Washington's General by Terry Golway Page A

members, who said that he recognized a man “named Greene” among the raiders. If there was, in fact, a man named Greene among the
Gaspee
boarding party, most likely it was Rufus, the captain of the ill-fated
Fortune.
But beyond the question of his innocence, Nathanael Greene had good reason to fear being named as a suspect in the affair. He had heard further rumors claiming that
Gaspee
suspects would be transported to London for trial.
    Of his accuser, Greene said, “I should be tempted to let the Sunshine through him if I could come at Him.” Again, as with the seizure of the
Fortune,
Greene transformed his personal travail into a political epiphany. Questions of freedom and liberty no longer were distant or merely academic. They now were unavoidable; they affected him, and, he realized, they affected all other Americans as well.
    He told Sammy Ward that the
Gaspee
commission was “Justly Alarming to every Virtuous Mind and Lover of Liberty in America.” If the commission succeeded in tempting witnesses “to Perjury,” he wrote, “this Court and mode of Trial. . . will naturally Affect all the other Colonies.” He went on to condemn the colony’s General Assembly, which had not vigorously protested the commission’s work, as a “Pusillanimous Crew and betrayers of the Peoples Liberties.”
    Although he now feared for the liberties of his fellow colonists and had reason to resent the power and prerogatives of the Crown, Nathanael Greene–like most Americans–was not prepared for radical solutions to their complaints. The king remained a popular figure in America, and Britain’s tax and revenue policies were blamed on Parliament and the king’s ministers. Greene himself still honored Rhode Island’s connection to the mother country. His favorite horse, a stallion, was named Britain.
    His connection to his faith was undergoing a similar transition. He was becoming ever more impatient with what he regarded as the irrational and anti-intellectual cant of his late father’s brand of Quakerism, and yet he had not broken completely with the traditions of his childhood. But Nathanael’s occasional appearances at the Quaker meetinghouse inEast Greenwich, near the family homestead in Potowomut, did nothing to persuade him that he was making a mistake as he drifted away from his father’s faith.
    One such meeting featured a particularly pompous and long-winded minister whose sermon inspired only cynicism from Nathanael as he sat in the congregation, wishing he were somewhere else. The minister’s talk, Greene wrote, was “so light that it evaporated like Smoke and left us neither the fuller nor better pleased.” Indeed, the experience, and perhaps his never-ending search for a bride and companion, left him “in the dumps . . . brooding over mischief and hatching Evils.”
    Greene’s impatience with conventional religious practice was not confined to criticism of Quakerism. He lashed out when the colony’s clergymen protested the performance of a play called
The Unhappy Orphan.
Stage performances were prohibited under Rhode Island law, and a holy ruckus followed the play’s debut. “Priests and Levites of every Order [cry] out against it as a subversion of Morallity and dangerous to the Church,” Greene wrote. But he took the side of the actors, one of whom he knew.
    It was not entirely surprising that Nathanael Greene eventually found himself suspended from the Quaker meetings for an infraction of their code of behavior. The suspension was ordered in July 1773, and for years, historians stated that it was a punishment for Greene’s having attended a military exercise of some sort. Such activity, it was assumed, constituted a breach of Quaker pacifism. More recently, however, Greene scholars have argued persuasively that the suspension was related to Nathanael’s appearance at a public house or some other