Address of Henry C. Robinson

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ADDRESS

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m AT DEDICATION OF MONUMENT

To

GEN. ISRAEL PUTNAM.

BROOKLYN, JUNE 14, 1888.

HENRY C. ROBINSON.

ADDRESS

OF

Henry C. Robinson,

AT THE

DEDICATION,

STATE OF CONNECTICUT,

OF

Gen. PUTNAM'S STATUE,

AT

Brooklyn, June 14, 1888.

HARTFORD, CONN.:

Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co.

1888.

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OtyVCi sor"*-vy^ .

Ninety-eight years ago the wasted form of an
old soldier, scarred by tomahawk and bullet, was
laid to rest in yonder graveyard. The sacred acres
were filled with mourners. He was consigned to
sleep in the echoes of artillery and of musketry, and
under the glories of the flag, the fibres of whose folds
his own brave hands had so conspicuously helped to
weave. His epitaph was written by the foremost
scholar of our State. The fret of time, the frost of
winter, and the selfish hand of the relic-hunter wasted
the stone slab on which it was written. And here,
above a handful of ashes, all that remains of that
stalwart frame, which, in life, was the inspiration of
Colonists, the hate of Frenchmen, the fear of English-
men, and the awe of Indians, to-day, late, but not too
late, a grateful State has built a seemly and enduring
pedestal, has placed upon it his war-horse, and called
again to his saddle, with his bronzed features saluting
the morning, the Connecticut hero of the revolution.

Blessed is a state which has a history. Its pres-
ent is the natural evolution of its past. Out of strug-
gles it has grown ; from storms and sunlight of other
years it has made strength. Its greatness of other
centuries is its renewed and transfigured greatness of
to-day, its traditions are its inspirations, its buried
heroes are its living prophets. It is the blessedness
of continued personality, the manliness of the mature
man ; its brain has developed with its muscles, its
heart with its bones. Reverence and pride for the
past, the kindling warmth of tender associations, and
the hallowed flames of love are its attributes. The

scholar reads about it, the poet sings of it, the phi-
losopher studies it. The banks of its streams are
sacred for the foot-prints upon them ; its mountains
are dear for the brave steps that climbed them ; its
groves are instinct with the meditations of its patriot
fathers ; its churches pure with the purity of its saints ;
its graveyards are peopled with the presences of its
ancestry. Thermopylae was a perpetual legacy to the
sons of Sparta, the atmosphere of the Academy was
an everlasting inheritance to the men of Athens.
The children of Israel sing the songs of Miriam and
David, study the philosophy of Moses, and Ezra, and
Hillel, fight over the battles of Saul and the Macca-
bees, and rightly say, they are all ours. The wars
are over, the wisdom is written, the lyrics are sung,
the laws are written on papyrus, are cut in stone, are
printed on paper, but the lesson in them all is as
fresh as a bubbling spring. We stand almost aghast
before the grandeur of a new state, as Dakota,
but we find no leaves of history to turn over
and study and ponder. But when we examine
the record of the last two and a half centuries
of human progress, the filial love of the people
of Connecticut finds a catalogue of statesmen,
and warriors, and orators, and philanthropists, a
story of patriotism, and self-government, and edu-
cation, and discipline, and virtue, and piety, better
than all the traditions, gathered from three thou-
sand years, which haunt the waters of the Ganges, or
are assembled on the banks of the Nile. And the
result of those early frictions and fights with rough
nature and rougher man are written in the culture,
and courage, and refinement, and sentiment of our

little Commonwealth of to-day. There was choice
seed dropped in the scant soil of the wilderness by
the pilgrims and by the colonial rebels, but lo, the
wilderness has become a garden and blossoms like
the rose.

