Washington's General (11 page)

Greene saw himself, and his fellow officers and soldiers, as the embodiment of republican virtue, sacrificing everything for the sake of liberty. He was none too patient, then, with civilians who seemed less enthusiastic about the cause, and they were numerous. Again, to Ward, he complained about his fellow Americans who put profits ahead of patriotism.

This is no time for geting Riches but to secure what we have got. Every shadow of Oppression and Extortion ought to disappear, but instead of that we find many Articles of Merchandise multiplied four fold their value. . . . The Farmers are Extortionate where ever their situation furnishes them with an Opportunity. These are the people that I complain mostly of; they are wounding the cause.

In other letters to Ward, Greene showed a grasp of how the rebels in America fit into the larger picture of clashing empires. He urged Ward and Congress to “embrace” France and Spain “as brothers” in the fight against the common enemy, Britain. “We want not their Land Forces in America; their Navy we do,” he wrote.

As the memorable year of 1775 entered its final months, however, Greene and the other American commanders were faced with issues more pressing than extortionate prices and foreign alliances.

Their citizen soldiers were preparing to go home.

With enlistments among the New England soldiers due to expire on December 1, Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas Lynch to Cambridge to meet with Washington and his generals. They arrived on the night of October 15 and immediately were briefed on the perilous situation. Greene sat in on the somber discussion between the delegates and Washington, and he found himself paying careful attention to the legendary Franklin, who years before had fallen in love with and vainly pursued Caty's aunt, Catherine Ray. Of Franklin, Greene wrote, “Attention watched his Lips and Conviction closed his periods,” and he assured Ward that he and the other generals would pay the delegates “every mark of Respect and Attention during their stay.” They remained for four days, during which they heard unpleasant truths. The army was about to melt away, and Washington, the colonies, and Congress would have to recruit and pay for a new army. Otherwise, the siege of Boston would end in a British victory.

The politicians and the generals talked about the very prosaic details of fighting a war: the size of a new army, the costs of feeding, clothing, and supplying the troops, the length of new enlistments, even the size of food rations. They agreed on a sweeping reorganization plan for a new army consisting of twenty thousand troops divided into twenty-six regiments. Greene's three Rhode Island regiments were melded into two new regiments, the 9th and 11th Continentals. Congress, based on the recommendations of Franklin, Harrison, and Lynch, authorized Washington to begin recruiting new soldiers for one-year enlistments, which would expire on December 31, 1776.

Greene and other generals argued that Washington should offer bounties to troops already on duty who agreed to stay with the army for another year. But Washington refused, arguing that the soldiers already were well paid. Many political leaders sided with Washington, but for different reasons. Offering bounties seemed like a step toward the creation of a professional, standing army. And that smacked of oppressive, militaristic Old World tradition, and not the republican ideal of a citizen army.

Greene, in this case, was very much Old World. He pleaded with Washington for bounties, especially as the new year approached and recruiting yielded disappointing results. He believed bounties would help build an army of seventy thousand, a highly unrealistic number. But without bounties, by early December only a few thousand men had signed up for service beyond New Year's Eve. And only a small number of those recruits came from Rhode Island, to Greene's intense mortification. He regularly harangued the Rhode Islanders to put the cause ahead of self, but with disappointing results, even among the officer corps. Of the sixteen second lieutenants in Rhode Island's regiments, none reenlisted. Rhode Island had been assigned a quota of fifteen hundred recruits, but so few came forward that Greene plunged into despair. To Ward, he wrote: “I fear the Colony of Rhode Island is upon the decline. I was in hopes . . . that ours would not have deserted the cause of their Country. But they seem to be so sick of this way of life, and so home sick that I fear the greater part and the best part of the Troops from our Colony will go home.” He told his brother Jacob that civilians at home ought to “make it disgraceful for any of the [soldiers] to return home.”

