01:00 AM EDT on Friday, July 21, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Late in the drab month of November 1783, a sailing ship ghosted into Newport Harbor in the darkness. Nathanael Greene, by now the storied Conqueror of the South, stepped off the ship without fanfare. He walked or rode a carriage to his new home, a house his wife had rented in "The Point" section of Newport, a damp and chilly neighborhood on the waterfront.

Greene quickly determined that the house will not answer well for the Winter and set out to find one on higher ground.

Newport was then a depressing place. Before the war, Paul Revere called it "the garden of America" for its fruit orchards and fertile fields. Now there was barely a single tree standing on the whole of Acquidneck Island. During the three years of British occupation troops had cut orchards and burned fruit trees for firewood. They ripped the planking off the wharves and burned it, also to keep warm. They torched houses on the waterfront and pulled them down on the hills to create better firing lines for their cannon. More than half the island's population had fled, moving Rhode Island's capital city from Newport to Providence forever.

"Since the peace everything is changed," a French politician and merchant wrote in the late 1780s. "The reign of solitude is only interrupted by groups of idle men, standing with folded arms at the corners of streets; houses falling to ruin; grass growing in the public square[;] rags stuffed in the windows or hung upon hideous women and lean unquiet children."

Most of the houses in Bristol were still burned-out shells from the British raid of 1778. Warren too was burned, as were Bedford-Fairhaven, New London-Groton, Springfield, N.J., Georgetown, N.C. Coastal cities such as Newport, New York and Charleston stood burned and shelled from the war, while along the mountainous frontier, American forces had laid waste to Indian villages from the Adirondacks of New York through the Cherokee and Choctaw settlements in the Appalachians of Georgia.

For Greene there was no homecoming fanfare. There were the predictable encomiums from the General Assembly, committees from Coventry and East Greenwich and the leading citizens of Newport. They all offered good words and the best of luck, but no money.

In attempting to rebuild his life in a war-wracked country, Greene felt enormous economic pressure. He lived with bad credit, in a bad house, and in January, the new year of 1784 brought him bad news: a hurricane had wiped out his Boone plantation's rice crop.

That winter was one of the worst of the century; Greene slipped on ice and hurt the vessels of the stomach . . . I was seized with deadly pain that spread into his chest and lasted well into spring.

Also, for the fifth time in seven years, Caty was pregnant.

Mrs. Greene['s] situation has prevented my visiting Boston, Greene wrote to Henry Knox in early March 1784. I expect her to put to bed every hour.

Three weeks later he wrote to Knox again: Mrs. Greene not in bed yet but in hourly expectation.

Before his November homecoming, Greene had not seen his wife since she left Charleston on the brig Christiana on June 7, so by mid-March -- nine months later -- he naturally expected the baby to be born at any moment.

The average human gestation period is 280 days, which assuming conception on the last they could have seen each other, in South Carolina, would have brought the birth on March 12.

In a letter of April 15, he was still waiting.

Finally on April 17, 1784, the baby, a girl named Louisa Catharine Greene, was born. From Newport, Greene wrote to a business partner, Charles Petit:

I imagine you will be equally surprised to find me here as not having heard from me before. Mrs. Greenes not getting to bed as early as she expected prevented my setting out for the Southward[,] and a very disagreeable complaint in my breast has forbid my writing.

Caty's term of 315 days (1784 was a Leap Year) was almost a smoking gun for infidelity.

Isaac Briggs, a Georgia inventor and politician who owned land near Greene's in Georgia, heard a rumor that Greene "had made application for a divorce from his wife, because she had been unfaithful to his bed in his absence."

Briggs, being a busybody, took it upon himself to investigate this rumor on a trip to Newport: "I made inquiry concerning this report and found 'twas all a lie," Briggs reported. ". . . A lady who is superior to the little foibles of her sex, who disdains affectations, who thinks & acts as she pleases, within the limits of virtue and good sense, without consulting the world about it, is generally an object of envy and distraction. -- such is Lady Greene [Caty] -- She confesses she has passions & propensities & that if she has any virtue 'tis in resisting and keeping them within due bounds. . . . In short she is honest & unaffected enough to confess that she is a woman, & it seems to me the world dislikes her for nothing else."

Bills come due

In May 1784, Nathanael Greene left his wife and their five children in a dank house near the Newport wharves, and set out for Philadelphia; he hoped to settle his army accounts with Congress, particularly the 30,000-pound debt he'd incurred to clothe his men.

He had no luck. Congress faced a national debt of $30 million from the war, and it had no power to tax the states to pay for it. When Congress asked for an import tax to pay the debt, only a few states refused -- including, to Greene's mortification, his home state of Rhode Island.

He sailed back to Newport on June 7, and bad news from Philadelphia caught up with him there: John Banks, the army contractor whose credit Greene had guaranteed, had no way of paying his bills.

Banks "is in a bad way," a friend wrote from Philadelphia. "I hope not ruind intirely in purse; but I am apprehensive too much so in character."

Then came a letter from a London firm called Newcomen and Collett, dunning Greene for money for the clothing they had sold to Banks for Greene's army at Charleston. Greene answered that he was broke, so the company should badger Banks. Greene said he had told Banks he & I would not live long in the same World if he brought me into difficulties in the matter, and I will follow him to the ends of the Earth for Satisfaction. I am now going to Charleston and shall be glad to hear from you there.

Greene shipped out of Newport aboard a sloop that he partially owned, the Charleston Packet, on July 12, arriving in the oppressive heat of South Carolina on Aug. 1. Almost immediately he was hit with demands for the loans he had guaranteed to feed and clothe his army. Banks turned out to be quite a con man. He told the overseer of Greene's Boone plantation that he'd settled all debts with Greene, was acting as his attorney and that Greene had instructed the overseer to give Banks some money. This the overseer did before Banks fled town, leaving behind 20 lawsuits and several judgments against him.

The debt for Banks' army purchases weighed heavily on Greene as he wrote to his brother, Jacob:

My heart is too full and my situation too distressing, to write much . . . . My situation is truly afflicting! to be reduced from independence to want, and from the power of obliging my friends, to a situation claiming their aid. My heart faints within me when I think of my family.

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.

Dearden, Paul F. The Rhode Island Campaign of 1778. The Rhode Island Bicentennial Foundation: Providence, 1980.

Kimball, Gertrude Selwyn, ed. Pictures of Rhode Island in the Past. Preston and Rounds Co.: Providence, 1900.

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

Stegeman, John F. and Janet A. Caty: A Biography of Catharine Littlefield Greene. Rhode Island Bicentennial Foundation; Providence, 1977.

A continuing series.