10:36 AM EDT on Friday, June 9, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

SAVANNAH, Ga., MARCH 1901

Rhythmically swinging their picks in an old graveyard, two men broke through the brick walls of a tomb; a stench soon tainted the springtime air. This red brick vault, like the other 10 vaults they had knocked open, was squat, not tall enough for a man to kneel in. Both workmen crawled in on their bellies, illuminating the cramped, foul crypt with a sputtering lantern. Even though 100 years had passed since 1801 when a body was last placed in that vault, the odor was strong enough to sicken the men who crawled into it.

In the lamplight they saw a coffin with a name engraved into a metal plate: Sarah S. Wood, died 1801. This was not the corpse of the famous man they were seeking; they had failed again.

The two workers crawled out into the fading light of a March day. They reported their finding to Col. Asa Bird Gardiner, a dignified Yankee in a high, black hat.

William Maxwell Greene Collection, on loan to the Rhode Island Historical Society. Photo by David Schultz, The Rhode Island Historical Society, 2006

Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene

Gardiner was president of an exclusive club: the Rhode Island State Society of the Cincinnati, an organization only for descendants of military officers of the Revolutionary War. In January 1901, Rhode Island's chapter of the Cincinnati had voted to spend $100 -- more than $2,000 today -- to send Gardiner to Georgia on a morbid mission: Find the forgotten bones of a great American, Maj.-Gen. Nathanael Greene.

Greene had died near Savannah, far from his Rhode Island roots, in 1786. Now, 115 years later, no one in that city could say for certain where his body rested.

The Society of the Cincinnati thought it shameful that the bones of "such a great patriot and soldier" should be interred in an unknown, unmarked grave. Gardiner had come to Savannah with a firm resolve to find Greene's tomb.

After 115 years of decay it would be hard to distinguish a particular pile of bones as Greene's without some sort of identifiers. Gardiner knew that Greene had been tall for his time, about 5 feet 10 inches, so the bones would be longer than most.

One of Greene's grandsons, George Washington Greene, had written of his grandfather: "His face was a well-filled oval, with all the features clearly defined, though none of them, except, perhaps, the forehead, large enough to arrest the attention at a first glance. . . . The eyes themselves were of a clear, liquid blue, which kindled under excitement to an intense and flashing light."

The "well-filled oval" of Greene's face had long ago decayed to dust, but Gardiner hoped that Greene's distinctive skull, with a large forehead prominent in every known portrait of him, might yet be intact.

Gardiner hoped too that Greene's sword might still be at his side and that fragments of his uniform -- metal buttons or the gold-silk epaulets that decorated Greene's shoulders -- might be recognizable.

As the sun set on Saturday, March 2, 1901, the workmen laid down their tools till Monday morning, when the search resumed. Again a crowd formed in the old cemetery, framed with a fence of black iron spears.

The first tomb they knocked through was empty. In the second vault they found a well-preserved coffin; a silver coffin plate screwed into the lid said it contained the bones of a man who had died 56 years before.

Then one of the workmen saw, on the other side of the narrow vault, fragments of a coffin rotted into the sandy soil.

"Upon these [fragments] being removed," Gardiner wrote, "there appeared a man's skeleton quite intact, except some of the smaller ribs."

The two workmen, Charles Gattman and Edward Keenan, worked without a lamp now, near midday, when sunlight pierced their entry hole and illuminated the vault.

Even from outside the crypt, the bones within were visible. Edward Kelly, the supervisor of the two workmen, called out to Gardiner that the skull looked unusually big.

Kelly dispatched Keenan to the city greenhouse for a sieve to sift the moldy sand from the bones.

With Keenan gone, his partner, Gattman, poked through the skeleton's breast bones, searching for the coffin plate that should have sunk into the mold from the rotted lid. He found it.

The silver was badly corroded; Gattman wiped it against the cloth of his shirt and held it up to a shaft of sunlight. He called out that he could decipher the figures 1786.

The number must have sent Gardiner's heart pounding; he knew that as the year of Nathanael Greene's death.

Keenan returned with the sifter and plunged into the sands of the tomb to see what he could find. He heard something clatter inside the sieve and plucked from it three metal buttons with a patina of green. He wiped one button clean and saw the faint outline of an eagle.

Gardiner recognized these as buttons worn by officers of the Revolution. Enlisted men wore buttons of wood covered with cloth; officers wore the eagle-inculcated metal.

Keenan then found a French silk glove filled with finger bones. French silk had been a luxury during the Revolution; a glove like this was the kind of thing a high-ranking Frenchman such as the Marquis de Lafayette would have given to an American Army officer. Keenan found a second glove full of bones.

He then found a third glove stiff with finger bones. Obviously more than one person had been entombed on this side of the vault.

For Gardiner, the intermingled sets of bones added more evidence that they'd found the missing bones of Nathanael Greene. After Greene died his oldest son had swamped a homemade canoe and drowned in the Savannah River at age 18; it had long been rumored that the son had been buried alongside his famous father.

Journal photo / Sandor Bodo

The Greene home still stands today in Warwick,264 years after its legendary occupant, Nathanael, was born.

