Yet as anxious as he was for a new assignment, he’d lost much of his belief in the glory of serving in battle. The failed Franco-American campaign at Newport in 1780 had brought scorn on the military. Greene, temporarily detached from his department to lead one of the American divisions, had performed well; the defeat resulted mainly from miscommunication between his volatile superior, General John Sullivan, and d’Estaing’s offshore fleet. Rhode Islanders, angry that the British hadn’t been expelled, called the operation “ill planned and worse conducted.” The loudest critics were John and Nicholas Brown.
When Greene heard the Providence brothers were saying that Continental commanders lacked audacity, he responded with uncharacteristic venom, firing off a letter to John Brown that opened with a shot at John’s rearguard bravado. “Men often feel courageous at a distance from danger that faint through fear when they come to be exposed.”
Venting a lifetime’s resentment toward the man who’d financially bullied his family for decades, Green suggested that Rhode Island’s scandalous heritage disqualified its citizens from making moral judgments. “However,” he concluded, “I cannot help feeling mortified that those that have been at home making their fortunes and living in the lap of luxury and enjoying all the pleasures of domestic life should be the first to sport with the feelings of officers who have stood as a barrier between them and ruin.”
Nicholas Brown came to his brother’s defense, explaining with careful deference to Greene’s rank that John’s supposed “ungenerous insinuations” about the army’s performance had been misrepresented. Mollified, the general wrote back (more politely than honestly) that perhaps he’d overreacted. “Your family is one of the first in this state and one whose good opinion and friendship I have always endeavored to cultivate. Therefore the least reproach would be more sensibly felt.”
Greene’s sensitivity to criticism finally drove him to resign as quartermaster general in July. Congress’s recent reorganization of the department had resulted in the dismissal of his top aides (and business partners), Charles Pettit and John Cox. The implication of corruption was obvious and, to Greene, unacceptable. Congress answered his demand for a vote of confidence with silence. When Greene then submitted his resignation, only Washington’s intercession prevented a vote to cashier him from the service for seeming to defy the republican principle of civilian control of the military.
Back in the field, Greene’s first notable assignment was “tragical”—he presided over the espionage trial of Benedict Arnold’s cohort, John Andre. The twenty-nine-year-old British major was impossible to dislike; during the occupation of Philadelphia he’d impressed the townspeople with his fairness, dignity, and charm. Upon capture, had he been wearing his uniform plainly rather than under a topcoat he might have been exchanged as a prisoner of war. But as a spy attempting to pass as a civilian, his execution was certain and its means mandatory: hanging.
Andre requested a firing squad. Greene was inclined to allow it, but Washington, who admitted the major was “more unfortunate than criminal,” insisted on hanging and left it to Greene to justify the decision to Andre’s many American sympathizers. “He is either a spy or an innocent man,” Greene told them. Permitting the more humane execution by firing squad “will awaken public compassion, and the belief will become general that there were exculpatory circumstances entitling him to lenity beyond which he received—perhaps entitling him to pardon. Hang him therefore, or set him free.”
Andre was hanged on October 2, 1780. An observer of the major’s demeanor before the scaffold described “some degree of trepidation, placing his foot on a stone and rolling it over and choking in his throat, as if attempting to swallow.” After adjusting the noose about his neck, Andre asked those in attendance to bear witness “that I meet my fate like a brave man.” Buried on the spot, his remains were later moved to London’s Westminster Abbey, where a monument to his memory was erected by George III.
Greene’s spirits hit bottom that fall. “I am such an unfortunate dog,” he wrote Jeremiah Wadsworth. Wadsworth, the army’s commissary general, was the primary investor along with Greene in the deceptively named Barnabas Deane & Company.
The partnership was the only money-loser in Wadsworth’s vast portfolio; after the war he emerged as a leading banker and entrepreneur. But Barnabas Deane & Company had a larger stake in privateers than did Wadsworth’s other ventures—and it seemed that any privateers to which Greene was connected failed. Though the general took no part in choosing vessels and captains, he was apologetic about the company’s poor record. “We have been very unfortunate in our navigation,” he wrote Wadsworth. “There is no help for these things. It is true I can ill afford it, but what is that to the purpose?”
His privateer exposure was even greater in the family-run Jacob Greene & Company. The capture of two of its warships the previous spring, worth $7,000 in hard silver, “destroyed all our plans for this season,” Jacob lamented. “If we had never been concerned in navigation we should have been possessed of a much larger property than we now are.”
Four months later, Jacob had more bad news. “We purchased a small part of a new privateer at Salem and the very first cruise she was taken, so let us turn to the right or left we are unfortunate.” Lest Nathanael think Jacob was careless with his brother’s money, Jacob assured him, “I am vexed and mortified at our ill success more on your account than my own. My connection is small compared with yours.”