A nation's character may be read in its heroes.
It has been often said that no nation is better than
its gods. Nor can it be unlike its demi-gods. Tell
us what were the shrines in the Pantheon and whose
ashes lie in Westminster Abbey, and we can more
than guess what was Rome and what is England.
And if the gates of the abbeys have opened chiefly at
the bidding of kings, the people have found the graves
of their heroes in the churchyard, have followed their
ashes to the rivers where spite and malice flung them,
have chanted their stories in song and set up their
memorials in marble and bronze. If men of blood
and ambition are the ideals of a nation, we find a
nation of warriors ; if patriots are the heroes, be
they on the battle-field or in the council chamber,
we find a nation proud of its nationality. Nor are
our heroes only the leaders. A personal friend of
Mr. Lincoln tells how he rode with him in a carriage
through the city of Washington when its squares
were dotted with camps, and its streets were full of
boys in blue. When generals and field-officers
saluted him, he returned the compliment by the cus-
tomary and formal wave of the hand, but when a
private soldier presented arms, he rose in his carriage
and took off his hat. He did not undervalue lead-
ership, but he appreciated that patriotic, unher-
alded support of the flag which was found in the
lines. And so our people, in memorializing the

critical struggle at Antietam, chose for a symbol, not
a portrait of one of the many general officers who
made great names on that historic ground, but
the figure of an American soldier, with no state
or regimental distinction, only a type of the hundreds
of thousands who fought and fell, and whose
names do not appear in the histories, but whose
blood won the victory.

If it is true that the admiration of a community is
significant of its character, it is equally true of its con-
tempt. It is not military greatness that we honor
to-day, it is loyalty to manhood and to truth and to
country. When the aggressions of the mother country
became insufferable, and the cry was " to arms," there
were two men upon the soil of our little Connecticut,
who were especially conspicuous for their military ac-
complishments. Both incarnated personal bravery;
neither had learned an alphabet out of which the
word " fear " could be made ; both were leaders. One
gathered the sons of New Haven upon the Green and
drilled them for war, — the other left his oxen in the
field and rode to Boston. Both had achieved success
and glory in the earlier wars. The eyes not only of
Connecticut and New England, but of Virginia and
the Carolinas turned to both of them. Both were
offered high places by the enemy. One went through
the struggle with an unclouded story, and to-day his
name, the name of Putnam, is written upon nine
counties in nine states, and we are bending in rever-
ence before his statue. The other fled his country,
died in ignominy, and an American community would
as soon adopt the name of Judas as the name of
Arnold.

Nations are not created by acts of parliament,
nor by acts of congress, nor are they made by treaties.
Statutes and treaties imply states behind them.
Nations grow — ^grow from the people. The United
States are the result of no sovereignty but the sover-
eignty of this great people — a people made and being
made of the manifold strength of the older folk.
Time has winnowed away the chaff and sifted out the
grain from many peoples, and many races, and has
brought many good " remnants " together, to work
out in wholesome friction the best methods of
self-government and constitutional law. Hither
have come, each with a gift, first of all and best
of all, the Puritan to New England, and the sturdy
Scotchman, the honest Briton, the quick-witted
Irishman, the Huguenot, son of a martyr and father
of heroes, the Dutchman, full of honesty and trade,
the German - happy combination of much good-
ness and few faults, the Scandinavian, the Italian,
the Mongolian, and the African, by the grace of
God and the will of the people and the terrible
tribulation of war, transformed from chatteldom
to manhood.

In studying the history of our country, we may
and must study its biographies. Its own biography,
so to say, is made up of the stories of its individual
lives. It was once taught, with more or less truth,
that the genius of a whole nation is the creation of
a single life, as Alexander's and Solomon's and
Julius Csesar's. It is only a partial truth. The in-
dividual of mark represents, just as truly as he creates,
a community. Marcus Aurelius and Christopher
Columbus were not prodigies, springing from the air

8

or the sky or the rocks: — their roots struck into soil
— they were born in the travail of forces, which are
only lost to our sight because the chronicles are kept
by courtiers. It is a flippant philosophy which sees in
human progress only the work of individual greatness ;
the great individual incarnates in blossom and fruit>
the processes of society for an era, as the aloe expresses
the natural forces of a century. We look at the
liberal legislation of England for a quarter of a century,
its education bills, its burials bills, its extension of the
franchise, its disestablishments, and we give glory to
Gladstone and Peel. But behind Gladstone and Peel
there has been a great constituency, struggling with
burdens and pleading for rights, often in inarticulate
ways, and they have only waited for the strong arm
of Peel and the matchless voice of Gladstone to strike
and speak for them. We look back to the first half
of the seventeenth century, and we glory in Winthrop
and Hooker, but Winthrop and Hooker were largely
representative of the common ideas of the little colony.
We stand in reverence before Washington, in admira-
tion before Trumbull, and Adams, and Hamilton, in
enthusiasm before Putnam and Moultrie, but let us
never forget the hardy, believing, self-denying men
whom they represented and who supported them.
When we honor Putnam, and Wooster, and Knowlton,
and Chester, and Humphreys, let us never forget the
thirty-one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one men,
most of them private soldiers, whom Connecticut sent
to the revolutionary fields, from Ticonderoga to York-
town. Neither let us forget that the atmosphere of
Connecticut was charged with ozonic forces of the
most patriotic and self-centered kind. Our ancient

