His experience was shaped in a Rhode Island iron foundry that specialized in forging anchors. It was a successful business, and the extended Greene family was prominent. (A cousin was the Rhode Island governor.) Greene drifted from his family’s Quaker religion, and at one point was suspended from his meetinghouse for going to a “public resort”—a tavern.4
While both Washington and Greene were unschooled and largely self-taught, Washington learned his military skills from the experience of fighting in the Seven Years’ War; Greene learned his from books. “I lament the want of a liberal education,” he wrote. “I feel the mist [of] ignorance.”5
He opposed the British for a traditional New England reason: The British cracked down on smugglers who avoided customs duties. In 1772, a revenue schooner, the Gaspée, seized a boat smuggling cargo for the Greene family business. Rhode Islanders later attacked the Gaspée and burned it. The action contributed to increasing tensions. As those tensions climaxed in the Boston area, Greene joined a local Rhode Island militia unit. To his “mortification,” his fellow soldiers refused to elect him as an officer, citing his limp, which was “a blemish” to the unit. But Greene stayed with the unit as a private. When fighting began in April 1775, he found himself in a different position. Rhode Island formed a 1,500-man army to support the Massachusetts rebels, and the legislature named Greene, a private, to be its general. Family connections and his own service in the legislature notwithstanding, Greene projected persuasive intangibles.6
It wasn’t the first time. A year before, he had persuaded Catharine “Caty” Littlefield to marry him. Littlefield was about twenty; Greene, thirty-two. “Her power of fascination was absolutely irresistible,” wrote an early biographer. During and after the war, she would attract men wherever she went, but to Greene, she would be “my dear angel.” (A jealous Philadelphia matron suggested Caty’s marriage to former ironmonger Nathanael was evidence of her class: “I think I hear the clink of the iron on the anvil at every step she takes.”)7
Washington found other intangibles in Greene. He was “much in my confidence, so intimately acquainted with my ideas, with our strength and our weaknesses, with everything respecting the Army. . . . He deserves the greatest respect, and much regard is due to his opinions.”8
The general of the Rhode Island Army became the youngest brigadier general in the Continental army. “His knowledge is intuitive,” wrote General Henry Knox. “He came to us the rawest and most untutored being I ever met with; but in less than twelve months, he was equal in military knowledge to any general officer in the army, and very superior to most of them.”9
After New York, he commanded troops at the battles in Trenton in 1776, and Princeton, Brandywine, and Germantown in 1777. In early 1778, Washington, desperate for supplies, named Greene quartermaster general. Greene reluctantly accepted. “Nobody ever heard of a quartermaster in history,” he told Washington. He proved tough and competent.10
In fall 1780, Washington ordered Greene to take on a desperate situation. British generals Clinton and Cornwallis had defeated two Whig armies in the South. Britain controlled the backcountry and the low country. Greene became commander-in-chief of the Southern Department.
