by Terry Golway
Once at Roxbury, Greene immediately prepared his troops for a possible new attack on the American right wing. He dispatched an urgent message to members of the Rhode Island Committee of Safety: “[Send] about two Tons of Powder and as much ball as you can conveniently spare.” His instincts were as sound as his experience was limited: The British briefly considered an assault on Dorchester Heights, to the right of Greene’s position in Jamaica Plains, but decided against it. The troops were too dazed and too bloodied to mount another attack.
Though Greene missed the battle near Bunker Hill, he absorbed its lessons and would carry them with him for the rest of the war. Bunker Hill showed Greene and the Americans that they could redefine the very idea of victory in this war. To his brother Jacob, Greene wrote, “I wish [we] could Sell them another Hill at the same Price we did Bunkers Hill.” In the coming years, Greene would have many opportunities to make such a transaction.
In Philadelphia, members of the Continental Congress realized that the hodgepodge collection of militia outside Boston was fighting not a local battle but a war for American liberties and so should have the support of all the colonies. On June 14, 1775, at the urging of John Adams and others, Congress officially adopted the troops in Boston, creating the Continental army. The new army required a new commander: George Washington, of Virginia. And a new commander required staff, so Congress appointed an adjutant general, paymaster general, quartermaster general, commissary general, four major generals, and eight brigadier generals. The last and most junior brigadier was Nathanael Greene, who became the new Continental army’s youngest general. Eight months earlier, in October 1774, men in the Kentish Guards had told Private Nathanael Greene that he was unfit and unworthy for militia duty, that his limp was a blemish on the company. Now he was a brigadier general in the Continental army. Although not religious in the conventional sense, Greene in later years often spoke of his belief that the Almighty had a special interest in the American cause. Given his astonishing and perhaps inexplicable rise from militia outcast to brigadier general, it’s hardly a wonder that even Greene was tempted to look heavenward for answers.
With his new title came a salary: one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Like his brother generals and members of Congress, Greene supplemented that meager income with profits from his private businesses, which he continued to manage from afar. He would need the extra income, once Caty gave birth to their first child.
The new commander in chief of the Continental army arrived in Cambridge on July 3, 1775. With him were several officers who were strangers to Greene, but with whom he would soon become familiar. Perhaps the most memorable member of Washington’s party was an eccentric Englishman named Charles Lee, a major general who would become renowned for his sloppy dress, his affection for dogs (as opposed to human beings), and his undoubted ability as a career military man. The other newcomers included another former English officer, Horatio Gates, now Washington’s adjutant general, and another wayward Quaker, Thomas Mifflin, who was Washington’s aide-de-camp and soon to become the army’s quartermaster general. Greene was destined to work closely with, and sometimes against, all of these men in the struggle to come.
On July 4, Greene sent a detachment of two hundred Rhode Island troops, armed with a letter of welcome, to the new commander’s headquarters. Washington accepted the gesture and reciprocated by inviting Greene to headquarters for a personal meeting. And so the tall, remote Virginian met the broad-shouldered, hearty Quaker from Rhode Island, beginning a relationship and a friendship that profoundly affected the course of the war. At first, they seemed to have as much in common as Virginia did with Rhode Island; in other words, not much. Washington came from a family of proper Anglicans–people likely to look askance at Quakers, Puritans, and other noncomformists–and grew to adulthood in a colony that was as orderly as Rhode Island was chaotic, as aristocratic as Rhode Island was democratic. Washington himself was as distant as Greene was eager to please. But they shared far more than they realized at that first ceremonial meeting. Washington’s bearing and confidence–but not his writing–hid the fact that his formal education was hardly any better than Greene’s. His unlettered mother, widowed when George was eleven, had no money to send him to Europe for a ruling-class education. Just as Nathanael Greene spent his formative years toiling at the family forge, the teenage Washington worked his mother’s farm, far from the libraries and schoolhouses of Virginia’s wellborn sons. And like Greene, he was unwilling to settle for the fate that destiny and circumstances had in mind for him. So he read, and read some more. Like his new subordinate from Rhode Island, George Washington was a son of the New World of opportunity through self-improvement.
