Washington's General (5 page)

What made the Sugar Act of 1764 historic, and even more threatening, was Parliament's assertion that it had a right to levy taxes to raise revenues, especially to pay for the thousands of British soldiers in America. Previously, taxes were considered a means by which Parliament regulated trade. The government of George Grenville warned that colonists could expect further taxes in the future, including the possibility of “certain Stamp Duties.”

A few months after the
Squirrel
arrived to remind Rhode Island of its new obligations, sailors aboard another Royal Navy vessel, the
St. John,
were accused of stealing goods from Newport's merchants. As an indication of just how tense affairs had become in Newport by the spring of 1764, residents gained access to a fort and opened fire on the
St. John,
but dispersed before the
Squirrel's
guns could be brought to bear. When the
Squirrel's
commander, Captain Richard Smith, discovered that the man who had fired the first shots actually acted on orders from local officials, he condemned Rhode Island as a “licentious republic” in need of drastic change. Smith demanded apologies; local officials were equally angry. They wanted to know why the gunners hadn't sunk the
St. John.

The following spring, angry Newporters again took action against the Royal Navy when the captain and crew of the
Maidstone
virtually shut down the port by seizing merchant sailors and fishermen coming in and out of the port and putting them to work on His Majesty's ships. This practice, known as impressment, was common on the seas (and would become one of the flashpoints in the War of 1812) and in seaports, but
the
Maidstone's
captain was particularly ruthless. Newport struck back in early June 1765. A group of about five hundred citizens made off with one of the
Maidstone's
boats and burned it, to the delight of all.

This was a shocking act of defiance, but only one manifestation of Rhode Island's anger. In late 1764, Governor Hopkins published a treatise titled
The Rights of the Colonies Examined,
which argued vehemently against the Sugar Act. He also complained against the latest outrage: the Stamp Act. Parliament, he argued, had no right to collect taxes without the consent of the colonists themselves. Furthermore, he wrote, the American colonies were “entitled to equal liberty and freedom with their fellow subjects in Europe.”

Hopkins's arguments helped move the roiling debate in America toward issues larger than any single tax or law. The issue, as Hopkins and others were making clear, was liberty.

After limited debate in Parliament, the Stamp Act passed the House of Commons on February 27, 1765, and the House of Lords on March 8. Unlike past taxes, the Stamp Act did not concern itself with trade regulation. It was designed to raise revenue, specifically, to help pay for British troops stationed in America that cost the treasury three hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. Military tribunals called Admiralty Courts were given jurisdiction over those accused of violating the new law.

Reaction throughout the colonies was swift and certain. In Rhode Island, the public's outrage inspired a small insurrection in Newport in late August. The colony's legislators asserted publicly that Parliament had no right to impose such a tax on the colonies.

Despite the protests and violence, the Stamp Act remained on schedule, due to take effect on November 1. A load of stamped paper arrived in Newport Harbor a few weeks before the deadline, inspiring a new round of denunciations. A special supplement to the
Newport Mercury
of October 28 reported the imminent death of “North American Liberty.” A few of Liberty's friends “went a few Days ago to wait upon the poor old Gentleman, and found him indeed gasping his last, and now find him reduced to a Skelton,” wrote the newspaper's correspondent,
identified only as “A Mourner.” The Mourner invited the people of Newport to a public funeral and burial for old man Liberty on the morning of November 1.

The ceremony took place at the appointed hour, with none of the violence of previous demonstrations. A standoff followed: the stamped paper remained on board a British ship in the harbor; the stamp master, Augustus Johnston, remained in his office but incapable of action; and all eyes turned to Samuel Ward, who had succeeded Hopkins as the colony's governor. He ordered that Rhode Island set aside Thursday, November 28, as a day of Thanksgiving. This seemingly innocuous gesture was, in fact, a work of political genius. Ward played the role of dutiful royal subject in asking “Almighty God” to bless and protect King George Ill's “most precious life,” which was nice enough. But Ward added a few more requests for the Almighty. He prayed that “our invaluable Rights, Liberties and Privileges, civil and religious, may be precious” in God's sight, and that “He will be pleased to frustrate every Attempt to deprive us of them.”

