Patriot Pirates (24 page)

He briefly sailed with John Paul Jones before hopping a merchant ship bound for America in March 1780. It was captured, and Conyngham wound up in Mill again. After more than a year of “severe and cruel treatment; dogs, cats, rats, even the grass eaten by prisoners,” he again escaped. In company with his wife, who’d journeyed to Europe to be near him, he returned to Philadelphia with a letter from Franklin certifying that he’d received a Continental commission dated March 1, 1777.

He used the letter as the basis for an appeal for reinstatement as a navy officer; once obtained, it would help his claim for back pay and prize money. But in 1784 the Navy Board ruled that the commission had been “intended for temporary expeditions only and not to give rank in the navy.” In the Board’s view, in other words, he was merely a privateer.

Seven years later Conyngham presented Congress with an account of his Revolutionary activity that included a request for “compensation” in the amount of £2,381. Not even the support of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, could expedite the claim, which languished without a verdict.

Writing “your honorable body” in 1797, he bewailed his “state of doubt and uncertainty, no investigation or report having yet been made.” He continued to submit an “earnest and solemn prayer” for a settlement every year until his death in 1819.

In 1828 a letter from one of Conyngham’s former officers found its way to Timothy Pickering, former judge of the Salem Prize Court and a member of Congress at the time of Conyngham’s first petition. The elderly writer had suffered “ruinous losses” that now compelled him to seek “reward” from the government for his wartime service. “The name of Conyngham in our little navy,” he wrote hopefully, “at the commencement of our Revolutionary War was very conspicuous.”

Pickering, in his mid-eighties, composed a reply in his own hand. “I know nothing of the subject of the inquiry,” he wrote.

Ten

656 frowned on us 6121y until this 1179 and 56 ruined our 1200 in 1284. We 913 a 919 in two fine 916s 905 a brig 211’d 1254 Deane of 18 six-pounders and 1254 other a Bermudan sloop 211’d 2154 17 of ten four-pounders.

[Fortune frowned on us extremely until this spring and almost ruined our stock in trade. We own a part in two fine privateers, one a brig called the
Deane
of 18 six-pounders and the other a Bermudan sloop called the
Active
of ten four-pounders.]

—Barnabas Deane to Nathanael Greene, September 5, 1781

1254 1150 17 was 201’d by 1254 191 in N London 730. 1254
Deane
and other vessels we 913 came near 1117ing 1254 1081 627. Our 841 is about £800.

[The sloop
Active
was burned by the British in New London harbor. The
Deane
and other vessels we own came near sharing the same fate. Our loss is about £800.]

—Barnabas Deane to Nathanael Greene, ten days later

W
hat I have been dreading has come to pass,” Nathanael Greene wrote his wife in October 1780. “George Washington has appointed me to the command of the Southern Army, General Gates being recalled to an examination into his conduct.”

Greene’s chagrin reflected the many setbacks to the rebellion that had followed France’s entry into the war. More than two years after securing the alliance, America still was far from victory. Some of the war’s bloodiest fighting lay ahead, and the thirty-eight-year-old general would be in the thick of it.

The North American operations of the French fleet had been the first disappointment. Admiral d’Estaing’s arrival in 1778, bringing four thousand troops along with his eminent passengers Silas Deane and Conrad Gerard, compelled British forces to abandon Philadelphia for New York, a triumph for Americans still celebrating Burgoyne’s defeat and William Howe’s resignation from enemy command (he was replaced by Henry Clinton, who’d taken Newport in 1776).

But d’Estaing, after a feeble brush with the Royal Navy off New Jersey, failed in a joint assault with Continental forces to liberate Newport in August. A year later he unsuccessfully laid siege to Savannah, under British occupation since late 1778, in another joint expedition. The defeat, termed “the greatest event that has happened in the whole war” by an ebullient General Clinton, drove a wedge of distrust between American and French forces.

The British rode the momentum of the Savannah victory to the successful capture of Charleston in May 1780, inflicting on the rebels their single greatest toll of casualties and prisoners. After crushing Continental resistance in Georgia that same month, Clinton handed over his southern command to Charles Cornwallis and returned to New York.

Cornwallis’s march through the Carolinas caused the region’s loyalist-patriot tensions to erupt in what historians have called “the first American civil war.” Fighting among partisan militia reached new levels of atrocity and civilian suffering. Fearing the colonies would splinter as a result, Congress, without consulting Washington, dispatched an army under Horatio Gates to repel the enemy’s northward advance.

Against Burgoyne at Saratoga, Gates had been more lucky than good. Against Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina, in August 1780, his most memorable feat was to flee the battlefield faster and farther than anyone had done before. “One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half!” Alexander Hamilton wrote in dismay.