seat of learning at New Haven was a very furnace of
patriotism. In 1774, Dr. (President) Stiles wrote
" there is to be another Runnymede in New Eng-
land." In 1779, President Napthali Daggett, with
his fowling piece blazing away at British regulars,
made the most picturesque single portrait of the war.
And a greater than both, through the war a tutor, but
afterwards President, one of America's chief educators,
Timothy Dwight, whose distinguished grandson and
successor to-day leads our worship of Almighty God,
was firing the young men of Yale with that burning
patriotism which prepared them so well for the promi-
nent part which they were so soon to play in the
trying campaigns of war. Of the small number of
alumni upon Yale's catalogue in the days of the revo-
lution, two hundred and thirty-four rendered con-
spicuous personal service upon the battlefield. The
universities have been the friends of freedom. Big-
otry and tyranny are exorcised from the human mind,
as evil spirits, by the influence of intelligence and
education and culture, an influence covering and bless-
ing both the learned and the unlearned.

You will not expect an extended sketch of our
hero to-day — only now and then a leaf from his life.
Salem had the honor of his birth, in 17 18, and well did
he repay the obligations of his Massachusetts' nativity,
by the defense and deliverance which he brought to
her territory. He was of sturdy English blood, and,
curiously enough, the family crest was a wolf's head.

Like Washington and Hale, in his youth he was a
conspicuous leader in athletic sports. When he
visited the city of Boston for the first time, and his
rural appearance excited uncomplimentary comment

2

lO

from a city youth of twice his size, who chaffed him
in a way to which the country boy was not accustomed,
the young Israel proceeded to amuse the Boston people,
who even at that early day seem to have had a keen eye
for the champion's belt, by a thorough, if not a scien-
tific pounding of his antagonist. He was first married
at twenty-one years of age, and at once moved to Pom-
fret. He settled at Mortlake, and became a large pro-
prietor of land. Here, in industry and domestic virtue,
he pursued the hardy life of a Connecticut farmer. He
was fond of horses and was interested in stock-breeding.
Here occurred the wolf's den incident, a story which
will be told to reverent and admiring boys as a classic
so long as boys admire pluck and bravery — which may
it be as long as grass grows ! In the French and Indian
war, beginning as a captain under Sir William John-
son in 1753, he continued in service until his final
return from Canada, in 1762.

In looking at the great deliverance from the op-
pressions of England in our war for independence,
we are sometimes tempted to forget the importance
of the earlier struggles, in which our fathers fought,
as British colonists, against the aggressions of France
upon the North. This contest continued at intervals
for nearly a century before the revolution. The Eng-
lish colonists held the coast. They had brought here
the free ideas of the common law, of 7nagna charta,
and the bill of rights. They had done much more ;
they had abolished primogeniture and entails, had
introduced reasonable laws of inheritance, had estab-
lished universal education, had made, in the cabin of
the Mayflower, an embryonic attempt at a written con-
stitution, and, at Hartford, in 1639, had indeed made

II

a written constitution which is the type of the written
constitutions of modern civilization. They were learn-
ing the sovereignty of the individual man, and were
unlearning lessons of subservience and idolatry to
rank, and title, and heredities, and despotisms, and
divine rights, and prelacies, and spiritual and temporal
lordships, which were entrenched in Bastilles, and
behind pillars of Hercules, built up by centuries on
centuries of assumptions, traditions, prescriptions and
possessions, supported by credulity and superstition,
by fears, natural and unnatural, by the power of
money and of the sword, by punishments in the name
of law and by threats of everlasting punishment in the
flames of hell. Out of these bigotries and horrible
oppressions of body, and mind, and soul, and into
these regions of political right and moral sweetness
and intellectual light, the Puritans in New England,
and the colonists in Virginia and Maryland were
leading a civilization better even than the advanced
civilization of England. But there were other powers
struggling to get possession of this fair land — little
known then for its real physical worth, but at least
known as a market for European wares, and as yield-
ing something in the way of furs, and a few other
articles of value. For many years French civilization
on the North and West, and Anglo Saxon civilization
on the East, wrestled for supremacy. The scene of
the conflict was New York and Canada, and Northern
and Eastern Pennsylvania. The French held the
great rivers, could make war with the Indians for allies
as against the English colonists, whose course with
the Indians had always been unwise and unjust, a
policy which we haven't yet out-grown. In the end the