“I think I am giving you a general,” Washington told South Carolina’s Whig governor.11
When Greene arrived, he wrote Caty, and was only half-joking about what he found: “I arrived here the second of this month and have been in search of the Army I am to command, but without much success, having found nothing but a few half-starved soldiers who are remarkable for nothing but poverty and distress.”12
Cornwallis found Greene to be “as dangerous as Washington; he is vigilant, enterprising, and full of resources. With but little hope of gaining any advantage over him, I never feel secure when encamped in his neighborhood.”13
Greene’s counterpunching, ill-provisioned, amateur army forced Cornwallis to retreat to Virginia and, eventually, Yorktown. “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again,” Greene said. “The whole country is one continued scene of blood and slaughter.” He described his strategy: “There are few generals that run oftener or more lustily than I have done. But I have taken care not to run too far; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward to convince our enemy that we were like a crab that could run either way.” General Knox summarized Greene’s accomplishment: “Without an army, without means, without anything, he has performed wonders.”14
Now, in November 1781, Greene faced a new opponent in Leslie, as well as the challenge of maintaining an army. The British outnumbered Continental army regulars. Indian and Tory raids discouraged residents from leaving home to join the Whig militia. Soldiers left the army to go home to plant crops. Those who stayed lacked muskets. They lacked salt, cattle, bacon, spirits. They lacked clothing. There was neither money to pay for provisions nor money to pay the soldiers. The air dripped of mutiny, and Greene executed one sergeant for inciting one. Men deserted daily. British and Loyalist cavalry raided the countryside, stealing (or foraging, depending on perspective) “every species of property, Negroes, plate, household furniture, horses, carriages, cattle, etc.”15
“Our usual dish—a large plate of rice and little salt,” wrote a lieutenant. “This morning, six of the 2nd Battalion deserted . . . but what can we expect in their situation, without clothes and pay for two years? . . . On the road I killed an alligator seven-feet long. . . . This day, I mounted guard and was almost eat up with the mosquitos.”16
Greene’s letters describe woe after woe, and he sent his complaints to anyone he thought might help:
To the secretary of war: “You can have little idea of the confusion and disorder which prevails among the southern states.”17
To Washington: “We are in a poor situation to contend with a very superior force. Our men are almost naked for want of overalls and shirts, and the great part of the Army, barefoot. We have no rum or prospect of any. . . . We were four weeks without ammunition. . . .
“We are remote from support and supplies of every kind. No large bodies of militia can be hastily called together here, nor can supplies of any kind be had, but with the greatest difficulty. We have 300 men now without arms, and twice that number so naked as to be unfit for duty but in cases of desperation. Not a rag of clothing has arrived to us this winter. Indeed, our prospects are really deplorable.”18
To Congress: “The enemy threaten us daily with an attack. What have we not to fear with a very inferior army . . . ? Our force is daily diminished . . . The picture is too disagreeable to dwell upon.”19
To South Carolina’s governor: “One day we are without beef, the next without rice, and some days without either.”20
To the superintendent of finance: “The service in this country has become disagreeable even to the officers. The choking situation of the men . . . The badness of provision, the poorest of beef and rice, the exhausted state of the country, which affords them nothing but their rations and very bad water and the want of money, which prevents persons from bringing anything to the army for sale, are circumstances which keep the minds of the officers continually in a petulant and discontented disposition.”21
To an army provisioner: “The states have taken up an idea that the Continental army can subsist upon air.”22
To Pennsylvania’s chief executive: “Virginia and North Carolina governors say they can’t requisition supplies. They both appear like two great overgrown babies who have got out of temper and who have been accustomed to great indulgence.”23
Greene’s and Leslie’s South was a dictionary of eigteenth-century horrors: impure water, infection, vermin-infested clothes, malnutrition, exhaustion, fear of inoculation, heat exhaustion, rheumatic fever, jaundice, pneumonia, pleurisy, dysentery, smallpox, flu, sexually transmitted diseases, typhus, scurvy, typhoid fever, tetanus, worms, yellow fever (the “black vomit”), scabies, and malaria. Treatments often made things worse, from physician bans on drinking water when sweating, to bleeding and use of mercury. Old and
new armament technology—tomahawks, bayonets, grapeshot, soft lead musket bullets that shredded flesh, cannonballs, powder burns—created terrible wounds. While longtime residents had some immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria, most Whig and British regulars had none. They died in epidemic numbers.24
“Men die very fast,” wrote a Whig major. “Hospitals crowded, and great many sick in camp. Deaths so frequent, the funeral ceremony dispensed with.” Greene himself became “exceedingly sick” in September 1782. That month, he wrote Leslie seeking permission for another Whig general to pass through British lines to a coastal island for the “benefit of the sea air” to recover from his own “dangerous fever.” Leslie granted the request. Leslie’s own men were equally incapacitated. In one British unit of nearly 2,300, more than forty percent took ill.25
“This has been one of the sickliest seasons known this 30 years,” Greene wrote in reporting the deaths of two hundred men. “The only consolation and security we have had [is] the enemy has suffered no less than we.”26
7. The “Bloodiest, Cruel War”
GREENE AND LESLIE FACED ANOTHER MUTUAL CHALLENGE: unexpected, brutish fighting. The methodical terrorism that became the southern war between Tory and Whig militias obliterated the eighteenth-century courtesies and rules that regular armies observed.
