02:58 PM EDT on Thursday, June 1, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

On the morning of June 10, 1772, a young man paraded along the Great Bridge in Providence, wearing the gold-laced beaverskin cap he had swiped from the head of a British naval officer. He proudly told the story of the night before -- how he had helped plunder and burn the king's schooner Gaspee -- till some older men warned him to hold his tongue.

The story circulated to the Providence home of Darius Sessions, the deputy governor. Sessions smelled trouble. He saddled a horse and galloped the five miles to Pawtuxet, where the Gaspee still smoldered out on Namquid Point. He found British Lt. William Dudingston in "dangerous circumstances" in a small house by the shore. Sessions asked Dudingston for his version of the attack, but he would not say much. Sessions wrote: Mr. Dudingston answered that he would give no account of the matter, [because] if he died, he desired it might all die with him.

While Dudingston lay near death in Pawtuxet, the local sheriff came calling with a warrant for his arrest. The sheriff, Abraham Whipple, had been a leader of the men who'd shot Dudingston and burned his ship. Dudingston's condition was too critical for the sheriff to haul him off to jail, but Whipple did leave a calling card: a court summons to face charges brought by Nathanael Greene, who alleged that Dudingston had illegally seized his ship.

Dudingston never answered the summons; when he was well enough to move he stayed in the Newport home of his lawyer, James Brenton; from there an armed guard squired him aboard a British ship for a return to England.

On July 22, Greene saddled his bay-colored stallion, Brittian, for the ride from his Coventry ironworks to the courthouse in East Greenwich. Here he watched his lawyer, James Varnum, convince a jury that Dudingston, in absentia, owed the Greenes 300 pounds for the illegal seizure of their sloop, with its cargo of rum, sugar and molasses.

That was probably the high point of Greene's summer. A month later, the forge at Coventry burned to its foundation.

Greene wrote to his young friend, Sammy Ward: Your Letter reacht me the Morning after the Destruction of the Forge. I sat upon the remains of one of the old Shafts and read it. I was surrounded with Gloomy Faices, piles of Timber still in Flames, Heaps of Bricks dasht to pieces, Baskets of coal reducd to ashes. Everything seemd to appear in Ruins and Confusion.

He then turned his attention to the blue-eyed Nancy Ward, Sammy's sister: It is your advice to stop our Correspondence. What can I say to it? If you was to see her last Letter perhaps youd be of a different oppinion. To stop the Correspondence is to loos her for Ever; to continue it is to overwhelm myself with agreeable Distress and pleasant pains.

The smoldering ruins of the forge aggravated Greene's asthma, a condition that plagued him for life; six days after the forge fire he wrote: I have had a most severe turn of the phthisic or asthma. I have not slept six hours in four nights, being obliged to sit up the last two nights.

Greene couldn't breathe and he could not sleep; his love for Nancy Ward was unrequited; and the family forge with which he'd been entrusted had turned to ashes.

A difficult year

By January 1773, the Coventry forge was back in business. But that year, in which he turned 31, brought few improvements to Greene's life. He bought a lottery ticket and fantasized that if he won I intend to turn Beau with my part of the money, and make a Shining Figure amongst the Greenwich Bucks, the fancy folk of East Greenwich.

He went to the barber shop in East Greenwich and observed a Doctor Joslin shake his head and make such a dust from the powder in his whig.

He commented on the play that had been staged in Providence, in violation of the 1762 Act prohibiting "theatrical entertainments." Cry fire, the Church is in danger, Greene wrote satirically to Sammy Ward. There has been a play acted in Providence known by the Name of the unhappy Orphan. . . . You say there's nothing new under the Sun. This is new, for its the first attempt ever made in this Colony to stage a play.

In July, Greene and his cousin, Griffin Greene, were suspended from the Quaker church where Nathanael's father had preached for going to "a place in Conecticut of Publick Resort where they had No Proper Business."

Greene's temporary suspension from the Society of Friends has taken on a mythical quality; his first biographer, Judge William Johnson, interpreted a place of public resort to mean a military parade, which violated the Society of Friends' pacifist principles.

The first editor of the Greene Papers, Richard K. Showman, found that dictionaries of the day defined a public house as "a disorderly house or other place of questionable repute." Greene wasn't suspended from his Quaker church for an interest in military affairs; he was suspended for going to an ale house or brothel.

Greene was an irreverent, practical and funny man who was never much interested in the Society of Friends. He held the Society responsible for his own lack of an education, which is something he truly desired.

I lament the want of a liberal Education, Greene wrote to Sammy, who at 15 graduated from Rhode Island College, now known as Brown University. I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me, for my own part I was Educated a Quaker, and amongst the most Supersticious sort, and that of its self is a sufficent Obstacle to cramp the best of Geniuses; much more mine.

