An Unlikely Soldier

That Nathanael Greene would pursue a military career was unlikely, and that he had performed with distinction would have appeared — at least to those who knew him early in his life — slightly ridiculous. That is how Greene’s rise in the ranks of the Continental army struck the other members of the volunteer militia company with which he attempted to serve, formed in the fall of 1774, just six months after the British had closed the port of Boston.

Born in 1742 in Rhode Island, Greene was the son of a reasonably prosperous merchant (his company operated an iron forge), “a man of industry,” Greene said, who “brought up his children to business. Early, very early, when I should have been in pursuit of Knowledge, I was digging into the Bowels of the Earth after Wealth.” His father “was over shadow’d with prejudices against Literary Accomplishments,” and — what might be more significant, considering Greene’s career as a soldier — the Greenes were Quakers. As such, many of them were pacifists.

The militia company that he organized called themselves the Kent­ish Guards, for their home county of Kent, and they drilled in East Greenwich, the county seat. Greene, who shared his neighbors’ mount­ing indignation over British interference in the colonists’ economic affairs, was thirty-two that season, and he had spent a good deal of his time preparing himself, he believed, for such a moment as this. The Kentish Guards wore “red coats with green trim, white waistcoat and pantaloons, and hats with a black cockade,” and Greene — five foot ten and tall for his time — looked splendid in his.

And he was a sturdier specimen than might first appear. He was a good-looking man, though not without flaws. His right eye was scarred, the result of inoculation against smallpox, and he suffered from asthma, which could keep him up at night and, presumably, anyone else in the room who had to hear him cough. He also had a slight limp brought on by an infection in his right knee. It was this limp that troubled the other members of the Kentish Guards. They had been drilling regu­larly and making sufficient progress that in October of that year, they successfully petitioned the Rhode Island assembly to recognize them as the county’s official militia. Greene was made a private, and, given his commitment to their cause and his position in the community, it was widely assumed that he would be one of their officers, although he would insist that he never expected any such honor. Later in the month, however, his fellow militiamen, without bothering to take him aside, informed him that because of his limp, he was a “blemish to the company.” It embarrassed them, and for that reason it was highly unlikely that he would ever be one of the company’s officers, assuming he was even allowed to remain a member.

“I confess it is the first stroke of mortification that I ever felt from being considered, either in private or publick Life a blemish to those with whom I assosiated,” he wrote to James Varnum, the Kentish Guards’ captain who seems not to have been present when Greene was given the bad news. He was “too suseptible of pride, and my sentiments too delicate,” he admitted, “to wish a connexion where I am considered an inferior point of light.”

He need not be reminded of his handicap. He was well aware that it was his “misfortune to limp a little but I did not conceive it to be so great,” Greene admitted, “but we are not apt to discover our own defects.” Evidently the problem was more noticeable than he had real­ized, and for that, he felt “more mortification than resentment.” He wished the others in the Kentish Guards had “given me their opinions in private” than in such a public manner, “for nobody loves to be the subject of ridicule however true the cause.”

Greene was permitted to remain with the Kent­ish Guards, and at dawn on April 20, the day after British troops had fired on American militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the company set off for Massachusetts, where they hoped to defend their fragile, fledgling country. Greene, it turned out, would prove to be far better equipped to do so than his skeptics had imagined — far better, in fact, than they.

If Nathanael Greene was an unlikely soldier, he was an even more unlikely Quaker. Not only did he reject his family’s pacifism; he rejected as well its disapproving attitude toward the pleasures of the flesh. Limp or no limp, he learned to dance, and when he was known to have gone out at night to engage in this unseemly recreation, when he got back home, his father would beat him. “You dance stiffly,” one partner told him. “Very true,” Greene replied. “But you see I dance strong.” Where he would go to dance is not known, but the year before he joined the Kentish Guards, the Quaker meeting removed him from its rolls for frequenting a “Public Resort,” where he had “No Proper Business.” The summer before his humiliation by the other militiamen, he married Catharine Littlefield of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. Known as Caty, she was by no means a pious Quaker. Twelve years younger than her husband — twenty to his thirty-two — Caty was “a small brunette with high color, a vivacious expression, and a snap­ping pair of dark eyes,” with a “form light and agile.” She too liked to dance. (Four years later, at an officers’ ball at Valley Forge, General Washington danced with her for three hours.)

Although his father scorned “Literary Accomplishments” and con­sidered schooling a distraction from business, Greene took pains to educate himself. He enjoyed The Drapier’s Letters by Jonathan Swift, for example, and worked his way through John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He kept a copy of Euclid’s Elements at his side when he worked at his father’s forge and tried to master the theorems. Like many of his fellow colonists, he pored over law books, includ­ing Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which gave the people of the Atlantic colonies a remarkably sophisti­cated understanding of British common law, strengthening their sense of their rights as subjects of the king. But what Greene seems to have enjoyed most were books on military strategy and tactics. He read, at the very least, Frederick the Great’s Instructions for His Generals and Maurice de Saxe’s Mes Reveries. Both were highly influential contri­butions to the development of European ideas about war and how it should be waged.

The Kentish Guards would not figure in the defense of Massa­chusetts. When they reached Pawtucket, Governor Joseph Wanton ordered them to return to East Greenwich, and most of the militiamen did so. Greene, however, trudged on, returning only upon learning that the British had pulled back into Boston. In early May, however, the Rhode Island General Assembly announced the formation of an “Army of Observation,” and, recognizing ability where the members of the Kentish Guards did not, the legislators offered command of the 1,500-man force to the asthmatic man with the limp. He was now General Greene.

