Washington's General by Terry Golway Page B

disreputable place. The official record states that Greene and one of his cousins, Griffin Greene, were punished for having been seen at “a Place in Coneticut of Publick Resort where they had No Proper Business.” Historians for decades assumed that the “Publick Resort” was a military parade, but the editors of Greene’s published papers note that the phrase was used at the time to describe alehouses and the like. Given Greene’s convivial personality (at around this time, he attended a friend’s wedding and wound up celebrating the occasion for several days), not to mentionhis clear disregard of Quaker tenets, it is not hard to picture him enjoying himself in an alehouse.
    But even if he was drinking and not drilling in Connecticut, Greene’s heretical interest in military matters was undeniable. He continued to study Caesar and Frederick the Great and cited famous campaigns from the past, like Hannibal’s in northern Italy, in his letters. His correspondence with Sammy Ward offers a tantilizing but mysterious clue about his interests at the time. In two letters in the early 1770s, well before the colonies and Britain marched to war, Greene referred to himself as “the colonel.” Nobody is quite sure why. But if his self-styled title betrayed a secret ambition, Greene set his sights far too low.
    The organized boycott of British goods began to sputter out in late 1770, after the government withdrew duties on most items except tea. In Boston, however, agitators continued their boycott, even though one of the city’s leading citizens, John Hancock, made a fortune importing tea from Britain.
    The East India Company, the tea-trading firm that had become one of Britain’s largest institutions, was perilously close to bankruptcy in the early 1770s. Parliament tried to bail out the company in May 1773 by eliminating colonial middlemen from the tea trade. The East India Company was given permission to ship and sell directly to designated American agents, drastically lowering the cost of its tea. Stouthearted patriots would be sorely tempted to reconsider their principles, American merchants would be cut out of the action, and only the company’s agents would make money on the deal.
    Ships carrying the tea sailed into Boston Harbor in late November and early December 1773. And on the night of December 17, the city’s most radical agitators disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, sailed into the harbor, boarded the merchant ships, and dumped the offending tea into the sea. The Boston Tea Party electrified America’s radical leaders and enraged Britain’s politicians. In March 1774, Lord North introduced legislation in Parliament called the Boston Port Act. It wasBritain’s reply to the Tea Party: the port of Boston was ordered closed, and its government and administative functions were transferred out of the city. General Thomas Gage was dispatched to Massachusetts to become the colony’s military governor, and he would have command of four thousand troops who would enforce the Crown’s laws.
    In addition to the Boston Port Act, Parliament passed a series of laws that became known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. Royal officials accused of crimes would be tried not in the colony in which the crimes took place but in Britain or in another colony. The Quartering Act ordered that colonial authorities provide British troops with housing and supplies. And the Massachusetts charter was rewritten to give the new military governor extensive powers over the town meetings that had helped give birth to the colony’s agitation.
    Other colonies rallied around stricken Boston, even as rumors circulated that more oppressive measures were under consideration. John Sherwood, Rhode Island’s agent in London, wrote to Governor Wanton, warning him: The prime minister may be considering a bill to “Vacate Your Charter, and to add part of Your Colony to