by Terry Golway
His morbid self-absorption gave way to engagement and fury when Greene heard rumors that he had been identified as one of the leaders of the Gaspee raiding party. The royal commission hearing evidence in the case interviewed one of the Gaspee crew members, who said that he recognized a man “named Greene” among the raiders. If there was, in fact, a man named Greene among the Gaspee boarding party, most likely it was Rufus, the captain of the ill-fated Fortune. But beyond the question of his innocence, Nathanael Greene had good reason to fear being named as a suspect in the affair. He had heard further rumors claiming that Gaspee suspects would be transported to London for trial.
Of his accuser, Greene said, “I should be tempted to let the Sunshine through him if I could come at Him.” Again, as with the seizure of the Fortune, Greene transformed his personal travail into a political epiphany. Questions of freedom and liberty no longer were distant or merely academic. They now were unavoidable; they affected him, and, he realized, they affected all other Americans as well.
He told Sammy Ward that the Gaspee commission was “Justly Alarming to every Virtuous Mind and Lover of Liberty in America.” If the commission succeeded in tempting witnesses “to Perjury,” he wrote, “this Court and mode of Trial. . . will naturally Affect all the other Colonies.” He went on to condemn the colony’s General Assembly, which had not vigorously protested the commission’s work, as a “Pusillanimous Crew and betrayers of the Peoples Liberties.”
Although he now feared for the liberties of his fellow colonists and had reason to resent the power and prerogatives of the Crown, Nathanael Greene–like most Americans–was not prepared for radical solutions to their complaints. The king remained a popular figure in America, and Britain’s tax and revenue policies were blamed on Parliament and the king’s ministers. Greene himself still honored Rhode Island’s connection to the mother country. His favorite horse, a stallion, was named Britain.
His connection to his faith was undergoing a similar transition. He was becoming ever more impatient with what he regarded as the irrational and anti-intellectual cant of his late father’s brand of Quakerism, and yet he had not broken completely with the traditions of his childhood. But Nathanael’s occasional appearances at the Quaker meetinghouse in East Greenwich, near the family homestead in Potowomut, did nothing to persuade him that he was making a mistake as he drifted away from his father’s faith.
One such meeting featured a particularly pompous and long-winded minister whose sermon inspired only cynicism from Nathanael as he sat in the congregation, wishing he were somewhere else. The minister’s talk, Greene wrote, was “so light that it evaporated like Smoke and left us neither the fuller nor better pleased.” Indeed, the experience, and perhaps his never-ending search for a bride and companion, left him “in the dumps . . . brooding over mischief and hatching Evils.”
Greene’s impatience with conventional religious practice was not confined to criticism of Quakerism. He lashed out when the colony’s clergymen protested the performance of a play called The Unhappy Orphan. Stage performances were prohibited under Rhode Island law, and a holy ruckus followed the play’s debut. “Priests and Levites of every Order [cry] out against it as a subversion of Morallity and dangerous to the Church,” Greene wrote. But he took the side of the actors, one of whom he knew.
It was not entirely surprising that Nathanael Greene eventually found himself suspended from the Quaker meetings for an infraction of their code of behavior. The suspension was ordered in July 1773, and for years, historians stated that it was a punishment for Greene’s having attended a military exercise of some sort. Such activity, it was assumed, constituted a breach of Quaker pacifism. More recently, however, Greene scholars have argued persuasively that the suspension was related to Nathanael’s appearance at a public house or some other disreputable place. The official record states that Greene and one of his cousins, Griffin Greene, were punished for having been seen at “a Place in Coneticut of Publick Resort where they had No Proper Business.” Historians for decades assumed that the “Publick Resort” was a military parade, but the editors of Greene’s published papers note that the phrase was used at the time to describe alehouses and the like. Given Greene’s convivial personality (at around this time, he attended a friend’s wedding and wound up celebrating the occasion for several days), not to mention his clear disregard of Quaker tenets, it is not hard to picture him enjoying himself in an alehouse.
But even if he was drinking and not drilling in Connecticut, Greene’s heretical interest in military matters was undeniable. He continued to study Caesar and Frederick the Great and cited famous campaigns from the past, like Hannibal’s in northern Italy, in his letters. His correspondence with Sammy Ward offers a tantilizing but mysterious clue about his interests at the time. In two letters in the early 1770s, well before the colonies and Britain marched to war, Greene referred to himself as “the colonel.” Nobody is quite sure why. But if his self-styled title betrayed a secret ambition, Greene set his sights far too low.
The organized boycott of British goods began to sputter out in late 1770, after the government withdrew duties on most items except tea. In Boston, however, agitators continued their boycott, even though one of the city’s leading citizens, John Hancock, made a fortune importing tea from Britain.