Named by Washington to command the Southern Army on October 14, Greene broke the news to his wife with regret, knowing it meant they wouldn’t see each other until his return. Resolving his money woes would likewise have to wait, he sent his wife a summary of his holdings in case he was killed. In addition to their Rhode Island home, he owned a New Jersey farm and three thousand acres along the Hudson River. He had £2,500 invested in Barnabas Deane & Company and in deals with Pettit and Cox. But of the cash tied up with his brothers, “I know not nor will they give me any account. I suppose it is owing to their not knowing the state of their own affairs.”
Greene reached Charlotte, North Carolina, in December. The army he inherited from Gates numbered 2,400 “naked and dispirited” men. Most belonged to “six weeks militia” and fought out of greed (Greene likened their pillaging to “the locusts of Egypt”) or to settle personal scores and generational feuds. That the Quaker-born Rhode Islander was able to persuade them that their “partisan strokes” were pointless “unless you have a good army to take advantage of your success” was the first of his many notable feats of command.
Almost two hundred years later, General George S. Patton would answer a reporter’s question, “What makes a great general?” with a simple reply: “Not to be beaten.” The definition particularly applies to Greene because throughout his campaign he never gained a single victory. Rather, he maneuvered his troops to inflict maximum damage with minimum casualties, withdrawing from each field of battle with his army’s spirit and fighting ability intact and the enemy’s depleted and shaken.
Greene combined the small-unit, guerrilla style of the militia with a nimbler version of the traditional practice of lining up armies in opposing ranks and smashing one another to pieces. His first deployment was his most famous. Against military principle, he divided his army in the face of Cornwallis’s larger force, at times separating the two commands by more than a hundred miles yet periodically uniting them for battle.
It’s been called “the most audacious and ingenious piece of military strategy in the war.” Revealingly, Henry Clinton noted the instant confidence it gave British officers. “Thus separated,” he wrote in his memoirs, Greene’s army seemed “certainly not in a situation to encourage any hopes of success from its operations.” The move prompted the aggressive Cornwallis likewise to split his army in order to pursue both American units. This further strained his supply lines and, thanks to Greene’s hard-won appreciation of logistics and advance scouting, let the Americans dictate when and where to fight
.
The portion of Greene’s army led by Daniel Morgan defeated the cavalry of Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens in January 1781. Morgan then rejoined Greene, who nipped at the British in a series of skirmishes that drew Cornwallis northward away from his supply bases. In March Greene abruptly pivoted and confronted the enemy. His popularity and success had swelled his ranks to more than four thousand men, though 80 percent were raw recruits. Meanwhile casualties, disease, hunger, and desertion had reduced the redcoats to half that number. Cornwallis was desperate for conventional battle, however, and attacked the waiting Americans at Guilford Courthouse.
After a day of ferocious fighting, Greene broke contact first. He gathered his men and headed south, where he continued “not to be beaten” in engagements in Georgia and South Carolina. It had been six years since his first combat outside Boston. The enemy likewise had won that battle, but at a cost. “A few such victories would ruin them,” he’d written. The lessons of that experience still applied, for similar “victories” over Greene in the second half of 1781 ultimately forced the British back to Savannah and Charleston to recover. Within a year both towns were evacuated.
As for Cornwallis, his army was so battered after Guilford Courthouse he’d limped to the coast to await reinforcements. From there he headed north to Yorktown, Virginia.
Greene’s finances deteriorated all the while. Reluctant to trouble him with bad tidings, his business partners sent only sketchy reports. These were increasingly glum, the chronic “losing by sea” made more vexing by reports of “the amazing success of privateering to the eastward” in Massachusetts. Businessmen there “seem as secure as if the war was already determined in their favor,” marveled Wadsworth. “They are building houses and barns and living in ease and plenty. They pay more ready money for foreign goods, especially the luxuries, in a month than they ever did in three before the war.”
Understandably given his immersion in combat operations, the scope of Greene’s financial decline took time to sink in. His replies to his partners’ morose letters were almost jaunty about being “jilted” by capricious fate. Clinging to faith in “the smiles of fortune,” his optimism carried a wistful awareness “that so much is left in the order of things to time and chance.” As the unpleasant facts poured in, however, Greene turned philosophical. “If we are not rich we will be honest, and if we are not respected for our wealth we will be for our industry.”
He took pains to lighten his partners’ remorse for losing so much of his money. In response to Griffin Greene’s confession that it was easier to gauge “how much we have lost than what we have left,” he assured his cousin of his “grateful sentiments for the particular manner in which you seem to be engaged to promote my interest.”
In August 1781, Charles Pettit informed Greene that their joint investment in a blast furnace “has sunk.” Their “mercantile transactions” were faring even worse. Pettit was dumping their privateer shares at a loss even though, he said, “I am persuaded we will suffer deeply by it.”
John Cox’s note came next. “I take this opportunity to inform you that all our naval concerns are now reduced to the ship Congress which has been out a considerable time and done little or nothing.”
Then Pettit again: “Confiding in your friendship and confidence,” he explained to the general that he’d invested their last funds in several more privateers but had paid the insurance premiums only on some of them. The ones he’d insured had returned safe to port. The others had been captured, leaving him and Greene “all at risk” for their loss. Ultimately Pettit made good use of the experience; after the war he founded the Insurance Company of North America and became one of the richest men in Pennsylvania. But in 1782 it left him severely straitened, compelling him to end his letter with a sheepish reference to money he owed the general on a personal debt. “I venture to lean on your friendship to spare calling on me.”