By the end of the month, Greene and his men, still loyal subjects of the king, were back on the road to Roxbury. There they would join forces with thousands of other colonists laying siege to British-occupied Boston. In June, Congress adopted this unlikely agglomeration of vol­unteers into the new Continental army and gave George Washington of Virginia the unenviable task of turning it into an effective fighting force. On July 4, Greene and Washington met. “Though raw, irregu­lar, and undisciplined,” Washington noticed, Greene’s Rhode Islanders were “under much better government than any around Boston.” The way they conducted themselves was a noticeable improvement, Wash­ington said, over most of the “dirty & nasty” New Englanders.

Washington, while a realist about such matters, was a stickler for orderly appearance, and this was not merely a matter of personal idiosyncrasy. He had served under Major General Edward Braddock in the Seven Years’ War, and his ambition in life — until the drive for independence — was to be a proper British officer. Orderly appearance was the mark of an orderly army, and Washington took his new respon­sibilities seriously. By the time he and Greene met, Washington had developed sturdy notions about how to staff an army worthy of the name, and these notions looked more to Old Europe than to the New World. In late September 1776, after having retreated from Long Island and made his headquarters in Harlem Heights, Washington wrote to John Hancock about the kind of army he hoped to produce and the leadership it would require.

“To place any dependence upon Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff,” he told the president of the Continental Congress. 

Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestick life — unaccustomed to the din of Arms — totally unacquainted with every kind of Military skill, which being followed by a want of Confidence in themselves when opposed to Troops regularly train[e]d — disciplined and appointed — superior in knowledge & superior in Arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own Shadows. 

Even when there is no immediate danger, he said, they are unaccus­tomed to camp life and long for their homes, which results in “shame­ful, & scandalous Desertions,” encouraging bad habits among regulars. “Again, Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no controul, cannot brooke the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good Order and Government of an Army; without which Licentiousness, & every kind of disorder triumphantly reign.”

This war will drag on, Washington told Hancock, and to see it through required men of strong character and of generous and liberal impulses. The general wanted men of sound reputation, with signif­icant stature among their countrymen. He sought men, that is, like Washington himself, a substantial landowner and planter with a solid sense of the duties that went with his position, which included pub­lic service, such as holding local office and representing his county in the Virginia legislature. Men like Washington and those he believed should serve as officers in the Continental army would need to be paid well enough to compensate for the sacrifices they would make over the course of long campaigns. An officer should not be expected “to ruin himself and Family to serve his Country, when every member of the community is equally Interested and benefitted by his Labours.” Main­taining a real army “upon a permanent footing” and paying them well “will induce Gentlemen, and Men of Character” to serve, and until “the bulk of your Officers are composed of Such persons as are actuated by Principles of honour, and a spirit of enterprize, you will have little to expect of them.”

A few days later, still at Harlem Heights, Washington expressed similar concerns to Governor Patrick Henry, who was then assem­bling battalions from Virginia. Washington had no confidence in mere militiamen, for good reason. Militias were composed of men on short enlistments and, lacking proper training, were forever “impatient to return to their own Homes; & who from an utter disregard of all dis­cipline and restraint among themselves” were “too apt to infuse the like Spirit into others.” Inexperienced in battle, they would tend to flee. They were “altogether unfit for the Service,” and costly, as well, given their comings and goings. Up against the enemy’s regulars, he told Henry, there was no substitute for a “permanent Body of Forces.”

As for officers, Washington had strong opinions as well. Militiamen often elected their commanders from their own ranks, which can invite problems. “One Circumstance, in this important Business ought to be cautiously guarded against, and that is the Soldier & Officer being too nearly on a level — Discipline & subordination add Life & Vigor to military movements,” and the absence of both can prove calamitous. Unfortunately, the United States (they had declared their indepen­dence six months before) lacked anything resembling a long military tradition, and its men lacked experience in camp, much less in battle. Washington believed it was critical that officers be selected with great care. And it was here that the commander in chief sounded far more European than American. The “true Criterion” by which a candidate for military office should be evaluated is whether that man “has a just pretension to the character of a Gentleman, a proper sense of Honor, & some Reputation to [lose].”

But over time, Washington would find the traits he sought in the officers of the Continental army in unlikely places. Men of substantial wealth from established families such as New York’s Philip Schuyler (and, certainly, Benedict Arnold of Connecticut) would repeatedly dis­appoint him; and, as the war dragged on, he began to see merit in largely self-made men such as the rotund but rugged bookseller Henry Knox of Massachusetts, the barely literate teamster Daniel Morgan of Virginia, and, most notably, the self-educated Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. In time, Washington would even come to admire the contributions of such independent partisans as Francis Marion and Andrew Pickens, whose men lacked even the organization of militias.

Knox, who had risen rapidly to become Washington’s trusted com­mander of artillery, was astounded by Greene’s ability to absorb infor­mation and ideas and put them to practical use. He “came to us, the rawest, the most untutored being I ever met with,” Knox said. But within a year, Greene was as knowledgeable about military matters as “any General officer in the army, and very superior to most of them.” Tench Tilghman, soon to be one of Washington’s aides-de-camp, called Greene “a first-rate military genius and one in whose opinions the Gen­eral places the utmost confidence.” He had already established him­self, on a smaller stage, as a man of character, worthy of others’ trust. Named to a committee advising the Rhode Island legislature on the colony’s defense, Greene was soon shuttling back and forth between Providence and Washington’s headquarters outside Boston, developing political skills that would serve him well over the course of the war. That summer, as Washington organized his army, Congress appointed Continental officers, including eight brigadier generals. Greene, at thirty-three, was the youngest.

Excerpt adapted from This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South by Alan Pell Crawford. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Alan Pell Crawford.

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