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their trade with Britain, just as other Rhode Islanders traded with the French during the French and Indian War. Merchants in Boston and Philadelphia sent messages to Newport suggesting that the Rhode Islanders reconsider their position, lest they find themselves with no markets within the colonies. The British were not alone in bemoaning Rhode Island’s iconoclasm and sense of independence.
    Nathanael Greene spent the turbulent 1760s in Potowomut, continuing his work in the family business and trying to find some balance between the Quaker tradition of his family and his own intellectual curiosity. He took a small step into the colony’s civic affairs when he joined three other men, including his tutor, Adam Maxwell, in petitioning the Rhode Island Assembly to relocate Rhode Island College from the town of Warren to East Greenwich, not far from the family homestead. Greene very likely wrote the petition, which described East Greenwich as “abounding with Every necessary supply to render the Scholars Comfortable.” Included among the town’s amenities, Greene wrote with impressive earnestness, was “a post office.”
    The petition failed, and the college was moved to Providence and eventually renamed Brown University. Greene’s involvement in the campaign, however, further illustrated how far he was straying from the parochial, insular traditions of his faith and family. The distance became a good deal greater in November 1770, when Nathanael’s father died in Potowomut at the age of sixty-three. The surviving sons inherited the family business, but Nathanael continued to shake loose other parts of his father’s legacy. It is in letters written after his father’s death that Nathanael begins to complain about his lack of education and about his father’s hostility toward literature and the world of ideas.
    There are few indications of any radical political activity on his part during his twenties, but he continued to visit Newport on business and he could hardly have missed the new spirit of the times in that city, whererioters had taken to the street to protest the Stamp Act and other British policies. And as an avid reader, he surely must have devoured the flowery denunciations of Parliament regularly available in the
Newport Mercury,
which briefly sported a front-page slogan reading, “Undaunted by TYRANTS – We’ll DIE or be FREE .”
    Greene’s regimen of self-improvement continued, too, and he found himself attracted to military histories, beginning with Caesar’s. While the Roman’s book had a narrative flow and battlefield descriptions designed to capture the reader’s imagination, Greene’s further reading showed that he had moved beyond mere narrative and was looking for actual instruction in the art and science of war. In his letters, Greene mentioned that he read
Instructions to His Generals
by the Prussian militarist Frederick the Great, and
Mes Reveries,
by Maurice de Saxe, the famed French marshal. Greene’s unlikely interest in warfare, along with his general thirst for secular knowledge, nurtured his private rebellion against religious traditions he regarded as unreasonable and arbitrary. Tales of great battles and triumphant generals offered him an exciting glimpse of glory beyond the Quaker meetinghouse and the gristmill. And these books did not simply stir his imagination; they also offered him instruction in battlefield tactics and strategy. As he would demonstrate in later years, Greene learned these lessons well, however irrelevant they might have seemed at the time.
    For the moment, however, Greene’s only personal knowledge of combat was restricted to that fought on legal battlefields. He and his brothers were frequent visitors to the Court of Common Pleas in East Greenwich, usually in pursuit of an unpaid debt. Court documents from the era show numerous legal actions, some involving family squabbling, related to