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Nathanael Greene - Charles Lee

The American who emerged from the Revolution with a military reputation second only to that of George Washington was a Quaker with a physical affliction that had caused him to be rejected as an officer by the men in his militia company. Nathanael Greene’s career was a curious interplay of such contradictions, with the result that his fortunes seemed always at the flood or the ebb, never fully resolved. Raised a Quaker, he never lost the deep sense of piety he learned at meeting, but could not go along with the doctrine of pacifism, which he regarded as impractical under such circumstances as the “business of necessity” in which the colonies found themselves in 1775. A big, husky man, Greene had a powerful frame that came from years at his father’s forge in Coventry, Rhode Island, but his robust appearance camouflaged chronic ill health. Asthma plagued him, inoculation against smallpox left a spot in his right eye that pained him frequently, and a stiff right knee caused him to limp noticeably. None of these ailments kept him from being something of a lady’s man in his younger days, but the gimpy leg frustrated his first attempt to become an officer. In 1774, when the men of the Rhode Island Kentish Guards were choosing officers, they refused to have Greene even though he was thought to be the best qualified; what kind of volunteer company, the men asked, wanted a captain who limped across the parade ground? The word that he was “a blemish to the company” mortified Greene, who was sensitive about his leg and about how it would seem for a successful, thirty-twoyear-old man to serve as a private. But he swallowed his pride and let it be known that he was willing to carry a musket in the ranks.

At daybreak on the morning after the battles at Lexington and Concord the Kentish Guards were on the march toward Massachusetts. It turned out that the company was not needed near Boston just then, but the Rhode Island assembly voted to raise a i,5oo-man brigade known as the Army of Observation to preserve “the liberties of America”—somewhat ironically in the name of His Majesty King George in. And when it came time to select a commander, no one could think of anyone better qualified than Nathanael Greene, who was given the rank of brigadier general. During nine years of service with the Continental Army Greene’s career was a series of ups and downs, a frustrating blend of military defeats or personal disappointments leavened with moments of triumph. His first and worst defeat came with the fall of Fort Washington in November, 1776, which Greene had stubbornly insisted on defending despite the better judgment of Washington. It was one of the most costly losses of the entire war, but from it Greene learned never again to rely on raw, inexperienced troops to withstand a heavy assault by disciplined British regulars. At the battles of Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Newport the Rhode Islander distinguished and redeemed himself, but he had a rare capacity for alienating the civilians who ran the shaky new government. There were complaints that he dominated the Commander in Chief; angry disputes followed Congress’ appointment of a French volunteer to higher rank than Greene; and when he reluctantly accepted the post of quartermaster general at Washington’s insistence and Congress tried to reorganize his department, Greene resigned from the job, and several members of Congress tried to have him cashiered from the Army for challenging their authority. When Washington sent him south in 1780 to replace Horatio Gates, whose army had been annihilated at Camden (Greene wrote him magnanimously but ungrammatically that “you was unfortunate but not blameable”), Greene came into his own at last. Usually outnumbered, cursed with a continual lack of men and supplies, he learned “to practice that by finesse which I dared not attempt by force.” His insight into the mind and strategy of his able foe Lord Cornwallis and Greene’s adept use of guerrilla warfare involving a mastery of swift, deadly movement were bolstered by a dogged determination summed up in his statement, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.” Ina land of steaming swamps and musical names—the Congaree, the Wateree, the Pee Dee, the High Hills of Santee—Greene fought a desperately difficult, dirty war against the British and Tories, shortages, and disease; and although he never won a major victory, he never lost a campaign. Even before he had pushed Cornwallis toward Yorktown and defeat, it began to dawn on Americans that, as Washington’s military secretary Joseph Reed put it, if Greene “cannot preserve the Country it is because it cannot be preserved.” In mastering the technique of survival, Greene wrote, “There are few generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too far, and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our Enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way.”

For months after the American victory at Yorktown he went on fighting; and when he finally returned in triumph to Providence, he was plagued with debts he had contracted in order to supply his army. He sold his Rhode Island property and returned to a plantation that a grateful Georgia had given him, where he worked hard to scratch out a meager livelihood but was so overwhelmed by difficulties that he scarcely knew where to turn. In June, 1786, after a long, hot day in the rice fields, he died of sunstroke at the age of forty-four. A half dozen years passed, and an inventive young man from Connecticut named Eli Whitney visited Greene’s widow at the plantation, where he perceived the manifest need to make such unprofitable land productive. In 1793, within a period of only ten days, Whitney designed a machine called the cotton gin.

