Nathanael Greene: the general who won the South

Nathanael Greene almost never won a battle, and yet he won a war. A Quaker ironmaster with a limp and no military experience, he became one of George Washington's most trusted generals. Given the ruined southern army in the darkest days of the Revolution, he wore the British down through a campaign of maneuver and attrition until Cornwallis marched away to his doom at Yorktown. Britannica remembers him as Washington's designated successor and a strategist without peer on the American side.²

Early life

Greene was born on 7 August 1742 at Potowomut, Rhode Island, into a devout Quaker family that ran an iron forge working for the shipbuilders. He had little formal schooling, which the Society of Friends did not much value, but he taught himself, excelled at mathematics and read the Greek and Roman classics. He managed a branch of his father's ironworks and served several terms in the colonial legislature. A childhood affliction left him with a limp for life.³

The quarrel with Britain pulled him in. In 1772 his family was accused of a part in the burning of the British revenue schooner Gaspee, and in July 1773 his Quaker meeting expelled him after he was caught at a "house of public resort." He helped raise a local militia company, the Kentish Guards, but his limp was judged a disqualification for a soldier in the ranks, and he joined as a private with a musket bought from a British deserter.⁴

From militia to major general

After the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the Rhode Island Assembly made the private a brigadier general in May 1775, at the head of three regiments sent to join the army besieging Boston. In June he received a brigadier's commission in the Continental Army, and in 1776 he was promoted to major general. When the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, Washington gave him command of the city.⁵

Who was the Quaker-born general who lost Fort Washington?

That general was Greene. In the New York campaign of 1776 Washington, unwilling to give up Manhattan altogether, ordered him to defend Fort Washington, on the heights of northern Manhattan now called Washington Heights. Early American successes gave Greene and the garrison commander, Colonel Robert Magaw, a false sense of security, and Greene argued that the fort could be held. On 16 November 1776 a British and Hessian force of about 8,000 stormed it, and Magaw surrendered some 2,800 surviving defenders. Four days later the British crossed the Hudson and Fort Lee, across the river, had to be abandoned too.⁶ › The Fall of Fort Washington, 16 November 1776

The loss of the two forts, the devastating last chapter of a disastrous New York campaign, was the great blemish on his record, and it left him racked by guilt. Washington kept faith in him.⁷

Trenton to Valley Forge

Greene went with Washington on the retreat across New Jersey, and in the counterstroke that followed he led one of the columns that won at Trenton on 26 December 1776 and fought again at Princeton a few days later. In 1777 he led troops at Brandywine and Germantown in the losing defense of Philadelphia.⁸ › Battle of Trenton, 1776

Quartermaster general

The winter at Valley Forge showed how badly the army was supplied. Greene reluctantly agreed to become quartermaster general, on condition that he keep his right to command in the field, and reorganized the department. The American Battlefield Trust judges that he did the job brilliantly. But the work was thankless: inflation forced him to pay more than authorized, he was accused of profiteering, and when Congress refused him a vote of confidence he resigned in July 1780. He then took over the defenses of the upper Hudson, replacing Benedict Arnold after his treason.⁹

The southern command

By 1780 the war in the South was a string of American disasters: Savannah lost under Robert Howe, Charleston under Benjamin Lincoln, and in August 1780 Horatio Gates's army destroyed at Camden. In October Congress let Washington choose the next southern commander, and he chose Greene. In December 1780 Greene took over what was left of the Southern Army.¹⁰

He was outnumbered by Lord Cornwallis's field army, and his plan was built around that fact. Irregular forces, the partisans of Francis Marion among them, kept the British stretched; Greene kept his own small army intact as a "force in being" to lure Cornwallis farther from his coastal bases. He even took the risk of dividing his army, sending Daniel Morgan into western South Carolina, to tempt the British into dividing theirs. On 17 January 1781 Morgan destroyed Banastre Tarleton's detachment at Cowpens.¹¹ › Battle of Cowpens, 1781

