12:47 PM EDT on Monday, June 26, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Nathanael Greene got called to Philadelphia to meet with Congress and he didn't like it; he was not fond of big cities and though he had served in Rhode Island's General Assembly, he had no patience for politicians.

As he prepared to set out for the city on Dec. 21, 1778, he wrote from the main Army's winter camp in Middlebrook, N.J.: The Weather is cold and the Roads are very bad. I expect a very disagreeable jorney.

His wife, Caty, was with him, having just arrived in the winter camp with George, their son, almost 3. Their daughters -- 21-month-old Martha and Cornelia, not even 3 months old -- remained with relatives in Rhode Island.

Caty and George had had a most disagreeable and distressing jorney riding in a rickety coach from Rhode Island to camp. Her health was somewhat impaird in coming, but George stood it out finely. He is a fine hardy fellow, full of play and meriment, Greene wrote.

En route to Philadelphia the trio stopped at Trenton, where Caty and George would stay in the stately brick home of John Cox while Greene conducted business in Philadelphia. Cox was one of Greene's two assistants in the quartermaster's department; he was sickly that winter, but his wife and many daughters -- he eventually had six -- kept Caty comfortable.

Before Nathanael set out from Cox's a blizzard struck, leaving him snowbound with his wife and child. Yet rather than sink into the domestic comforts of a crackling fire while snow swirled past the tall windows he fretted about how well horses at camp had weathered the storm: the distresses that must have taken place among the Cattle [i.e., livestock] has given me many uneasy feelings, he wrote to the camp commander, Gen. William Alexander. Alexander was in charge, for Washington, too, had been summoned to Philadelphia.

The Delaware River finally froze thickly enough for Greene to cross it on Dec. 31, and he spent that New Year's Eve, 1778, alone in Philadelphia, where he groused: There is nothing new in the City. Political feuds are very prevalent and luxury and extravagance beyound description. The City is crowded with people and all kinds of diversions are going on. . . .

Greene expected to be in Philadelphia for a couple of days; he wound up spending more than a month. Since Washington was stuck there too, the two men grew even closer. Washington had stopped holding councils of war, but he asked Greene's opinion on what the Army's strategy should be for the campaign of 1779.

By candlelight in the predawn darkness of Jan. 5, Greene responded:

The Middle and Eastern States have been harassed very greatly for four Campaigns runing by means of which the Country has got much exhausted and the People sore with the hardships they have suffer'd, and the state of our [nearly worthless] currency . . . renders a contracted plan and a breathing spell for the People absolutely necessary.

"There is three principal objects to be attended to in the plan of the next Campaign. To take a position favorable for subsisting the army with ease and at the least Expence, To scourge the Indians at the proper season, and route [rout] the Enemy from N York should the state of the Garrison there render it practicable.

To scourge the Indians properly there should be considerable bodys of men march into their Country by different routes and at a season when their Corn is about half grown. The month of June will be the most proper time. If the corn was burned or ripped up then, the growing season would be too advanced to resow it.

For most of 1779, Washington followed Greene's advice to the letter, keeping the Army in a defensive position in New Jersey, while sending an expedition into northern New York to fight the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy. Five of the six tribes of the Confederacy -- the Oneida being the exception -- had aligned themselves with Tory militiamen for raids as far south as Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, where they routed an American militia group of 360 men, taking 227 scalps.

Gen. Horatio Gates, who won fame at the Battle of Saratoga, had an aversion to Indian warfare; he'd backed out on an earlier scheme to fight the Iroquois and passed on this one as well, so Washington sent Gates to Rhode Island to relieve Gen. John Sullivan.

Washington planned to send Sullivan and 2,500 men to annihilate the Seneca and other tribes in New York's Finger Lakes region. The tribes of the Six Nations were not nomadic. They lived in villages of log cabins and fieldstone houses amidst cultivated orchards and fields.

While Washington was considering the expedition to the north, Greene wrote to his cousin, Griffin: It may not be amiss for you to lodge some good liquors at Albany in the course of the Winter; this is a secret hint. Greene held a business partnership with Griffin, and he figured the price of liquor would rapidly increase when the Army came through.

Sullivan did not reach Seneca territory in time to destroy their corn when half-grown, but destroy he did. Between mid-August and late September 1779, Sullivan's troops ruined 160,000 bushels of corn and torched 40 towns, mostly Indian settlements. The only real battle came at the Indian village of Newtown, where Sullivan's troops squared off with Tory Rangers, some British regulars and 400 Indians. It ended in a rout. Sullivan had dragged artillery through the footpaths of Iroquois country, and his firepower grossly overmatched anything else on the frontier.

After the battle, Lt. William Barton of New Jersey -- not to be mistaken for the William Barton who'd captured a general at Newport -- sent a scouting party to count the Indians killed.

"Towards noon they found them," Barton wrote, "and skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs, one pair for the major, the other for myself."

Burning villages and skinning the dead did not serve to end the joint Indian-Tory raids on the American border settlements; on the contrary, starving, angry tribes were forced into the British camp at Niagara for sustenance, and became even more enmeshed with the King's cause.

A little respite

Most of Nathanael Greene's time in 1779 was consumed with supplying Sullivan's expedition against the Seneca tribe. Feeding and transporting an army through what was then wilderness was exactly the kind of painstaking "druggery" that had almost scared him away from accepting the quartermaster's post. His papers from this time show request after request after request for money, pack saddles, tools and forage, always forage.

But it wasn't all drudgework. Despite the copious criticism Greene received for being well-compensated, he performed near-miracles with the quartermaster's department. Accounting for inflation, the department spent less money in his tenure than it spent before he took over, and thanks to efficiencies in transportation, goods were getting to the places that needed them -- soldiers weren't nearly naked and starving.

Indeed, in March 1779, Washington could boast to the Marquis de Lafayette from Middlebrook:

"The American troops are again in huts, but in a more agreeable and fertile country than they were in last winter at Valley Forge, and they are better clad and more healthy than they have ever been since the formation of the army."

Martha Washington had come to headquarters, much to Greene's relief, for he had noted that Washington was getting grouchy without her. Caty Greene was there too, and with the troops living in relative comfort there was time for dinners and balls. Caty was just 24 years old, a dozen years younger than her husband.

We had a little dance at my quarters a few Evenings past, Greene wrote in mid-March. His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down. Upon the whole we had a pretty little frisk.

Newport evacuation

The waning days of 1779 brought two big events, one good one bad.

The bad news came from Savannah, where Count D'Estaing again tried to work with American troops in taking a British-controlled city, as he had at Newport. This time he failed utterly, losing 800 men including the Polish Count Casimir Pulaski, a frustrated cavalry officer who never achieved in life the military fame he sought in America, though in death he's been memorialized in Rhode Island: he is the eponym for Pulaski State Park in Burrillville.

The good news hailed from Rhode Island. On Oct. 26, 1779, Col. Ephraim Bowen sent Greene a message via the express chain of horses that linked the state to Washington's headquarters now on the Hudson River:

"I have the Pleasure to Acquaint you of the Evacuation of this Island by the British Army on Monday night last," Bowen wrote from Newport. "The Enemy have Left about Fourteen hundred Tons of Excellent Hay, Sixty of [or] Seventy Tons of Straw, [and] upwards of three hundred Cords of Wood," merely a week's supply of firewood for the garrison. "I shall get you a pair of English blankets."

Bowen made good on that promise to send blankets; Greene doubtless appreciated them as that winter of 1779-80 was one of the coldest of the entire 18th century. It came early and it came on hard.

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

A continuing series.