The epic rise and sad end of our county namesake

In our community, we are surrounded by the names of our patriot forefathers.

Our county seat namesake is the original author of the Declaration of Independence and our third U.S. president.

The new Thomas Jefferson Gardens reflects his likeness in statue and salutes elements that are associated with him and during his era. The gardens will be the “first stop” when visitors come to town to see the sites.

Our Abraham Lincoln statue standing in front of the county courthouse commemorates the original Lincoln Highway as the first transcontinental highway spanning from coast to coast while passing through our very own town square.

But there is still one name that commonly eludes us — the namesake for the county itself.

When we see the name, most of us conjure thoughts of the color green with an extra “e” attached to the end. However, the name belongs to another Founding Father and for the second-most celebrated Revolutionary War general — only behind a man named Washington.

Nathanael Greene was born to an industrious Quaker preacher and his wife outside Warwick, R.I., on Aug. 7, 1742.

At the age of 11, Nathanael’s mother passed away. Everyday life for him and his five brothers was filled with nonstop hard work.

The Greene family owned a multitude of businesses that included a farm, wharf, warehouse, sawmill and a store. They also owned two forges that produced anchors bound for the international shipping port of Newport across the Greenwich Bay.

Nathanael, standing almost 6 feet, was tall for the time.

As an adult he had chronic knee pain and walked with a limp, most likely due to his work with foot-powered bellows in his father’s forge as a child.

His skull produced a pronounced forehead that distinguished him from others.

Greene had little formal education. Outside of church teachings, it was thought by his father that any other educational pursuit was a waste of time.

However, ambitious Nathanael pursued tutoring on a wide range of subjects that included geometry and some Latin. His personal library was filled with numerous other subjects, including military theory.

He was capable enough intellectually that he represented associates in court as their attorney.

These were the days leading up to the American Revolution when the British were desperately trying to collect as many taxes as possible to pay for their extraordinarily expensive American colonies. However, the colonies — ever so restless to rid themselves of the overreach and growing oppression of the English crown — were none too eager to oblige.

Greene’s own disdain for the British manifested when his small ship, the Fortune, and her cargo of West India rum, Jamaican spirits and a barrel of brown sugar was seized by force in 1772 by the British navy for ignoring customs on their transported goods.

Once this “illegal” seizure occurred, Greene wrote to a friend, “I have devoted almost the whole of my time in devising and carrying into execution measure for the recovery of my property and punishing the offender.”

His route was court.

Others on his behalf carried out vigilante justice.

Five dozen men located the British ship Gaspee that was responsible for confiscating the Fortune and promptly burned it to the ground.

For the commanding officer of the Gaspee, his fortunes were not any better. He received a musket ball fired into his upper thigh, making him the first British casualty of the impending American Revolution.

In addition, the British officer was arrested by the local sheriff for his deeds. However, it was not mentioned that the sheriff was the very man responsible for leading the 60 men that burned down the Gaspee.

Matters between the colonies and the British only intensified over the next few years. After the “tea parties” in Boston and other colonial cities, the British continued tightening their grip on the colonists until all retributions of the tea were paid.

With the occupation of Boston by more than 4,000 British soldiers, communities in Rhode Island began to muster a new militia for their protection.

Greene was a member of the chartering of a militia company.

As a Quaker, Greene had no previous military experience. However, he had served on the Rhode Island Committee to Revise Militia Laws. He was passed over as lieutenant of the new company but eventually stayed aboard as a private.

Although marching with his limp and having suffered an obvious blow to his pride for not being elected commander, he persisted to help build the company.

When the revolution began in Concord and Lexington, and word reached Greene, he immediately left his wife and family for war.

Shortly thereafter, the Rhode Island General Assembly sought to combine all militias into a 1,500-man army. The assembly passed over men who had previously served in the French and Indian Wars and higher-ranking officers of the militias to appoint 32-year-old Nathanael Greene as general of their army.

Greene possessed many qualities that led to this decision, including military intelligence from all of his readings, his work to reorganize the militia laws, legislative experience and his training as a private. It also likely helped that he had political connections with a former governor, the legislature and other influential individuals.

Gen. Greene’s commanding officer was Gen. George Washington. The Second Continental Congress had named him commander in chief of the Army of the United Colonies.

Washington took favor to Greene and continued to add to his responsibilities. Greene would be named quartermaster general of the army and successfully improved the logistical system.