12

flimsy Latin civilization was driven from the country,
and we were delivered from the power of Bour-
bonism and the hands on the dial went forward
and not backward.

And what a country was then saved for the larger
humanities ! A land, the granary and garden of the
world, the story of whose factories and agriculture and
commerce is a very miracle of progress ; a land, great
in material wealth and its innumerable agencies and
demonstrations of mercantile success, and even greater
in its elevations of the humble, its development and
culture and education of the many, its abolition of
class notions and class facts in political and religious
life, its loyalty to law without the defence of bayonets,
and its development of that personal freedom, which is
the supreme Divine gift that lifts man to manhood ;
a land offering to human study the sublime picture of
a nation, inconceivably strong, and every year becom-
ing stronger in geometrical progressions, according to
the will of Almighty God, governing itself without
the sceptre of a king, or the patronizing dominion
of an enthroned ecclesiastic, or the tread and tramp
of a standing army.

And this repulse of haughty Bourbon France could
never have been won by the British army alone, and
her Braddocks and Abercrombies. They knew little
of the country and less of the hostile Indians. But
the provincials knew the Indians and their ways, and
they knew the country, and its mountains, and rivers,
and swamps, and its winters, too.

We risk little in saying that for audacity, intre-
pidity, ingenuity, for an imprudence which concealed
the very genius of prudence, for sagacity, intuition,

13

prescience of hostile manoeuver, for leadership
in woods and boats and swamps, no single man
who entered into that conflict was the superior
of Israel Putnam. He was not slow in exhibiting
his peculiar genius in these campaigns. He soon
found out the incapacity of many of his superiors.
Several times he took unauthorized responsibil-
ities, and once or twice forbidden ones, which were
only saved from severe criticism by the brilliant
success which attended him on each occasion, and
by the demonstrations which he so often made of his
larger intelligence. As an Indian fighter, Putnam
had qualifications which have not been excelled in
the long story of our conflicts with the red men, from
John Mason, to George S. Crook. And, in the more
regular contests with the Frenchmen, he was almost
uniformly a successful and skilful officer. His bravery
was of that highest kind which never lost its wisdom.
When he and Major Rogers were examining Crown
Point, and had moved up so close to the fort and so
far from their troops that Rogers was taken, Putnam
had no idea of letting Rogers go into captivity, nor
any more idea of firing a gun to insure his own ; so
he knocked the captor of his friend dead with one
blow from his old fusee. The career of Putnam in
in these earliest wars was as romantic as the journeys
and battles of ^neas, and as real as martyrdom.
In the forests and swamps and fields, in rapids and
creeks, and on the lakes, by night and by day, in re-
connoitre, or bush fight or battle line, as scout, or as
company leader, in charge of a battalion or in single
combat, he was tireless in action, fertile in expedients,
absolutely insensible to fear and almost invariably a

14

victor. A prisoner, bound to a tree, struck in the
jaw by the butt of a Frenchman's musket, his head
made a target for Indian tomahawks, then released
and tied to a stake, surrounded by faggots, and, when
the flames were already scorching him, rescued by
the bravery of an officer as by a miracle, his iron
nerve never failed him. Prostrate upon his back and
tied to two stout saplings at diverging angles, and
surrounded by sleeping Indians, suffering the agonies
of the rack, his humor bubbled into a laugh as he
thought what a droll picture it all would make for a
painter's canvass. He struggled with fire at the mag-
azine for hours, until but a single thickness of board
stood between the furious element and the gunpowder,
and until he conquered, and saved fort, garrison, and
magazine, his hands, and face, and legs blistered and
burned, the very skin coming off with his burnt mit-
tens. There is more pluck exhibited than glory in
prospect in such a fight with fire at the very lip of a
magazine. At last, maimed, worn and lacerated, he
arrived a prisoner at Montreal. Here he met the cul-
tured and patriotic Colonel Philip Schuyler. At the
shocking sight of Putnam's condition, Colonel
Schuyler said that it was difficult to restrain his
language " within bounds consistent with the pru-
dence of a prisoner and the meekness of a Christian."

