Washington's General (4 page)

The molasses trade developed and prospered because merchants, government officials, and ordinary citizens had simply ignored an act of Parliament. In 1733, Parliament ordered a tax of six pence on every gallon of molasses imported from foreign countries, including parts of the West Indies not under British rule. The Sugar Act of 1733 was a protectionist measure designed to assist the British-controlled molasses industry, but it soon became clear that collection of these taxes would have made molasses too expensive. So the taxes were ignored, or at very least were collected only sporadically; by one estimate, customs officials were content to collect about 10 percent of the taxes due. Rhode Islanders liked the arrangement, and the Crown's appointees quickly learned to ask no questions. Three thousand miles away from London, blessed with a charter that offered them a reasonable facsimile of self-government, proud of their tradition of tolerating dissenters, Rhode Islanders took great delight in thumbing their collective nose at dictates of the English government.

Much of what we know about young Nathanael Greene is based not on records but on stories and legends handed down to his grandson
George Washington Greene who met some of Nathanael's brothers and contemporaries. In writing of his grandfather's earliest years, George Washington Greene described a childhood that was by turns idyllic and laborious. Fields and forest were their most intimate neighbors, with the nearest large town, East Greenwich, two miles away. In the summers, the boys swam in nearby streams after a long day in the fields or the forge. Then it was off to a friend's home, often a journey of several miles, for an evening's entertainment. Strict Quaker custom regulated even these pastimes, and the Greene boys, like their peers, were forbidden to dance.

Of course, as parents through the centuries have learned to their dismay, there is nothing so alluring to a young person as a forbidden pleasure. Somehow, in the darkened countryside of Kent County, Rhode Island, far from the disapproving gaze of his preacher father, Nathanael Greene learned to dance. Perhaps around a discreet bonfire in a lonely field, perhaps on the earthen floor of a deserted forge, this inquisitive Quaker boy tapped his feet to fiddle music and met the children of other pious households. He was limping even then, but the young ladies of Kent County were a good deal more tolerant of this disability than his future militia comrades–most of the time. One partner, however, couldn't help but blurt out what others noticed without comment. “You dance stiffly,” the young lady said, her eyes perhaps drifting to the future general's slightly lame right leg.

Greene had a quick answer. “Very true,” he conceded. “But you see that I dance strong.”

Young Nathanael was a fugitive at these dances and socials, as were many of his friends. Only through elaborate playacting and the active cooperation of his brothers could he make his way from house to fields undetected. Greene family legend has it that on dance nights, Nathanael went off to bed like a good boy, only to sneak out a window when the coast was clear. (It has been suggested that his limp may have been the result of an injury suffered during one of these perilous escapes.) He climbed down from his second-story room and dashed off into the darkness, sneaking back into his room hours later with nobody the wiser–except
for his coconspiring brothers. This plan of campaign required intense preparation, shrewd planning, and, on at least one occasion, no shortage of courage. Sometimes, even parents figure out that their children are up to no good, and Nathanael Sr. made such a discovery one chilly night. Young Nathanael came waltzing home to find his father not only awake but on lookout duty outside the house. Ominously, Nathanael Sr. had a bullwhip in his hands. A careful survey of the landscape convinced young Nathanael that he had made a terrible strategic error–he had left himself no line of retreat. So, legend says, he crept over to a pile of shingles near the house, placed a few under his coat to defend the most likely area of attack, and then walked toward his father to meet his fate. His screams of agony, family members later said, were very convincing.

The overpowering figure of pious, strict, and occasionally well-armed Nathanael Greene Sr. dominated his sons into their young adulthood. His influence became even more profound when the only female in the Greene household, young Nathanael's mother, Mary, died when Nathanael was eleven years old. The effect of the Greenes' loss can only be guessed at, for later in life, Nathanael wrote little about his mother. The continued influence of his father and his rigid ways, however, was ever present in Nathanael's letters. “I lament the want of a liberal Education; I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me,” Greene wrote. “For my own part I was Educated a Quaker, and amongst the most Supersticious sort, and that of itself is a sufficient Obstacle to cramp the best of Geniuses, much more mine.”

