Washington's General (31 page)

Some people in this neighbourhood are polite and obliging, others are the reverse. It was and is my wish to live upon good terms with the people of the House and I have [endeavored] to accomodate my family so as to render it as little inconvenient as possible. . . . On you alone the manner of our living
together will depend. If you are friendly and obliging you shall not find me wanting injustice and generosity.

Greene and Caty remained in Arnold's house, although it is not known whether their reluctant host ever became friendly and obliging.

There was little money to be had, and so the army's supplies were dangerously low as 1779 drew to a close. The army's express riders, whose courage and horsemanship kept the lines of communications open, were threatening to ride away from their duties unless Greene found a way to increase their pay. In a petition addressed to Greene, fourteen riders maintained it was “impossible to ride for the present pay”; therefore “[we will refuse to do so] until your Honor thinks [it] proper to raise the pay. . . . Our present pay is but a small pittance and no ways equivalent to the many things We stand in need of which We are Obliged to Purchase.” They had their answer shortly, and it came not from Greene but from Congress; the delegates, in a cost-cutting move, discharged the army's express riders.

Greene sensed that yet another crisis was unfolding, telling his friend and business partner Jeremiah Wadsworth: “We have had the most alarming accounts from all quarters of the approaching . . . famine and want. Flour and Forage are [exceedingly] scarce.” After heroic service as the army's commissary general–the officer in charge of food supplies–Wadsworth resigned in early December and was awaiting the appointment of a successor even as the supply line to Jockey Hollow and Morristown was beginning to break down. Greene, perhaps envious of Wadsworth's impending freedom, submitted his own resignation to Congress on December 12. Congress pretended not to notice.

A few days before Christmas, Greene wrote: “We are at this time in the greatest distress for want of cash, being out of forage, having extended our Credit as far as possible, and the people are ready to pull us to pieces on account of the losses they sustain from a delay of payment [and] by the depreciation of the money.”

Civilians near camp were unhappy with Greene's housing arrangements. Like Greene himself, officers were not expected to live in huts with the rank and file, but owners of private residences were behaving much like Greene's own temporary landlord. Greene wasted precious time and energy examining New Jersey's laws on the touchy subject of quartering soldiers in civilian homes. He concluded that the law was against him, and told Washington that “the Inhabitants cannot be prevailed upon to receive the Officers.” Among the officers without proper quarters was General Benedict Arnold, who was in camp to attend his court-martial on charges that he misused his powers as the military governor of Philadelphia.

Greene's report about Morristown's petulant homeowners bitterly disappointed Washington. “I regret that the Inhabitants should be unwilling to give shelter to men who have made and are still making every [sacrifice] in the service of their Country,” he told Greene. Washington already feared that the army, and possibly the Revolution itself, suddenly was on the verge of collapse. After hectoring Congress in vain about the faltering supply line and the possibility of starvation in camp, he turned his attention to the quartermaster's department and found it wanting. Surprisingly, Greene did not take his mentor's implied criticisms to heart, perhaps because he understood that the army was on the verge of catastrophe, and Washington felt powerless to prevent it. The commander in chief could only lash out, criticize, condemn, and otherwise lament imminent disaster. On December 19, Greene told Wadsworth that Washington was in “a state [of] distress” and was blaming “every body, both innocent and guilty.” The quartermaster's department, he noted, was “not altogether exempt” from Washington's complaints.

Greene asked Wadsworth to remain at his post as commissary general while “the storm rages.” Nevertheless, Wadsworth was determined to retire by the end of 1779.

On Christmas Day, a cold and dreary day in camp, an anguished Greene wrote of the army's increasingly bleak prospects and of the bitter
reception Morristown's citizens offered the hungry and tired men who were fighting and sacrificing for their liberty.

They receive us with coldness, and provide for us with reluctance. The Army is in great distress for want of Provision and forage. . . . Our affairs are in a disagreeable train from the wretched state of our business of finance. . . . [A] thick cloud hangs over our heads at this hour threatening us with destruction.

