The Founder's Burden: Nathanael Greene: The Quartermaster Who Broke an Empire's Grip
He never became president. He never even won a battle outright. But without Nathanael Greene, the American South probably stays British.
Born a lame Quaker ironmaster in Rhode Island, Greene had no business becoming George Washington's most trusted general. Yet when the Continental Army was starving and freezing, he took the job everyone else refused-quartermaster general-and staked his own credit to keep the war alive. Later, when the southern colonies were collapsing under British occupation and Loyalist terror, Washington sent Greene south with one brutal order: hold the line or the Revolution dies.
In the swamps and pine forests of the Carolinas and Georgia, Greene fought a different kind of war. He retreated without breaking, bled Cornwallis without gambling his army, and turned "victorious" British campaigns into a string of strategic dead ends. By the time Yorktown fell, Greene had already made the South ungovernable for the empire.
The Founder's Burden: Nathanael Greene strips away the patriotic gloss and follows Greene through shortages, mutinies, civil war, and the ugly realities of a slaveholding South he helped keep inside the new republic. This is the story of the founder who took the worst job, paid the highest personal price, and got the least reward-yet changed the map of North America more than most men whose faces ended up on money.
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