In this war Putnam was doing more than to
help in whipping the French. He was studying as
well the strength and the weakness of the British sol-
dier, and the qualities and invincibilities of his provin-
cial neighbors and brethren.

For the next twelve or more years after the
French and Indian war, Putnam remained at home

15

an object of admiration and love by his neighbors
and many friends. He was honored by civil office
and enjoyed the hearty esteem of the colonists.

And here we claim for Putnam an intuition of
the coming independence, which few, even of the
most radical of the fathers, dared to hope for. A
complete and successful separation and a new repub-
lic were things which great and wise leaders re-
garded as hardly to be desired, still less to be
expected. Freedom under the crown was the
general hope. But this unlettered man thought
deeper and saw more clearly the struggles to come,
and their issue. He waited for a war which he felt was
at hand and for a victory which he felt was to be
ours. He well understood the encroaching tyranny
of the crown, he knew there could be but one solu-
tion of provincial troubles and in that fearful contest,
with its not unguessed agonies, and sorrows, and
disappointments, and jealousies, and mistakes, he
knew the ultimate invincibility of the American colo-
nists. And so, when a stamp master was appointed
to enforce the stamp act in Connecticut, Putnam
inspired the measures, more forcible than polite,
which resulted in his resignation. And his statement
to Governor Fitch on the subject was so unmistak-
able in its tenor that no stamps ever came to this
colony from New York. When the Port bill
oppressed Boston, Putnam sent on sheep and lambs,
and openly declared that their blood was but a type
of the sacrifice which he and his neighbors were
ready to make in the common defence. And when the
tidings of Lexington came, the old prophet saw the
morning in whose twilight he had been watching.

i6

Even the accomplished Warren, upon whose green
grave the muses of history, and poetry and eloquence
have delighted to linger, no less a patriot than Put-
nam, but more conservative, and inclined to hope yet
in the power of persuasion, and perhaps trusting to
the noble oratory of Chatham, failed to convince the
the blunt old soldier that harmony was possible, and
ultimately acquiesced in his bold measures. When
British officers reasoned with him on the folly of
colonial resistance, and asked him if he had any doubt
that five thousand veterans could march through the
continent, " no doubt " said he, " if they behaved civ-
illy and paid well for everything they wanted ;" " but"
he continued, after a pause, " if in an hostile manner,
though the American men were out of the question,
the women with ladles and broomsticks would knock
them all on the head before they could get half
through." Putnam expected to fight the mother
country and expected to win.

For these intuitions we claim eminence for our
General. It is given to few to feel the first waters of
tides, to know the gathering storms and coming sun
bursts, to measure the patience and endurance of
peoples in the shadow of death, and to forecast the
issues of crises, as by instinct. Such power of insight
we conceive was the highest trait in the composition
of that peculiar man, Abraham Lincoln. Such
powers normally belong to men of the people. Here
kings and prelates have often failed. Putnam was
thoroughly of the people. His call to the Major
Generalship was by a vox populi^ which stood not
upon proprieties of order in promotion. Untrained
in letters, the wants of his countrymen and their

17

rights had been his alphabet. He had found out the
capacities for endurance of man's physical nature,
the inborn sovereignty of the people, the electric
power of patriotism. And so he looked across the
ocean to the King and felt the certain comings of
continued and increasing exactions ; he looked over
the rough hills of New England, and the plains of
the South, and from Lake Champlain to Georgia he
heard the speech of patriots and their prayers, and,
clearly as he foresaw the snows of December and the
foliage of June, he recognized the coming clash of
arms and the deliverance of the oppressed.

The call came soon. It found him in the field.
Leaving his oxen unloosed and mounting his horse,
he rode to Boston to the fight which he saw had
come, and had come to stay until it should be forever
settled upon principles of freedom and right. He
forsook his home and the joys of domestic life to
serve the people without a hesitating look or word.
He returned from Massachusetts for troops, and was
appointed a General by Connecticut.

It was but a few weeks from Lexington to Bunker
Hill.