Ten months before Yorktown—where the allies hosted dinners for the defeated generals—O’Hara wrote about the kind of war he had seen in the South. “I cannot even hint . . . upon the scene before me, which are beyond description wretched, every misery which the bloodiest cruel war ever produced . . . The violence of the passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion and humanity. They are unbounded, and every hour exhibits, dreadful, wanton mischiefs, murders, and violence of every kind, unheard of before.”1
The British commander in Wilmington reported, “This country is in a glorious situation for cutting one another’s throats.” Rebel soldiers, said a Tory officer, were “Goths and Vandals,” having “murdered every Loyalist they found whether in arms or at home.” After an incident in which rebels burned a British hospital and reportedly forced injured soldiers to “expire in the swamps,” Leslie’s adjutant protested that this “is a species of barbarity hitherto unknown in civilized nations.”2
Even a Whig officer conceded that “scarce a day passes but some poor deluded Tory is put to death at his door.” A Yorktown veteran and Whig legislator said the brutality was mutual. “The outrage and cruelty of the British is beyond description, and the inveterate hatred and spirit of vengeance which they have excited in the breasts of our citizens is such as you can form no idea of,” he wrote. “The very females talk as familiarly of shedding blood and destroying the Tories as the men do.”3
South Carolina governor John Rutledge summarized the Whig grievances: Not only did South Carolinians feel the “common calamities” of war, but they suffered from “the wanton and savage manner in which it has been prosecuted.” Many residents were confined on prison ships. Their properties were looted. “Many who had surrendered as prisoners of war were killed in cold blood.” Others were turned over to Indians—“savages”—and tortured to death. The British raped women. They burned churches. They destroyed homes of “widows, the aged, and infirm.” They “disgraced the profession of a British soldier, and fixed indelible stigmas of rapine cruelty, perfidy, and profaneness on the British name.”4
“You can have little idea how the war has raged here. It has operated like a consuming fire and has hardly left a green thing,” Greene wrote a friend. To Caty, he said: “With us, the difference between Whig and Tory is little more than a division of sentiment; but here they persecute each other with little less than savage fury.”5
One account describes a Whig dragoon who was shot and killed. The British parade his scalp through Savannah, then mangle and disfigure his body, and order that it remain unburied. Black people, “more humanized,” steal the corpse and bury it. The British offer a reward for the capture of these criminals. German Moravian settlers complain about Whigs who “seized oats, pottery, corn, and whatever came to hand,” robbing and beating up farmers and their wives. A Whig general says the British treat prisoners poorly, holding them in cages without room to stand or sit, and without adequate food. The British respond with accusations in kind. Salisbury, North Carolina, residents testify about Whig militia who committed “numberless barbarities, assassinations, murders, and robberies.” The rebels arbitrarily seize men and murder them on the spot or jail them. Others “have been hanged up two or three times until almost dead, and then shot by way of diversion. . . . Women and children have been tortured, hung up and strangled, cut down, and hung up again, sometimes branded with brands or other hot irons in order to extort confessions from them.” A British officer stops a rebel woman in Charlestown “as she was innocently walking out one morning.” He orders a “Negro fellow” to kiss her. In Cross Creek, North Carolina, rebels exact revenge on a Loyalist widow. “They have taken every article of clothing and every means of subsistence from the widow and the children, and have left them to the cold merciless hand of charity.” A boy is bayoneted by British troops who believe he’s a spy. Whig soldiers find him the next day. As he dies, he explains he was looking at the soldiers out of curiosity. “The sight of this unoffending boy butchered,” says one Whig, “relieved me of my distressful feelings for the slaughter of the Tories, and I desired nothing so much as the opportunity of participating in their destruction.” Alexander Shannon, a Tory, is captured and killed by rebel militia in retaliation for a murder. Shannon’s killing, concedes a militiaman, didn’t follow “the rules of law” but was justified because “the country was almost drowned in the blood of her citizens by barbarous murders, not done by the British, but by the Tories.”6