News of the Camden rout, which cost more than a thousand American dead, reached Congress ten days after the treachery of Benedict Arnold was discovered. Arnold had solicited a £20,000 bribe to provide the enemy with the defensive plans of the key American stronghold at West Point. He was foiled only through the chance capture of Major John Andre, his British liaison to Clinton. The betrayal by one of its most brilliant officers (“Who can we trust now?” Washington wondered) stunned the nation. Pushed to the edge of panic by subsequent news of the fiasco at Camden, members of Congress—even those who, in the afterglow of Saratoga, had wanted him to replace the seemingly ineffective Washington—demanded that Gates be relieved of command of the Southern Army.

Typically, General Greene (“how wretched this state, to always be at war with one’s inclinations”) was of two minds about seeking the job. He was tired of running the quartermaster department. Though profitable thanks to personal commissions on government transactions, his logistical duties created the dispiriting circumstance of a public that “refuses me that degree of reputation due to my services” while also deeming “my merit less than my reward.”

Beyond unavoidable whispers of graft, Greene caught blame for the country’s larger fiscal woes. Now that four thousand Continental dollars bought only one dollar in gold, “certain members of Congress are endeavoring to spread among the people that the avarice and extravagance of the quartermaster staff are the principal cause of all the depreciation of the money.” In fact the opposite was true. Measured in hard money rather than Continental paper, the per capita cost of supporting troops in the field had decreased under his stewardship as quartermaster general.

Yet as anxious as he was for a new assignment, he’d lost much of his belief in the glory of serving in battle. The failed Franco-American campaign at Newport in 1780 had brought scorn on the military. Greene, temporarily detached from his department to lead one of the American divisions, had performed well; the defeat resulted mainly from miscommunication between his volatile superior, General John Sullivan, and d’Estaing’s offshore fleet. Rhode Islanders, angry that the British hadn’t been expelled, called the operation “ill planned and worse conducted.” The loudest critics were John and Nicholas Brown.

When Greene heard the Providence brothers were saying that Continental commanders lacked audacity, he responded with uncharacteristic venom, firing off a letter to John Brown that opened with a shot at John’s rearguard bravado. “Men often feel courageous at a distance from danger that faint through fear when they come to be exposed.”

Venting a lifetime’s resentment toward the man who’d financially bullied his family for decades, Green suggested that Rhode Island’s scandalous heritage disqualified its citizens from making moral judgments. “However,” he concluded, “I cannot help feeling mortified that those that have been at home making their fortunes and living in the lap of luxury and enjoying all the pleasures of domestic life should be the first to sport with the feelings of officers who have stood as a barrier between them and ruin.”

Nicholas Brown came to his brother’s defense, explaining with careful deference to Greene’s rank that John’s supposed “ungenerous insinuations” about the army’s performance had been misrepresented. Mollified, the general wrote back (more politely than honestly) that perhaps he’d overreacted. “Your family is one of the first in this state and one whose good opinion and friendship I have always endeavored to cultivate. Therefore the least reproach would be more sensibly felt.”

Greene’s sensitivity to criticism finally drove him to resign as quartermaster general in July. Congress’s recent reorganization of the department had resulted in the dismissal of his top aides (and business partners), Charles Pettit and John Cox. The implication of corruption was obvious and, to Greene, unacceptable. Congress answered his demand for a vote of confidence with silence. When Greene then submitted his resignation, only Washington’s intercession prevented a vote to cashier him from the service for seeming to defy the republican principle of civilian control of the military.

Back in the field, Greene’s first notable assignment was “tragical”—he presided over the espionage trial of Benedict Arnold’s cohort, John Andre. The twenty-nine-year-old British major was impossible to dislike; during the occupation of Philadelphia he’d impressed the townspeople with his fairness, dignity, and charm. Upon capture, had he been wearing his uniform plainly rather than under a topcoat he might have been exchanged as a prisoner of war. But as a spy attempting to pass as a civilian, his execution was certain and its means mandatory: hanging.

Andre requested a firing squad. Greene was inclined to allow it, but Washington, who admitted the major was “more unfortunate than criminal,” insisted on hanging and left it to Greene to justify the decision to Andre’s many American sympathizers. “He is either a spy or an innocent man,” Greene told them. Permitting the more humane execution by firing squad “will awaken public compassion, and the belief will become general that there were exculpatory circumstances entitling him to lenity beyond which he received—perhaps entitling him to pardon. Hang him therefore, or set him free.”

Andre was hanged on October 2, 1780. An observer of the major’s demeanor before the scaffold described “some degree of trepidation, placing his foot on a stone and rolling it over and choking in his throat, as if attempting to swallow.” After adjusting the noose about his neck, Andre asked those in attendance to bear witness “that I meet my fate like a brave man.” Buried on the spot, his remains were later moved to London’s Westminster Abbey, where a monument to his memory was erected by George III.

