George Bancroft
History of the United States Volume 4, 1774-1776
EPOCH THIRD America Takes Up Arms for Self-Defence and Arrives at Independence From 1774 to 1776
Chapter 11: Effects of the Day of Lexington and Concord, The General Rising, April-June 1775
p. 174-175
New Hampshire agreed to raise two thousand men, of whom perhaps twelve hundred reached the camp. Folsom was their brigadier, but John Stark was the most trusty officer. Connecticut offered six thousand men; and about twenty-three hundred remained at Cambridge, with Spenser as their chief, and Putnam as second brigadier.

Rhode Island voted fifteen hundred men; and probably about a thousand of them appeared round Boston, under Nathaniel Greene. He was one of eight sons, born rear the Narragansett bay in Warwick. In that quiet seclusion, Gorton and his followers, untaught of universities, had reasoned on the highest questions of being. They had held that in America Christ was coming to his temple; that outward ceremonies, baptism and the eucharist, and also kings and lords, bishops and chaplains, were but carnal ordinances, sure to have an end; that humanity must construct its church by "the voice of the Son of God," the voice of reason and love. The father of Greene, descended from ancestry of this school, was at once an anchor-smith, a miller, a farmer, and, like Gorton, a preacher. The son excelled in diligence and in manly sports. None of his age could wrestle or skate or run better than he, or stand before him as a neat ploughman and a skilful mechanic.