Washington's General (28 page)

Sullivan, his dreams of a glorious victory fading as the French warships disappeared from view, wrote a letter of protest to d'Estaing on August 22, accusing the French of treachery, cowardice, and any number of unmanly vices. The fleet's retreat, Sullivan's letter charged, was “derogatory to the honor of France . . . and highly injurious to the alliance formed between the two nations.” Greene unwisely signed this indiscreet and inflammatory missive, avoiding a confrontation with his more experienced colleague. Before the Battle of Monmouth, he had joined Washington's other generals in signing a document containing advice with which he did not agree, and now he refused to confront the ill-tempered Sullivan over a letter he knew was bound to cause problems. The French action disappointed Greene as much as it did Sullivan, but Greene understood that a highly charged letter might cause permanent damage to America's vital alliance with France. But, rather than give voice to his objections, he meekly signed the letter, as he had at Monmouth.

As Greene suspected, the letter became an international incident. Lafayette sent a letter of his own to d'Estaing, assuring him that he had had nothing to do with it and, in fact, condemned it. But Sullivan was not finished: he issued an order to his remaining troops, confidently asserting that they didn't need the French after all. American arms, he wrote, would prevail despite France's “refusal to assist.”

Sullivan might well have believed what he told his troops–that they needed no help from their ally–but Greene knew better. Sullivan's assertions, Greene realized, had implications beyond the alliance. To
Greene's chagrin, many delegates in Congress continued to insist that the war could be won with a small regular army reinforced with citizen soldiers in the militia service. The Rhode Island campaign, however, demonstrated the folly of such thinking. The militia melted away at the first sign of adversity. So the Americans needed the French, and needed them desperately.

Greene sent a private, conciliatory letter to Lafayette, which tempered the young Frenchman's anger. Greene was “sensible,” Lafayette told Washington, and had offered views “very different from the expressions I have a right to complain of.” Washington, who readily agreed that Sullivan's letter to d'Estaing was “impolitic,” deputized Greene to resolve and contain the dispute that Sullivan had started. “I depend much upon your temper and influence to conciliate that animosity, which I plainly perceive . . . between the American officers and the French in our service,” Washington wrote. The commander in chief clearly was worried that publication of the offensive documents would inflame public opinion against the French. So, Washington told Greene, it was imperative to make sure that Sullivan's words remained secret.

I beg you will take every measure to keep the protest. . . from being made public. . . . [My] dear Sir, you can conceive my meaning better than I can express it, and I therefore fully depend upon your exerting yourself to heal all private animosities between our principal officers and the French, and to prevent all illiberal expressions and reflections that may fall from the Army at large.

Working with Lafayette, Greene soothed relations with d'Estaing, who actually offered to march the French marines from Boston to Newport if that would help the Americans. It was a fine gesture, but it was clear the expedition would not achieve its goal without a fleet in Narragansett Bay. Nevertheless, even with a depleted force, Greene urged Sullivan to attack. Choose three hundred experienced troops, Greene told Sullivan, put them aboard boats “with good Oars Men,” and land
them south of the British redoubts. The flanking maneuver would place the Newport garrison between Sullivan's main force and the detachment.

Greene later admitted that his plan was far too risky, and Sullivan wisely decided to withdraw to the northern part of Aquidneck Island under cover of darkness on August 28. If d'Estaing changed his mind and chose to return to Rhode Island–a vain hope–Sullivan believed he still might salvage something from this campaign. He deployed his troops along the two-mile width of the island and again assigned Greene command of the shrunken army's right wing. Sammy Ward, temporarily in command of the free black troops whom Christopher Greene had organized, was entrenched on a redoubt guarding Greene's right flank. Christopher Greene was deployed in the center of the American line, while Varnum's Rhode Islanders were arrayed on the left of Greene's line.

