[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GENERAL GREENE.]
BY THOMAS WYATT, A. M., AUTHOR Of “HISTORY Of THE KINGS Of FRANCE,” ETC. ETC. ETC.
IN the early part of the seventeenth century a number of families emigrated to New England and took up their residence in the colony of Plymouth.
Among them was a family of the name of Greene, from which the subject of this memoir was a lineal descendant. Not many years after their settlement there, religious controversies began to wear a serious aspect, and John Greene becoming involved in them, determined to remove with his family to the settlement formed a year before, by Roger Williams, on the banks of the Providence river. We find the name of John Greene recorded among the twenty-four original colonists, who obtained a permanent organization by the charter of Charles the Second. From that period, members of this family are frequently mentioned as holding offices of dignity and trust; one of them was Governor of Rhode Island during several years of the revolutionary war.
Nathaniel Greene, a brother of Governor Greene, and direct in descent from the original emigrant, had established himself as an anchor-smith near the head waters of a small stream, which still retains its Indian name of Potowhommett.
On the settlement of this town it was named Warwick, where the subject of this sketch, and son of the above Nathaniel Greene, was born, on the 27th of May, 1742.
The first years of his life were almost exclusively passed in the labors of the farm, for which he was well adapted by a strong and vigorous constitution. Losing his mother when he was only ten years of age, his domestic education more immediately devolved upon his father, who was a rigid disciplinarian, confining his son very closely to agricultural pursuits, and a stand at the anvil. This was continued through the spring and summer, but at the approach of winter a teacher was sought to reside in the family to teach the elements of an English education.
The Bible was the only book allowed to be used in the family of the Quaker preacher, for such was the rank his father held. But to Nathaniel such an education was too limited, and therefore unsatisfactory; he accordingly, as fast as his small savings would permit, purchased himself a small, but well selected library, and often spent the whole night, after the family supposed he had retired to bed, in regular study. An acquaintance casually formed, at the age of fourteen, with a young man who happened to be spending his college vacation at Warwick, first directed his attention to higher and more absorbing pursuits. It is not for us to conjecture what passed between Greene and his newly found friend. But whatever it was, the spark in his coarse clad bosom soon became ignited, and kindled into a flame that was never to be quenched.