Washington's General by Terry Golway Read Free Book Online

foundry and forge. Nathanael Greene began his studies of Blackstone’s
Commentaries
because of the number of lawsuits involving the family business.
    Through his twenties, Greene’s health began to show signs of afflictions he would later suffer on the battlefield. He complained of asthma attacks that kept him awake at night, and his right eye was slightly scarred after he was innoculated against smallpox during a visit to New York.The scar, which occasionally became infected, was nothing compared to the disease itself, one of the most prolific killers of the era. Greene’s willingness to risk innoculation further demonstrated his free-thinking, independent spirit, for even in progressive Rhode Island in the early 1770s, smallpox innoculation was illegal.
    Just before his father’s death in 1770, Nathanael had moved from the Greene homestead to Coventry, about ten miles to the west, where Nathanael Greene & Company opened a new foundry. The twenty-eight-year-old bachelor built himself a new house, which he called Spell Hall, and made sure that it included a splendid library and study. And while he enjoyed the company of his growing collection of books, he was hoping for more animated companionship, too. He had fallen in love with Anna Ward, a daughter of Samuel Ward, the colony’s occasional governor and leader of one of Rhode Island’s political factions. But Anna, known as Nancy to her family, apparently wasn’t attracted to the young Quaker gentleman. Nathanael was crushed when it became apparent that Miss Ward had no intention of returning his affections. The humiliation became all the more intense when one of Nathanael’s younger brothers, Christopher, married another one of Samuel Ward’s daughters, Catherine, in 1774, formally linking the Greene family to the politically powerful Wards.
    The aborted relationship between Nathanael and Nancy was not in vain, at least not for posterity’s sake. Nathanael became friendly with her young brother, Samuel Ward Jr., who was precisely half Nathanael’s age and, at age fourteen in 1770, already was a student at Rhode Island College. Nathanael and the lad he called Sammy corresponded through the early 1770s, and Nathanael’s letters have survived. They are filled with spelling mistakes and earnest pronouncements about the world, like this offering from 1771: “To pursue Virtue where theres no Opposition is the Merit of a common Man, But to Practice it in spight of all Opposition is the Carrector of a truly great and Noble Soul.”
    What’s striking about Greene’s early letters to Sammy is the absence of any discussion of Rhode Island politics or the raging controversies of the day. He used the opportunity to lament his formal education, whileoffering Sammy advice about life and learning. “Study to be wise and learn to be prudent,” he told Sammy. “Learning is not Virtue but the means to bring us an aquaintance with it. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and Dreadful. Let these be your motives to action through Life, the relief of the distressed, the detection of frauds, the defeat of oppression, and diffusion of happiness.”
    At the age of thirty, Nathanael Greene was absorbed in introspection, self-improvement, and the misery of unrequited love. But great events would soon offer him the opportunity to put his words of wisdom to the test.

3 The Making of a Rebel
    Lieutenant William Dudingston, commander of the British navy schooner
Gaspee,
was a man who took his job very seriously. He and his ship were part of the navy’s crackdown on the colonial smuggling racket, and he had a reputation as a particularly aggressive enforcer of His Majesty’s revenue laws. Several years earlier, in 1769, he had assaulted fishermen in Pennsylvania for no apparent reason. Not surprisingly, then, customs officials in Boston decided he was just the man