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Part Taken by Women in American History


family of four children to some lands she owned on Cumberland Island, and while occasionally visiting the North in the summer, she continued to look upon the South as her home.

A letter from her about this time gives the incident of Colonel Aaron Burr's requesting permission to stop at her house when he came South after his duel with General Hamilton. She would not refuse the demand upon her hospitality, but his victim had been her friend and she could not receive as a guest one whose hands were crimsoned with Hamilton's blood. She gave Burr permission to remain, but at the same time ordered her carriage and quitted the house; returning as soon as he had taken his departure. This incident is strongly illustrative of her impulsive and generous character.

Her discipline was remarkably strict and none of her children ever thought of disobeying her. Yet, she would sometimes join with child-like merriment in their sports. A friend has related how one day, after the close of the war, passing General Greene's house in Newport, she saw the General and his wife playing "puss in the corner" with the children.

It was while she lived at Mulberry Cove that she became instrumental in introducing to the world an invention which has covered with wealth the fields of the South.

Late in 1792, her sympathies were enlisted in behalf of a young man, a native of Massachusetts, who having come to Georgia to take the place of a private teacher in a gentleman's family, had been disappointed in obtaining the situation and found himself without friends or resources in a strange land. Mrs. Greene and her family treated him with great kindness. He was invited to make his home in her house while he pursued the study of law, to which he had determined to devote himself. At one time a party of gentlemen on a visit to the family spoke of the want of an effective machine for separating the cotton from the seed, without which it was mournfully agreed there