Washington's General Read Online Free PDF

exercises designed not only to teach grammar and spelling but to reinforce Quaker theology. Greene no doubt spent a great deal of time with Fox’s work, and although he developed into a clear writer of “True English,” he was not much of one for “Right Spelling.”
    Among the other approved books Greene read, and reread, were
The Journal,
another text by George Fox, and a Quaker classic titled
An Apology for the True Christian Divinity
by Robert Barclay. Though the books sought to reinforce Quaker principles and demonstrate the fallacy of other denominations, the authors’ skepticism of tradition and authority and their emphasis on individual conscience prompted Greene to ask more questions and to demand more answers.
    Somehow–perhaps he solemnly promised that he’d never dance again!–he persuaded his father to hire a tutor named Adam Maxwell, a local schoolmaster and immigrant from Scotland. Tradition has it that Maxwell instructed Nathanael in mathematics and Latin, but Greene’s grandson suggested that the Latin lessons were short-lived, if they existed at all. Clearly, though, somebody inspired Greene to study classic Roman authors, for later in life he demonstrated an easy familiarity with Seneca, Horace, and Euclid, and an intimate knowledge of the writings of a Roman general named Julius Caesar. Their works were not on the Quakers’ list of necessary reading.
    Late in their lives, Greene’s brothers would recall seeing Nathanael climb upstairs, book in hand, to read by himself by candlelight in his bedroom. He read between chores, during his journeys to Newport, across Narragansett Bay, and he read at the forge and the mill. Decades after Nathanael’s death, his brothers proudly displayed a well-worn seat by the family forge. There, Nathanael tried to manage the irons in the fire while reading whatever book caught his fancy that day. According to George Washington Greene, “he would often forget himself in his book long after the last kernel had been shaken from the hopper.”
    His brothers did not share Nathanael’s eagerness to learn and to read.So his was a lonely pursuit, and he rarely met inquisitive peers or possible mentors as he carried out his chores in and around the family home. But when he visited Newport, New England’s second-busiest seaport (Boston was the busiest), he encountered men of education and knowledge, men who traded in ideas as well as goods, men with libraries and college degrees. Though extremely self-conscious about his own lack of formal education, Greene sought out men from whom he believed he might learn something, a trait that would serve him well on the battlefield. It must have taken no small amount of courage and self-confidence for this young Quaker to strike up conversations with men of letters in Newport. But he did, and for his efforts he formed friendships with such well-educated men as Ezra Stiles, a minister and future president of Yale University.
    Greene’s grandson tells a possibly apochryphal story about Nathanael’s first encounter with the learned and influential Stiles. Greene was in a bookstore, perhaps for the first time, in Newport, and he announced to the proprietor that he wished to buy a book. “Which one?” the proprietor asked. Flustered, the country boy from the forges of Potowomut was stuck for an answer. His embarrassment won the sympathy of a fellow patron, Stiles, who struck up a conversation with Greene about books and writers. The two men, one a learned clergyman, the other an earnest student, became friendly, and Greene often visited the older man when he was in Newport.
    Whether or not the story of Greene’s encounter at the bookstore is true, it’s not hard to imagine that the young man felt a little unsure of himself as he ventured ever so cautiously into the wide world beyond the forge. He persisted nevertheless and became friendly with a young college