Greene subsequently learned from Barnabas Deane, in one of Deane’s letters encrypted, at the general’s nervous insistence, in an “alphabet of figures,” that their company had “lost a fortune in a few months.” In a rare expression of raw distress, he lamented to their co-partner Wadsworth, “I have gone through sufficient hardships and done business enough to entitle me to a decent fortune; and the wreck of my constitution requires repose, but alas fate will have it otherwise.”
In 1782 the state of Georgia, in appreciation for his patriotic service, gave Greene a rice plantation called Mulberry Grove fourteen miles north of Savannah. “It’s not like money in hand,” he told Wadsworth, who loaned Greene £1,500 to get the place, which had been neglected during the war, up and running.
Their fortunes had greatly diverged. “I am told you are burdened with wealth,” Greene wrote. “I am glad of it. There is no man who deserves it more or who I wish to possess the good things of this world in greater plenty than you.” In 1784 he would sell his former partner his remaining stake in Barnabas Deane & Company for £123, one-tenth its value three years earlier.
Meanwhile the bad news out of Jacob Greene & Company kept coming. Jacob wrote that he and their family co-partners “are in a state of perplexity to know what to do.” He put at £10,000 “our losses since the partnership commenced. We have tried all sizes of vessels from a frigate down to a small coasting sloop and found none of them to answer.”
Griffin grumbled that the family’s losses were unfair in light of “four or five years of pushing business in the most prudent and diligent manner.” But everyone trusted that Nathanael wouldn’t blame them. “When you see our state of losses and gain you will be satisfied and say men cannot get rich when fortune frowns.”
Their excuses out of the way, Jacob and Griffin asked Nathanael to use his influence to “open some plan of business” for the company. The hope, Griffin proposed delicately, was that the general would “look upon us as deserving of being your partners. You shall plan and we will execute. The world looks upon men generally that are unfortunate as undeserving, but I hope you will judge us as we deserve.”
Greene declined without giving a reason. “My disappointment is considerable, but I feel more for you than for myself. Thus my friendship will never forsake you nor shall the family want anything in my power to procure them.”
He was more candid in a letter to his wife. “To have a decent income is much to be wished; but to be free from debt more so. I never owned so much property as now, and yet never felt so poor.”
It was 1784. Three years earlier, Cornwallis had been cornered at Yorktown by ground forces under Washington and a French fleet under Admiral François de Grasse bombarding the British from Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis’s surrender had ended Britain’s will to keep fighting, though violence continued sporadically in the south and more seriously in the West Indies, where European navies jockeyed for advantage prior to their governments sitting down to sign a peace treaty in September 1783.
By that time, Greene had sold his Rhode Island home to his brother Jacob and moved with his wife and four children to Mulberry Grove. He was bankrupt—hit with bills he hadn’t expected, debts he couldn’t pay. Creditors hounded him, but it was Congress that broke his back.
The last months of the war had left Greene’s troops without sufficient food or clothing, “naked as the day they were born,” he wrote. Robert Morris, now superintendent of finance, was in the process of instituting a policy to supply the military through fixed contracts rather than through private agents working on commission. With his men on the verge of mutiny, however, Greene retained a South Carolina businessman named John Banks to procure supplies in the expectation, once the new procedures were in place, that the bills would fall “upon Mr. Morris the financier or upon any state in the southern department, whichever may be the most agreeable.”
He knew Banks to be a “suspicious character long engaged in contraband trade.” But he was also, Greene wrote, “the only person who have the will and the means” to obtain what was needed amid the war’s devastation. Wit
h no illusions about Banks’s integrity, he implored him to keep prices “as low and moderate as the nature of the business will admit.” And he appealed to Bank’s heart, reminding him that such abject neglect “is hard upon troops who have bled so freely for this oppressed country.”
But Banks was an inveterate speculator. Armed with government drafts that Greene had provided, he launched a scheme whereby they would actually go for buying tobacco, which then could be traded—and with British suppliers if need be, either the ones still in Charleston or others in the West Indies—for larger quantities of supplies than Greene had contracted for, leaving some left over to sell at a profit.
Greene guessed what Banks was up to (“it had an odd appearance to me”), but desperate to provide for his men, he gave little objection beyond “that he seemed to be prosecuting trade on principles not admissible.” But, Greene testified later, “He had the example and practice of all the principal merchants in trade for his justification, and merchants will devise more ways and means for the preservation of their property than any other order of men.”
Rumors arose that the former quartermaster general was also secretly profiting. The taint of associating with Banks led Greene to consider voiding their deal altogether. Realizing it would mean no supplies for his troops, he instead took a fateful step of pledging his remaining personal assets as collateral to complete the whopping £30,000 purchase—expecting, again, that Congress would pay it off once everything was explained.
Patriot Pirates Page 23