01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, July 22, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The last full year of Nathanael Greene's life, 1785, began badly. In January he shipped out from Newport bound for Charleston, S.C., and nearly died at sea.

His ship, the Union, was just a few days out from port when a winter storm knocked it down. Seas broke over the deck and "washed the Captain with such force against the Chains as to dislocate his Leg, and greatly injured the first Mate," according to the newspaper the Newport Mercury. Greene, a veteran of combat, remained cool. "While the ship was on her Beam-ends, the Hon. Major-General Greene . . . by an Exertion and presence of Mind peculiar to himself, was greatly instrumental" in righting the ship.

The Union limped into Charleston on Jan. 28, its rigging a mess of snapped spars and tangled sheets. Ashore, Greene quickly learned that heavy rains had ruined his ripened rice crops, leaving him with just a fraction of what he'd expected to sell.

Then a Georgia cavalry captain who'd served under Greene in the Southern Army, James Gunn, challenged Greene to a duel. Gunn has been described by one Georgia historian as "violent, aggressive" and "overbearing"; Greene summed up Gunn as a "public nuisance" and a "mad man."

Gunn felt that Greene had insulted him two years earlier by refusing to let him keep federal horses as his personal property when the army broke up. A Board of Officers had ruled that it was OK for Gunn to keep the horses, but Greene overruled the board saying that if every officer took off with horses, every private would go home with muskets and the United States would have neither horses nor arms.

Greene was in Savannah, preparing to inspect his plantation near there, when in late February he received a threatening letter from Gunn. Gunn also owned a plantation on the Savannah River, so he was near enough to act on his threats.

With both men now claiming civilian status, Greene, Gunn wrote, no longer had the "power to do me an Injury notwithstanding you may feal a disposition to do so. Consequentially as I feal myself equally Independent with you: there can be no acceptation taken: nor can you object to meeting me with your friend, provided with Arms necessary on those occations at 4. oClo. this afternoon, on Mr. Campbells plantation opposite to Savannah, to render that satisfaction, which is due to Injured reputation."

Gunn had challenged Greene to bring a second, or assistant, and pistols to a duel, that afternoon, across the Savannah River in South Carolina.

In a terse response that day, March 2, Greene refused the challenge. He wrote: I will never establish a precedent for subjecting superior officers to the call of inferior officers for what the former have done in the execution of their public duty.

Greene's reasoning was sound; every officer of the past two centuries would be thankful to him for refusing to set the precedent. Still, declining the duel gnawed at him. More than a month after Gunn's challenge it weighed on Greene's mind as he wrote George Washington:

If a commanding Officer is bound to give satisfaction to every Officer who may pretend he is injured . . . it places him in a much more disagreeable situation than had ever occurred to me before. But as I may have mistaken the line of a commanding officer I wish for your sentiments on the subject. It is possible you may be put in the same predicament by the ignorance of sum or the impudence of others . . . . If I thought my honor or reputation might suffer in the opinion of the World and more especially with the Military Gentlemen I value life too little to hesitate a moment to answer the challenge. But when I think of the nature of the precedent and the extent of the mischief it may produce I have felt a necessity to reject it.

Washington wrote to Greene that he had done the right thing: "your honor and reputation will not only stand perfectly acquited for the non-acceptance of his challenge, but that your prudence and judgment would have been condemnable for accepting of it, in the eyes of the world, because if a commanding officer is amenable to private calls for the discharge of public duty, he has a dagger always at his breast, & can turn neither to the right nor to the left without meeting its point."

Even with Washington's approval, the Gunn affair rankled Greene. He took to carrying a small pistol in case Gunn tried anything: if he should he should take a sudden leap.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Source for today's installment:

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

A continuing series.