02:14 PM EDT on Monday, July 24, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

In a rented house on a hill in Newport, Caty Greene delivered a baby girl, her sixth child. Her husband, Nathanael Greene, was not home for the birth, having sailed to New York in hopes of settling an enormous debt that he had borne to clothe the troops he had commanded in the American Revolution.

Greene sailed back into Newport just days after the baby's birth in mid-August 1785. He had a houseguest in tow, the Baron von Steuben, who had earned fame at Valley Forge for teaching American troops how to fight as unified battalions, enabling them to stand toe-to-toe with the British at Monmouth.

Now, like Greene, von Steuben was broke. He had sold even his watch and his silver forks to support his men in the Southern Campaign. Congress was debating whether to award him back pay, and a Rhode Island delegate held the key vote on that issue.

The barons claims are high upon the score of merit, Greene wrote from Newport to his congressman, William Ellery. The ocenomy and order introduced into the Army from system and dicipline can hardly be too highly rated.

The Greenes now lived in a rented house on a hill in Newport, where they'd moved to be above the dank air near the city's wharves. The house cost $85 more per year, money Greene could ill-afford, but he hoped the more healthful air would cut down on his doctor's bills. His hopes were in vain; soon after he got home, all of Greene's children came down with whooping cough. On Aug. 30, Greene took up his quill and reported the death of the baby, Catharine.

Since I wrote you last Tuesday I had the misfortune to loose my youngest Child with the throat distemper, he told his friend, the Hartford merchant Jeremiah Wadsworth. Mrs Greene is very poorly and my two little Girls very sick with the hooping Cough. Patty is so bad with it as to be dangerous. Cousin Griffin arrived from New York and now lays sick with fever at my house.

Word spread through town that the Greenes planned to move to their Mulberry Grove plantation in Georgia. Greene groused People knowing that I am going away harass me death for a number of little debts.

Two days after baby Catharine's death, Greene got hit with a demand for payment of 1.1 pounds for a baby-size coffin, plus a bill from an Abraham Greene, who had provided funeral services including "ringing the bell."

The family -- plus a tutor, Phineas Miller, who'd later become the widow Caty's second husband -- sailed for Georgia on Oct. 14, 1784. When Block Island and Westerly slipped astern, Nathanael Greene glimpsed the last that he ever would see of his beloved Rhode Island.

Once again, the passage south was dangerously rough -- a crew member was washed overboard in a gale, and lost at sea.

Just two months after losing baby Catharine, Caty Greene was pregnant again and she had a miserable trip. After a 16-day sail Nathanael Greene wrote from Charleston: The passage was long and disagreeable, Catys sufferings inexpressible. Her fears magnified the smallest dangers into certain ruin. However, we had two Gales in one of which we lost a man over board that were not pleasant and not altogether free from danger. Caty was so affrighted during their greatest violence that she almost loose her senses.

At Savannah, the Greenes and their tutor unloaded their carriages from the ship and drove the sandy Augusta Road a dozen miles upriver to their new home, the Mulberry Grove plantation on the Savannah River. Before the State of Georgia confiscated the place and gave it to Greene, the estate had belonged to a British Lt. Gov., John Graham, who had lived in a stately house in a grove of mulberry trees.

Greene had sent carpenters to Mulberry Grove the previous spring to spruce up the estate. Now in November, many windows were still shattered in the house, the greenhouses and bird coops, and the place was dirty.

Still, Greene was pleased with what he saw:

We found the house situation and outbuildings more convenient and pleasing than we expected. The prospect is delightful and the house Magnificent but very dirty. Nell [probably a house slave] was on eight days mounted on a stage scowering the Cornishes and painted plaistering upon the sides of the Wall; and several more were spent on the Wainscoting and floors.

The grounds held a coach house and stables, an out kitchen for cooking in the summer heat, a long poultry house, a smoke house. The estate even came with the Graham family's burial vault in Savannah.

The Garden is in ruins, Greene reported, but there are still a great variety of shrubs and flowers in it. In the Poultry and the Garden Caty promises her self no small amusements.

One complication marred Greene's arrival: the overseer had sent a slave out to keep cattle from grazing in the rice, and the slave had built a warming fire that burned out of control. Fire ate up a field of harvest-ready rice worth 200 pounds sterling. So far his plantations had lost rice to flood and to fire while yielding precious little for market.

