The Life of Nathanael Greene, Major-General in the Army of the Revolution
RECENT LITERATURE.
By . Vol. III. New York : Hurd and Houghton.
MR. GREENE here successfully ends a long and arduous labor, and gives ns another of those American biographies in which it is so desirable to have American history written. Too great personal interest cannot be imparted to the annals of any people, and without it the story of our own past would be peculiarly dry and meagre. It needs the greatest possible infusion of character and adventure ; and for this reason the first and third volumes of Mr. Greene’s work are better and far more entertaining than the second. The first dealt very largely with the incidents of General Greene’s early life ; and when it brought ns to the events of his first years as a soldier, it had not yet entered so deeply into public affairs as to remove us often from, his presence. But in the second the complicated narrative of the Quartermastership had to be given, and the result was, that while the case was stated with a clearness and candor that ought to be final, the author as well as the reader was too heavily urdened with impersonal details. Now if he third and last volume Mr. Greene recovers the spirit of his first. His style has fresh vigor, and he tells with admirable force the story of his ancestor’s splendid Southern campaign, explaining first the nature of the country fought over, then rapidly yet fully sketching the disastrous attempts of Gates to reconquer the South from the British, and then entering upon the record of those unerring strokes of generalship by which Greene retrieved all that Gates lost, and victoriously ended the struggle by outmanœuvring and outfighting the enemy wherever he met them.
The charm of personal interest is constantly supplied in the brief yet sufficient notices of all those heroic people who appear with such peculiar picturesqueness in this episode of the War for Independence. Morgan, Huger, Williams, Henry Lee, William Washington, Sumter, and Marion are of the many whom our author brings before us, not in the stage costume in which they have so often masqueraded, but in their proper dignity and true dramatic character. The best of these studies, which are all good, is that of Morgan ; but it is too long for us to copy here, and we must content ourselves with a single passage from it, relating an incident of Morgan’s service in the old French War : —
“ The scene was in the valley of the Shenandoah, not many miles from Winchester, and the occasion an ambuscade of French and Indians. Morgan had been sent with an escort of two horsemen to carry a despatch to the commander of the garrison at Winchester. His road lay along a narrow path formed by a huge precipice, known in that region as the Hanging Rock, which, jutting over a small stream, left no other passage for footman or rider but the scanty space between it and the margin of the watercourse. It was the very spot for an ambuscade, and local traditions told of a fierce battle which had been fought there by the Delawares and Catawbas many years before. A party of French and Indians were now lying among the rocks which commanded the way, peering out unseen, like tigers on the watch for prey. The first to come within their toils were Morgan and his unfortunate escort. How far the associations and nature of the spot excited their suspicions we do not know, for Morgan never told, and his companions did not live to tell. It was their only path, and they rode boldly into it. Their unseen enemy had but to choose his moment and fire. It was the work of an instant ; at the first fire the two soldiers dropped dead from their saddles, and Morgan reeled in his with a desperate wound. A bullet had entered the hack of his neck, grazed the neck-hone, passed into his mouth near the socket of the jaw-bone, and, knocking out all the teeth on the left side of his face, come out through the left cheek. The blood gushed after it, and though he kept his seat with an iron will, he felt that his strength was already beginning to fail. The wound, he did not doubt, was mortal ; he felt that he must die ; but he shrank from the thought of being mutilated by the scalping-knife of his savage foe. Such men’s thoughts are like instincts in these moments of supreme danger. Morgan’s horse, a fleet filly, had stopped short at the sudden alarm, standing motionless with expanded nostril and startled eye. But she was swift of foot, and true to her master’s voice. That voice was gone now ; but leaning over his saddle-how, Morgan clasped her neck with his gigantic arms, and as she felt the pressure she started forward at the top of her speed. The enemy saw that he was wounded ; saw, too, that they could not reach him with their rifles without injuring the horse, which they were anxious to preserve, and bending all their attention to secure the other horses, and the scalps, which they valued most of all, left him to a single warrior. In later life, Morgan loved to tell how he watched the expression of that Indian’s face, as he ran with open mouth by the horse’s side, looking every moment to see his victim fall; how doubt came over it, and then gradual conviction that the horse was too swift for him, and at last, how he hurled his tomahawk with a hand made uncertain by anger and exertion, and seeing that he had missed, turned back with a yell of baffled fury. Fortunately for Morgan, his horse had, with the singular instinct of that half-reasoning animal, turned hack towards the fort. When she reached the gate her rider was insensible. ”
Such was the military school in which the greater part of Greene’s officers had been trained. They added great individual weight to his little army ; but his qualities of generalship were hardly less brilliantly employed in subordinating and utilizing such friends than in beating the enemy.
With our minds accustomed to the vast scale of modern warfare, the physical proportions of the struggle in the South seem pathetically small. Greene had never four thousand men in the field, and the British never had more. But they had none of his marvellous disadvantages to labor with, and his triumph was not upon the scale of the military numbers engaged, but indefinitely greater. His army was never fully provisioned, and never fairly clothed, and he was too poorly equipped to he able to do more than stand upon the defensive after his hard-won fights. He was not acting, either, in a country entirely friendly. On the contrary, the inhabitants were about equally Whigs and Tories, with a natural leaning towards the stronger and richer side. The British had more constant information than Greene, and were well ted and clothed, where his men suffered with cold and hunger. Their general was also secure of his forces; whereas Greene might wake any morning and find half of his command missing, so loose and vague were the ties of military allegiance amongst the soldiers of freedom. At the same time he was harassed by the action of the local legislatures, which regarded his efforts to supply himself from the country with jealousy, and sometimes frustrated them.
Our author makes an admirable picture of the campaign in these particulars, but the different battle-pieces are painted with singular vividness and force. The third volume more than fulfils the promise of the first; and we hope that Mr. Greene will consider the utility of condensing the story of his ancestor’s life, and offering it to the public in some more popular form. An epitome of these three volumes would achieve a wider recognition than can be expected for them, and such a book would be a service to many readers to whom the present work must remain inaccessible. Every student of American history, however, should possess himself of the “ Life of Nathanael Greene ” as it now stands written.