Patriot Pirates (25 page)

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.

G
reene’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.

T
he 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. With 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.

He was wrong. Congress disavowed the transaction, a decision underpinned by the common presumption that Greene was rich; his obsessive discretion about his business activities had concealed his losses as well as his profits. Banks had no money to help pay the debt but did provide a statement in court that Greene “neither has, or ever had, any commercial connection with me of a private nature, or intimated a wish or desire of the kind.”

Banks regretted “that I took an improper liberty with General Greene’s name,” but was confident that his partner had nothing to worry about. “I cannot suppose an idle surmise can affect a reputation so permanently established.” But the general knew the ways of Congress. “How different in their conduct from the Romans who honored their officers even in adversity.”

Greene implored Congress to reconsider its verdict against him. Colleagues and subordinates sent petitions expressing outrage that he should “have his conduct made a subject of public discussion, from a transaction which had the public good and the relief of the suffering soldiers for its objects.” Congress refused.

By 1785 Greene’s continuing woes had brewed pure hatred for Banks. “I verily believe if I was to meet him I should put him to death.” He went to Virginia in a last attempt to squeeze money out the man. His fortunes were nothing if not consistent, however, for he found that Banks had died suddenly, leaving no assets and no documents of their erstwhile collaboration. Near to breakdown, Greene wrote his wife, “I tremble when I think of the enormous sums I owe. I seem to be doomed to a life of slavery and anxiety.”

The following spring, the forty-four-year-old general collapsed from heatstroke while walking the grounds of Mulberry Grove. His friend, General Anthony Wayne, sent word around the army. “I have just seen a great and good man die.”

Modern historians have assessed Greene’s legacy this way: “The general who could not win a battle had brilliantly forced the enemy out of the southland in less than a year. As a strategist among the Patriots, he was second only to Washington; some would place him first.”

His assessment of himself was humble. Fate, Greene wrote, “has never been much my friend. If she has granted me one favor, she has commonly brought on me two misfortunes to balance it.”

Five years after his death, Caty Greene presented her husband’s case for restitution to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. After noting Greene’s error in not notifying Congress beforehand of his emergency deal with Banks, Hamilton supported the appeal.

On April 27, 1792, President Washington, on Congress’s recommendation, “this day approved and signed an act for indemnifying the estate of the late General Nathanael Greene.” The award was for $47,000, equal to well over $1 million today.

1782

G
UADELOUPE,
W
EST
I
NDIES

Prime Minister Frederick North, architect of the infamous Pirate Act of 1777, fell from power in March 1782. Weeks later, John Manley was exchanged out of Mill Prison after a two-year stint during which he’d failed at three escape attempts, each of them followed with increasingly harsher penalties of reduced rations and confinement in the “black hole.” He’d won admiration by challenging a bullying inmate to a duel with pistols probably acquired from prison officials who hoped both would be killed. The other prisoner backed down, converting his reputation for toughness into that of “a great coward,” Manley wrote.

Back in America, he took command of
Deane
, a Continental frigate originally outfitted in France by Silas Deane and John Ross. Who exactly had chosen that name isn’t clear, but in June 1782 Congress retracted the honor (“the person after whom she was called has by his perfidy and defection forfeited all title to every mark of honor or respect”) and rechristened the vessel
Hague
.

In the West Indies Manley captured several prizes, including a transport armed with twenty guns, before engaging four British warships off Guadeloupe. Sailing inside a reef out of range of their fire, he blasted a thirteen-gun salute “in defiance” once safely away. The island governor commended him. “You have perfectly fulfilled the duty of a brave officer, and it is with utmost satisfaction that I pay the tribute to your honor.” On his return voyage to Boston in 1783, Manley took the last great prize of the war, the 340-ton
Baille
, a fitting bookend to the ordnance ship
Nancy
whose capture in 1775 had made his name.

Hague
was decommissioned in May, one of only two Continental warships to survive the war. The navy had logged 198 captures all told, 12 of them Royal Navy ships. Most were tallied by John Paul Jones, a full-time navy man, and Gustavus Conyngham, whose ambiguous combination of public and private service confounded Congress and obscured his posthumous renown.

Privateers, no doubt only because forced to it, captured or destroyed sixteen Royal Navy warships. At least six hundred of their prizes were settled in American courts; countless others were tried in foreign courts, retaken by the British, or lost somewhere at sea. Edward Stanton Maclay, the first serious chronicler of Revolutionary privateering, wrote in 1898, “It is very much to be regretted that many of the cruises and actions of these craft have not been recorded.”

Maclay was an unabashed cheerleader for his subject. “Had it not been for our privateers, the Stars and Stripes would have been completely swept from the seas.” His counterparts among historians of the Continental Navy have been compelled to be more circumspect. William M. Fowler, Jr., ends his book,
Rebels Under Sail
, with something like an apology for taking up so much of the reader’s time. “If the Continental Navy had never existed, it is hard to see how the outcome of the Revolution could have been any different.” And in his 2003 biography of John Paul Jones, Evan Thomas demythologizes Jones and the strategic significance of the navy in which he served while still giving full due to the character, valor, and sacrifice of Jones and his fellow sailors.