Perhaps Washington recognized in Greene something of himself–a less polished, less refined version for sure, but a decent reflection all the same, a competent man, a patriot, and a man, like himself, willing to sacrifice his fortune for an idea. And perhaps Greene saw in Washington the mentor he wished Nathanael Greene Sr. had been. From the very beginning of their association, Greene looked up to Washington as a surrogate father, a man he would defend against enemies and whose patience he would test repeatedly.
Washington decided to give Nathanael Greene the chance his peers in Kent County denied him because he walked with a limp.
Neither man left an extended written record of their first meeting, but their actions as the siege wore on spoke to the immediate respect they developed for each other. In a letter to Samuel Ward, Greene described Washington in glowing terms.
I hope we shall be taught to copy his example and to prefer the Love of Liberty in this time of publick danger to all the soft pleasures of domestic Life and support ourselves with manly fortitude amidst all the danger and hardships that attend a state of war. And I doubt not under the Generals wise direction we shall establish such excellent order and stricktness of [discipline] as to invite Victory.
Greene and many other officers in camp began referring to Washington as “His Excellency,” a gaudy, Old World honorific that seemed decidedly out of place among the flinty egalitarians gathered in the camps outside Boston. Rank meant little among the rugged New England individuals who made up the new American army. Officers were known to stand in line for their food along with the men under their command. There even were reports of officers trained as barbers who shaved their soldiers. The New England troops were proud of their anti-aristocratic, anti-elitist army, but some officers, including Greene, were horrified. Such familiarity would not help in administering the discipline the raw Americans needed. Washington, whose bearing and background practically defined the notion of Virginian aristocracy, quickly made it clear that the old ways were over. In a letter to Congress, he condemned “Familiarity between the Officers and men, which is incompatible with Subordination and Discipline.”
Inadequate supplies continued to bedevil the army. On July 4, the day after Washington took command, Greene condemned a shipment of moldy bread from Providence. A few days earlier, enraged Rhode Island troops had discovered that a welcome supply of beef actually was horse meat. A disgusted Greene told Governor Cooke, “[I am] willing to spend and be spent in so Righteous a Cause, but unless I am supported by the helping hand of Government, my indeavors will be defeated and your expectations blasted.” If well-fed, well-supplied troops are derelict in their duties, he wrote, they can and ought to be punished “with great justice.” But if they are suffering from hunger and want, “they excuse all their misconduct.” And there was no shortage of misconduct: Washington’s general orders through the summer of 1775 frequently made reference to the general’s approval of whippings meted out to insubordinate or otherwise misbehaving soldiers.
Turning these farmers and tradesmen into something resembling an army was an enormous challenge. But Washington and his generals also had to achieve another kind of transformation, one that even the lash could not help bring about: they had to turn these farmers and tradesmen into Americans.
The new Contin
ental army was, in fact, a New England army commanded by a Virginian. Not until thirteen companies from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland arrived in midsummer did the army begin to resemble the vast and diverse enterprise that Congress envisioned. But these men were strangers to one another and regarded one another with suspicion, skepticism, and even fear–not unlike their political leaders in Philadelphia. Washington himself was not immune to parochial sectionalism. In a far too candid letter to his cousin, Lund Washington, he referred to New England troops as “dirty and nasty.” He also complained to a fellow Virginian about the “unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people which . . . prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the Army.” The New Englanders, for their part, were repulsed by the crude frontiersmen from the southern states. These troops were accomplished riflemen, rightly known for their marksmanship–they picked off three British officers in two days not long after arriving–and their toughness, but their insolence made them few friends among the New England regiments. The southerners were themselves puzzled by their northern brethren: “Such Sermons, such Negroes, such Colonels, such Boys [and] such Great, Great-Grandfathers,” one southern soldier wrote. To the astonishment of the southerners, blacks were serving alongside whites in some of the New England units, and within a few years blacks would make up about 15 percent of the Continental army. Among those who advocated for black recruitment was Nathanael Greene’s cousin Christopher, who would go on to command a small unit of blacks from Rhode Island.