The East India Company, the tea-trading firm that had become one of Britain’s largest institutions, was perilously close to bankruptcy in the early 1770s. Parliament tried to bail out the company in May 1773 by eliminating colonial middlemen from the tea trade. The East India Company was given permission to ship and sell directly to designated American agents, drastically lowering the cost of its tea. Stouthearted patriots would be sorely tempted to reconsider their principles, American merchants would be cut out of the action, and only the company’s agents would make money on the deal.
Ships carrying the tea sailed into Boston Harbor in late November and early December 1773. And on the night of December 17, the city’s most radical agitators disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, sailed into the harbor, boarded the merchant ships, and dumped the offending tea into the sea. The Boston Tea Party electrified America’s radical leaders and enraged Britain’s politicians. In March 1774, Lord North introduced legislation in Parliament called the Boston Port Act. It was Britain’s reply to the Tea Party: the port of Boston was ordered closed, and its government and administative functions were transferred out of the city. General Thomas Gage was dispatched to Massachusetts to become the colony’s military governor, and he would have command of four thousand troops who would enforce the Crown’s laws.
In addition to the Boston Port Act, Parliament passed a series of laws that became known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. Royal officials accused of crimes would be tried not in the colony in which the crimes took place but in Britain or in another colony. The Quartering Act ordered that colonial authorities provide British troops with housing and supplies. And the Massachusetts charter was rewritten to give the new military governor extensive powers over the town meetings that had helped give birth to the colony’s agitation.
Other colonies rallied around stricken Boston, even as rumors circulated that more oppressive measures were under consideration. John Sherwood, Rhode Island’s agent in London, wrote to Governor Wanton, warning him: The prime minister may be considering a bill to “Vacate Your Charter, and to add part of Your Colony to the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and part to the Colony of Connecticut.” Sherwood added that he found the report hard to believe. Nevertheless, with the great port of Boston closed and their neighbors in Massachusetts under martial law, Rhode Islanders had reason to believe that anything was possible, given their own record of defiance. Wanton set aside June 30 as a day of fasting and prayer. In keeping with custom, Rhode Islanders were asked to pray for the king, and while they were at it, for the “relief ... of the town of Boston.” A correspondent identified only as “the Preacher” wrote in the Newport Mercury that it was “now high time for the
Colonies to have a grand Congress to complete the system for the American Independent Commonwealth, as it is so evident that no other plan will secure the rights of this people from rapacious and plotting tyrants.” Such a congress did, in fact, convene in 1774–the First Continental Congress. But the Preacher’s goal was more radical than most of the delegates, who sought a more peaceful resolution to the growing conflict.
Nathanael Greene followed events in Boston closely, and he often visited the city, sixty miles from his home in Coventry, during the crisis in 1774. At some point during his journeys to Boston, he met a portly young bookseller named Henry Knox, who shared not only Greene’s love of literature but also his growing interest in military science.
The Boston Port Act and the Intolerable Acts solidifed Greene’s evolution into a fledgling revolutionary. His letters now were filled with language that Samuel Adams would have enjoyed. Britain’s political leaders, he wrote, seemed “determined to embrace their cursed hands in American Blood, and that once Wise and Virtuous Parliament, but now Wicked and weak Assembly, lends an assisting hand to accomplish their hellish schemes.” He condemned the soldiers in Boston as “insolent above measure.” And, like Adams, he saw events speeding toward a violent end. “Soon very soon expect to hear the thirsty Earth drinking in the warm Blood of American sons. O how my eyes [flash] with indignation and my bosom burns with holy resentment.”
It was not only resentment that so agitated Greene’s bosom. Quite the opposite. He had fallen in love, again, this time to a nineteen-year-old beauty he had known since she was a little girl. Her name was Catherine Littlefield, and she was a cousin of Sammy Ward’s. Catherine’s mother died when she was ten, so she left her home on Block Island and moved to the home of her mother’s sister, who was married to William Greene, a distant relation of Nathanael’s and a prominent political leader in the colony. Nathanael Greene was an occasional visitor to William Greene’s house, so he watched the couple’s niece, known to her friends as Caty, blossom into a charming and flirtatious young woman who enjoyed the company of men. One observer described her as a “small brunette with high color, a vivacious expression, and a snapping pair of dark eyes.” Other descriptions insist, with equal enthusiasm, that those dark eyes actually were violet.
Her aunt, Catherine Ray Greene, was just as charming and lovely as Caty Littlefield. When Catherine Ray was younger and single, she fell in love with the married but frequently obliging Benjamin Franklin. Franklin and young Catherine Ray carried on a memorable correspondence indicating that they were on the verge of intimacy, but never actually got there. However, they remained friendly once Catherine Ray married into the expansive Greene family.
Catherine Ray Greene was a strong influence on her niece, seeing to it that she took French lessons and developed an interest in the world outside their home. That latter assignment was relatively easy, because the outside world was very much a part of the Greene household. William Greene was building a political career that would lead to his election as governor of Rhode Island during the Revolution, and so his home became a meeting place for colonial patriots and other ambitious men. Young Caty Littlefield prospered in this highly masculine world, and not just because of her beauty. Though not especially well-educated, she was smart and charming, and men gravitated toward her.