Within a few days, snow was falling from a number of thick, dark clouds. It fell, and fell, and fell some more. It fell on the soldiers as never before; it was nothing like the Christmas snowstorm of 1776, nothing like the snows of Valley Forge two years earlier. It began falling on January 2, a bitterly cold day with gusting winds from the west and northwest, and it continued for the better part of four days. The scanty supplies of food, clothing, and equipment that were being shipped to camp were now out of reach, unable to make it through the snow and drifts. “Our Army is without Meat or Bread; and have been for two or three days past,” Greene wrote on January 4. “Poor Fellows! they exhibit a picture truly distressing. More than half naked, and about two third starved.”

By January 6, eighteen inches of snow had fallen, making the roads to Jockey Hollow and Morristown impassable. The soldiers' suffering was, by nearly all accounts, worse than at Valley Forge. Greene told a friend:

The Army is upon the eve of disbanding for want of Provisions, the poor soldiers having been several days without. . . . Provision is scarce at best; but the late terrible storm and the depth of the Snow and the drifts in the Roads prevent the little stock coming foward which is in readiness at the distant Magazines. . . . The Roads must be kept open by the Inhabitants or the Army cannot be
subsisted. And unless the good people immediately lend their assistance to [forward] supplies the Army must disband.

So desperate was the army's plight that Greene decided the snow actually was a blessing. If the roads were not clogged, he said, “I believe the Soldiers would take up their packs and march” out of camp. He told Wadsworth that hundreds were “without shirts and many other necessary articles of clothing.” A few cattle were driven into camp on January 5, but that was hardly enough to relieve the army's hunger. The following day, troops left camp and grabbed what they could from local citizens, with Washington's reluctant approval.

The ice, the snow, and the cold were relentless, and not just in Jockey Hollow. The waters around New York City froze, as did portions of Chesapeake Bay. This, the fifth winter of the Revolution, was like no other. Desperate soldiers ate the bark off sticks, ate their shoes, and, on at least one occasion, ate a pet dog. In an unaddressed letter, Greene, a veteran of every winter camp thus far, offered a terrible word picture of conditions in early January.

Such weather as we have had, never did I feel. ... In the midst of snow and surrounded on every side by its banks, the army has been cut off from its magazines, and been obliged to fast for several days together. We have been alternately out of meat and bread for eight or nine days past, and without either for three or four. . . . Provisions are scarce indeed, not from any scarcity in the country, but from want of money to purchase it.

A welcome break in the weather after nearly two weeks of storms eased the crisis temporarily, allowing Washington to turn his attention from food and supplies to offensive operations. The narrow strip of water separating New Jersey from the British stronghold of Staten Island was frozen solid, allowing the possibility of a winter raid without the
need for boats. Washington turned to Greene for advice, and, with characteristic energy, the quartermaster general put aside his clerical burdens for a moment and reverted to his role as the army's chief strategist. He sketched out for Washington a plan calling for a surprise assault by a detachment of twenty-five hundred men that would cross the ice and raid several British outposts on the island. He proposed
Clinton
as the operation's password. (Clinton was, of course, the commander of the British garrison, although he was at that moment in the South.) This choice of a password, Greene told Washington, “may deceive the Enemy.”

Using sleds that Greene had rounded up from the New Jersey countryside, Lord Stirling led the raiding party across the ice and into Staten Island on January 15. This accomplished little, save to astonish observers in the decades and centuries to come, who saw a starving army on the verge of ruin transformed, in a matter of days, into a force capable of a small but bold action.

