08:14 AM EDT on Thursday, June 1, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

In spring of 1775, Nathanael Greene found himself in a fine mess. Just months removed from being a private in the Kentish Guards, he now commanded the 1,000 men in Rhode Island's Army of Observation.

Most of the men under Greene's command were raw recruits plucked from wharves and farms in Rhode Island. They straggled into Greene's camp on the outskirts of Boston, a city on a low peninsula nearly encircled by hills.

Journal graphic / Tom Murphy

Greene set up camp on a hill in Roxbury, where he witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown.

The sum of Greene's military training had been just the thrice-a-week drills on the East Greenwich parade grounds with the Guards. He had never seen combat.

His enemy, the British encamped in Boston, was one of the finest fighting forces the world had yet known.

The contrast was not lost on Greene; he wrote from camp:

I lament the want of knowledge in Generalship. But as we have all been cultivateing the arts of Peace, its no wonder that we are deficient in the Art of War.

For the Rhode Island camp, Greene chose a hill in Roxbury that he described as a "most excellent post for observation."

Greene demonstrated a knack for picking good ground. He laid out his Army's camp on a 60-acre estate seized from a British loyalist; the camp included a mansion, a pond for bathing, exotic plants and a hot house that the Rhode Island troops turned into a storage shed for their casks of gunpowder.

After laying out his camp, Greene returned to Rhode Island to recruit more men for what was supposed to be a 1,500-man Army of Observation. On his recruiting trip he was too busy to ride out to Coventry to see his new wife. The recruiting did not go well; Greene never did raise 1,500 men. It was more like 1,000, and most of these, notes Richard Showman, first editor of The Papers of Nathanael Greene, "were untrained boys in their teens or older men without skills. Some were riffraff."

Before he again left Providence to return to camp at Roxbury he wrote to his wife, Caty:

It had been happy for me if I could have lived a private life in peace and plenty, enjoying all the happiness that results from a well-tempered society, founded on mutual esteem. . . . But the injury done my Country, and the Chains of Slavery forgeing for posterity, calls me fourth to defend our common rights, and repel the bold invaders of the Sons of freedom. The cause is the cause of God and man. . . . I am determined to defend my rights and maintain my freedom, or sell my life in the attempt.

Undisciplined troops

On his return to Roxbury, Greene found the Rhode Island camp "in great commotion." Entire companies were threatening to march home, partly because of the corruption of merchants who won contracts to supply the army's food. A Providence baker sent barrels of moldy bread. The beef, too, was tainted.

On inspection, Greene found his troops hungry, dirty, poorly trained and undisciplined.

Greene cracked down. He drilled his troops on the parade ground daily, and insisted that they scrub their fire locks with hot water. In his general orders of June 4, he warned the officers to Supress as much as Posable all Debauchery and Vulgar Language Inconsistent with the Character of Soldiers. He banned card playing in camp because the losers resented the winners taking their money.

After stemming the insurrection in his camp, Greene again returned to Rhode Island in an attempt to muster more troops. This time he did get to see Caty, but after midnight on June 18, 1775, business called him from their bed. A courier carried the news that the British had marched from Boston and attacked the Americans' new position on Bunker Hill.

Greene rode all night, his horse's hooves pounding through Swansea, Dighton and Taunton along the post road to Boston. At daybreak he arrived at camp; looking down from his hill at Roxbury he saw smoke and flames smoldering from Charlestown, where many British regulars had torched the houses on their march toward Bunker Hill.

Greene missed the Battle of Bunker Hill, but he watched and heard the cannonading that went on after it:

The action began yesterday, continued all last night and Charlestown is burnt down, and they are now closely engaged today, Greene wrote to the Rhode Island Committee of Safety. The number of the slain and wounded on either side is not known, but very considerable.

At the end of the day the British held Bunker Hill, but at an enormous price. The Americans lost 441 men killed or wounded; British casualties totaled at least 828 wounded and 226 killed, including 92 officers.

Greene wrote to his brother, Jacob, back in Rhode Island: I wish [we] could Sell them another Hill at the same Price we did Bunkers Hill.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Boatner III, Mark M. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1994.

Showman, Richard K., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. I. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1976.

A continuing series.