Greene's brother, Christopher, remembered Nat studying in a little room above the kitchen at Potowomut. Greene puzzled over the geometry of Euclid while waiting for the forge fire to soften iron for the anchorsmiths; he used to become so absorbed in books while tending the gristmill that he'd keep reading while the mill stone ground round and round long after the last of the grist had been milled. Greene became so familiar with the novel Tristram Shandy that he could make his brothers laugh by mimicking a character, the "squat, uncourtly figure" of Dr. Slop.

The Society of Friends wasn't the only religion that Greene found suspect. He believed in God, but mistrusted overly pious people; he felt that the sanctimonious were not selfless do-gooders; rather, they acted out of self-interest to secure themselves a better seat in the afterlife.

For what can a man be Religious for but to recommend himself to the Favor of His God by which he expects (if he Succeeds) Everlasting Happiness? he wrote to Sammy Ward.

Despite his irreverence Greene still attended Quaker meeting occasionally, even after his father's death and his own suspension from the Society. He wrote to Sammy in 1773: I have been to Meeting today. Our silence was interrupted by a vain conceited Minister. . . . He began with asking us what could be said that had not been said. Much more, thinks I, than you ever thought off or ever will.

That August a man disguised in a nightgown broke into Greene's Coventry stable and galloped into the night astride Brittian, Greene's favorite horse. 1773 was not a good year; the next one was better.

Finding love

Nathanael Greene never could woo Sammy Ward's sister; he had better luck with Ward's cousin Caty Littlefield. She was just two years older than Sammy, and 12 years younger than Greene.

Caty Littlefield was born on Block Island at a time when only 50 families lived out there. Her mother died at age 28, leaving five children. Caty was a motherless 10-year-old when her father sent her to the mainland to live with her late mother's sister, Aunt Caty Ray Greene.

Aunt Caty lived in a big house on a hill above East Greenwich with her husband, William Greene, Nathanael's distant relative. Aunt Caty was an attractive, dark-haired woman who, when she was young, caught the eye of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, in his 50s, tried to seduce 23-year-old Caty Ray on a winter carriage trip from Boston to Westerly. Though she spurned the old man's advances they wrote to each other throughout their lives, often, and Franklin twice stayed in her house on the hill near Love Lane.

Nathanael Greene was 22 when 10-year-old Caty Littlefield moved in with her aunt and uncle, and he probably met her a few times when she was just a girl. She grew into a beautiful woman who looked a lot like the aunt who turned Ben Franklin's head. Her contemporaries described her as "a small brunette with high color, a vivacious expression, and a snapping pair of dark eyes" with a form "light and agile."

By all accounts, Caty Littlefield was pretty. Like Greene, Caty had little formal education but was naturally smart, lively and curious. During the war to come she'd have no trouble picking up French to converse with the French officers at Newport; after the war Caty helped Eli Whitney invent the cotton gin on her Georgia plantation. Together, Caty and Nathanael Greene would have a profound effect on American history.

Nathanael and Caty both loved to dance, an important skill in that era. British officers received dance lessons as part of their military training in order to appear polished and suave. At dancing Caty was apparently much better than Nathanael. Of Greene's dancing we hear only that a partner once told him: "You dance stiffly."

To which Greene replied: "Very true, but you see that I dance strong."

Caty became a favorite dancing partner of George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other officers, French and American. After Greene's death her flirtations with American officers went beyond dancing -- she had affairs with two married generals, Jeremiah Wadsworth and "Mad" Anthony Wayne. She was by her own description a woman of "passions and propensities."

On war and marriage

In July 1774, Sammy Ward opened a letter that was stuffed with wedding invitations. Love and war were on Greene's mind, as he wrote to Sammy: Friend Samuel -- Please to deliver the inclosd cards to your Sisters. On the 20th this Instant I expect to be married to Miss Kitty Littlefield at your Uncle Greens, in East Greenwich. [This marked the only time that Greene or anyone else referred to Caty as Kitty, though his local descendants still speak her name as Kitty.]

Greene spent one paragraph on the wedding -- the party would be small, at William and Catharine Greene's place, and Sammy was invited -- then segued into a rant against the 4,000 British soldiers then occupying Boston.

British warships blockaded Boston, stopping all trade until Bostonians paid for the three shiploads of tea they had dumped into the harbor. With no trade on the wharves, and 4,000 troops patrolling the streets, Boston faced hard times.

The Solders in Boston are insolent beyond measure, Greene wrote. Soon very soon expect to hear the thirsty Earth drinking in the warm Blood of American Sons.

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

A continuing series.