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student known only as Giles, who inspired Nathanael to further bury himself in books. Soon, Nathanael Greene was a walking incongruity: a self-taught child of the Enlightenment, dressed in the unadorned black garb of a Quaker. On his business trips to Newport, he sold miniature anchors he made at the family forge, and with the proceeds he began buying books. Through the influence of his new friend Stiles, he read John Locke’s influential treatise
Essay on Human Understanding,
which celebrated inquiry and intellectual independence. He read the classic English work on the law, Sir William Blackstone’s
Commentaries.
And he devoured
The Drapier’s Letters,
a series of articles written in the 1720s by the Irish satirist and rabble-rouser Jonathan Swift. Writing under the guise of a shopkeeper named M. B. Drapier, Swift argued vehemently against British economic policies in Ireland and helped inspire a campaign that thwarted Parliament’s attempt to introduce inferior currency in Ireland. But Swift went beyond just the issue of the moment. He wrote, “All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” And, addressing his fellow Irish, he said, “You are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.” Jonathan Swift quickly became Nathanael Greene’s favorite author.
    Yet there is no evidence that young Nathanael Greene sought to apply the rhetoric of Jonathan Swift to Rhode Island or to America. Still in his twenties, single with no immediate prospects for a family, he was very much a work in progress, still unsure of where life would take him, and without a guide to help him on the journey. Through his contacts in Newport and the friendship of Ezra Stiles, he knew of a larger world beyond the forge, the farm, and the mill. As yet, though, he simply wasn’t sure how he might fit into that world. And that world was beginning to change.
    Strapped for cash and stuck with bills from the French and Indian War, Parliament turned its eyes westward in the 1760s, toward the colonies in North America. The military power of Britain offered the colonists security; the economic might of the empire made their prosperity possible. It was time, then, to extract some measure of revenue from those subjects of the Crown scattered in the towns and forests of America.
    Of all the measures Parliament might have considered, of all the taxes it might have levied, none would have been worse for Rhode Island than the Sugar Act. It was not a new tax; the Sugar Act had been passed in 1733 and was promptly disregarded. Beginning in May 1763, however,it became a real tax. Parliament ordered that the duty of six pence per gallon on non-British molasses from the West Indies was no longer to be ignored or evaded or bribed away. Colonial governors and customs officials were put on notice that they could no longer act as if they knew nothing about uncollected molasses duties. To illustrate the point, Royal Navy warships took up positions in American ports. Parliament ordered them to “seize and proceed to condemnation of all such Ships and Vessels as you shall find offending” against the newly muscular Sugar Act. In December 1763, HMS
Squirrel
set up operations in Newport. For reasons best known to the Royal Navy’s commanders, the ship bore a name not likely to inspire much in the way of fear or respect from notably irrascible Rhode Islanders. The
Squirrel’s
twenty guns, however, got the point across.
    The crackdown was meant for all of His Majesty’s colonies, but Rhode Island had the most to lose. By the 1760s, the colony’s prosperity and development were linked inextricably to the molasses trade, and that trade was based on the informal agreement among merchants, politicians, and customs officials to act as though the Sugar Act didn’t exist. The six-pence tax would have made the cost of importing molasses from non-British sources