The more things change, the more they remain the same. This paradox is at the heart of biography no less than of history. Biography is written to recover lives different from our own, but biography would be impossible if those same lives were not made from a part of our own.

This double vision of past and present becomes occluded when we make too sharp a distinction between then and now – when, for example, we indulge in nostalgia for the good old days, those better times when Washington and Lincoln were in our midst, when Americans united in great causes.

“It was never like that,” Nathanael Greene would say – if he could emerge from Terry Golway’s biography and speak entirely for himself. Washington’s quartermaster general was a logistical genius and the mastermind of the Southern campaign that cornered Cornwallis with his back to the sea and the French fleet at Yorktown. But Greene often despaired of his unpatriotic countrymen: “Money becomes more and more the Americans’ object,” he wrote to his brother and business partner Jacob, “You must get rich, or you will be of no consequence.”

Greene took his own advice. Not only did he rake off 1%of all orders for the Revolutionary Army (standard practice then), he also set up deals that even then would have been considered conflicts of interest. He subsequently advised his associates to burn the incriminating evidence.

Yet Greene was not simply a war profiteer. He risked his life repeatedly in battle, endured long periods of separation from his beloved wife and family, and suffered the dithering of a carping Congress that did not understand – as Washington did – that Greene was indispensable to winning the war.

If there is any fault to be found with Terry Golway’s elegant new biography of Greene (“Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution,” Henry Holt, 368 pages, $26), it is that he does not emphasize enough his contradictory subject’s representative Americanness, his identity as self-made (even selfish) man who served his country loyally. A staunch Rhode Island democrat who encouraged slaveholders to liberate their slaves and enlist them in the fight for independence, he became, after the war, a plantation and slave owner. The son of Quakers, he grew up reading Julius Caesar and dreaming of military glory.

Like Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen and Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Greene has gaps in his biography that the narrator can only wonder at. How did this unschooled boy (his father did not believe in education) become a general in Washington’s army at the age of 32? The mystery deepens when Mr. Golway points out that Greene’s previous military rank was private. And Greene had a limp! His fellow Rhode Islanders refused to promote him, pointing out that he spoiled their marching form.

In six months Greene made his leap from private to general, and there is simply no documentation to explain this astounding ascension. What is apparent, however, is that Greene, like Alexander Hamilton, had a gift for interesting better educated and better placed men. Greene’s letters to George Washington show that he made demands – asking for acknowledgment of his services – such as few men would dare to seek from “His Excellency,” as Greene and others styled his commander in chief.

Mr. Golway reads Greene’s letters as self-pitying. Certainly there is a constant refrain of “I get no respect.” But I think the biographer misses the guile (conscious or not) behind Greene’s self-pity. He made Washington feel the urgency of his plight, and of the implicit warning that leaving Greene’s troubles unattended would lead to greater trouble for a harassed leader desperately trying to keep his ragged army together. Keeping Greene happy, in other words, was tantamount to keeping the Revolutionary Army happy.

Washington needed a man who knew how to retreat. Backing up in good order was more important than risking too many battles against the greatest military force in the world. A businessman and trader before the war, Greene knew where to locate supplies, and that made it possible for American armies – usually defeated in the field – to keep running. When the American cause finally looked lost, when Cornwallis began his sweep through the deep South on his way to Virginia, destroying two American armies on the way, Washington turned to Greene, advising him to avoid major confrontations but to keep Cornwallis moving further away from his supply depots.

Greene had help – notably from Daniel Morgan, a broken-down old veteran of the French and Indian War. Morgan lured the overconfident British into a Carolina pasture for cows (Cowpens), even though His Majesty’s forces outnumbered Morgan’s 600 men by two or three to one, even though Morgan had to rely on militiamen, who were infamous for running away from Redcoats.

Morgan divided his motley crew (hardly deserving the name of a military formation) into three lines, telling the first one (the sharpshooters) they could withdraw after taking two or three shots at British officers. As the sharpshooters retreated, they were backed up by Morgan’s more experienced second and third lines, who cut down the advancing Redcoats in one of the finest bits of fighting the world has ever seen.

Greene performed variations on Morgan’s strategy until he had Cornwallis pinned between the French fleet and Washington’s advancing army. There were many mishaps along the way, but Greene (well read in the vicissitudes of war) was prepared for them. Defeats did not matter. As Greene himself said, “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.”

Greene’s indomitable character evidently was formed early. As a young boy, he loved to dance. When a young lady, looking at his lame leg, commented that he danced stiffly, Greene replied, “Very true. But you see that I dance strong.”