A House of Commons resolution calls for an end to the war with America, and King George agrees.

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 19, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Lt. William McDowell was posted on advance guard duty that May morning in 1782, stopping all foot and horse traffic approaching a bridge spanning a wide, muddy river in South Carolina. On the other side of the bridge lay the American army's base camp.

Around 2 p.m., a British officer in his scarlet coat rode toward the bridge with a white flag of truce fluttering over his head. The officer identified himself as Major Skelly, an aide to British Gen. Alexander Leslie, now the commanding officer of all British troops in the South; he said he came on business "of consequence to both armies."

McDowell sent that day's field officer to fetch his commander, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, who was in no hurry to meet with the British major. Greene left him cooling his heels at the bridge until sunset.

"While he remained with me, we had a good deal of conversation," McDowell wrote in his journal. "He hop'd that matters were on a rare footing for peace; he hop'd that we would soon have the pleasure of drinking a glass of wine and taking each other by the hand in peac[e]able terms."

Greene eventually came down and met with Skelly in an outpost. He handed Greene some official-looking documents fresh off a boat from England: a March resolution of the British House of Commons, and King George III's reply to it.

Greene read the House's resolution, calling for an end to "offensive War on the Continent of the North America." King George concurred, writing that he wished "harmony between great Britain and the revolted countries."

Skelly offered Greene a cease-fire; if American troops would not fight, the British troops would also cease.

If anyone was ready for peace, it must have been Nathanael Greene. Of all the generals in the Continental Army only three had served since the 1775 siege of Boston: George Washington, Henry Knox and Greene; of those, Greene had seen far more hardship, battle and bloodshed.

Greene dismissed Skelly around 8 p.m. He slept on it that night, and then Greene rejected the peace proposal. He wrote to Congress, spelling out his reasons for rejecting the cease-fire: if America stopped fighting, England could turn more resources against France, which was not fair to America's trusted ally; also a cease-fire would lull Americans into a false sense of security, making it more difficult to negotiate a peace with honor.

And so the fighting continued, not as much as before, but enough to end the life of a son of a former Congressional president: On Aug. 27, 1782, Col. John Laurens, son of Henry Laurens, died in a rice paddy as he led a reckless attack on British ships that had sailed up the Combahee on a foraging expedition. Laurens was among the last casualties of the American Revolution.

Poor Lawrens has fallen in a paltry little skirmish, Greene wrote to a friend. . . . The State will feel his loss; and his father will hardly survive it.

"Swamp sickness"

By September 1782, British bullets had ceased killing American soldiers, but malaria dropped them in droves. No one knew what caused the summertime fevers of the South; many thought sickness sprang from swamp vapors rising in the morning mist.

Sick soldiers became such a problem that Greene moved his camp seven miles from Bacon's Bridge to Ashley Hill, S.C., in hopes that higher, drier ground would stem the fever. Still it spread, so that by September more than half the men, including Greene, suffered from the "malignant fever."

Greene reported: alas we have buryed upwards of two hundred of our fine fellows. A loss which we feel most sensibly as well from the smallness of our numbers as from the manner of their deaths. Had they fallen in the field it would have been nothing; but to dye in hospitals is truly distressing."

Finally on Dec. 13, 1782, word came that the British would sail next day from Charleston, their last stronghold in the South.

It is one of the most pleasing events of my life, Greene wrote of the evacuation. To Jeremiah Wadsworth he recounted the odds that he'd faced in chasing the British from the South: [T]he enemy had upwards of 18000 regular troops in the southern department last year plus 3,000 militia and nearly 1,000 black soldiers. Upwards of 10000 of these were in South Carolina and Georgia. . . . I believe when it is known our force amounted to little more than 2000 Men it will be difficult to account how the enemy have left this Country.

On New Year's Day 1783, Greene wrote to an aide: I wish you a happy newyear. If the year continues as badly as it has begun we shall end badly as we have nothing to eat for man or beast.

Greene needed a civilian contractor to provide food and clothing for his Army, but almost no one wanted the contract. Joseph Kershaw, who essentially owned the town of Camden before the war, said he couldn't fill the contract because: "the Stocks of the Country around for A great distance [are] almost totally destroy'd, Neither Horses, Cattle[,] Sheep or Hogs left. . . ."

A Virginia merchant named John Banks had been supplying some clothes and provisions to the army; he agreed to fill the contract, but in the spring of 1783 his credit dried up. Banks could buy no goods to sell to the army. In order to keep supplies flowing, Greene pledged his personal bond for 30,000 pounds sterling to cover debts to merchants who had sold clothing and other supplies to his army through Banks. In essence, Greene agreed to pay the costs of clothing and supplying his entire army.

Almost all of Greene's wartime investments had soured -- his privateers had made fortunes, then lost them; the Batsto Furnace had been a bust; his one asset was land. Thanks to the appreciative legislatures of South Carolina and Georgia, he had plenty of land: both states had voted to give him huge plantations confiscated from exiled Tories.

South Carolina gave Greene a plantation called Boone's Barony, some 6,600 acres on the Edisto River. The legislature authorized an expense of 10,000 guineas to buy the land; they spent less than that, and Greene successfully petitioned to use the rest of the money to buy the plantation's slaves.

The land without the means of cultivation will be but a dead interest, Greene wrote in his petition of Feb. 26, 1783. Those negroes belonging to the estate will be of more value to me than to any body else, but it will be enitrely out of my power to purchase them unless the State will make the conditions of pay favorable to my wishes. . . .

I have a dependant family and children to educate which I hope will apologize for this proposition.

The Georgia Plantation, Mulberry Grove, looked particularly promising: more than 1,300 acres, much of it fine River Swamp for cultivating rice on the Savannah River, plus a very elegant House.

The value of both plantations lay in the crops they could produce, chiefly rice. From his headquarters in Charleston, Greene began buying more slaves to work his plantations. He spent more than 5,000 pounds sterling for more Negroes that he enslaved at Boone's Barony.

Warner Mifflin, a Philadelphia Quaker who freed all of his slaves before the war, pressed Greene on the subject of slavery, pointing out the obvious contradiction that Greene had fought for liberty and was now practicing slavery.

Mifflin had read a letter that Greene wrote to a fellow Quaker "and as thou mentioned a hope you should fix Liberty on so broad a basis that it would be lasting tho[ugh] thou said nothing respecting Black People, yet as the Grand Strugle was for Liberty and thou took thy Commission from Congress who had in their Declaration [of Independence] set forth in such clear terms its being the Natural right of all men[,] should thou after all by thy Conduct countenance slavery it would be a stigma to thy Character in the Annals of History if the Historians of the present day should do justice in transmitting to Posterity the transactions thereof."

Greene responded: On the subject of slavery, nothing can be said in its defence.

Yet he continued to enslave people for the remaining three years of his life.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Conrad, Dennis M. ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, vols. XI and XII. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2000, 2002.

Parks, Roger N., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. XIII. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2005.

A continuing series.