G
reene’s spirits hit bottom that fall. “I am such an unfortunate dog,” he wrote Jeremiah Wadsworth. Wadsworth, the army’s commissary general, was the primary investor along with Greene in the deceptively named Barnabas Deane & Company.

The partnership was the only money-loser in Wadsworth’s vast portfolio; after the war he emerged as a leading banker and entrepreneur. But Barnabas Deane & Company had a larger stake in privateers than did Wadsworth’s other ventures—and it seemed that any privateers to which Greene was connected failed. Though the general took no part in choosing vessels and captains, he was apologetic about the company’s poor record. “We have been very unfortunate in our navigation,” he wrote Wadsworth. “There is no help for these things. It is true I can ill afford it, but what is that to the purpose?”

His privateer exposure was even greater in the family-run Jacob Greene & Company. The capture of two of its warships the previous spring, worth $7,000 in hard silver, “destroyed all our plans for this season,” Jacob lamented. “If we had never been concerned in navigation we should have been possessed of a much larger property than we now are.”

Four months later, Jacob had more bad news. “We purchased a small part of a new privateer at Salem and the very first cruise she was taken, so let us turn to the right or left we are unfortunate.” Lest Nathanael think Jacob was careless with his brother’s money, Jacob assured him, “I am vexed and mortified at our ill success more on your account than my own. My connection is small compared with yours.”

Named by Washington to command the Southern Army on October 14, Greene broke the news to his wife with regret, knowing it meant they wouldn’t see each other until his return. Resolving his money woes would likewise have to wait, he sent his wife a summary of his holdings in case he was killed. In addition to their Rhode Island home, he owned a New Jersey farm and three thousand acres along the Hudson River. He had £2,500 invested in Barnabas Deane & Company and in deals with Pettit and Cox. But of the cash tied up with his brothers, “I know not nor will they give me any account. I suppose it is owing to their not knowing the state of their own affairs.”

Greene reached Charlotte, North Carolina, in December. The army he inherited from Gates numbered 2,400 “naked and dispirited” men. Most belonged to “six weeks militia” and fought out of greed (Greene likened their pillaging to “the locusts of Egypt”) or to settle personal scores and generational feuds. That the Quaker-born Rhode Islander was able to persuade them that their “partisan strokes” were pointless “unless you have a good army to take advantage of your success” was the first of his many notable feats of command.

Almost two hundred years later, General George S. Patton would answer a reporter’s question, “What makes a great general?” with a simple reply: “Not to be beaten.” The definition particularly applies to Greene because throughout his campaign he never gained a single victory. Rather, he maneuvered his troops to inflict maximum damage with minimum casualties, withdrawing from each field of battle with his army’s spirit and fighting ability intact and the enemy’s depleted and shaken.

Greene combined the small-unit, guerrilla style of the militia with a nimbler version of the traditional practice of lining up armies in opposing ranks and smashing one another to pieces. His first deployment was his most famous. Against military principle, he divided his army in the face of Cornwallis’s larger force, at times separating the two commands by more than a hundred miles yet periodically uniting them for battle.

It’s been called “the most audacious and ingenious piece of military strategy in the war.” Revealingly, Henry Clinton noted the instant confidence it gave British officers. “Thus separated,” he wrote in his memoirs, Greene’s army seemed “certainly not in a situation to encourage any hopes of success from its operations.” The move prompted the aggressive Cornwallis likewise to split his army in order to pursue both American units. This further strained his supply lines and, thanks to Greene’s hard-won appreciation of logistics and advance scouting, let the Americans dictate when and where to fight.

The portion of Greene’s army led by Daniel Morgan defeated the cavalry of Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens in January 1781. Morgan then rejoined Greene, who nipped at the British in a series of skirmishes that drew Cornwallis northward away from his supply bases. In March Greene abruptly pivoted and confronted the enemy. His popularity and success had swelled his ranks to more than four thousand men, though 80 percent were raw recruits. Meanwhile casualties, disease, hunger, and desertion had reduced the redcoats to half that number. Cornwallis was desperate for conventional battle, however, and attacked the waiting Americans at Guilford Courthouse.

After a day of ferocious fighting, Greene broke contact first. He gathered his men and headed south, where he continued “not to be beaten” in engagements in Georgia and South Carolina. It had been six years since his first combat outside Boston. The enemy likewise had won that battle, but at a cost. “A few such victories would ruin them,” he’d written. The lessons of that experience still applied, for similar “victories” over Greene in the second half of 1781 ultimately forced the British back to Savannah and Charleston to recover. Within a year both towns were evacuated.