during the campaign season of 1779, the army would return to the New Jersey village the soldiers remembered from a previous winter's camp: Morristown.

The months before the Americans returned to Morristown offered some cheerful news: the British evacuated Newport to reinforce their garrison in Savannah, Georgia; American surprise raids on Stony Point in New York and Paulus Hook in New Jersey (present-day Jersey City) had routed British defenders; John Paul Jones and the
Bon Homme Richard
had brought the naval war to the British coast, and the Spanish entered the conflict, mostly in an attempt to recover Gibraltar.

These developments inspired Washington to dream, once again, of conquering Clinton's garrison in New York City, and Greene spent several weeks in the fall of 1779 working on the logistics of such an assault. Those preparations, however, were in vain. Washington's fantasy of a smashing victory in New York evaporated when the British captured Savannah in October, leading d'Estaing–whose fleet was an integral part of Washington's plan–to return to France.

The British assault in Georgia was a significant development. Like Washington, Clinton was weary of the stalemate in the North. Unlike the
American commander, however, Clinton had the resources to move the war to the South, which he saw as his enemy's soft underbelly. If the British could conquer the South and return Georgia and the Carolinas to the king's rule, they could continue marching north through Virginia until Washington realized that all was lost.

There was no secret about the British strategy. Clinton himself, along with the inevitable Cornwallis, set sail from New York in late December 1779, after the fall of Savannah. The British generals planned to continue the campaign in the South through the winter months. Clinton left about eleven thousand Hessians and loyalist militia in New York, believing, correctly, that the Americans were far too weak to challenge even this depleted garrison.

Washington and Greene, their strategy centered on the Hudson River, were not sure of Clinton's final destination. So they could risk no movement that might weaken their position near that broad and vital waterway. Morristown, or more specifically an area three miles southwest of the town called Jockey Hollow, would keep the Americans close enough to the Hudson Valley while moving nearer to supply lines and forage for the winter.

In mid-December, ten to twelve thousand American soldiers settled into the now familiar routine of clearing land (about six hundred acres) and building huts (nearly a thousand, twelve men to a hut) that would serve as their quarters for as long as six months. With huts laid out in neat rows, areas set aside for parade grounds, and roads providing access to regimental villages, winter camp at Morristown resembled a small city.

Once again, it was Nathanael Greene's job to keep this city supplied with food, clothing, tools, wagons, and other necessities. But even as the first trees were felled in Jockey Hollow, it was becoming clear to Greene that this winter promised none of the music and frivolity that made Middlebrook, just a dozen or so miles to the south, such a welcome delight. The Continental dollar continued its spectacular slide toward worthless-ness; its value was about three cents. Farmers and merchants were unwilling to sell their goods to the army in return for useless scraps of paper, a foreboding development. But the army could, if Washington
said so, simply take what it needed. Washington despised such measures, but they at least were within his control.

Neither he nor Greene, however, had any power over winter itself. And as American soldiers labored over their tiny huts, bitter winds shook the bare branches of Jockey Hollow. Snow and hail fell during the first two weeks of December, as the army built its temporary city. Indeed, the weather was so severe that some work stopped or was postponed, delaying the process of getting the men into their huts, which measured fourteen by fifteen feet. Greene, as a major general and the quartermaster general, of course was entitled to more comfortable quarters, and that entitlement was all the more important because his pregnant wife had shown up for her annual winter holiday in late November. Nothing, neither her own doubts nor the imminent birth of her fourth child nor the serious illness of her brother, Simon, could keep Caty Greene away from winter camp. She had turned over her children to the care of relatives and set out on a journey whose landmarks she knew so well by now. Greene was astonished to find her, in the full bloom of her pregnancy, standing before him in the gathering gloom of late autumn. He had told friends that Caty very likely would not be in camp this year. The baby, after all, was due soon.

Finding decent housing was not easy, even for a major general. An aide, James Abeel, had chosen the home of a local patriot and merchant, Jacob Arnold, as Greene's headquarters. Arnold owned a fine home on the village green in Morristown, and Abeel installed a separate kitchen for the general and his wife, but it was not long before Arnold's patriotism gave way to impatience. He soon told Greene he would have to find other quarters. With the weather already bitter, with a wife due to give birth in a month, Nathanael Greene was not about to be thrown into the street. He wrote to Arnold on December 16: