Washington's General (34 page)

Supplying such a force, however, presented another set of problems. Greene's supply line, when it functioned at all, stretched hundreds of miles, to Virginia and even farther north. When Greene asked for additional arms and perhaps a detachment of French soldiers based in Newport, a pained Washington explained that such help would not be coming.

Strategically, too, the South was unlike the North. There was no single vital river such as the Hudson to defend at all costs; instead there were dozens of smaller rivers, streams, and tributaries, not to mention disease-infested lowland swamps and rugged backcountry mountains, to consider when moving the army and supplies. Greene studied maps that bore place-names and features unknown to him: the Yadkin River, the Pee Dee, the High Hills of Santee. In the South, he would be a stranger in a foreign land.

Indeed, the South was unfamiliar in more than geography. Britain's southern strategy not only had broken two Continental armies but had demolished civil authority in Georgia and South Carolina. While Greene certainly did not enjoy his dealings with politicians in the North, at least states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania had functioning legislatures that could assist the army with supplies and recruits. But that was no longer true in the lower South. South Carolina's governor, John Rutledge, had fled with Gates's army into North Carolina after the rout at Camden. Both South Carolina and Georgia were virtually restored to British rule, resisted only by bands of partisan guerrillas under the command of men
like Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and Thomas Sumter. In the North, Greene developed a healthy distrust of militiamen. But in the South, these mobile, effective, and often ruthless citizen soldiers were the bulwark of the faltering American cause. They were all that was left after the reckless Gates destroyed the main southern army at Camden.

The patriot irregulars were not the only well-armed bands roaming the southern countryside. Tory militia–more numerous, more fervent, and more deadly than those Greene enountered in the North–took heart from Britain's victories in the region, and recruits were pouring into the ranks, eager to join the winning side. Tory units manned some of the forts the British were building in South Carolina, and they were an integral part of Cornwallis's ambitious plans for pacifying the lower South and bringing the war into North Carolina and Virginia.

Greene, then, would be facing not only Cornwallis and his increasingly notorious cavalry commander, Banastre Tarleton, but also thousands of his fellow Americans. The war in the South truly was a civil war and so would be more vicious than anything Greene had encountered.

It is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of Nathanael Greene's position in the fall of 1780. His new command promised to be a military, political, and logistical nightmare. After the devastating American defeats in Charleston and Camden, after Arnold's betrayal, an American victory still seemed as implausible as it did during the retreat through New Jersey in 1776 or during the winters at Valley Forge and Morristown. As he made his way south from state to state, begging for supplies, for money, for support beyond encouraging words, Nathanael Greene seemed to be riding toward oblivion, with death and destruction his only companions.

Greene's cavalry commander, Henry Lee, understood how close the cause was to failure. If the British defeated Greene, he wrote, “the Carolinas and Georgia inevitably become members of the British empire.” The enemy would then move into Virginia, and soon “[all] the country south of the James River . . . would be ground to dust and ashes. Such misery, without hope, could not be long endured.” It would be just a matter of time, Lee wrote, before the cause was abandoned and “re-annexation to the mother country . . . would be solicited and obtained.”

Everything, then, depended on Nathanael Greene.

From his days in Rhode Island, where politics was so interwined with individual leaders–Hopkins versus Ward–Greene understood the importance of personal leadership, of the ability of charismatic leaders to inspire, encourage, and organize. He saw personal leadership exercised most dramatically in the person of George Washington, who by force of character alone kept alive the Revolution in its earlier, darkest hours. Now, at this new critical moment, surrounded by the shattered remnants of a broken cause, Greene knew that his own leadership ability would be put to the test. “I believe the views and wishes of the great body of the people are entirely with us,” he wrote. “But remove the personal influence of a few and they are a lifeless, inanimate mass, without direction or spirit.”

It was not the most sanguine expression of republican confidence in the people. One can hardly imagine Thomas Jefferson writing such a sentence. But then again, Thomas Jefferson had not marched through New Jersey during the lonely depths of 1776, had not begged his fellow citizens for forage and supplies in the fields of Pennsylvania, and had not tried to fight a war in the name of countrymen who so often seemed apathetic at best, or hostile at worst.

Greene and his second in command, the capable Baron von Steuben, arrived in Philadelphia on October 27 to request the money and materiel they would need to rebuild the southern army. They spent more than a week in the capital–which was about a week longer than Greene wished to stay–meeting with committees, discussing logistics, and generally pleading for more of everything. His meetings did not go well. “Congress can furnish no money, and the Board of War neither clothing or other necessities,” he wrote to Washington. “Indeed the prospect is dismal, and truly distressing.”

Hoping to do better with patriots of more means, Greene appealed to merchants in Philadelphia to supply his troops with five thousand uniforms. The merchants told him that they were too busy. Actually, they
believed they would never get paid, a consideration Greene regarded with contempt. “[If] there is not public spirit enough in the people to defend their liberties, they will well deserve to be slaves,” he told Washington. Eventually, grudging patriotism had its day; local merchants sold fifteen hundred uniforms to the Board of War for Greene's troops.

Before leaving Philadelphia for additional begging sessions in other states, Greene received unexpected good news from the South. Several weeks earlier, on October 7, American guerrillas had routed an enemy detachment of a thousand loyalists and about a hundred British regulars at a place called Kings Mountain in South Carolina. British and Tory casualties were enormous, some 60 percent, and among those killed was a young and promising British officer, Patrick Ferguson. The American militiamen mutilated his corpse, an extra act of savagery designed to send a message to other Americans who sympathized with the British. If they acted on their sympathies, they, too, might meet Ferguson's fate or the fate of Tory militiamen who were killed even after they attempted to surrender.

The defeat at Kings Mountain forced the seemingly unstoppable Cornwallis to postpone his planned advance into North Carolina. And the American message to the local Tories apparently was well understood. Cornwallis told his superiors in London that the pro-British civilian population was “totally disheartened.” Suddenly, Greene's burdens seemed slightly lighter as he left Philadelphia and continued his journey to the South.

Greene rode through Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, stopping to ask political leaders for help with supplies and recruitment. He was met with sympathetic nods, expressions of support, and not much else. He told Washington, “They promise me all the assistance in their power, but are candid enough to tell me, that I must place little [dependence] on them, as they have neither money nor credit, and from the temper of the people are afraid to push matters to extremities.”

He wrote that depressing letter in the early morning light of a bedroom at Mount Vernon, where he was a guest of Martha Washington's. The southern autumn had descended on the fields of northern Virginia,
leaving trees bare and adding a bite to sunset. The northern army, he knew, would welcome the change of seasons, just as his wife did, for cold weather meant winter quarters, and winter quarters meant a respite from battle, if not always from suffering. The only respite he would receive now was this short stay at the home of his commander in chief.

His travels already had taken him more than two hundred miles and nearly eight weeks, with much more riding to come before reaching North Carolina. But Greene remained in Mount Vernon barely twenty-four hours, just enough time to socialize with Mrs. Washington and take a short ride around the plantation before setting off for Richmond and a meeting with Governor Thomas Jefferson.

Though he presided over the nation's richest state, Jefferson was in no better position to offer help than his less celebrated colleagues in Maryland and Delaware. Virginia had been expected to recruit thirty-five hundred men for Continental service, but only fifteen hundred had turned out. And those few who did enlist were hardly in fighting form. Some quickly deserted; others were so unhealthy that Greene believed they would be of little use on the battlefield. Jefferson promised Greene a hundred wagons to transport his meager supplies, but even with the power to seize private property, the governor's agents could round up only eighteen. “Our prospects with respect to supplies are very discouraging,” Greene glumly reported to Washington.

Greene's discussions with Jefferson left him uninspired and pessimistic. The governor could summon no inspiring phrases or poetic tributes to send Greene on his way to battle. Instead, there was only grim accounting and gloomy statistics. Greene wondered, not for the first time, how and why such burdens had fallen on his shoulders. He had given so much to the cause, and now, in this critical hour, all he asked for was the tools to do his job. But his fellow patriots said they could only do so much. Greene found himself longing for the relative comforts of the North, for the company of Washington, of Caty, of his friends like Henry Knox and Jeremiah Wadsworth. Melancholy and dread overcame him as he considered the enormity of what lay ahead. He wrote to Washington:

I cannot contemplate my own situation without the greatest degree of anxiety. I am far removed from almost all my friends and connections, and have to prosecute a war . . . with almost insurmountable difficulties. . . . How I shall be able to support myself under all these embarrassments God only knows.

These were not the sentiments George Washington wanted to read from his ebullient and loyal subordinate, the man he had entrusted with nothing less than the cause itself. He knew his friend was capable of selfpity, but surely now was not the time for Greene's flights of woe-is-me. Woe was the cause itself, as Greene surely knew.

But Greene could not help but reflect on what the looming catastrophe would mean for his reputation, so carefully guarded and fiercely defended.

My only consolation is, that if I fail I hope it will not be accompanied with any peculiar marks of personal disgrace. Censure and reproach ever follow the unfortunate. This I expect if I don't succeed. . . . The ruin of my family is what hangs most heavy upon my mind. My fortune is small; and misfortune or disgrace to me must be ruin to them.

After putting these dark thoughts on paper, he left Steuben in Richmond to defend the army's barren depots and set out for North Carolina.

Grim as Greene's prospects were, he could take some solace in the quality of his new subordinates. The partisan commanders, particularly Marion, Sumter, and Pickens, were fighters who knew the terrain as neither Greene nor Cornwallis knew it. Greene also came to rely on another talented foreign officer, Thaddeus Kosciuszko of Poland, who had served as the southern army's chief engineer under Gates. It would be the Pole's assignment to ford the region's rivers as Greene moved his army through alien territory.

As he studied the terrain of this hostile region, Greene the organizer, Greene the supplier, Greene the quartermaster immediately understood that the logistical challenges of the South could be summed up in a word:
boats.
He would need them, plenty of them, for the roads that supplied him would be rivers, and his lines of retreat invariably would involve crossings great and small. The Roanoke, the Yadkin, the Dan, the Pee Dee, and hundreds of small streams coursed though the southern landscape like so many veins and arteries. Greene dispatched men to survey the rivers, to note “the Depth of the Water, the Current & the Rocks & every other Obstruction that will impede the Business of Transportation.”

Greene then turned his attention to horseflesh and brainpower. In the mobile war he was planning, cavalry would play a significant role in monitoring the enemy's movements, harassing his flanks, and seemingly appearing from nowhere on the battlefield. The commander of these quick-striking troops would have to be daring and shrewd–and he was. In Lighthorse Harry Lee, Greene added to the impressive cast of supporting characters he was assembling for the new campaign. Assisting Lee was William Washington, a cousin of the commander in chief. And then there was a tough, hulking backwoodsman named Daniel Morgan, a veteran of the French and Indian War. Morgan had quit the army in 1779, claiming he was too ill to continue but privately nursing a grievance over promotions. He returned to duty, however, after Gates's disaster at Camden, and he now offered his services to Greene.

The new southern commander did not hesitate to seek the counsel of strangers who could instruct him not only in the terrain but in the particular bitterness of the southern war. Years ago, long before he joined the army, the young Nathanael Greene eagerly collected friends who were better educated and better read than he was, and he learned from them. Now, in his first independent command of the war, Greene was secure enough to surround himself with able, talented people–some of them professional soldiers with far more experience than he had.

He arrived at the American camp in Charlotte on December 2 and took over command from Gates the following day with surprisingly little
tension. The cordiality between the two no doubt was a sign of the desperate moment; though they had clashed before, Gates and Greene knew that their differences meant nothing now. Washington had given Greene authority to conduct an inquiry into Gates's retreat from Camden, but Greene decided against such a proceeding. In fact, in the coming months, he would defend Gates, a magnanimous gesture at a time when Congress was looking for scapegoats.