by Gerald M. Carbone

Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages. $27.95

BY ERIK J. CHAPUT
Special to the Journal

On July 4, 1789, Alexander Hamilton delivered a eulogy at a meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati in New York City for Nathanael Greene, his friend and comrade in arms in the Continental Army. Greene, who was born in 1742 in Warwick, had actually been dead for three years, having succumbed to what some believed was heatstroke on his Georgia plantation in the spring of 1786.

Greene was famous for his battles against the British army in the southern campaigns of the American Revolution, which eventually earned him a military reputation second only to George Washington’s. According to Hamilton, Major-General Greene “cheerfully resolved to stake his fortune, his hopes, his life, and his honor upon an enterprise of the utmost danger.”

Gerald M. Carbone has written a compact and lucid narrative that examines the American Revolution through the eyes of one of its foremost military strategists. Carbone, a former award-winning reporter for The Providence Journal, first examined Greene’s life and career in a lengthy series that appeared in The Journal in the summer of 2006, in connection with the release of the multi-volume Nathanael Greene Papers by the Rhode Island Historical Society. This biography grew out of that series.

Carbone deserves considerable credit for his copious mining of the Papers. After a fascinating prologue that chronicles the 1901 discovery of Greene’s final resting place in Savannah, Ga., by the president of the Rhode Island chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, he discusses Greene’s role in the formation of the Rhode Island Kentish Guards in 1774.

The first half of the book details the military campaign in the North. Despite his mistake in not evacuating Fort Washington and Fort Lee in 1776, which led to the loss of more than 3,000 men, Greene redeemed himself in the battle of Trenton in late 1776. Particularly engaging are the discussions of the battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777. Students of Rhode Island history will enjoy Carbone’s description of the Battle of Rhode Island in the summer of 1778.

Part II details the southern campaign of the Revolution, where the success of Greene’s “Flying Army,” especially at Guilford Court-house and Eutaw Springs, played a pivotal role in securing the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. As Carbone notes, it “was a brilliant, unorthodox campaign orchestrated by a thirty-eight-year-old man then at the height of his powers.” Carbone’s discussion of Greene’s involvement with the institution of slavery and his fascinating exchange with Warner Mifflin, a Philadelphia Quaker, on human bondage, is one of the highlights of Part II.

While Carbone’s biography of Nathanael Greene is a good read, the meager analysis and the lack of a rationale for writing about a topic already amply covered is a shortcoming. He neglects to clearly explain where previous accounts, especially Terry Golway’s 2005 book on Greene, have fallen short. Also, as opposed to what Carbone writes, James Monroe was not one of the authors of The Federalist papers. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining look at a local hero and well worth picking up. NATHANAEL GREENE: A Biography of the American Revolution,

ejchaput@maxwell.syr.edu