In March 1786, Greene wrote a letter to his old friend, Henry Knox, that sounded as plaintive as a country-western song: poverty, fire, crop failure, another pregnancy, disease. He wrote from Mulberry grove:

My family is in distress and I am overwhelmed with difficulties and God knows where or when they will end. I work hard and live poor but I fear all this will not extricate me. I have met with some heavy losses this winter, I had fifty barrels of Rice burnt up and forty five sunk in Savannah Docks sent to market for sale. Those losses add to my distress greatly. My Crops failed owning to the wet season last year, and this deduction out of the little I made leave but a small support for my family. Mrs. Greene is just ready to lay in. [For the seventh time in 11 years she was pregnant.] And the children have just got out of the small pox by innoculation. . . . Mrs. Greene joins me in affectionate compliments to you and Mrs Knox. She is transformed from the gay Lady to the sober house wife.

In docketing this letter Knox scrawled: "This is the last letter I ever received from my truly beloved friend Genl. Greene."

Dogged by debts

E. John Collett was a very good businessman -- polished, polite and persistent as the devil. He represented the London house of Newcomen and Collett, one of two businesses that had supplied an American Army contractor with clothes for America's Southern Army. Now three years after the war, he wanted payment for those clothes, payment that Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene had guaranteed from his personal funds.

Collett was aware that in trying to collect from Greene he was dunning an American hero; in his first collection letters, his tone was almost apologetic, but still -- a deal was a deal, and he counted on Greene's honor.

Collett sailed from London to collect that debt; upon arriving in Charleston in early March, he wrote a letter that Greene either did not receive or ignored. Collett wrote again. This time Greene responded, and although the letter does not survive, it's obvious from Collett's next letter -- written from Savannah -- that Greene had laid out a litany of hardships that prevented his paying.

"I am very Sensible Sir of the disagreeable Situation in which you are placed, & I assure you it is by no means my intention to add to your difficulties," Collett wrote. ". . . I am now in Savannah," closer to Greene's house, "where I shall await your answer."

Despite his hardships, Nathanael Greene managed to keep a sense of humor and, at least on one April morning, a modicum of optimism. Writing to Ethan Clarke, a Newport merchant who married Greene's former heartthrob, Nancy Ward, he described a calamitous day on Mulberry Grove: his hugely pregnant wife, Caty, had turned her ankle, fallen and bruised her hip.

Then the housekeeper's son took a horse kick to the face and had his upper lip cut through his jawbone from his nose downwards and the end of his nose split open.

Greene took up needle and thread and sewed the wound himself. I am in hopes it will not disfigure him greatly, but cannot pronounce positively it bled so freely as to render the operation difficult.

While he was sewing the boy's bloody face the family tutor yelled that Patty, Greene's oldest daughter at age 9, was having a seizure.

Here we had a serious call for all our medical knowledge and I hardly know which is the greatest quack Mrs Greene or me. [Patty] lay in a lifeless situation for two hours until I got a puke to operate which restored vital heat and activity to the circulating fluids. . . . The accidents of yesterday made me think of Job[']s Messengers. The family all well at noon and in the evening one half of it laid by the heels.

And yet, Greene wrote to Clarke on a spring morning, his life was good. Through a settlement with the estate of John Banks, his ne'er-do-well Army contractor, he now owned all of Cumberland Island, an 18-mile-long sea island near the Florida border. Greene planned to escape the heat of a lowland summer by moving his family there.

The garden is delightful. The fruit trees and flowering shrubs forms a pleasing variety. We have green peas almost fit to eat and as fine Lettice as you ever saw. The mocking bird serenades us evening and morning.

His orchards were fragrant with blossoms of apples, pears, peaches and apricots, nectarines, plumbs, figs, oranges. And we have strawberries that are three inches around.

Yet, Greene wrote in a more melancholy vain, it is a great deduction from the pleasures we shall feel from the beauties and conveniences of the place that we are obliged to leave it before we shall have tasted of several kinds of fruit.

Greene meant that he'd never taste the fruit of his orchards because he'd be on Cumberland Island when it ripened; in fact, he never ate of his fruits, for not long after the bloom fell from the branch, Nathanael Greene was dead.

A trip to Savannah

E. John Collett would not be denied. Greene owed him a lot of money, and he was bound to collect. On May 8, 1786, he sent a messenger up the Savannah River to deliver a collection letter to Greene's plantation.

Greene had not responded by Wednesday, so that evening Collett sent another letter up the river: "I rather apprehend my [earlier] letter miscarried, as the messenger by whom I forwarded it, returned again to Town, saying he had met one of your Servants on the Road and delivered it to him.

"This Circumstance, and my not hearing from you, Occasions me to trouble you again."

When, Collett wanted to know, could Greene meet him face to face to discuss the debt?

