Background

George Washington Greene was born on April 8, 1811 at East Greenwich, Rhode Island. He was the son of Nathanael Ray and Anna Maria (Clarke) Greene, the grandson of Gen. Nathanael Greene, and a descendant of John Greene, surgeon, who came from Salisbury to New England in 1635.

Education

At the age of fourteen he matriculated at Brown University but because of poor health withdrew in 1827 and went to Europe.

Career

With the exception of one year in 1834 as principal of Kent Academy at East Greenwich George lived abroad until 1847.

He met by accident at an inn in Southern France Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and there began an intimate friendship that was to influence his career profoundly. From that meeting with Longfellow, literature became the inspiration, the guide, and the comfort of his life. He began his historical career by writing essays for the North American Remew, the first of which appeared in 1835. From 1837 to 1845 he was United States consul at Rome. While there he wrote his one-volume Life of Nathanael Greene (1846) in Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography. In 1848 he became instructor in modern languages at Brown University and while there he published several text-books of French and Italian.

In 1850 a volume of his Historical Essays was published. He removed to New York City where he devoted himself to lecturing and writing. A collection of his articles, Biographical Studies, appeared in 1860 and his Historical View of the American Revolution, a series of popular lectures first delivered before the Lowell Institute, was published five years later. Greene had in early youth determined to write an adequate biography of his distinguished grandfather. To that end he traveled widely collecting documents and interviewing those who might reminisce about the General.

“Among all who had known him I found but one opinion both of his greatness and of his goodness, of the vigor and depth of his mind, of the warmth and purity of his heart”. The earlier volume for Sparks had been written from the common printed authorities; now he worked in the family papers, containing hundreds of letters and documents. “Every page I read confirmed my original opinion, and strengthened my first intention”.

In 1866 he wrote a lengthy and labored pamphlet, Nathanael Greene: An Examination of the Ninth Volume of Bancroft’s History, attacking Bancroft’s statements concerning his grandfather. To this Bancroft effectively replied in his letter to the editor of the North American Review, published in April 1867. The first volume of the long-expected Life of Nathanael Greene appeared in 1867, the second and third volumes in 1871. Two factors seriously impaired the value of the Life: Greene agreed heartily with his friend Washington Irving that “care should be taken to vindicate great names from the pernicious erudition which, in the name of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies, ” and Greene was the devoted grandson of an eminent grandfather. Thus a mistaken sense of patriotic duty and the adulation of ancestor worship disfigured the labors of many years.

In 1871 Greene was invited to become lecturer in American history in the new Cornell University. He accepted and for a year held the first chair of American history to be established in the United States. But his library was more congenial than the classroom; his lectures quietly read from manuscript lacked any distinctly didactic quality. Some years earlier he had edited The Works of Joseph Addison. Now he wrote and published The German Element in the War of Independence and A Short History of Rhode Island. He had always been of delicate health and he spent the last years of his life in the quiet seclusion of his home at East Greenwich.

Achievements

• George Washington Greene was famous for such a works as Nathanael Greene: An Examination of the Ninth Volume of Bancroft’s History, Historical View, Biographical Studies etc.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Nathanael Greene. An Examination of Some Statements Concerning Major-General Greene, in the Ninth Volume of Bancroft's History of the United States

    ( About the Book History texts study and interpret the pa...)

  • The Works of Joseph Addison

    (This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before ...)

  • The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. 3 of 3: Major-General in the Army of the Revolution (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. 3 of 3: M...)

Connections

On Feburary 9, 1852, he was married to Catharine Van Buren Porter, daughter of an old New England family.

Father:

Nathanael Ray Greene

Mother:

Anna Maria (Clarke) Greene

Spouse:

Catharine Van Buren Porter

Friend:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow