What Nathanael Greene accomplished in his two years in command of the southern Continental Army was nothing short of miraculous, especially considering his starting point. The army Greene inherited was in a shambles after the opening phases of the war and many saw little hope for the cause. His tactics were so effective that within six months of Greene taking command, Lord Charles Cornwallis moved his shrinking British army into Virginia and closer to his date with destiny at Yorktown.

By the late summer of 1781, the American Revolution was drawing to a close. Hoping to inflict more damage to the British, Major General Nathanael Greene planned a strike at the one remaining British army in South Carolina. The Battle of Eutaw Springs, fought on September 8, 1781, sixty miles from Charleston, resulted in another frustrating loss for General Nathanael Greene and his Continental Army, a fight Greene described as the most obstinate he ever saw.

In the spring of 1781, American forces under General Nathanael Greene rolled up the British garrisons in the interior of the Carolinas one by one. The last British holdout was the fortified town of Ninety Six, in the foothills of western South Carolina. On June 12, with the end in sight for the Brits, a rider brought word that a relief column under Lord Francis Rawdon was on the way from Charleston. Greene decided to lift the siege but not before trying one final assault on the night of June 18, an attack that failed terribly.

In late April 1781, Lord Charles Cornwallis made the painful decision to abandon the Carolinas and Georgia, and took his 2,000 veteran soldiers to Virginia. General Nathanael Greene’s strategy to wear down and frustrate Cornwallis had worked masterfully, as Cornwallis wrote he was “quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures.” The remaining British outposts in the southern colonies were left in the capable hands of Colonel Francis Rawdon, but they were not mutually supporting. Greene recognized this fatal flaw and immediately began to reconquer them one at a time.

In March 1781, General Nathanael Greene decided to finally confront Lord Charles Cornwallis’s British army in a pitched battle and selected Guilford Courthouse in western North Carolina as the spot. Greene positioned his troops as Daniel Morgan had at Cowpens, with two ranks of militia in front and a final line of seasoned Continentals led by Colonels Otho Williams and John Howard. With hand-to-hand fighting raging just in front of him and the contest hanging in the balance, Cornwallis ordered his artillery to fire grapeshot point blank into the mass.

On October 14, 1780, General Nathanael Greene was appointed commander of the southern Continental Army by General George Washington and tasked with salvaging the desperate situation in the southern theater. Confronting Greene and his skeleton force was a British army of 3,200 trained, experienced men led by Lord Charles Cornwallis, arguably the best British general in North America.

In 1775, Rhode Island officials named Nathanael Greene commander of the state’s Army of Observation, making Greene the youngest general in the army. During the Siege of Boston, Greene’s brigade was recognized as the most disciplined and best equipped of the colonial militias, and Greene gained the notice and admiration of General George Washington.

Nathanael Greene was one of America’s greatest generals in the Revolutionary War, perhaps second only to George Washington. He was born on August 7, 1742, in Warwick, Rhode Island into a prosperous Quaker family. When his father died in 1770, Nathanael, despite having several older brothers, took over the family business. As relations with England worsened, Greene became more involved in colonial resistance to British authority.