Nathanael Greene

Nathanael Greene was a Rhode Island Quaker who was read out of meeting for attending militia drills and then became the general Washington trusted with the hardest theater. He served as quartermaster when the army was starving, which is a kind of combat. In 1780, after Camden, he took the Southern Department.

He did not try to smash Cornwallis in one set-piece. He divided his force, let Daniel Morgan win at Cowpens, then led the British on a winter race to the Dan River. Guilford Courthouse was a tactical loss that wrecked the British army as a pursuing instrument. Eutaw Springs and the recapture of the interior finished the work. Cornwallis went to Virginia and to Yorktown.

Greene never got the public statue density of some Northern names. Southern independence was recovered by a man who understood supply, distance, and when to give a field in order to keep an army.

He died at Mulberry Grove, Georgia, on June 19, 1786, forty-three years old, worn out by the war he had finished. The South he saved was not yet done with its own arguments. The campaign remains a model of losing battles and winning a country.