One acquaintance nicknamed him Naso, for the long beak that dominated his dark, pinched face. Mohawk warriors, with whom he lived during the French and Indian War, called him Ounewaterika, or “Boiling Water”—a name that only partially suggested his disposition. And during the first year of the Revolution certain members of the Continental Congress regarded him as the greatest general in the world—the officer who should have led the American army had he not been an Englishman. A man around whom controversy swarmed like angry hornets, Charles Lee was a Jekyll-Hyde personality, a stormy character eaten with pride and ambition, brilliant, courtly, scholarly and at the same time uncouth, slovenly, and contentious.

The family into which he was born in Chester, England, a few months before George Washington’s birthday in 1732, had been gentry since the thirteenth century, and Charles, the seventh child—tall, bony, thin and ugly as a scarecrow —was educated in a manner befitting a son of the Enlightenment. Commissioned in his father’s regiment at the age of fifteen, he came to America in 1755 to fight the French and Indians, where he acquired a reputation for a violent temper and brutally frank opinions. Back in Europe, he was active in literary, theatrical, and political circles, condemned the government loudly, fought in Portugal, became an aide to King Stanislas of Poland (who made him a major general), and was increasingly on the outs with the ministry of George in, whom he called a “despicable and tho stupid at the same time not innoxious dolt.” Finally, he had enough of the Old World and sailed to America in 1773, where he rapidly met most of the men who were to assume importance in the Revolution and became, by the time hostilities broke out, a leading contender for commander of the Continental Army. But Congress had to have a native-born American, and to Lee’s chagrin, George Washington of Virginia received the appointment. Lee was named a major general, and it required no imagination to see that he was a perfect original. An acquaintance, Jeremy Belknap, described him as “an odd genius; full of fire and passion, and but little good manners; a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs, —of which he had two at dinner with him, one of them a native of Pomerania, which I should have taken for a bear had I seen him in the woods.” By the fall of 1776 Lee had won acclaim for the defense of Charleston, he was on close or intimate terms with the important members of Congress, and he was the army’s favorite officer. This—coupled with the fact that Washington had presided over an unbroken series of disasters beginning with the loss of Long Island—gave rise to rumors that Charles Lee would supersede the Virginian in command of the army. Lee’s insatiable ambition and colossal vanity made it certain that he would seek the opportunity to do so, and when Washington divided his army after the Battle of White Plains and left Lee in Westchester while he retreated through New Jersey, Lee took his own good time about rejoining his commander. Meantime, he was carrying on a highly dubious correspondence with other officers, including Joseph Reed of Washington’s staff, to whom he complained of the Commander in Chiefs “fatal indecision of mind.” He wrote to various officials in New England, requesting recruits and supplies for his own army (he could expect little help from Washington, he told them) and observing that it was up to the military to save cause and country from the British and a bungling Congress. “There are times,” he stated, “when we must commit treason against the Laws of the State for the salvation of the State.”

Moving slowly across New Jersey to join Washington, despite repeated requests that he do so as quickly as possible, Lee made the great mistake of spending the night of December 12, 1776, about three miles from his army’s camp at a tavern in Basking Ridge, and was captured the next morning by a party of British dragoons. (The young cavalryman who took Lee was to gain notoriety on the battlegrounds of America as “Bloody” Tarleton; after escorting his “Noble Prisoner” to Brunswick, Tarleton, whose actual first name was Banastre, declared proudly that this “most miraculous Event” had “put an End to the Campaign.”) Lee was imprisoned for nearly two years, never knowing if he would be tried as a deserter from the British army, and to save his neck, submitted a plan to the enemy for ending the rebellion—a scheme that Americans did not learn about until seventy years after his death. He was finally exchanged, but at the Battle of Monmouth he inexplicably ordered a retreat and was later court-martialed and suspended for twelve months. His brilliant, merciless pen was his undoing: during the trial he cast aspersions on Washington and other officers that could not be forgiven, and when his year’s penance was up, wrote such an offensive letter to Congress that that body cashiered him from the service. In 1782, heavily in debt and still fulminating against Washington, whom he called a “puffed up charlatan … extremely prodigal of other men’s blood and a great oeconomist of his own,” he died in Philadelphia.

Lee’s capture effectively ended his career, and there is no saying what might have happened had that event not occurred. He had been chafing for months about his subordinate role, he had the bit in his teeth and was lining up allies for what appeared to be a final power struggle with Washington, and on the strength of their respective achievements to that moment, it is quite possible that the Virginian might have lost out. Had Lee instead of Washington received credit for the victories that came later, at a time when many Americans were seriously questioning Washington’s military capabilities, it is not easy to say what the consequences might have been then, or after the war’s end. For Lee was scornful of Washington’s considered habit of deferring to Congress, he had no use whatever for the principle of military subservience to a civilian government, and in hindsight it maybe asked whether the removal of this power-hungry egocentric from the center stage may not have been the luckiest possible break for the country.

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