09:23 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 30, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The rector unlocked Boston's Old South Church at 10 a.m., and a crowd surged in. They had come to church that morning -- March 5, 1775 -- not to worship, but to commemorate the fifth anniversary of what locals called "The Boston Massacre," in which British soldiers shot and killed five rioters.

Among the crowd was a British officer, Lt. Frederick Mackenzie, who sat in the pews with a number of fellow officers who wanted to hear how they'd be portrayed in that morning's speeches.

The pulpit was draped in black; for nearly an hour the crowd sat staring at this black sheet, waiting for the speeches to begin. The church grew close and hot in the unseasonable heat.

Finally around 11 a.m., Dr. Joseph Warren ascended the pulpit.

Warren "was attended by all the most violent fellows in town," Mackenzie wrote in his diary -- including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and the infamous orator Benjamin Church. (Church was later exposed, with the help of Rhode Islanders Ezra Stiles and Nathanael Greene, as a traitor.)

Every person was silent, and every countenance seemed to denote that some event of consequence might be expected.

The speeches were occasionally interrupted by hissing from the British officers, but the meeting was about to break up peaceably. Then Samuel Adams announced that another speech "should be delivered on the 5th of March next, to commemorate the bloody massacre of the 5th of March 1770."

To the British officers, Adams' reference to the riot as a bloody massacre was an insult. They shouted, "Oh, fie! Oh, fie!"

Their jeers were mistaken as a cry of "Fire! Fire!"

The crowd stampeded for the doors and burst through windows; women screamed. British soldiers of the 43rd Regiment were coincidentally marching past, with drums beating and fifes squalling. People thought they were under attack.

The town people certainly expected a Riot, Mackenzie wrote, as almost every man had a short stick, or bludgeon, in his hand. . . . It is certain both sides were ripe for it and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities.

Bloodshed was avoided that day, but soon it would spill copiously across the Lexington Green.

Finding arms

A few days after the anniversary speeches, Mackenzie noted that a "country fellow" had been caught buying a gun from a British soldier. The men who caught him stripped him naked, "Tarred & feathered him" and paraded him through Boston.

Arms of all kinds are so much sought after by the Country people, that they use every means of procuring them, Mackenzie wrote, including buying them from unscrupulous soldiers.

Nathanael Greene Jr. was one of those "country people" trying to buy a black market musket despite the risk of being stripped and scalded in boiling tar. The Greenes weren't hunters; their farm, mills and forges produced their food and cash. As Quakers, the sons of Nathanael Greene Sr. had not been soldiers in the recent French and Indian War. So Greene had no gun.

Guns weren't the only item in Boston that Greene wanted. He also rode into British-occupied Boston to buy books.

Greene's grandson and biographer, George Washington Greene, noted: "It is as certain as tradition can make it, that he went more than once to [Henry] Knox's bookstore," the London Book-Store, in Boston, where he bought several books about military matters to add to his large library at Coventry.

Knox, a large and fat man whose left ring and little fingers had been blown off by a musket, became a fast friend of Greene's; his equally large wife, Lucy, also liked Greene, though she was a dignified woman who never warmed to Block Island-born Caty Littlefield Greene.

"It is positively known," wrote George Washington Greene, "that [Nathanael] attended the morning and evening parades of the British troops [in Boston], looking at them sternly from under the broad brim of his Quaker hat."

There is no documentary evidence of Greene obtaining a musket in Boston; this would have been a black market transaction, not something to be set down on paper. But Greene did get a gun. His grandson wrote that Nathanael Greene bought his gun in Boston, probably from a British deserter. He then "prevailed upon a farmer to hide his musket in his cart" -- some stories say beneath a cartload of hay -- and smuggled it back to Rhode Island.

Forming a militia

With the British encamped in Boston, the men around East Greenwich decided they'd better form a militia company in case trouble spread to Rhode Island. Greene was among the 54 men of Kent County who chartered this militia company; they pooled their money to hire two British army veterans to teach military formations, the fife and the drum.

Greene (according to his grandson) convinced a British deserter in Boston to come to work as "drill master" for the newly formed militia. A man named William Johnson signed a contract to lead the local militia in drills "as taught in the English Army" and to "Engage Two lads to Beat the Drum."

Music played an important role in military maneuvers then, not so much on the battlefield where fife and drum would be drowned out by the boom of musket and cannon, but on the march and in camp. Drummers beat a rhythm called the troop in the morning to gather soldiers, the retreat at sundown and what they called the tattoo at dark to signal troops to douse their fires and candles and go to bed.

In October 1774 the militia made it official: they obtained a charter from the General Assembly to form the Kentish Guards. No drawings or descriptions of the Kentish Guards' uniforms remain, but the accounts of East Greenwich merchants at that time show a run on red broadcloth, blue tammy (a fine worsted), silver jacket buttons, tailed wigs and wig powder, knee garters and three yards of a fabric called Nonesopritty.

The Kentish Guards did not come together just to look sharp on the parade field; their accounts show that they also bought cartridge paper and lead to make bullets.

The Guards conducted their meetings in democratic fashion, with a moderator instead of a commanding officer; their meetings at William Arnold's house felt more like Town Meeting than a military tribunal.

At the urging of his friend and cousin, Griffin Greene (with whom he'd been caught in a public house), Nathanael Greene ran for lieutenant in the newly formed company. Certainly Greene had every right to expect a prestigious position in the Guards; he was a charter member from a prosperous family.

When the votes for officers were tallied, Nathanael Greene lost out. His fellow members of the Kentish Guards did not have confidence that this asthmatic, gimpy, bookish son of a Quaker preacher had the stuff to lead them. Greene was mortified, both by the vote and by some of the discussions afterward. He wrote to the new captain, his friend and lawyer James Varnum:

I was informd the Gentlemen of East Greenwich said that I was a blemish to the company. I confess it is the first stroke of mortification that I ever felt from being considered either in private or publick Life a blemish to those with whom I assosiateed. . . .

If I concieve right of the force of the Objection of the Gentlemen of the town it was not as an officer but as a soldier, for that my halting was a blemish to the rest. I confess it is my misfortune to limp a little but I did not concieve it to be so great: but we are not apt to discover our own defects.

Greene submitted his resignation from the Guards. He urged Varnum to stay on, and pledged his financial support of the militia. I would not have the company break and disband for fifty Dollars. It would be a disgrace upon the county and upon the town in particular. I feel more mortification than resentment, but I think it would manifested a more generous temper to have given me their Oppinions in private than to make proclomation of it in publick as a capital objection, for nobody loves to be the subject of ridicule however true the cause.

For some reason Greene quickly changed his mind about resigning; he swallowed his pride and stayed on with the Kentish Guards as a private. Through that winter and spring of 1775 he was one of the more faithful attendees as William Johnson drilled the Guards in military maneuvers. They drilled three days a week on the frozen parade field above East Greenwich, marching to the beat of the fife and the drum.

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

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