The British and Hessian forces from Newport attacked the American position not long after sunrise on August 29. The Americans fell back but then held as both sides began exchanging artillery fire. Greene favored more aggressive tactics, telling Sullivan he should move the entire force forward to crush the British. And once again, Sullivan chose to defend rather than attack, a prudent decision Greene later praised. As the battle continued into the afternoon, the British brought up four small warships to pound Greene's position, but he turned his artillery east toward the bay, firing on and eventually chasing away the warships.

At about two o'clock, Greene's position came under heavy assault as a Hessian unit tried to break through the American right. Greene counterattacked with a combination of Continental regulars, Massachusetts militia units, and a unit of light troops. Ward's black troops fought with conspicuous bravery, twice beating back a Hessian assault with bayonets and bare hands. The enemy soon retreated, to Greene's delight. “We . . . put the Enemy to the rout and I had the pleasure to see them run in worse disorder than they did at the battle of Monmouth,” Greene later told Washington. He expressed his emotions more colorfully in a letter to one of his friends, the Unitarian minister John Murray.

To behold our fellows, chasing the British off the field of battle, afforded a pleasure which you can better conceive than I can describe. If, my dear Murray, I had before been an unbeliever, I have had sufficient evidence of the intervention of Divine Providence to reclaim me from infidelity.

The Americans suffered about two hundred casualties; the British and Hessians, nearly three hundred. The battle was a draw, but once again, the Americans had fought well and bravely, particularly those under Greene's command. Greene soon learned, however, that the battle was not quite over. Sullivan, bitter over what he considered a lost opportunity, continued to criticize the French, adding to Greene's bulging diplomatic portfolio. He wrote another discreet letter to d'Estaing, saying that he was “Exceedingly hurt” and “astonished” by Sullivan's continued carping. “We consider ourselves under great obligations to France for their generous . . . interposition, and I should be very sorry to be thought [ungrateful] or to be wanting in respect to your Excellency, who came for the sole purpose of befriending us.” The Americans were relieved when d'Estaing replied to Greene, saying that his letter “was of a nature to console me.”

The grand alliance survived.

After Sullivan's withdrawal from Newport, Greene returned home to Coventry to be with his family again. Caty's child was due momentarily, but Greene left for Boston before the birth. It is unlikely that he relished the journey, for his agenda in Boston was a reminder that he once again was quartermaster general and not a field commander. His tasks in Boston included an accounting of new shoes, uniforms, shorts, and blankets for the army, as well as meetings with Massachusetts politicians during which he pleaded for price controls on such goods as hay and corn. It was exhausting, detail-oriented work (he told Washington that the “cloathing department” had purchased “7669 pairs of shoes”), a far cry from his most recent service in Rhode Island.

“My appointment is flattering to my fortune,” Greene conceded, referring
to the 1 percent commission he shared with his two deputies on all department orders. He added, however, that the post was “humiliating to my Military pride.” He kept his business in Boston brief and was on his way home from John Hancock's house on September 24 when he came upon a family servant dispatched from Coventry to fetch him. Caty had given birth to a baby girl the day before, and neither was doing well. Greene rode through a wet, raw night and arrived home, soaked to the skin, at nine o'clock. Caty was ill and in bed; their baby was weak and seemingly destined for a tragically early grave.

They named the girl Cornelia Lott, a tribute to the daughter of their friend and host in New Jersey, Abraham Lott. With Nathanael at their bedside, Caty and little Cornelia grew stronger in the days after his arrival. This respite in his own home, now filled with laughter and hope, reminded Greene of the life he had given up for his country. It also brought to mind words he had written in the early months of the war, when he warned that militiamen would prove unreliable because, as part-time soldiers, they retained “all the tender feelings of domestic life” and so were not “sufficiently fortified” for the “shocking scenes of war.” Now, Greene's own “tender feelings” softened his heart, or at least his resolve. But it was not the shock of war he sought to avoid, but the tedious paperwork and unheroic duties of the job he loathed. The Rhode Island campaign and the Battle of Monmouth had reminded him of why he had joined the army. But now it was time to return to Washington's side as the general in charge of making sure the soldiers had enough blankets and tents and hammers. Important work, to be sure. But not the work Nathanael Greene wished to perform.