The starvation was over, but winter was not, and it continued to heap suffering upon the army's sagging shoulders. More than two dozen snowstorms buried the camp in six-foot snowdrifts, making supply a never-ending nightmare. The absolute misery, along with the continued breakdown in supplies, reminded Greene that he wished for nothing more than to be relieved of his duties as quartermaster general. Congress, unable to levy taxes, had divested itself of the supply business. Instead, states were charged with the responsibility of supplying troops raised within their individual borders. The new system was an ineffective patchwork and made Greene's job that much more difficult. He had become a vigorous advocate of strong, centralized government, at least on broad issues affecting the nation as a whole. His business career and his firsthand experience as a soldier emphasized organization and coordination above all else, and the new system of supply was anything but well organized. He sent a letter to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington, in mid-January, noting that he had submitted his resignation a month earlier but had heard nothing.

Congress continued to ignore his request, but it put together a committee to reorganize the quartermaster's department. To Greene's disgust, among the committee members was Thomas Mifflin, in Greene's eyes one of the instigators of the defunct Conway Cabal and an undoubted critic of both Greene and Washington. Not surprisingly, Greene's friend and aide Charles Pettit saw Mifflin's appointment as evidence of a “plot” to embarrass Greene.

In the midst of these bleak proceedings, the Greene family grew by one. Caty Greene gave birth to a baby boy on January 31, and they named him Nathanael Ray Greene. He was the center of attention among the women in camp, a welcome distraction from the snow and the cold. Whatever Greene's unhappiness with Congress, with the uncooperative citizens of Morristown, with Mother Nature herself, he was delighted with his new son. He sent a teasing letter to his business partner Barnabas Deane, who was unmarried, to tell him of the arrival of his “fine son.” Greene wondered why Deane would go through life “without ever tasting some of the sweetest pleasures that falls to the lot of Mortals.”

But even the sweetest pleasures had to be swept aside for drudge work. “The business of my Department is growing more and more desperate every day,” Greene told Wadsworth. Food supplies were low again. After sending yet another letter to Philadelphia asking why his resignation had not been accepted, Greene decided to go to the capital to raise the issue personally with members of Congress. There would be no happy parties and balls during this visit with Congress; Greene was prepared to tell the politicians precisely what he thought of them. “Their conduct,” he wrote to Wadsworth, “is intolerable.” He told Washington that he expected little good to come of his negotiations–“unless it is dismissing my self from the Department, which I most devoutly wish.” Washington wished him well, and almost as an aside, he confided to Greene that he was concerned about British advances in the South. Thousands of British troops under Clinton's personal command had begun a siege outside Charleston, and Washington feared for the American garrison and his commander in the South, Benjamin Lincoln. He mentioned to Greene that he was
worried about “the effect which the loss of [Charleston] may produce on the minds of People” in the South.

Greene conveyed Washington's concerns to the nation's political leaders, but he did not achieve what he so “devoutly” wished–his dismissal from the cares and burdens of the quartermaster general's department. He was convinced that his archenemy, Mifflin, once again was plotting against him under the guise of cutting the quartermaster's expenses. It was becoming clear to him that Congress would not authorize the money he believed the army needed to fight a new campaign. After less than a week of talks with Congress, Greene was depressed, pessimistic, and ill. With a nod to his friend Thomas Paine, he told Wadsworth, “These are the times that will try men's Souls.” He wrote yet another letter to Samuel Huntington, the president of Congress, reminding him that Congress had yet to act on his letter of resignation as quartermaster. He told Huntington that he was tired of meetings, tired of waiting for Congress to pass a resolution declaring its confidence in the quartermaster's integrity. (Some lawmakers thought there should be an investigation of the department before members offered their support for the quartermaster.) His presence in the capital, Greene declared, “is no longer necessary,” so he announced that he would leave Philadelphia immediately.

Greene's curt language and lack of diplomacy did nothing to win new friends in Congress, as became evident after his allies quickly drew up a new resolution of support. During a private debate one of his supporters–he was never identified–asserted that Greene was entitled to congressional support because he was the “properest person” to become commander in chief should anything happen to Washington. According to Philip Schuyler, the former general who was now a member of Congress, the speaker added that Washington himself believed that Greene was his natural heir.