Found ’twas all a lie

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 263.

About a year before first blood was spilled at Lexington, Nathanael Greene’s personal life took a sharp turn. He fell totally and forever in love. Catherine Littlefield, known always as Caty, was born on wind-blown Block Island to a well-connected Rhode Island family. She was nineteen years old in the summer of 1774, thirteen years his junior. She had looks and wit, and according to tradition “her power of fascination was absolutely irresistible.” A contemporary described her as a “small brunette with high color, a vivacious expression, and a snapping pair of dark eyes.” Following a swift courtship, they were married on 20 July 1774. Nathanael Greene was enchanted with her for the rest of his life. They lived in a house he had built in Coventry for less than a year before he went to war for the greater part of their married life, and for most of that period she was plagued by gossips who accused her of infidelity. That other men fell in love with her is true, that she probably encouraged them is a reasonable assumption, that she was unfaithful to her husband some have accepted without offering solid evidence. Isaac Briggs, a Georgia politician who on his own investigated the story that Nathanael Greene was suing for divorce for infidelity, “found ’twas all a lie,” and in a letter of 1785 left a delightful description of Caty’s character as well as her own charming summing up of her predicament and how she met it: “She confesses she has passions and propensities & that if she has any virtue ’tis in resisting and keeping them within due bounds.” Briggs had a high regard for her, and Nathanael Greene staunchly defended her against slander in New England and Georgia.