Excerpt from Washington and His Generals, Vol. 2
It is pleasant to take up a character, the resplendent qualities of which are not darkened by serious defects. Arnold was adventurous and heroic, but he lacked principle - Lee, brilliant and brave, but too ambitious; while Greene possessed all their good qualities, with none of their bad ones. Poor, and without patrons, he began his career on the lowest steps of fame"s ladder, and by his energy and effort, alone, reached the highest - yet he never became dizzy by elevation, nor exhibited any of those weak or wicked passions power and rank so invariably develop.
Nathaniel Greene was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, May 27, 1742, and hence was a young man at the breaking out of the Revolution. His father was a Quaker preacher; and young Nathaniel was early instructed in the principles of peace and universal brotherhood. To have seen him about on the farm, in his drab suit and broad-brimmed hat, or sitting meek and grave as a statue in one of those silent conventicles, one would never have picked him out for a major-general in the American army. His father owned a forge, and to this Nathaniel was finally promoted from the farm, and worked at the anvil with the same vigor he afterwards did in hammering out his own fortune. For a while his youthful energy and ambition expended itself in athletic sports, such as wrestling, leaping, throwing the bar, and so forth, and in these none swung a more vigorous or steadier arm than he.
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