As he made the journey from child to adolescent after his mother's death, young Nathanael devoured the few books he was permitted to read. His intense studies of the Bible, the essential text for children of all pious colonial families, gave young Nathanael a moral and literary framework that would serve him well into adulthood. To complement the Scriptures, Greene and his siblings read from approved Quaker texts, including a book cowritten by the sect's founder, George Fox. With the lumbering title
Instructions for Right Spelling and Plain Directions for
Reading and Writing True English,
this workbook was written specifically for Quaker households, its exercises designed not only to teach grammar and spelling but to reinforce Quaker theology. Greene no doubt spent a great deal of time with Fox's work, and although he developed into a clear writer of “True English,” he was not much of one for “Right Spelling.”

Among the other approved books Greene read, and reread, were
The Journal,
another text by George Fox, and a Quaker classic titled
An Apology for the True Christian Divinity
by Robert Barclay. Though the books sought to reinforce Quaker principles and demonstrate the fallacy of other denominations, the authors' skepticism of tradition and authority and their emphasis on individual conscience prompted Greene to ask more questions and to demand more answers.

Somehow–perhaps he solemnly promised that he'd never dance again!–he persuaded his father to hire a tutor named Adam Maxwell, a local schoolmaster and immigrant from Scotland. Tradition has it that Maxwell instructed Nathanael in mathematics and Latin, but Greene's grandson suggested that the Latin lessons were short-lived, if they existed at all. Clearly, though, somebody inspired Greene to study classic Roman authors, for later in life he demonstrated an easy familiarity with Seneca, Horace, and Euclid, and an intimate knowledge of the writings of a Roman general named Julius Caesar. Their works were not on the Quakers' list of necessary reading.

Late in their lives, Greene's brothers would recall seeing Nathanael climb upstairs, book in hand, to read by himself by candlelight in his bedroom. He read between chores, during his journeys to Newport, across Narragansett Bay, and he read at the forge and the mill. Decades after Nathanael's death, his brothers proudly displayed a well-worn seat by the family forge. There, Nathanael tried to manage the irons in the fire while reading whatever book caught his fancy that day. According to George Washington Greene, “he would often forget himself in his book long after the last kernel had been shaken from the hopper.”

His brothers did not share Nathanael's eagerness to learn and to read.
So his was a lonely pursuit, and he rarely met inquisitive peers or possible mentors as he carried out his chores in and around the family home. But when he visited Newport, New England's second-busiest seaport (Boston was the busiest), he encountered men of education and knowledge, men who traded in ideas as well as goods, men with libraries and college degrees. Though extremely self-conscious about his own lack of formal education, Greene sought out men from whom he believed he might learn something, a trait that would serve him well on the battlefield. It must have taken no small amount of courage and self-confidence for this young Quaker to strike up conversations with men of letters in Newport. But he did, and for his efforts he formed friendships with such well-educated men as Ezra Stiles, a minister and future president of Yale University.

Greene's grandson tells a possibly apochryphal story about Nathanael's first encounter with the learned and influential Stiles. Greene was in a bookstore, perhaps for the first time, in Newport, and he announced to the proprietor that he wished to buy a book. “Which one?” the proprietor asked. Flustered, the country boy from the forges of Potowomut was stuck for an answer. His embarrassment won the sympathy of a fellow patron, Stiles, who struck up a conversation with Greene about books and writers. The two men, one a learned clergyman, the other an earnest student, became friendly, and Greene often visited the older man when he was in Newport.