In the midst of these anxious weeks, Greene had an opportunity to relax and perhaps even entertain some memories of his increasingly distant youth. A delegation of Quakers from Rhode Island, led by the influential Moses Brown, visited Washington's headquarters in mid-December, asking for permission to deliver relief for civilians trapped in Boston and running low on food and fuel. Washington was sympathetic but reluctant, explaining that Bostonians fleeing the city reported that smallpox was epidemic. They agreed that Brown should write to General Howe, the British commander, to effect a meeting between the delegation and several Quakers from Boston. Perhaps with a knowing smile, Washington urged Brown to consult with one of the camp's resident Quaker apostates, Nathanael Greene. (The other was Thomas Mifflin; Brown and his party later met with him, too.)

The Quakers and Greene dined together on the night of December 14. In a journal he kept of his visit, Moses Brown wrote that Greene graciously handled what might have been an awkward occasion. Greene told
Brown and the other Quakers that they should abide by their principles, notwithstanding that he had abandoned them, but he added that they should not take sides in the conflict between America and Britain. If they did, “they must Expect to suffer,” he said.

The Quakers and the former Quaker parted on amiable terms, and the delegation went on to distribute assistance to the poor and hungry in and around Boston, with no regard for politics or political allegiances.

As 1775 drew to a close, some ten thousand men had enlisted to serve in 1776, half the troop strength Congress had authorized. Though Greene and other American commanders pleaded with their troops to remain with the army, they were betrayed by bitter conditions. The weather had turned cold, with snow piled in great white heaps on the ground, and firewood became increasingly scarce. Troops were eating their provisions raw because they had nothing with which to build campfires for cooking. Even wooden fences had been broken apart and burned. “Our suffering,” Greene wrote, “has been inconceivable.” In a humane gesture that was becoming one of the hallmarks of his leadership, Greene ordered that sentries be replaced every hour, rather than every two hours, to protect his men from the freezing, windy conditions.

There was news from across the Atlantic as the year drew to a close, and it was equally chilly. Only now were the Americans learning that King George III, in his speech at the opening of Parliament on October 26, had announced that more troops and ships would be sent to the New World to suppress what he called a “desperate conspiracy,” and that he was receiving “the most friendly offers of assistance” to help put a “speedy end” to the revolt. The British navy already had bombarded and burned the town of Falmouth in Maine, a punitive action that shocked the Americans, and now the king himself was saying the rebels could expect more of the same. Those Americans who clung to the belief that somehow George would mediate the crisis rather than take sides against them were stunned. There no longer was any doubt that the king and Parliament were united.

American troops prepared to leave the snow and smoke and smells of their camps around Boston not knowing that yet another bitter blow was about to fall: American soldiers in Canada, suffering in even more extreme conditions, were about to launch what would prove to be a disastrous New Year's Eve assault on Quebec. The battle cost the life of the promising American commander Richard Montgomery and the freedom of Nathanael Greene's young friend Samuel Ward Jr., who was captured.

A despondent Greene retired to his tent on New Year's Eve to write a long letter to Samuel Ward Sr. Neither man knew, of course, that Sammy Ward was in such mortal peril on this frigid night. But Greene knew that first light would reveal a depleted American army, even though some newly arrived militia units from New England had been deployed to fill in gaps on the lines. He told Ward: “We never have been so weak as we shall be tomorrow when we dismiss the old Troops; we growing weaker and the Enimy getting stronger renders our situation disagreeable. However if they Attack any of our Posts I hope [they'll] be met with a severe repulse.”

Such hopes were little more than wishful thinking. On the morning of January 1, 1776, Nathanael Greene had only seven hundred soldiers in his brigade. His authorized troop strength was more than double that number.

Washington chose to ignore what must have been a depressing sight that first day of the new year. His general orders that morning announced that the new army was, “in every point of View . . . entirely Continental.”

His Excellency hopes that the Importance of the great Cause we are engaged in, will be deeply impressed upon every Man's mind, and wishes it to be considered, that an Army without Order, Regularity and Discipline is no better than a Commission'd Mob; Let us there fore . . . endeavour by all the Skill and Discipline in our power, to acquire that knowledge and conduct which is necessary in War.

To commemorate the occasion, Washington ordered a new flag raised on the hills overlooking Boston. A replica of Britain's Union Jack decorated
the upper left corner, but the flag also bore thirteen stripes on a background of white. From their redoubts guarding Boston, British troops saw the strange banner and cheered. They thought the Americans had surrendered. That, too, was wishful thinking.