The race to the Dan and Guilford Courthouse

Cornwallis chased Greene north across North Carolina. Greene retreated toward Virginia, and his men crossed the flooded Dan River just ahead of the British, taking every boat on the southern bank with them. Cornwallis's army, about 2,000 strong, was left stranded far from its supplies, losing men to desertion and skirmishes. On 22 February, reinforced, Greene recrossed the Dan with about 4,400 men.¹²

On 15 March 1781 he offered battle at Guilford Courthouse, near present-day Greensboro. He copied Morgan's plan at Cowpens: three lines about 400 yards apart, North Carolina militia in front, Virginia militia in the woods behind them and the Continentals of Maryland and Virginia at the back. The militia lines fired and gave way; at the third line the fighting came down to musket and bayonet. Rather than risk his army, Greene withdrew in good order. Cornwallis held the field but lost about a quarter of his men, and the Guards battalions more than half. Greene called the fight "long, obstinate and bloody." In London Charles James Fox told the House of Commons that another such victory would ruin the British army.¹³ › The Battle of Guilford Courthouse, 1781

Cornwallis could not pursue. He fell back to his supply base at Wilmington, and in late April he marched north into Virginia, abandoning the Carolinas. About five months later he surrendered at Yorktown.¹⁴

Retaking the South

Greene did not follow him. He turned south into South Carolina, against the British outposts, and kept losing battles. On 1 May 1781 he wrote to Washington: "We fight get beat and fight again." At Hobkirk's Hill on 25 April the British beat him; from 22 May to 18 June he besieged the loyalist garrison of Ninety Six with about 1,000 men in what the National Park Service calls the longest field siege of the war, and failed to take it. Yet each British victory cost men the British could not replace, and by the end of June they had pulled back to the coast.¹⁵

On 8 September 1781 he attacked Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stewart at Eutaw Springs with about 2,200 men against 2,000. His three lines drove the British back to their camp, where Stewart made a stand in a brick mansion and a palisaded garden, and a counterattack forced Greene to break off. Again he lost the field, but Stewart's army, with about 880 casualties against Greene's 580, fell back to Charleston. There Greene held the British until they left the city in December 1782.¹⁶

How he made war

Greene's genius was strategic rather than tactical. He understood that in the South the British could win every battle and still lose, because each victory drained an army far from home that could not be reinforced, while his own army only had to survive. He kept it alive, used the partisans to cut British communications, picked fights on ground where his militia could do damage before they ran, and withdrew before a defeat became a disaster.¹⁷

He was also a political general in the best sense. Once the fighting slackened he worked to restore civil government and order to a South torn by years of guerrilla war, and, committed to the rights of property, he opposed the persecution and dispossession of loyalists. The National Park Service sums up his three years in the South as the campaign that broke the back of the British war effort in America.¹⁸ › The Greatest American Commanders

Debts and death

The war ruined him. To feed and clothe his southern army he had cosigned notes with a contractor whose bankruptcy and death left Greene personally responsible, and at the end of the war in 1783 he sold most of his own property to pay the creditors. Charges of impropriety followed him; they were never proven. South Carolina and Georgia gave him generous grants of land and money, and in 1785 he settled with his wife, Catherine Littlefield Greene, and their five children at Mulberry Grove, a plantation near Savannah that had belonged to a loyalist official.¹⁹

He died there on 19 June 1786, at 43. The cause is uncertain: the National Park Service says possibly complications of sunstroke, Britannica suggests a stress-induced heart attack. He was buried in Johnson Square in Savannah.²⁰

Legacy and memory

Greene is remembered not for his bookkeeping, as Britannica puts it, but as the general Washington would have wanted to succeed him and as the best strategist the Americans had. His southern campaign is a classic of how a weaker army can win by refusing to be destroyed. The battlefield of Guilford Courthouse, where he lost the battle and won the campaign, is a national military park, with his monument on the ground held by the Virginia militia.²¹

Read more about his commander, George Washington, his subordinate Daniel Morgan, the end of the war at Yorktown, or what happened on 15 March, the day of Guilford Courthouse.