Whether or not the story of Greene's encounter at the bookstore is true, it's not hard to imagine that the young man felt a little unsure of himself as he ventured ever so cautiously into the wide world beyond the forge. He persisted nevertheless and became friendly with a young college student known only as Giles, who inspired Nathanael to further bury himself in books. Soon, Nathanael Greene was a walking incongruity: a self-taught child of the Enlightenment, dressed in the unadorned black garb of a Quaker. On his business trips to Newport, he sold miniature anchors he made at the family forge, and with the proceeds he began buying books. Through the influence of his new friend Stiles, he read John Locke's influential treatise
Essay on Human Understanding,
which celebrated inquiry and intellectual independence. He read the classic English work on the law, Sir William Blackstone's
Commentaries.
And he devoured
The Drapier's Letters,
a series of articles written in the 1720s by the Irish satirist and rabble-rouser Jonathan Swift. Writing under the guise of a shopkeeper named M. B. Drapier, Swift argued vehemently against British economic policies in Ireland and helped inspire a campaign that thwarted Parliament's attempt to introduce inferior currency in Ireland. But Swift went beyond just the issue of the moment. He wrote, “All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” And, addressing his fellow Irish, he said, “You are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.” Jonathan Swift quickly became Nathanael Greene's favorite author.

Yet there is no evidence that young Nathanael Greene sought to apply the rhetoric of Jonathan Swift to Rhode Island or to America. Still in his twenties, single with no immediate prospects for a family, he was very much a work in progress, still unsure of where life would take him, and without a guide to help him on the journey. Through his contacts in Newport and the friendship of Ezra Stiles, he knew of a larger world beyond the forge, the farm, and the mill. As yet, though, he simply wasn't sure how he might fit into that world. And that world was beginning to change.

Strapped for cash and stuck with bills from the French and Indian War, Parliament turned its eyes westward in the 1760s, toward the colonies in North America. The military power of Britain offered the colonists security; the economic might of the empire made their prosperity possible. It was time, then, to extract some measure of revenue from those subjects of the Crown scattered in the towns and forests of America.

Of all the measures Parliament might have considered, of all the taxes it might have levied, none would have been worse for Rhode Island than the Sugar Act. It was not a new tax; the Sugar Act had been passed in 1733 and was promptly disregarded. Beginning in May 1763, however,
it became a real tax. Parliament ordered that the duty of six pence per gallon on non-British molasses from the West Indies was no longer to be ignored or evaded or bribed away. Colonial governors and customs officials were put on notice that they could no longer act as if they knew nothing about uncollected molasses duties. To illustrate the point, Royal Navy warships took up positions in American ports. Parliament ordered them to “seize and proceed to condemnation of all such Ships and Vessels as you shall find offending” against the newly muscular Sugar Act. In December 1763, HMS
Squirrel
set up operations in Newport. For reasons best known to the Royal Navy's commanders, the ship bore a name not likely to inspire much in the way of fear or respect from notably irrascible Rhode Islanders. The
Squirrel's
twenty guns, however, got the point across.

The crackdown was meant for all of His Majesty's colonies, but Rhode Island had the most to lose. By the 1760s, the colony's prosperity and development were linked inextricably to the molasses trade, and that trade was based on the informal agreement among merchants, politicians, and customs officials to act as though the Sugar Act didn't exist. The six-pence tax would have made the cost of importing molasses from non-British sources prohibitive, and there was only a limited amount of molasses from British possessions, not nearly enough to satisfy demand. Enforcement of the tax on foreign molasses, then, threatened Rhode Island's financial health and prosperity. A Rhode Island merchant soon reported that “all business seems to wear a gloom not before seen in America.”

Inspired by their merchant colleagues in Boston, who were prepared to resist enforcement of the molasses tax, Rhode Island's politicians and businessmen drew up a written protest and dispatched it to London. The document emphasized the importance of molasses to Rhode Island's economy: rum, the Rhode Islanders said, was “the main hinge upon which the trade of the colony turns, and many hundreds of persons depend immediately upon it for a subsistence.” The merchants painted a picture of desperation: “Two-thirds of our vessels will become
useless. . . . Our mechanics and those who depend upon the merchant for employment must seek for subsistence elsewhere. . . . An end will be put to our commerce.” The Rhode Islanders and other American protesters knew that the Sugar Act was due for renewal (or expiration) in early 1764, and they hoped their arguments would carry some weight with Parliament. New legislation in 1764 lowered the tax to three pence per gallon, but it was hardly a victory for colonial merchants. Parliament made the molasses tax permanent, and it increased taxes on sugar from foreign colonies as well as adding taxes on other, non-British goods.