It  was  General  Greene's  fortune  to  preside  over  the  board  of
officers  at  Tappan  which  condemned  the  chivalric  but  ill-starred
Andre.  That  board  was  composed  of  the  most  distinguished
men  of  the  army.  Among  them  all,  we  will  venture  to  say,  no
heart  was  wrung  more  acutely  by  the  inexorable  necessity  for
the  vindication  of  military  law  than  was  that  of  the  president.
Alexander  Hamilton  said,  near  the  close  of  the  war,  while
opposing  reprisals  for  the  death  of  Captain  Huddy  :  "  The  death
of  Andre  could  not  have  been  dispensed  with ;  but  it  must  still
be  viewed  as  an  act  of  rigid  justice."

General  Greene  retired  from  the  army  in  very  embarrassed
circumstances.     Like  the  other  general  officers,  he  had  received


lee's  headquarters  and  vicinity,  151

no  equivalent  for  the  sums  he  was  compelled  to  disburse  for  his-
support  while  in  the  field.  These  officers  were  obliged  to  apply-
to  Congress  for  "  relief,"  such  being  then,  as  now,  the  legal
phraseology  of  an  application  of  a  creditor  when  government
is  the  debtor.  Greene  met  with  losses  at  the  South  which
hurt  him.  He  turned  to  the  soil ;  but  the  season  was  un-
kind, and  his  first  crop  was  a  failure.  Congress  voted  him
military  trophies,  but  these  did  not  afford  him  the  means  of
living.
It  is  pleasant  to  turn  from  the  contemplation  of  thf-  neglect
which  Greene  experienced  as  a  general  to  examine  the  inner
characteristics  of  the  man.  These  cannot  better  be  illustrated
than  by  the  following  extracts  from  a  letter  written  by  him  in
the  autumn  of  1781,  from  his  camp  on  the  High  Hills  of  Santee.
Henry  Jackson,  of  whom  the  General  speaks,  was  the  burly,
good-natured  colonel  of  the  16th,  sometimes  called  the  Boston
Regiment.