Nathanael Greene intuitively understood that success of the cause depended on men willing to put aside their sectional prejudice and pride, if not their racial prejudices. When New Englanders complained that Washington seemed to favor his fellow southerners, Greene was quick to compose a masterfully diplomatic defense of a man he admired almost to the point of hero worship. In a letter to Samuel Ward Sr., Greene explained carefully that Washington “had not had time to make himself thoroughly Acquainted with the Genius” of the New England troops. “His Excellency has been taught to believe the People here a superior Race of Mortals, and finding them of the same temper, disposition, passion and prejudices, Virtues and Vices of the common People of other Governments, they Sink in his Esteem.”
To help break down the sectionalism that even he was guilty of, Washington reorganized the army into three integrated divisions, eliminating the notion of separate provincial armies. He also tried to break up regiments based on geography, but officers and troops alike objected and Washington backed down. “His Excellency,” Greene told Ward, “has a great desire to Bannish every Idea of Local Attachments.” That task, Greene admitted, would continue to cause problems, because it “is next to impossible to unhinge the prejudices that People have for places and things they have had a long Connexion with.” But Greene himself was a budding American nationalist who cared little for the regional prejudices that obsessed the war’s soldiers and politicians alike. “For my own part I feel the cause and not the place,” he wrote. “I would as soon go to Virginia as stay here.”
He soon was on the move all right, not to Virginia but to a Virginian. Washington gave Greene command of a brigade of seven regiments–his three from Rhode Island plus four from Massachusetts–and redeployed him from Roxbury to Prospect Hill, north of Cambridge. And he was placed under the direct command of Major General Charles Lee of Virginia.
Greene took a liking to Lee, which spoke well of the Rhode Islander’s open mind, for Lee was not easy to like. He was not much of one for personal hygiene, even by the standards of an army camp in 1775. His crude manner was more suited to backwoods Virginia than to the affluent circles he had frequented in his native England. Educated in Switzerland and literate enough to quote from the classics, he nevertheless repelled many members of his social class and station with his profanity and rude references.
He dubbed his headquarters “Hobglobin Hall” and once shocked Abigail Adams, who was visiting Lee, by insisting that she shake the paw of one of his dogs. Abigail’s husband, John Adams, preferred to overlook Lee’s personality tics because the general was, beyond doubt, a walking, swearing, publicity coup: an English general converted to the American cause. He also was the most experienced officer in the American army, having fought in the French and Indian War and as a soldier of fortune in the Polish army. True, Adams wrote, Lee was “a queer creature,” but it was important to “forgive a thousand whims for the sake of the soldier and the scholar.”
Greene certainly would have agreed with Adams. The Rhode Island brigadier had yet to witness his first battle, whereas Charles Lee had fought many battles, as he was more than happy to point out. Greene had always sought out the company of men better educated than he, eager to learn from them what he had not learned as a young adult working the family forge. Lee was his latest mentor, and although Greene left little record of their consultations together, it’s easy to imagine him listening attentively as the loquacious Lee expounded on his martial conquests, some of which may actually have been true.
Certainly, Lee’s stories were more exciting than the reality of camp life as the siege continued through summer. Lee’s tales were full of danger and glory, real and imagined; the siege of Boston was about boredom and court-martials and worse. Greene reported to Governor Cooke in early August: “Our troops are now very sickly with the Dysentery. There was about a Week of exceeding hot Weather, [which] brought on this distemper, but they are now getting better, and from the change of aid and the healthy situation we [are] posted in, I hope we shall recover a perfect state of health very soon.”
