When the Revolutionary War began, Nathanael Greene was a private in the militia, the lowest rank possible, yet he emerged from the war with a reputation as George Washington's most gifted and dependable officer-celebrated as one of three most important generals. Upon taking command of America's Southern Army in 1780, Nathanael Greene was handed troops that consisted of 1,500 starving, nearly naked men. Gerald Carbone explains how within a year, the small worn-out army ran the British troops out of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina and into the final trap at Yorktown. Despite his huge military successes and tactical genius Greene's story has a dark side. Gerald Carbone drew on 25 years of reporting and researching experience to create his chronicle of Greene's unlikely rise to success and his fall into debt and anonymity.
"Carbone gives a little-known Revolutionary War leader his due in this admiring biography... [A] lucid account of the Revolutionary War from the point of view of its most successful general."
Kirkus
"To this much-needed new biography of America's most unjustly neglected Revolutionary War hero, Gerald Carbone brings a journalist's concision, a storyteller's eye for illuminating detail, a wry New England sensibility, and a historian's diligence. The result is a compelling account of how Nathanael Greene, the self-taught former Quaker ironmaster from Rhode Island, made himself over into the Continental Army's finest strategist and one of the best minds of Enlightenment America. Carbone carries us deftly through the triumphs and tragedies of this remarkable life, offering us a Founder of flesh, blood, acumen and ambition who, had he lived longer and his luck been kinder, might even have become president."
Charles F. Price, award-winning author of Freedom's Altar and of Nor the Battle to the Str
"Ged Carbone has written a lively, accessible biography of one of the truly great strategists in American history, Major General Nathanael Greene, second only to Washington in the pantheon of heroes of the War of the Revolution."
John Buchanan, author of The Road to Guilford Courthouse