"God helps the heavy battalions" said Napo-
leon. God helped David and his sling, says history.
Is it to be a victory for Napoleonism, and the fire of
hell which he made the genius and motive of battle,
or shall wrath and its remainders be turned to praise
and made to promote the ongoings of truth and the
civilization of society .?

It was a sorry match as a military problem.
Here were regulars, veterans, victors of many fields,
trained to touch shoulders, to hear commands, to

i8

march and wheel in time ; their arms were well ap-
pointed and clean, their ammunition was plentiful and
of the best ; their ofificers were educated, experienced,
brave. Here were traditions, and prestige, and the
grip of the leading monarchy of the world upon its
colonies. Here were ships of war and the flames of
fire striking terror by the horrors of a burning city.
But here too, were tyranny, and oppression, and
pride, and swelling self-confidence.

There were a few hundred yeomen with insuffi-
cient arms and short rounds of powder and shot.
They have come from Massachusetts, and Connecti-
cut, and New Hampshire. Their leaders have had
little council together. They have scraped up a
clumsy redoubt and have covered a rail fence with
loose hay. Thank God they are on a hill ! But if
they are awkward, untried soldiers, they are freeholders
and freemen. If they have no common acquaintance,
they have a common cause ; if they have no uni-
formity of dress or of arms, they have but one purpose
and a single inspiration. If they have left different
firesides in different states, they have all left homes
with kindred watch-words. They all love freedom
and God ; they all hate oppression and the King.
And w^ith them and over them are invisible things in
holy concert; the elevation of man, the supremacy
of constitutional law, the transfiguration of human
beings from vassalage to independence, and the will
of Almighty God that these vast millions of acres of
land, and lake, and river, with treasures unguessed
of soil, and stream, and mine, shall not be tributary to
the haughty little island across the Atlantic.

19

The assault was made, and renewed, and again re-
newed. The people watched the struggle from the
roofs and steeples of Boston, and held up the cause
of the patriots with their prayers. And the friends
of man have returned to the picture of that struggle
again and again, and with tears of joy. The un-
disiplined yeomanry withstood the charge of the best
disciplined troops, and the crowning victory of York-
town was spoken from Bunker Hill. The last of the
retiring patriots, he, who had filled, as nearly as the
circumstances would allow anyone to fill it, the posi-
tion of commanding general, who had superintended
the construction of the humble fortifications, who had
cautioned the patriots to hold their fire and to hus-
band their powder, who had offered his stalwart body
as a target for British balls from the beginning to the
end, upon the hill, in the field, and in the highway, in
the assault, in urging re-inforcements, and in the final
withdrawal, was Israel Putnam.

Three weeks after the battle Samuel B. Webb
wrote from the seat of war at Cambridge :

" You will find that Generals Washington and
Lee are vastly prouder and think higher of Putnam
than of any man in the army, and he, truly, is the
hero of the day."

On the 9th of July, 1775, Silas Deane, a Connecti-
cut man of national reputation and intensely patriotic,
wrote from Philadelphia, then the capital city :

" The cry here is Connecticut forever. So high
has the universally applauded conduct of our Gover-
nor (Trumbull), and the brave intrepidity of old
General Putnam and his troops raised our colony in

20

the estimation of the whole continent." And again
on July 20th, 1775, he writes:

" Putnam's merit runs through the continent ; his
fame still increases, and every day justifies the unani-
mous applause of the country. Let it be remembered
that he had every vote of the congress for Major-
General, and his health has been the second or third
at almost all our tables in this city."

But they were all heroes. Not only Putnam, and
Prescott, and Warren, and Stark, and Knowlton, and
Chester, and Grosvenor, but each one of the fifteen
hundred who proved in the heat and carnage of that
June afternoon that free hearts are invincible. On
the 17th of June, 1775, Artemas Ward and Charles
Lee were chosen to the ofKice of Major-General by
congress, and on the 19th of June, Philip Schuyler
and Israel Putnam were elected to the same rank, and
of the four, Putnam alone was chosen unanimously.