As the war raged on, the British focused on the South with hopes that loyalists to England would do the heavy fighting on their behalf as they fought on multiple fronts with the French in both Europe and in the Caribbean theaters.

Congress repeatedly appointed generals in the South that were ineffective.

Finally, Congress allowed Washington to choose the general to turn the South.

His immediate answer was Gen. Nathanael Greene.

With his lack of formal military theory and education, Greene’s approach in war was unorthodox. His philosophy was high risk with high rewards when executed to plan.

He assumed command in the South in December 1780, then divided his army — one under his command and the second under Gen. Morgan.

Conventional thinking would be that these two forces would be soundly defeated, but the British took the bait and split their forces to give chase. Morgan retreated initially and then used a combination of military maneuvers to crush 90 percent of 1,100 of the pursuing British army.

The American forces under Greene then recombined. The British commander Cornwallis, embarrassed from the recent defeat, aggressively pursued Greene’s army.

Greene played a cat-and-mouse game and always avoided a full altercation until they crossed the Dan River into Virginia. Cornwallis’ army, exhausted by the pursuit, turned back south to regroup. Greene seized the opportunity, re-crossed the Dan River and attacked.

The armies met at Guilford Courthouse (now Greensboro, N.C.). The British were the victors but at a catastrophic loss to its army.

Cornwallis moved his army back to Wilmington, N.C., to regroup and resupply. Greene took the opportunity to march south and reclaim the Carolinas and Georgia.

When his main duties subsided as the Americans gained more and more ground in the colonies, his army had reclaimed the entire South except for Charleston and Savannah.

After the war was won, Greene found the transition from active duty to civilian life difficult.

He, along with Washington and Henry Knox, were the only generals to serve all eight years of the war.

Much of his fortune had been lost in the war. Greene repeatedly had to pay or use personal financial guarantees to merchants to feed and clothe his army. Now these merchants were looking for payment but there were no more funds to pay with.

To exacerbate the issue, his finances were overseen by a con man who fleeced his accounts.

For gratitude of his generalship, the state of Georgia bequeathed a plantation to Greene and his family outside Savannah.

With few choices because of his financial woes, he accepted the offer and moved to Georgia. As he tried to jump-start the plantation, he fell into more bad luck and much of his rice was lost.

That same year, 1786, a headache struck Greene and within days he had passed at the age of 43.

With the gift of the plantation also came a burial plot. His body was placed in a vault in the Colonial Cemetery. At the time, no one thought to place a marker or headstone above his resting place.

Over the years, his burial site was forgotten after the last body was set into the vault in 1801.

In 1901, funding by the Rhode Island State Society of the Cincinnati, an organization strictly for those descendants of Revolutionary War officers, sought to find the body of Gen. Greene for proper burial.

A crowd grew and the Savannah Morning News of March 3, 1901, described the spectacle: “A morbid curiosity drew a crowd to the scene. Many of those attracted by the prospect of a peep at the remains of persons who died a century ago did not stay long, the one peep sufficing them, but there were other with no especial interest in the work who remained for hours.”

Looking for his pronounced forehead from his skull and any other clues, workers eventually found in a rotted coffin buttons stamped with an eagle to signify an officer from the Revolutionary War and silk gloves given to him by Gen. Lafayette with decayed bones inside.

Other remains proved that they had located Gen. Greene’s remains.

They also found another body in the coffin — that of his son, who passed away when he was young and entombed with his father.

The remains of Greene were eventually placed in a memorial in tribute to him at Johnson Square in Savannah, Ga.

As we note the 275th anniversary of Nathanael Greene’s birth and what it means to our county today, we can take a couple of things from it:

1. We must not forget those who have served in our military.

Whether they saved the South from British oppression or were an enlisted person doing a small job hundreds of years later in our military, we must both remember and honor them.

Locally, Greene County was the first Home Base Iowa community to help serve veterans in any capacity, but especially those transitioning from military to civilian life.

2. When we celebrate the patriots that helped shape our town and world today, hopefully another will now be on our radar.

At the very least, from now on when we utter the name Greene County, the name will reflect the war general who saved the South — not a color with a random “e” on the end.

Michael Reese is a Jefferson native and a consultant to the Greene County Chamber of Commerce as owner of Atlas Media Group.