The Greenes of Rhode Island, with historical records of English ...

George Sears Greene.
these died before they were two years old, and the other five hved to be
more than eighty.
He attended the village school at Apponaug, and afterward the grammar
school at Old Warwick. In his sixteenth year he was sent to Wrentham,
Mass., to prepare for college, and in the following year to the Latin
grammar school near Brown University in Providence. It was his inten-
tion to enter Brown, but the project was abandoned, because his father,
whose shipping business had been ruined by the embargo, could not afford
to support him through college. He therefore sought commercial employment,
and came near being apprenticed as a boy on an East India merchantman.
The captain at the last moment decided not to take any
apprentices on that voyage; and my father then secured employment in
the office of Henry Jacobs, a dry-goods merchant in Pearl Street, New York.
While employed there he received his appointment as a cadet at West Point.
He entered the Academy, June 24, 181 9, and was duly graduated four years
later, number two in a class of thirty-five members. Among his fellowcadets
who afterward attained the rank of general officer in the Civil War,
or were otherwise distinguished, were Donelson, Winder, and Ramsay, of
the class of 1820; Mansfield, Hunter, and McCaU, of the class of 1822;
Mordecai, Thomas, and Day, of his own class; Mahan, of 1824; Bache,
Anderson, and C. F. Smith, of 1825; and Bartlett, A. S. Johnston, Heintzelman,
and Casey, of 1826. His own class entered seventy-nine strong, of
whom only twenty-six received their commissions in 1823, after passing the
severe ordeal of the yearly examinations, then recently established by
Major Thayer; who had become Superintendent in 181 7, and introduced
the methods of instruction and administration which have ever since been
the basis of the training at the Military Academy. During his term as a
cadet, my father was the quartermaster-sergeant and quartermaster of the
battalion, and, in his last year, acting assistant professor of mathematics.
The corps of cadets then numbered about two hundred, and was commanded
by Brevet Major W. J. North, afterward distinguished in the
Mexican War. It was the custom to have a practice march every summer,
part of the distance being covered by actual marching and part by transportation
on boats. In 181 9, the march was up the Hudson to Rhinebeck,
in 1820 to Philadelphia, and in 1822 to Boston.
Upon his graduation in 1823, my father was appointed a Second Lieutenant
in the 3d Artillery. After the usual graduating furlough, he was
ordered to duty at West Point as assistant professor of mathematics, and
remained there nearly four years, with the exception of a few months in the
summer of 1824, when he was on duty at the Artillery School then just