In what may have been a related development, Greene found that his men had become less than diligent about digging proper latrines, so that soldiers had little choice but to “Void [their] Exerment about the fields.” Camp was foul enough already, with its acrid haze and dubious food and lack of clean clothing. Dictating an order to an aide who, like many others on both sides of the conflict, spelled phonetically, Greene noted that the health “of the Camps is greatly Dangred by these Neglects” and so “it is Recomended to the ofisers of the Several Ridgments to put do attention” to the digging and maintaining of proper latrines. Greene had yet to prove himself on the battlefield, but there was little doubt that he grasped the importance of war’s less glamorous essentials: supply, logistics, discipline, and the health and morale of the rank and file.
While the Americans suffered through the fetid summer in the high ground around Boston, conditions in the British-occupied city were a good deal worse. The civilian population decreased from seventeen thousand to fewer than seven thousand, and Greene was receiving reports from deserters and exiles about the deplorable state of affairs, including an outbreak of smallpox, for soldiers and the public alike. Greene summarized his intelligence from Boston in a letter to Governor Cooke: “Provisions bad, and [fuel] scarce, and ... no harmony among the Troops. . . . Many of the People that [come] out are real Objects of pity, their suffering has been exceeding severe, especially among the poorer sort. Great Violence is done to the cause of humanity in that Town.”
Violence, though not particularly great, was no stranger in the American camps. As the patriot lines moved closer to British forward positions, the long summer days often were punctuated with sniper fire–the two lines were within shooting distance of each other at some points–and periodic shelling. These exchanges did little damage and actually broke up the monotony of the siege. The green American troops took to chasing unexploded cannonballs as they rolled through the lines. But not all such skirmishes were without effect. In late August, Augustus Mumford, a member of the Kentish Guards who had joined Greene when he marched to Boston, was decapitated by a cannonball while digging entrenchments. Greene was devastated. In more than three months of siege and gunfire, he had lost no friends, indeed, no Rhode Island soldier had died, until now. He and Caty knew poor Mumford, and the loss was so powerful that Greene dispatched his friend Colonel Varnum to Rhode Island to break
the news personally to Mumford’s widow. Greene also sent a letter to Caty, who was four months into her pregnancy, to offer her some measure of comfort and reassurance. Addressing his wife as “My Sweet Angel,” Greene wrote:
The fears and apprehensions for my safety, under your present debillitated state, must be a weight too great for you to support. We are all in the hands of the great Jehovah, to him let us look for protection. I trust that our controversy is a Righteous one, and altho many of our friends and rellatives may suffer an untimely fate, yet we must consider the evil Justified by the Righteousness of the dispute. Let us then put our confidence in God and recommend our souls to his care. Stifle you own grief my sweet creature and offer a small tribute of consolation to the afflicted widow.
In late September, Greene’s former tutor, Adam Maxwell, arrived in camp with an urgent message from Henry Ward, the secretary of Rhode Island and brother of Samuel Ward Sr. Henry Ward had come upon a letter written in code and intended for British officials in Boston. Suspecting treachery, he sent the letter to Greene via Maxwell, urging the general to bring it to Washington’s attention. Similarly alarmed, the American general tracked down a Boston woman who had tried to deliver the letter to the British. After interrogation, the woman revealed the letter’s author: her lover, Dr. Benjamin Church, a onetime member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the colony’s Committee of Correspondence, a noted patriot orator, and the chief physician in the American camp. He also was a British spy. The Americans brought in two cryptologists, who broke Church’s code and discovered that the letter contained information about American positions and troop strength.
Greene wrote back to Ward to thank him for his alert actions: “The Author is found. You cannot guess who it is. It is no less a man that the famous Doctor Church.” The famous doctor got off with a relatively easy sentence. He was driven from the colony, jailed for two years, and then sent into exile in the West Indies.