Nathanael Greene

His father ran a Rhode Island foundry and considered book learning close to sinful, but the son talked him into a tutor anyway and read his way through law, mathematics, and the Enlightenment on his own time. A limp from childhood marked him for life and nearly kept him out of uniform altogether — the militia he helped found in 1774 balked at electing a visibly lame private soldier as an officer. His Quaker meeting read him out that same year for attending musters. He married Catharine Littlefield in July 1774 and inherited the family ironworks, still assembling a personal library of Caesar and Frederick the Great when the war reached Rhode Island.

Washington gave him the Southern command in October 1780, after two American armies there had already been destroyed. Within eight months the British held nothing south of Charleston but a strip of coast, and Cornwallis was marching toward Yorktown. Congress voted him a gold medal for a battle he did not technically win. BriefHistory tells that campaign in full. This page is about what running an army on his own signature, with almost no money behind it, did to Greene once the shooting stopped.

To keep his starving Southern army supplied, Greene personally guaranteed a contractor's debts to the merchant house of Banks & Co. — a decision that outlived the war by decades. Georgia thanked him with Mulberry Grove, a rice plantation near Savannah worked by enslaved people, which the pacifist-raised general accepted and moved his family onto in 1783. Neither gift settled the ledger: the government payment meant to cover the contract went astray, creditors came after Greene directly, and by 1791 his widow was petitioning Congress for relief. A 1792 relief act paid two thousand dollars against a debt closer to twenty-four hundred pounds sterling, and litigation over the balance dragged on into the 1850s, more than half a century after the man who owed it was dead.

Greene fell ill on June 12, 1786, and was dead of sunstroke within the week, at forty-three, not quite three years past Yorktown. His widow, Catharine, kept Mulberry Grove running and in 1793 hosted a Yale-educated tutor named Eli Whitney, hired to teach her children — Whitney built the cotton gin on the property that year, on the plantation of the general whose war had been fought, nominally, for liberty. The debt kept dragging at the family for another two generations. Savannah reburied Greene under a monument in Johnson Square in 1902, and fourteen American counties carry his name, more than any other Revolutionary general besides Washington.

Nathanael Greene's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Kentish Guards company
  Rhode Island militia unit he helped organize, over his Quaker meeting's objection 1774
• Continental Army Quartermaster Department other
  Rebuilt the army's collapsed supply system with Charles Pettit and John Cox 1778
• The Race to the Dan mission
  A 200-mile retreat that preserved his army ahead of Cornwallis 1781
• Southern Campaign of 1780-1781 mission
  Cleared British forces from the Carolinas and Georgia without a single outright battlefield win 1781
• Battle of Eutaw Springs mission
  Last major engagement of the campaign; Congress awarded him a gold medal despite the tactical loss 1781

• July 1773 aged 30 Read out of his Quaker meeting for attending militia drill
• July 20, 1774 aged 31 Marries Catharine Littlefield
• June 22, 1775 aged 32 Commissioned brigadier general in the Continental Army At 32, its youngest general officer.
• March 2, 1778 aged 35 Takes over as Continental Army quartermaster general Accepted reluctantly, at Washington's insistence.
• October 14, 1780 aged 38 Assumes command of the shattered Southern Department
• March 15, 1781 aged 38 Fights Cornwallis to a costly draw at Guilford Courthouse
• September 8, 1781 aged 39 Battle of Eutaw Springs, the campaign's last major engagement
• 1783 aged ~41 Moves his family to Mulberry Grove, a Georgia plantation gifted for his service
• June 19, 1786 aged 43 Dies of sunstroke at Mulberry Grove, age 43

• George Washington 1732–1799
  First President of the United States and commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. trusted by, over the objections of Congress
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. praised his death as an irreplaceable loss
• Eli Whitney 1765–1825
  Inventor of the cotton gin, which revolutionized Southern agriculture and had profound economic impacts. built the cotton gin on his widow's plantation
• Benedict Arnold 1741–1801
  Continental Army general whose plot to surrender West Point made his name the American synonym for treason. briefly succeeded at West Point after his treason