Ward's language did not go unnoticed. Other colonial radicals cheered his sly maneuver, noting that no other governor had yet asked for God's intercession on behalf of American liberty.

In late December, Stamp Master Johnston resigned. Governor Ward informed London of Johnston's resignation and further asserted that the tax was “inconsistent with” Rhode Island's “natural and just rights and privileges.” As for the act itself, Ward reported that he couldn't enforce it because, after all, he had no stamped paper.

It was sitting in the cargo hold of a British ship in Newport Harbor, and nobody dared unload it.

The hated Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but tensions between the colonies and Parliament continued, and Rhode Islanders in particular kept a wary eye out for further limitations on their liberty and their commerce. There was no shortage of them: the Townshend Acts imposed taxes on glass, lead, imported paper, and, most famously, tea, while the Declaratory Act asserted Parliament's right to legislate for and tax the colonies. The Townshend taxes inspired throughout the colonies an
agreement to stop importing British-made goods, but for some of Rhode Island's merchants, love of commerce trumped love of liberty. They continued their trade with Britain, just as other Rhode Islanders traded with the French during the French and Indian War. Merchants in Boston and Philadelphia sent messages to Newport suggesting that the Rhode Islanders reconsider their position, lest they find themselves with no markets within the colonies. The British were not alone in bemoaning Rhode Island's iconoclasm and sense of independence.

Nathanael Greene spent the turbulent 1760s in Potowomut, continuing his work in the family business and trying to find some balance between the Quaker tradition of his family and his own intellectual curiosity. He took a small step into the colony's civic affairs when he joined three other men, including his tutor, Adam Maxwell, in petitioning the Rhode Island Assembly to relocate Rhode Island College from the town of Warren to East Greenwich, not far from the family homestead. Greene very likely wrote the petition, which described East Greenwich as “abounding with Every necessary supply to render the Scholars Comfortable.” Included among the town's amenities, Greene wrote with impressive earnestness, was “a post office.”

The petition failed, and the college was moved to Providence and eventually renamed Brown University. Greene's involvement in the campaign, however, further illustrated how far he was straying from the parochial, insular traditions of his faith and family. The distance became a good deal greater in November 1770, when Nathanael's father died in Potowomut at the age of sixty-three. The surviving sons inherited the family business, but Nathanael continued to shake loose other parts of his father's legacy. It is in letters written after his father's death that Nathanael begins to complain about his lack of education and about his father's hostility toward literature and the world of ideas.

There are few indications of any radical political activity on his part during his twenties, but he continued to visit Newport on business and he could hardly have missed the new spirit of the times in that city, where
rioters had taken to the street to protest the Stamp Act and other British policies. And as an avid reader, he surely must have devoured the flowery denunciations of Parliament regularly available in the
Newport Mercury,
which briefly sported a front-page slogan reading, “Undaunted by
TYRANTS
–
We'll
DIE
or be
FREE
.”

Greene's regimen of self-improvement continued, too, and he found himself attracted to military histories, beginning with Caesar's. While the Roman's book had a narrative flow and battlefield descriptions designed to capture the reader's imagination, Greene's further reading showed that he had moved beyond mere narrative and was looking for actual instruction in the art and science of war. In his letters, Greene mentioned that he read
Instructions to His Generals
by the Prussian militarist Frederick the Great, and
Mes Reveries,
by Maurice de Saxe, the famed French marshal. Greene's unlikely interest in warfare, along with his general thirst for secular knowledge, nurtured his private rebellion against religious traditions he regarded as unreasonable and arbitrary. Tales of great battles and triumphant generals offered him an exciting glimpse of glory beyond the Quaker meetinghouse and the gristmill. And these books did not simply stir his imagination; they also offered him instruction in battlefield tactics and strategy. As he would demonstrate in later years, Greene learned these lessons well, however irrelevant they might have seemed at the time.

For the moment, however, Greene's only personal knowledge of combat was restricted to that fought on legal battlefields. He and his brothers were frequent visitors to the Court of Common Pleas in East Greenwich, usually in pursuit of an unpaid debt. Court documents from the era show numerous legal actions, some involving family squabbling, related to foundry and forge. Nathanael Greene began his studies of Blackstone's
Commentaries
because of the number of lawsuits involving the family business.