Through the first days of January, the old army of provincial militias was replaced by and reorganized as a new Continental army in the midst of the siege. It was, Greene believed, an unprecedented achievement: “We have just experienced the Inconveniency of disbanding an Army within Cannon Shot of the Enimy and forming a new one in its stead, an Instance never before known.” The British never attacked during the transition, which Greene attributed to their faulty intelligence, and recruiting improved dramatically through the first few weeks of the year. On January 4, Greene advised Samuel Ward Sr. that Congress should prepare for outright war, now that the new Continental army was in place.

It is no time for Deliberation, the hour is swiftly rolling on when the Plains of America will be deluged with Human Blood; Resolves, Declarations and all the Parade of Heroism in Words will never obtain a Victory. Arms and Ammunition are as necessary as Men. . . . An Army unequiped will ever feel the want of Spirit and Courage but properly furnished fighting in the best of Causes will bid defiance to the United force of Men and Devils.

The new army was designed to be more stable and more professional than the undependable collection of militia that had borne the fight thus far. The one-year enlistment assured the generals that their regiments would not slip away one night or walk away from camp with weapons in hand. It went without saying that there would be problems on New Year's Eve, 1776, when the new enlistments were up, but Washington, Greene, and the other generals had their sights set on more immediate problems.

Greene continued to enforce strict discipline at the most minute level. He banned card games, which must have seemed like cruel and unusual punishment for bored soldiers working the interminable siege. His reasoning was simple: “[Playing cards] brings on a Habit of Drinking; and the Habit of Drinking [leads to] Disputes and Quarrels, disorder and Confusion which disturbs the Peace and Tranquility of the Camp, and often proves fatal to Individuals.” The last phrase suggests that Greene's rigid discipline was necessary in a camp filled with well-armed men with little to do.

His days were spent among the men, his nights at his desk writing letters long and short to friends and colleagues. Greene had been in camp since April, and the effects of hard work, fatigue, and camp life were beginning to show. His stomach was constantly upset, and in late January he developed jaundice. He asked Washington for permission to return home to recuperate, but his request was denied. Washington once again was pressing his generals for their consent in an attack on Boston, before spring allowed the British to reinforce their garrison. So, instead of submitting himself to the comfort of his now very pregnant wife in Coventry, Greene rested, or tried to rest, in his quarters on Prospect Hill. “I am as yellow as saffron, my appetite all gone, and my flesh too,” he told his brother Jacob. “I am so weak that I can scarcely walk across the room.” When Caty got wind of her husband's illness, she immediately left Rhode Island and set out for camp on Feburary 20. While the precise date isn't known, she had just recently given birth to their first child, a boy they named George Washington Greene.

Caty had been to camp at least once before little George was born, so she was used to the sights and smells of an army of thousands camped in open fields. She had met, or would soon meet, some of the army's leading commanders, including His Excellency, the commander in chief. Not one to turn away from a pretty face, Washington teased young Caty about her “Quaker-preacher” husband and seemed completely charmed. Other officers were similarly taken with Caty's looks, high spirits, and almost scandalous preference for the company of men–and not, save for
Martha Washington, the wives of other generals. The women in camp took note that General Greene never seemed to go to church when his wife was in camp, and wasn't that so very interesting?

Under Caty's care, Greene recovered quickly, and soon the yellow drained from his face. The American army was recovering, too. Troop strength approached eighteen thousand, but its hue was unchanged. Still green, Washington's new troops were about to attack Boston, or at least that was the plan until more cautious generals advised against it. An exasperated Washington devised another plan: if he couldn't attack the British, he could at least make the British attack him. Artillery from New York's Fort Ticonderoga soon rolled, a miracle made possible by Henry Knox's men. Washington decided to put the artillery to immediate use: the Americans would seize Dorchester Heights, overlooking the British positions from the south. General Howe would have no choice but to attack, a prospect Washington welcomed. Greene and his fellow generals Israel Putnam, John Sullivan, and Horatio Gates were ordered to devise a plan to take the heights.