After an apparently short courtship, the wedding between Nathanael Greene and Catherine Littlefield took place on July 20, 1774, in East Greenwich. The ceremony was small, restricted, in Nathanael’s words, to “only a few Choice spirits.” Among those choice spirits were several well-connected friends of Greene, including not only Sammy Ward but a lawyer named James Varnum and a future member of the Rhode Island Supreme Court named Thomas Arnold. They were typical of the kind of company Nathanael Greene cultivated. Both men were younger than Greene, were college educated, and were involved in the colony’s civic affairs. Though Greene still remained self-conscious about his incomplete education, he surrounded himself with young friends who had the schooling he wished for himself. He knew he still had much to learn, and he was comfortable in the company of those who could teach him something.
He brought his bride back to his home in Coventry, a three-story house that no longer seemed such a lonely place. Relatively late in life, at a time when his friends despaired of him ever finding a bride, thirty-two-year-old Nathanael Greene began his new life as a married man with all its attendant responsibilities.
It quickly became obvious, however, that he was hardly settling down.
Just a few weeks after his wedding, Greene joined his friend James Varnum and other leading citizens from and near East Greenwich in raising money for the suffering citizens of Boston. Greene’s was among eighty signatures on a public subscription that deplored the “Late, Cruel, malignant and more than savage Acts of the British Parliament.” Greene contributed two pounds, eight shillings to the fund, the second-highest single donation. The money was used to buy food and livestock for Boston.
As America’s emerging political leaders convened in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, Nathanael Greene was moving beyond rhetoric and subscription lists. The avid student of battles past took his first step toward a military career of his own by joining a private military company based in East Greenwich. It was one of many militia units forming throughout the colonies as tensions over Boston worsened. The new militia met several times a week to drill, train, and study under the supervision of two former officers in the British army. Tradition has it that Nathanael Greene was responsible for recruiting one of the officers after they met during one of Greene’s visits to Boston. Greene also brought back a musket from Boston, hiding it in a farmer’s load of hay until they were safely beyond the watchful eyes of British soldiers.
In October 1774, after a few weeks of training, the amateur soldiers of East Greenwich asked the Rhode Island Assembly to incorporate them as a recognized state militia for Kent County. Approval was quick in coming, and so Nathanael Greene became a private in the new Kentish Guards. With their red coats with green trim, white waistcoat and pantaloons, and hats with a black cockade, they were a frequent sight in East Greenwich.
Few of these citizen soldiers were more enthusiastic than the newly married Nathanael Greene, who expected to become one of the company’s leaders. It is hard to imagine, then, the wound he suffered in late October, when the troops overlooked Greene in electing their officers. Several militiamen took Greene aside and told him he was an embarrassment to the company. It was, they said, his limp; slight though it was, it took away from the company’s manly, martial appearance. It simply wouldn’t do, the men told Greene, to have an officer with a limp. Who would take such a company seriously?
Greene was crushed. He immediately wrote a heartrending letter to the unit’s new captain, James Varnum, confiding that it was a “stroke of mori-tification” to be told that he was “a blemish to those with whom [he] associated.” He went on to say, “I confess it is my misfortune to limp a little but I did not conceive it to be so great.” After such an embarrassment, so completely unexpected, he was prepared to leave the company. “My heart is too sus[c]eptible of pride, and my sentiments too delicate, to wish a connexion where I am considered in an inferior point of light,” he wrote.
He sent the letter to Varnum and then reconsidered. He did not resign from the Kentish Guards. But the episode showed a side of Greene that would become familiar to his colleagues in the years and conflicts to come. He was extremely sensitive to criticism, whether explicit or perceived, and it didn’t take much for him to take a plunge into waves of self-pity.
The guards continued to drill and parade, with great effect. Greene and his fellow militiamen, like all American patriots, followed events in Boston with increasing anxiety as General Gage tightened his grip over the city. On the night of April 19, 1775, an express rider galloped into East Greenwich with news that a British column had opened fire on patriots in Lexington and Concord. Greene heard the news in Coventry. He sai
d his farewells to his bride of less than a year, mounted his horse–but not his beloved Britain, for the stallion had been stolen some time ago–and rode to East Greenwich. With Varnum in command, the Kentish Guards set out for Massachusetts at daybreak on April 20 to provide whatever assistance their embattled countrymen might require.
Was this war or another terrible incident, like the Boston Massacre? Was this little outfit of part-time, unpaid militiamen prepared to face some of the best-trained soldiers in the world?
The men from East Greenwich soon learned that there would be no answers to such questions, at least not at the moment. When they reached Pawtucket, they learned that Governor Wanton had ordered them to halt their march to Massachusetts. Though Wanton had delivered some fine, defiant words to Crown authorities in the past, he was not prepared for the next step in Anglo-American relations. He was not quite a Tory, but he was more sympathetic to British authorities than the Kentish Guards were.