Contributing to his melancholy mood was, as ever, the thought that somebody, somewhere, was criticizing him. “I am [persuaded] I have saved the public Millions of dollars,” he told Rhode Island governor William Greene. “Yet I am told some [think] my merit less than my reward.” When he heard complaints that some of his department's agents were corrupt, he replied that a “charge against a quarter-master general is most like the cry of a mad dog in England. Every one joins in the cry, and lends their assistance to pelt him to death.”

“This is a [malevolent] age,” he wrote in one of his last letters from Coventry before returning to Washington's headquarters in New York. “A season wherein envy, malice and detraction are very predominant.”

He wished nothing more than to be relieved of this work, which sometimes kept him at his desk past midnight. Accounts from his deputy quartermasters and purchasing agents arrived regularly in his tent, detailing, to cite some examples, the numbers of riding bridles, barrels of tar, reams of writing paper, wooden bowls, canteens, shirts, tomahawks, and other items in various units. He confided to a friend that he hoped to be assigned a command in the South, where the British were preparing to launch an offensive that would lead to the fall of Savannah in late December 1778. A transfer to this newly active theater of the war, he told a friend, “will free me from the disagreeable department I am in.”

But there would be no relief from the disagreeable department, at least not for some time. Greene dutifully reported to Washington in mid-October and soon was back to reading reports, hectoring politicians about the curse of runaway inflation, and issuing orders for forage, wagons, tools, and the like.

The war in the North was at a virtual standstill. The main British army was in New York City; the main American army guarded the Hudson River, waiting for the British to make a move. The status quo was more than just a moral victory for the Americans; it was a tangible sign of the army's resolve and leadership. The defeats of 1776, the disappointments of 1777, and the ordeal of Valley Forge had been terrible, but not fatal. The army had been preserved; it remained in the field, and the Revolution continued. Nathanael Greene understood the simple glory and utter necessity of mere survival.

By the time Greene returned to Washington, it was time to look for winter quarters again. Memories of his time at home were hard to shake, and he began to entertain hopes that Caty would make her annual visit to winter camp despite her difficult delivery of Cornelia and the infant's brush with death. Perhaps not surprisingly, Caty was not terribly enthusiastic about the trip. Little Cornelia was only a few months old, and Caty herself was not fully recovered from the baby's birth. Little George and
Martha were just getting familiar with her again after her yearlong absence–she had been home less than six months. And there was no denying the obvious: if she spent another winter and spring in camp, she most likely would return home pregnant again. Her last two deliveries had been difficult and nearly tragic, in that order. She had three children now, the oldest of whom, George, would soon turn three. Hardly a wonder, then, that she seemed less than eager to join Nathanael in camp.

Greene sensed her reluctance, and he tried his best to sympathize. He desperately wanted her to come–“I am impatient to see you,” he wrote on November 13–but he made a gallant effort to understand why she might choose to stay home with her children. He said he would willingly sacrifice “this pleasure . . . rather than expose you too much in coming to camp.” But it was clear he hoped she would decide otherwise. He urged her to bring little George along to keep both of them company through the winter. And then there was the opinion of little George's namesake. In a transparent ploy to get Caty on the road from Rhode Island, Greene noted that Washington had been asking about her. “I [dined] yesterday with His Excellency, who enquired very particularly after you and renewed his charge to have you at Camp very soon,” Greene wrote.

He dispatched the letter by messenger, hoping that if his appeals didn't work, well, perhaps His Excellency's just might.

After a few weeks of scouting central New Jersey, Greene settled on Middlebrook–where he had been quartered briefly the previous year–as the main army's camp. From there, the army could keep its watch on New York while maintaining reliable supply lines. Greene established his headquarters in a two-story stone house, whose halls were soon filled with the effervescent presence of Caty and the laughter of young George Washington Greene.