Richard Henry Greene
1833-1877
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Richard Greene was the first African American to graduate from Yale University. Greene was born in New Haven, Connecticut where he was tutored in Latin, Greek and mathematics before enrolling in Yale in 1854. After graduating from Yale in 1857, he taught school in Milford, Connecticut, and after a year and a half took a teaching job at the Bennington Seminary here in Bennington. This is when he met his future wife, Charlotte Caldwell.
In 1860, Greene began studying medicine under the tutelage of local doctors. He went on to Dartmouth College in 1863. By that November he had accepted a commission in the Navy as an assistant surgeon. Over the next year and a half he would be involved with a blockade in North Carolina, deal with outbreaks of yellow fever and smallpox, and go ashore at Norfolk, Virginia, after it was occupied by the Union.
He wrote to Lottie about the feelings of the locals: "All the young men have gone out of the place with the Confederates and a kind of gloom hangs over the city. A good many of the secession ladies remain… they turn their heads when they meet any of our officers. I really cannot conceive that we shall ever be a united people. Words can hardly express the bitterness of the Southerners toward the North."
After he returned from the war in 1865, he and Lottie first lived in Cambridge, New York but later moved to Hoosick Falls, after helping with an outbreak of cholera in the town.