Greene knew he could postpone Collett no longer; he packed his carriage and turned his horses for the 14-mile trot down the Augusta Road to Savannah. His wife, Caty, rode with him; she wanted to get off their isolated plantation for a while. She felt weak, the result of having a miscarriage of her full-term baby after she had taken a bad fall.

About a mile from town, it occurred to Greene that his old comrade, Gen. Mad Anthony Wayne, was supposed to ride over from his nearby plantation for dinner that night. He thought about turning around to write Wayne a message saying not to come, but with his wife's weakened condition he did not want to prolong the carriage ride.

In Savannah, Greene tried to hammer out a deal with Collett in which he'd pay some of his debts. The two men agreed to meet again in a month, and on June 12, 1786, the scene repeated itself: the Greene carriage rolled down the sandy, shady Augusta Road carrying Nathanael and Caty into town so Greene could meet Collett to make a final debt schedule.

The Greenes spent that night at the riverfront home of Nathaniel Pendleton, a former aide de camp of the general who'd narrowly saved Greene from capture at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

The next morning, Greene and his wife left early for Mulberry Grove, intending to breakfast up the river with William Gibbons. He owned the plantation next to Greene's and sometimes acted as Greene's lawyer, even though his father was suing Greene, claiming ownership of a portion of Mulberry Grove.

After noon, the Greenes and Gibbons walked his plantation to see how Gibbons' rice was getting on. An 18th-century rice plantation in midsummer was a miserable place with slaves shin-deep in stinking muck hoeing aquatic weeds from the stagnant swamp waters nurturing the rice.

When he resumed his carriage ride home, Greene complained to his wife of a headache. The next morning, a Wednesday, it still hurt. Back at Valley Forge in 1778, Greene had developed a very disagreeable pain in one of his eyes that periodically plagued him for the rest of his life. That Thursday, June 14, the old eye pain flared again, behind both eyes. His forehead swelled painfully.

Pendleton rode into Mulberry Grove that evening and was alarmed at what he saw: Greene seemed depressed and wouldn't or couldn't join in the conversation.

A call went out for the local doctor, John Brickell; he arrived, drew a little blood, administered some medicine. That didn't work. Still Greene's forehead swelled.

Brickell called in a consultant, Dr. Donald MacLeod; he "blistered" the temples and drew blood freely, but Greene's entire head continued to swell until he fell into a stupor.

MacLeod dashed off a note to Anthony Wayne: Gen Greene, I am distressed to inform you is just about closing the chapter of his life. As you may wish to be here at this unhappy moment, I thought it a duty to inform you. Mrs. Greene's Situation is not to be described.

Wayne came, and kept a bedside vigil of his comatose friend. On Monday morning, June 19, 1786, Nathanael Greene drew his last, shallow breath. He was 43 years old.

In the light of a midsummer morning, Wayne dipped his quill and wrote in a quivering hand:

"I have often wrote you but never on so distressing an occasion. My dear friend General Greene is no more. He departed this morning at 6 o'clock a.m. He was great as a soldier, greater as a citizen, immaculate as a friend. His corpse will be at Major Pendleton's this night. . . . Pardon this scrawl; my feelings are but too much affected because I have seen a great and good man die."

The next morning they brought Greene's body by boat down the river to Savannah. As the sloop bearing Greene's body sailed past ships in Savannah Harbor, they struck their colors to half-mast. In town, merchants drew their shutters against the summer sun and closed business for the day; the entire city of Savannah fell quiet.

Around 5 p.m., pallbearers carried Greene's coffin from the riverfront house of Nathaniel Pendleton, Greene's friend and former aide de camp.

Mounted dragoons led the funeral parade through the sandy streets of Savannah up to the Colonial Cemetery near the tall white steeple of Christ Episcopal Church. Artillery rolled behind the horses; light infantry soldiers flanked the coffin. The guns of Fort Wayne thundered once a minute as the band played a solemn dirge, the March of Death in Saul.

As no preacher could be found anywhere in Savannah, a judge read a funeral service, ironically the service of the Church of England. The infantry parted for the pallbearers, who stooped to slip Greene's body into a low vault.

The soldiers fired three musket blasts while artillery fired a salute of 13 guns, which echoed along the river and faded.

Greene had no money for a marker, and no one ever thought to put one on his plain, brick tomb.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conrad, Dennis M. ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, vols. IX and XII. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1997.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. New York: Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1871.

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

"Redcoats, Hessians & Tories," exhibit: Charleston Museum, Charleston, S.C. June 4 through Dec. 14, 2003.

The Remains of Major-General Nathanael Greene. Committee of the Rhode Island General Assembly. E.L. Freeman and Co.: Providence, 1903.

Showman, Richard K. ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, vol. II. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1980.

Tomorrow: the final installment.