Through his twenties, Greene's health began to show signs of afflictions he would later suffer on the battlefield. He complained of asthma attacks that kept him awake at night, and his right eye was slightly scarred after he was innoculated against smallpox during a visit to New York.
The scar, which occasionally became infected, was nothing compared to the disease itself, one of the most prolific killers of the era. Greene's willingness to risk innoculation further demonstrated his free-thinking, independent spirit, for even in progressive Rhode Island in the early 1770s, smallpox innoculation was illegal.

Just before his father's death in 1770, Nathanael had moved from the Greene homestead to Coventry, about ten miles to the west, where Nathanael Greene & Company opened a new foundry. The twenty-eight-year-old bachelor built himself a new house, which he called Spell Hall, and made sure that it included a splendid library and study. And while he enjoyed the company of his growing collection of books, he was hoping for more animated companionship, too. He had fallen in love with Anna Ward, a daughter of Samuel Ward, the colony's occasional governor and leader of one of Rhode Island's political factions. But Anna, known as Nancy to her family, apparently wasn't attracted to the young Quaker gentleman. Nathanael was crushed when it became apparent that Miss Ward had no intention of returning his affections. The humiliation became all the more intense when one of Nathanael's younger brothers, Christopher, married another one of Samuel Ward's daughters, Catherine, in 1774, formally linking the Greene family to the politically powerful Wards.

The aborted relationship between Nathanael and Nancy was not in vain, at least not for posterity's sake. Nathanael became friendly with her young brother, Samuel Ward Jr., who was precisely half Nathanael's age and, at age fourteen in 1770, already was a student at Rhode Island College. Nathanael and the lad he called Sammy corresponded through the early 1770s, and Nathanael's letters have survived. They are filled with spelling mistakes and earnest pronouncements about the world, like this offering from 1771: “To pursue Virtue where theres no Opposition is the Merit of a common Man, But to Practice it in spight of all Opposition is the Carrector of a truly great and Noble Soul.”

What's striking about Greene's early letters to Sammy is the absence of any discussion of Rhode Island politics or the raging controversies of the day. He used the opportunity to lament his formal education, while
offering Sammy advice about life and learning. “Study to be wise and learn to be prudent,” he told Sammy. “Learning is not Virtue but the means to bring us an aquaintance with it. Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and Dreadful. Let these be your motives to action through Life, the relief of the distressed, the detection of frauds, the defeat of oppression, and diffusion of happiness.”

At the age of thirty, Nathanael Greene was absorbed in introspection, self-improvement, and the misery of unrequited love. But great events would soon offer him the opportunity to put his words of wisdom to the test.

Lieutenant William Dudingston, commander of the British navy schooner
Gaspee,
was a man who took his job very seriously. He and his ship were part of the navy's crackdown on the colonial smuggling racket, and he had a reputation as a particularly aggressive enforcer of His Majesty's revenue laws. Several years earlier, in 1769, he had assaulted fishermen in Pennsylvania for no apparent reason. Not surprisingly, then, customs officials in Boston decided he was just the man to send to Rhode Island, the colony that had turned smuggling and evasion into an art form.

Rhode Islanders, of course, had some experience in dealing with customs and revenue officials who had no appreciation for their local traditions. And, like Dudingston, they were not shy about expressing their feelings. In the summer of 1769, the warship
Liberty
had sailed to Newport to enforce laws against smuggling and evasion of duty. After several confrontations with vessels suspected of carrying contraband, the
Liberty
opened fire on a particularly quarrelsome captain and his crew. The next day, the
Liberty's
captain was introduced to the ways and means of angry Rhode Islanders. As he set foot on a wharf in Newport, the captain was surrounded and was told to order his crew off the ship. He had little choice but to comply. A select committee of Newport citizens boarded the vessel, cut it loose, and scuttled it. A few days later, the
Liberty
made for a fine bonfire. Nobody was ever prosecuted for this daring display of dissent. Rhode Island authorities later described the suspects merely as “Persons unknown.”