Nathanael Greene Quotes

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.

And if his youth was obvious, the Glorious Cause was to a large degree a young man’s cause. The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general. In such times many were being cast in roles seemingly beyond their experience or capacities, and Washington had quickly judged Nathanael Greene to be “an object of confidence.

I hope this is the dark part of the night, which is generally just before day. ~General Nathanael Greene

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt. What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet. "Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself.

The second is the military narrative of the battles on Long Island and Manhattan, where the British army and navy delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs, but missed whatever chance existed to end it all. The focal point of this story is the Continental Army, and the major actors are George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and the British brothers Richard and William Howe.

To march over dead man, to hear without concern the groans of the wounded, I say few men can stand such scenes unless steeled by habit or fortified by military pride.

The last officer named was Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island; a man of limited education and military experience limited to two years of peacetime militia duty, he nevertheless was destined to be the best of the lot.27

a “free People think they have a right to an Explanation of the Circumstances which give rise to the Necessity under which they suffer.

That three of New York’s five delegates had been absent much of the time only added to his heavy burden. He had concluded that the country was not ready to amend the risible Articles of Confederation, because local and state politics exerted too dominant an influence. “Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,” he told Nathanael Greene. While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation.

In a eulogy that he later delivered for General Nathanael Greene, Hamilton talked about the personal opportunities that accompany revolutions. He said of them that “it has very properly been ranked not among the least of the advantages which compensate for the evils they produce that they serve to bring to light talents and virtues which might otherwise have languished in obscurity or only shot forth a few scattered and wandering rays.” Who could doubt that the comment had an autobiographical ring?

A wealthy native of New York, Morris relocated to South Carolina as an aide to Gen. Nathanael Greene during the Revolutionary War. Writing to his father while preparing for a British attack by Lord Cornwallis, Morris penned what became South Carolina’s state motto: Dum spiro, sperando (While I Breathe, I Hope).

After a week in Boston, Lafayette went to Providence for more parades, salutes, and receptions and a visit with Nathanael Greene. At a banquet with members of the General Assembly, he toasted unity among the states: "May these rising states unite in every measure, as they have united in their struggles." Fortunately, he gave his toast early; by the end of the evening, the sixty assemblymen and their guests had absorbed fifty-one bottles of Madeira, thirty-two bottles of claret, nine bottles of punch, and thirty-two bowls of rum punch-an average of a bottle and one-half (then five pints) of wine and a half-bottle of rum each. p200

There are many evangelical books, usually based on little science, extolling the healing benefits of wild plants. There’s no need to make airy claims about the superpowers of plants when we can instead point to the well-established benefits of eating leafy green vegetables. We’d all be healthier, poor and middle class alike, if we could open our eyes to the natural world around us and see the richness there that we usually miss. If by foraging we simply hope to harvest a little pleasure and a connection to the wild, the chances of success are good. But the likelihood of success declines if we’re primarily gathering food for the body rather than the soul.

One of the most colorful and remarkable Ballinger family stories is the tale of how my direct ancestor, Joseph Ballinger Jr., became an American hero by supporting Major General Nathanael Greene’s army during the famed Battle of Guilford Court House in 1781 during the Revolutionary War.