Reading Nathanael Greene, Quartermaster General

The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia has just finished digitizing its collection of Nathanael Greene Papers.

All the scans can be read through the Revolutionary City portal, created by the A.P.S., the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The A.P.S. collection comes from Gen. Greene’s years working as the quartermaster general, 1778 to 1780, and doesn’t contain any private correspondence.

As Thomas Johns III writes on the society’s blog:

As Quartermaster General, Nathanael Greene struggled with, but ultimately improved, the transportation of troops and supplies that the Continental Army depended upon. The need for supplies fluctuated throughout the war, but their successful transportation remained essential to the American cause. . . .

During the Philadelphia Campaign, fear of impressment caused many Pennsylvanians to conceal their wagons, horses, oxen, etc. When property was taken, those affected sought to have their damages repaid. Attempts at this, both formal and informal, are documented in the collection. Further, this collection mentions legislation from the General Assemblies of Rhode Island and New York that limited the impressment of articles and wagon-teams by the Continental Army.

Greene was the most successful quartermaster general the Continental Army produced. He took the job reluctantly months after Thomas Mifflin had resigned the post for the second time, and was able to stabilize the office and hand it off to Timothy Pickering.

Mifflin and Pickering were both merchants, so they understood bargaining for goods, but Greene brought a different sort of peacetime experience. As manager of his family’s anchor-making workshop in Rhode Island, he oversaw a proto-industrial factory with a skilled workforce to manage, supplies to obtain, customers to satisfy. Very few men in the young U.S. of A. had that sort of knowledge.

Understanding logistics and supplies for the whole army in turn helped Greene in waging that southern campaign in the last years of the war—but that’s beyond the timeframe of this documentary collection.

The largest collection of Nathanael Greene Papers is in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. A small collection is in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale.