01:41 PM EDT on Monday, July 24, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

For 14 years after Nathanael Greene's death, his widow, Caty Greene, stayed on at their Mulberry Grove plantation where she enlivened Savannah's social scene. She had one married boyfriend in town, Nathaniel Pendleton, and another one -- the Connecticut merchant Jeremiah Wadsworth -- in New York, where she sailed almost yearly to petition Congress for the money her husband had paid to clothe its army.

When a Georgia army captain, James Webb, insulted her on the streets of Savannah by saying, in her words, "things too shocking to think of," it fell to a third suitor to defend her honor by beating Webb with a cane: her children's tutor, Phineas Miller. And it was Miller who won her hand in marriage in 1793.

By a narrow margin, Congress finally agreed to pay Caty $47,000 for the clothes Nathanael Greene had bought for America's Southern Army. Caty and her second husband invested some of that money in an invention made by Miller's friend and fellow Yale graduate, Eli Whitney. Whitney invented the cotton gin on their Mulberry Grove plantation.

The cotton gin did not make Whitney and the Millers rich. Far from it: the gin was so essential and of such a simple design that people freely stole the idea, notwithstanding the trio's patent on it. They also invested in an infamous scheme called the Yazoo Land Deal that went bust and forced them to sell Mulberry Grove in 1800. The Millers, broke again, moved to Cumberland Island, the 18-mile-long sea island that Nathanael Greene had managed to salvage from his disastrous dealings with the army contractor John Banks.

Caty was widowed a second time in 1803, when Phineas pricked his finger on a thorn and died of blood poisoning. He was only 39. By then she had seen her share of grief: widowed twice, she had lost three of her children. One was lost after a full-term miscarriage, daughter Catharine to whooping cough shortly after birth, and her first-born, George Washington Greene, who was an intelligent, educated 18-year-old when he drowned in the Savannah River.

When Caty died of malaria in 1814, nobody in Savannah knew where her first husband, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, was buried. This was a source of some embarrassment to Savannah's city fathers.

In 1819, Savannah's aldermen appointed a commission to "claim [Greene's] precious remains and remove them from the vault where they are now supposed to be deposited and mingling with those no wise akin to him" and re-inter them in a more dignified manner.

Yellow fever raged through Savannah that year, and the committee never met. Though Savannah's city fathers never found the bones, they did authorize a public monument to be built in Greene's honor. To fund it they chartered a lottery, which Greene would have hated. Though Greene twice held lotteries to fund public works projects -- a dam on the Pawtuxet River, and the reconstruction of his family's burned-out forge -- Greene came to abhor gambling.

Gambling, he'd written in 1783:

[I]s the bane of all honest industry, and while it corrupts the morals it ruins the manners. Neither taste nor sentiment can prevail where this evil gets its footing. . . . Every vice is in the train of gaming, and ruin and disgrace will soon follow, if the better order of people don't correct this folly. There will be neither spirit or union or principles of liberty to support our republican form of government. Ruin the morals and corrupt the manners of any people and they will soon become the fit instrument of tyranny and despotism.

Through the lottery, Savannah raised $35,000 to build a 50-foot replica of an Egyptian obelisk called Cleopatra's Needle in honor of Greene. But they never raised enough money for a plaque; for more than 60 years the tall, white shaft that rose from Johnson Square had no marker explaining why it was there. Locals called it "the smokestack of hell."

When Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman burned his way across Georgia to Savannah in the Civil War, his occupying troops burst into the brick tombs of Colonial Cemetery, ransacking them for treasure and turning them into shelters and bread ovens. By luck, they never broke into the old vault from the Graham Estate, holding the anonymous remains of Greene and his son, George.

After the war the old Colonial Cemetery fell fallow; soon the jungle-like growth of Georgia all but obscured the tombs. After 30 years of post-war neglect the city took control of the graveyard and cleaned it up for use as a downtown park.

When Asa Bird Gardner first gazed on it in 1901, Colonial Cemetery was a neat, grassy square confined within an iron fence. Gardner, president of the Rhode Island Society of the Cincinnati -- which boasted Nathanael Greene as its first president -- came armed with $100 cash and a firm resolve to find Greene's grave. It took him just three days.

The following year Greene's remains and those of his eldest son were reburied beneath the obelisk in Johnson Square. At the reburial, Savannah Alderman Robert L. Colding said:

"The world, with its throbbing pulse, and quickening pace, passes rapidly; alas, too rapidly, in its efforts to advance over the graves of the departed with scarce a glance of recognition. . . .

"He, whose remains are to find a permanent resting place beneath this spot, although he passed away more than a century ago, yet, in the deeds he wrought and in the example he has left us as a legacy, is one of the brightest gems in the crown of our country's glory."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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.

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

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