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centuries have learned to their dismay, there is nothing so alluring to a young person as a forbidden pleasure. Somehow, in the darkened countryside of Kent County, Rhode Island, far from the disapproving gaze of his preacher father, Nathanael Greene learned to dance. Perhaps around a discreet bonfire in a lonely field, perhaps on the earthen floor of a deserted forge, this inquisitive Quaker boy tapped his feet to fiddle music and met the children of other pious households. He was limping even then, but the young ladies of Kent County were a good deal more tolerant of this disability than his future militia comrades–most of the time. One partner, however, couldn’t help but blurt out what others noticed without comment. “You dance stiffly,” the young lady said, her eyes perhaps drifting to the future general’s slightly lame right leg.
    Greene had a quick answer. “Very true,” he conceded. “But you see that I dance strong.”
    Young Nathanael was a fugitive at these dances and socials, as were many of his friends. Only through elaborate playacting and the active cooperation of his brothers could he make his way from house to fields undetected. Greene family legend has it that on dance nights, Nathanael went off to bed like a good boy, only to sneak out a window when the coast was clear. (It has been suggested that his limp may have been the result of an injury suffered during one of these perilous escapes.) He climbed down from his second-story room and dashed off into the darkness, sneaking back into his room hours later with nobody the wiser–exceptfor his coconspiring brothers. This plan of campaign required intense preparation, shrewd planning, and, on at least one occasion, no shortage of courage. Sometimes, even parents figure out that their children are up to no good, and Nathanael Sr. made such a discovery one chilly night. Young Nathanael came waltzing home to find his father not only awake but on lookout duty outside the house. Ominously, Nathanael Sr. had a bullwhip in his hands. A careful survey of the landscape convinced young Nathanael that he had made a terrible strategic error–he had left himself no line of retreat. So, legend says, he crept over to a pile of shingles near the house, placed a few under his coat to defend the most likely area of attack, and then walked toward his father to meet his fate. His screams of agony, family members later said, were very convincing.
    The overpowering figure of pious, strict, and occasionally well-armed Nathanael Greene Sr. dominated his sons into their young adulthood. His influence became even more profound when the only female in the Greene household, young Nathanael’s mother, Mary, died when Nathanael was eleven years old. The effect of the Greenes’ loss can only be guessed at, for later in life, Nathanael wrote little about his mother. The continued influence of his father and his rigid ways, however, was ever present in Nathanael’s letters. “I lament the want of a liberal Education; I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me,” Greene wrote. “For my own part I was Educated a Quaker, and amongst the most Supersticious sort, and that of itself is a sufficient Obstacle to cramp the best of Geniuses, much more mine.”
    As he made the journey from child to adolescent after his mother’s death, young Nathanael devoured the few books he was permitted to read. His intense studies of the Bible, the essential text for children of all pious colonial families, gave young Nathanael a moral and literary framework that would serve him well into adulthood. To complement the Scriptures, Greene and his siblings read from approved Quaker texts, including a book cowritten by the sect’s founder, George Fox. With the lumbering title
Instructions for Right Spelling and Plain Directions forReading and Writing True English,
this workbook was written specifically for Quaker households, its