The workmen in the vault divided the skeletons and placed them into two empty soap boxes. The big skull crumbled beneath their touch, but the jaw bones stayed intact. The jaws still held 32 teeth, 2 of them filled with gold.

The soap boxes were taken to the police barracks, where they were held under guard. A police reporter for the Savannah Morning News saw the unmarked boxes in a sergeant's office. He gave one box a kick and asked a Sergeant Reilly what was in it.

"Great heavens man," said the sergeant, "look out there, that's General Greene's body you are kicking."

From the Western Union office in the swank De Soto Hotel, Gardiner sent a telegram to Rhode Island Gov. William Gregory: "Have to announce to you and Rhode Island General Assembly that, after diligent search several days, committee appointed by Rhode Island State Society of Cincinnati from among eminent citizens Savannah discovered to-day remains Major-General Nathanael Greene in Colonial Cemetery."

The city parks crew constructed two boxes built of hardwood and lined with zinc; the next day the remains were transferred from the soap crates into the more dignified boxes.

The two zinc-lined boxes were taken by a horse-drawn hearse to the Southern Bank of Georgia, where they were placed in a vault.

Gardiner sent the corroded coffin plate north to a New York City museum to have it "scientifically" cleaned. After the silver plate was treated, the engraved letters clearly read:

NATHANAEL GREENE

Obit. June 19, 1786

Aetat [Age] 44 years

Greene's bones remained in the bank vault while Rhode Island and Georgia haggled over where they should be buried for eternity. Members of the Greene family in both states had the final say: they decided that Savannah, where Greene lived the last days of his too-short life, was the proper place. After all, it was in the South that he made his reputation as a general of genius compared, not unreasonably, to Scipio, Caesar and Napoleon.

When Greene took command of America's Southern Army in 1780, it consisted of 1,500 starving, nearly naked men. Greene's own assessment of his Army was: the whole force fit for duty that are properly clothed and equipt does not amount to 800 men.

His opponent, Lord Cornwallis, fielded 3,250 troops of well-equipped, well-trained Hessian and British soldiers.

Within a year, Greene's small Army ran all of those British troops out of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina into a trap at Yorktown, Va.

In the final months of the war, George Washington wrote to Greene:

If Historiographers should be hardy enough to fill the pages of History with the advantages that have been gained with unequal Numbers (on the part of America) in the course of this contest, & attempt to relate the distressing circumstances under which they have been obtained, it is more than probable that Posterity will bestow on their labors the epithet & marks of fiction for it will not be believed. . . .

In winning against such desperate odds Greene showed a genius for planning battles that ranks him among history's greatest generals. For the Revolution to be wholly successful it required these three elements: George Washington, the French Navy and Nathanael Greene -- he was that much of a force.

It's one of those odd, fortuitous events of the American Revolution that such a genius should have found an outlet in Nathanael Greene, a gimp-kneed asthmatic schooled by his stern father in the pacifist ways of Quakerism. How and why that talent for war developed in Nathanael Greene, an anchor smith from the Potowomut section of Warwick, Rhode Island, is the stuff of legend but better, for it is true.

Opening volleys

From the deck of his sloop, anchored off North Kingstown, Rhode Island, Rufus Greene watched a two-masted ship armed with cannon bearing down on him.

Rufus stood atop a valuable cargo stored in the hold: 12 hogsheads of West India rum, 40 gallons of Jamaica spirits and a barrel of brown sugar. The cargo belonged to the sloop's owners, Nathanael Greene & Co., his cousin's business on nearby Potowomut peninsula.

Rufus was 23, brown-haired, tall and slender. As young and strong as he was, he was no match for the armed boarding party bent on invading his ship, a sloop called the Fortune.

The raiders were not pirates, they were British seamen in the King's Navy, sent into Narragansett Bay in the winter of 1772 to enforce the customs laws. This was dangerous duty, for Rhode Islanders had been known to savagely beat customs collectors.

The British sent a tough man for the job: Lt. William Dudingston, who had recently been sued for beating a Delaware River fisherman while a mate held the man helpless. Dudingston commanded the revenue schooner Gaspee, a swift ship. He brought the Gaspee alongside the smaller Fortune and lowered a rowboat into the still, winter-blue waters of Narragansett Bay.

A Naval officer named Dundass rowed over from the Gaspee. He climbed aboard the Fortune's deck and asked Rufus if he would carry some freight for the King's Navy.

Rufus said he would not.

"Unlay the hatches," Dundass demanded.

Rufus said that the hatches were already unlocked.

The officer ordered Rufus below decks. Rufus asked Dundass by whose authority did he order him about on his own boat.

With the whetting sound of steel on steel Dundass drew his sword.

"If you do not go into the cabin I'll let you know." He grabbed Rufus by the collar and shoved him below. Footsteps sounded on the deck above as a boarding party from the Gaspee invaded the Fortune.

Rufus shook off Dundass' grip and made a run for the bow to keep the Gaspee's crew from weighing anchor.

Dundass grabbed Rufus and jammed him into the cabin, striking him in the head; the blow knocked Rufus down on a sea chest. At swordpoint Dundass kept Rufus Greene confined below decks, then let him up to watch as the boarding party marked the sloop's hatches with the king's "R."

The Fortune lurched forward; men in three rowboats, their oars plashing, had taken Greene & Co.'s sloop in tow. The Fortune and its cargo, valued at 295 pounds, now belonged to England's King George III.

It would prove to be a costly seizure; arguably it cost the king the loss of his schooner, Gaspee, and the colonies of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. For in seizing the Fortune, the King's Navy had stoked the slumbering fires of its owner, Nathanael Greene.

Into the fray

On the cusp of the American Revolution, 58,000 people lived in Rhode Island, about one-twentieth of the population today. Word of the Fortune's fate spread along the few dirt roads that connected village to village and through every smuggler's port along Narragansett Bay.

Rufus' cousin, Nathanael Greene Jr., was furious. Until this point in his life, Nathanael Greene had steered clear of the trouble brewing between England and the Colonies. Now it was personal, and Greene became obsessed.

Nathanael Greene was then 29 years old, and his life had dropped to its ebb tide. He had been spurned in love by Nancy Ward, of Westerly, a woman with "soft eyes of bluish gray," according to Greene's grandson, and a figure "of symmetry and grace."

Nancy was one of six rich and pretty daughters of the eminent merchant Samuel Ward, a former governor; Greene was one of six brothers, excluding two older half-brothers who had died in their 20s. Greene too came from a family of influence. His father was the Quaker preacher at the Greenwich Meeting House and had built quite a business at the family homestead on Potowomut.

The gabled, two-story house where Greene grew up with his brothers sat atop a hill that sloped gently to Greene's River. The river splashed noisily over the Greene family's dam and gurgled through the sluiceway that turned the wheels of the family's mill and forge.

Here in Potowomut the Greene's mill wheels ground grain hauled there by ship and in the carts of local farmers. Here, too, the brothers forged red-hot iron and banged it into massive fishermen's anchors that they shipped across the Bay to Newport, a hub of international shipping.

On nearly 200 acres near where Goddard Park is now, Nathanael Greene & Co. owned a wharf, warehouse, sawmill and store, as well as the dam, sluice ways, forge and anchor works.

The elder Greene and his six surviving sons also owned a forge at Coventry, where they smithed more anchors, a staple in seagoing Rhode Island. Greene sometimes cooked up tiny toy anchors that he'd sell in Newport for spending money. Months before Greene's father died in 1770, he built a house at the Coventry forge so he could better manage his work force of 100 men there. Nathanael Jr. drew the job of moving out to Coventry to oversee the works.

Greene found Coventry a dismal place. He wrote to Nancy Ward's little brother, Sammy Jr.:

If Coventry was ever tollerable, it has now become insupportable. . . . The Trees looks as surly, the Bushes as Sour, the Shrubs as Cross, If I happen to put my head out of Doors at any time, as if I had been their sworn Enimy.

When he lost the sloop Fortune, Greene was single, closing in on 30, rambling around a big, lonesome house in a place he did not like. His confidant was Sammy Ward, an odd pairing; at age 15, Nancy Ward's younger brother was barely half Greene's age. Greene may have begun writing to Sammy Jr. to ingratiate himself with Nancy, but Sammy had a classical education that Greene sincerely envied, and the two struck a friendship that lasted till Greene's death.

In April 1772, Greene took quill in hand to write to Sammy from Coventry, with the loss of his sloop very much on his mind:

I should Wrote you an answer long since but have been engageed in the pursuit of a Searover who took into his Custody a quantity of Our Rum and carried it round to Boston (contrary to the Express words of the Statute) for Tryal and condemnation. The illegality of his measure together with the Loss sustaind createed such a Spirit of Resentment That I have devoted almost the whole of my Time in devising and carrying into execution measures for the recovery of my Property and punnishing the offender.

What Greene had in mind for "punnishing" Dudingston was legal action: his company's lawyer, James Varnum, was even then drafting a suit against Dudingston for illegally capturing the Fortune.

Others had different ideas about a just punishment for Dudingston. On June 9, 1772, five dozen Rhode Islanders boarded the Gaspee as it lay grounded on a sand bar, shooting its captain and seizing the crew before setting the ship ablaze. Flames exploded the ship's cannon, sending blasts echoing across Narragansett Bay, the roar of revolution.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

Editor's note

There were only 3,000 of them left. Defeated and ragged, they retreated toward the Pennsylvania wilderness in the harsh cold of December 1776. Pursuing them were 20,000 soldiers of England, then the world's greatest superpower. The ragged men were the remnants of George Washington's Army. They were the only hope for the rebel Colonies calling themselves the United States, but no one expected they could win. Marching with them was the son of a Quaker preacher from Rhode Island, a man with a limp from birth and the heart of a lion.

Today we begin an extraordinary series about the life of Nathanael Greene of Warwick, R.I., one of the greatest heroes of the American Revolution. Historians rank him second only to Washington as the best soldier of that war.

best soldier of that war.