In another account, a Loyalist captain and his men seize fourteen rebel soldiers and execute them. The Loyalists decapitate the rebel captain, then sever both hands of another man before killing him. Whigs torture a Tory captain while hanging him. “In his struggles while dying, he attempted several times to take hold of the limbs of the tree on which he was hanged; and it afforded them high amusement to beat down his hands with their whips and sticks. His body remained hanging for three days.” A wounded Whig lies on a battlefield for thirty hours before friends find him. As he dies, he tells them that a Tory came by—a neighbor—“and instead of giving him a little water, for which he craved, to quench his raging thirst, kicked him and cursed him as a rebel.” In Charlestown, the British throw two women suspected of spying into the same cellar as rebel prisoners and British felons. It was “a damp, unwholesome place, which occasioned amongst the prisoners much sickness, and some deaths. It was a horrid place.”7
The southern experience was a “war of extermination,” said Whig John Marshall, a Valley Forge veteran (and future chief justice).8
Another Whig veteran, General William Moultrie, spent two years as a prisoner. “Each party oppressed the other as much as they possibly could . . . Although they had been friends, neighbors, and brothers, they had no feelings for each other, and no principles of humanity left. . . . The conduct of those two parties was a disgrace to human nature.”9
The result: devastation, depopulation, desolation. “All was gloomy,” said a traveling pastor. “Not a person was to be met with in the roads.” Moultrie was struck by the absence of animals. “Not the vestiges of horses, cattle, hogs, or deer, etc., was to be found. The squirrels and birds of every kind were totally destroyed. . . . No living creature was to be seen except now and then a few [buzzards] . . . picking the bones of some unfortunate fellows who had been shot or cut down and left in the woods above the ground.”10
This was the South that Greene and Leslie were ordered to command.
Greene based his military strategy on a simple principle: Distrust the British. Even after spring 1782, when rumors of peace agreements, evacuations, and ceasefires came to him from Congress and Washington in the North, and from Leslie an
d intelligence reports in Charlestown, Greene maintained three objectives: Preserve his army, “cover this country”—that is, pacify Loyalists—and “drive the enemy from their strongholds.”11
Greene was concerned that a peace treaty would be negotiated on the basis of uti possidetis. He intended to force the British from the South before their positions were preserved by treaty. Greene also was concerned that easing military pressure on the British in America would allow the enemy to focus resources on defeating the French. If that happened, the British would return in force. Moreover, it would be “dishonorable and perfidious” to ally France.12
Two months after Washington reported that the British would end their offensive war and evacuate the South, Greene pushed back. “I am not agreed with your Excellency in opinion that the enemy mean to evacuate this country; on the contrary I am fully convinced they do not. They are repairing their works, have lately paid off their militia, and engaged them for a further term of service.”13
By late summer 1782, Washington admitted that he had been too optimistic, and paraphrased Franklin: The British are “unable to carry on the war and too proud to make peace.”14
But Greene would get no major reinforcements. Washington told him to focus solely on “confining the enemy to their lines, and preventing them from carrying their ravages into the country.” Given the poor condition of Greene’s army, there would be no major battles, no turning points, no sieges, no ousting the British from Charlestown. Greene shared his frustration with a friend: “Our operations this campaign are as insipid as they were important the last.”15
After Yorktown Page 5