on the 2nd of December. The army was weak and badly equipped and was opposed by a superior force under Cornwallis. Greene decided to divide his own troops, thus forcing the division of the British as well, and creating the possibility of a strategic interplay of forces. This strategy led to General Daniel Morgan’s victory of Cowpens (just over the South Carolina line) on the 17th of January 1781, and to the battle at Guilford Court House, N.C. (March 15), in which after having weakened the British troops by continual movements, and drawn in reinforcements for his own army, Greene was defeated indeed, but only at such cost to the victor that Tarleton called it “the pledge of ultimate defeat.” Three days after this battle Cornwallis withdrew toward Wilmington. Greene’s generalship and judgment were again conspicuously illustrated in the next few weeks, in which he allowed Cornwallis to march north to Virginia and himself turned swiftly to the reconquest of the inner country of South Carolina. This, in spite of a reverse sustained at Lord Rawdon’s hands at Hobkirk’s Hill (2 m. N. of Camden) on the 25th of April, he achieved by the end of June, the British retiring to the coast. Greene then gave his forces a six weeks’ rest on the High Hills of the Santee, and on the 8th of September, with 2600 men, engaged the British under Lieut.-Colonel James Stuart (who had succeeded Lord Rawdon) at Eutaw Springs; the battle, although tactically drawn, so weakened the British that they withdrew to Charleston, where Greene penned them during the remaining months of the war. Greene’s Southern campaign showed remarkable strategic features that remind one of those of Turenne, the commander whom he had taken as his model in his studies before the war. He excelled in dividing, eluding and tiring his opponent by long marches, and in actual conflict forcing him to pay for a temporary advantage a price that he could not afford. He was greatly assisted by able subordinates, including the Polish engineer, Tadeusz Kosciusko, the brilliant cavalry captains, Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee and William Washington, and the partisan leaders, Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion.
South Carolina and Georgia voted Greene liberal grants of lands and money. The South Carolina estate, Boone’s Barony, S. of Edisto in Bamberg County, he sold to meet bills for the rations of his Southern army. On the Georgia estate, Mulberry Grove, 14 m. above Savannah, on the river, he settled in 1785, after twice refusing (1781 and 1784) the post of secretary of war, and there he died of sunstroke on the 19th of June 1786. Greene was a singularly able, and—like other prominent generals on the American side—a self-trained soldier, and was second only to Washington among the officers of the American army in military ability. Like Washington he had the great gift of using small means to the utmost advantage. His attitude towards the Tories was humane and even kindly, and he generously defended Gates, who had repeatedly intrigued against him, when Gates’s conduct of the campaign in the South was criticized. There is a monument to Greene in Savannah (1829). His statue, with that of Roger Williams, represents the state of Rhode Island in the National Hall of Statuary in the Capitol at Washington; in the same city there is a bronze equestrian statue of him by H. K. Brown.
See the Life of Nathanael Greene (3 vols., 1867–1871), by his grandson, George W. Greene, and the biography (New York, 1893), by Brig.-Gen. F. V. Greene, in the “Great Commanders Series.”
GREENE, ROBERT (c. 1560–1592), English dramatist and
miscellaneous writer, was born at Norwich about 1560. The
identity of his father has been disputed, but there is every
reason to believe that he belonged to the tradesmen’s class and
had small means. It is doubtful whether Robert Greene attended
Norwich grammar school; but, as an eastern counties man
(to one of whose plays, Friar Bacon, the Norfolk and Suffolk
borderland owes a lasting poetic commemoration) he naturally
found his way to Cambridge, where he entered St John’s College
as a sizar in 1575 and took his B.A. thence in 1579, proceeding
M.A. in 1583 from Clare Hall. His life at the university was,
according to his own account, spent “among wags as lewd as
himself, with whom he consumed the flower of his youth.” In
1588 he was incorporated at Oxford, so that on some of his title-pages
he styles himself “utriusque Academiae in Artibus
Magister”; and Nashe humorously refers to him as “utriusque
Academiae Robertus Greene.” Between the years 1578 and
1583 he had travelled abroad, according to his own account
very extensively, visiting France, Germany, Poland and Denmark,
besides learning at first-hand to “hate the pride of Italie”
and to know the taste of that poet’s fruit, “Spanish mirabolones.”
The grounds upon which it has been suggested that he took holy
orders are quite insufficient; according to the title-page of a
pamphlet published by him in 1585 he was then a “student in
phisicke.” Already, however, after taking his M.A. degree, he
had according to his own account begun his London life, and his
earliest extant literary production was in hand as early as 1580.
He now became “an author of playes and a penner of love-pamphlets,
so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that
who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin
Greene?” “Glad was that printer,” says Nashe, “that might
bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit.”
By his own account he rapidly sank into the worst debaucheries
of the town, though Nashe declares that he never knew him
guilty of notorious crime. He was not without passing impulses
towards a more righteous and sober life, and was derided in
consequence by his associates as a “Puritane and Presizian.”
It is possible that he, as well as his bitter enemy, Gabriel Harvey,
exaggerated the looseness of his conduct. His marriage, which
took place in 1585 or 1586, failed to steady him; if Francesco,
in Greene’s pamphlet Never too late to mend (1590), is intended
for the author himself, it had been a runaway match; but the
fiction and the autobiographical sketch in the Repentance agree
in their account of the unfaithfulness which followed on the part
of the husband. He lived with his wife, whose name seems to
have been Dorothy (“Doll”; and cf. Dorothea in James IV.),
for a while; “but forasmuch as she would perswade me from my
wilful wickednes, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having
spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her. Then
left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to
London,” where his reputation as a playwright and writer of
pamphlets of “love and vaine fantasyes” continued to increase,
and where his life was a feverish alternation of labour and
debauchery. In his last years he took it upon himself to make
war on the cutpurses and “conny-catchers” with whom he came
into contact in the slums, and whose doings he fearlessly exposed
in his writings. He tells us how at last he was friendless “except
it were in a fewe alehouses,” where he was respected on account
of the score he had run up. When the end came he was a
dependant on the charity of the poor and the pitying love of the
unfortunate. Henri Murger has drawn no picture more sickening
and more pitiful than the story of Greene’s death, as told by his
Puritan adversary, Gabriel Harvey—a veracious though a far
from unprejudiced narrator. Greene had taken up the cudgels
provided by the Harvey brothers on their intervention in the
Marprelate controversy, and made an attack (immediately
suppressed) upon Gabriel’s father and family in the prose-tract
A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a Quaint Dispute between
Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (1592). After a banquet
where the chief guest had been Thomas Nashe—an old associate
and perhaps a college friend of Greene’s, any great intimacy with
whom, however, he seems to have been anxious to disclaim—Greene
had fallen sick “of a surfeit of pickle herringe and
Rennish wine.” At the house of a poor shoemaker near Dowgate,
deserted by all except his compassionate hostess (Mrs Isam) and
two women—one of them the sister of a notorious thief named
“Cutting Ball,” and the mother of his illegitimate son, Fortunatus
Greene—he died on the 3rd of September 1592. Shortly before
his death he wrote under a bond for £10 which he had given to
the good shoemaker, the following words addressed to his
long-forsaken wife: “Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth
and by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for
if hee and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the
streetes.—Robert Greene.”
Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, Harvey’s attack on Greene,