I have alluded to Putnam as the commanding offi-
cer at Bunker Hill. It is enough to say that the voice
of contemporaneous literature and the representations
of the early sketches and pictures of the battle as pub-
lished in this country and on the other side of the
ocean, are substantially unanimous in demonstration
of the fact. It was reserved for later and ill-judged
criticism to question it. The artificial rules of eti-
quette and precedence were then, as they had been
before, and as they now are, and as they ever will be
the cause of historical quarrel and discussion. The
troops about Boston had their own State com-
manders; indeed, Major Stark, of New Hampshire,
was chosen to his rank by the soldiers upon the
ground. There was little unity of plan. General

21

Ward, who was the officer in command of all the
forces, was at Cambridge. It is almost certain that
General Putnam represented him at the battle, but the
troops on the hill were chiefly from Massachusetts,
and the Massachusetts troops were in the redoubt
where Colonel Prescott had personal command. It
is a fair statement of the case to say that Putnam's
rank gave him the command by his presence on the
field ; that the plan of the engagement and its execu-
tion were principally his, although he was unable to
get the re-inforcements which were needed and for
which he made loud demand and continued exertion.
In the broad sense of leadership there can be no
doubt in any impartial mind that he was the leader of
the American troops, and was so considered by friends
and foes at the day and time.

It is to be regretted that doubts about Putnam's
capacity for leadership, and even about his courage,
have been raised, but they must have been. They
were raised about Washington, and Greene, and every
great leader in the revolution. And one only needs
to read any history, so called, to see the strange possi-
biHties of conclusion to which authorities can arrive in
their accounts of battles, and estimates of military
men and military affairs. Nor is this peculiarity of
historical literature exclusively true of the battle-
field. It has been several times argued, and last of
all by the mysterious language of ciphers, by which
any literary result conceivable can be attained, that
the greatest of poets and dramatists did not write his
own plays, and, still later, we learn that the most
charming, characteristic, and inimitable reminiscence
of a great war, written by our own greatest soldier

22

and greatest man, was, in fact, the literary achieve-
ment of another, whose greatness the RepubHc had
failed to appreciate. But while it is true, such is the
power of partisanship, prepossession, and bias over
the human mind, and so easily do we make into be-
liefs those thoughts which are born of our wishes,
that there can be few facts of history which, in a
quarter of a century after their occurrence, will not
be questioned, the world will still justly credit Hamlet
to Shakespeare, his Memories to Grant, and Bunker
Hill to Putnam.

Washington did not meet Putnam until he came
to Cambridge. They had both achieved glory in the
Indian war; they knew and loved each other, but
they met for the first time at the headquarters of the
Continental army. And the absolute confidence
which Washington had in Putnam never abated until
death. He had no doubt about delivering his Major-
General's commission to him with his own hands,
while he hesitated in the case of others. He had no
doubt in sending him to New York to take chief
command, after the enemy had retreated from Bos-
ton, and after Putnam himself had taken possession
of the forts, provisions, guns, stores, and supplies in
the name of the thirteen colonies. He dad no doubt
in intrusting to him the supreme command at Phila-
delphia in his own absence. He had no doubt in
directing him to open his military letters. He had no
doubt of his purity, patriotism and rare capacity,
when he addressed him in words of deep tenderness,
in the day of an assured peace based upon our
national independence.

23

The story of Putnam's career from Bunker
Hill until his paralysis in the winter of 1779-80
is deeply interesting. He had his share, and no
more, of the ill fortunes of the campaigns, and
he had his full share of success. He fought the
so called battle of Long Island under circum-
stances for which he was not responsible, but
which made success impossible ; he conducted the
retreat through the present limits of the City of New
York before the superior force ' of Lord Howe with
characteristic fearlessness and courage. His dis-
criminating eye selected the heights of West Point
as a base of operations ; he captured hundreds, prob-
ably thousands, of prisoners in the Jerseys ; he beat
the bullets of the British drag^oons as he rode down
Horseneck steps, where no red coat dared to follow
him, and so aroused the admiration and wonder of
Gov. Tryon, of odious memory, that he sent him a new
cap for the one which had been ventilated by a
British musket ball. He replied to the haughty
demand of British officers for the return of the spy,
Edmund Palmer, in such accurate and concise terms,
that the letter has passed into classic literature.

It was not to be that Putnam's voice should
thunder commands and his sword flash in the
final victories. The horrible shock of his cap-
tivity in the earlier war, the re-action from his
wearied life of exposure, the strain of his long
ride to Concord and Boston, as glorious and
heroic as Paul Revere's, had searched through the
joints of even his matchless harness. As he was
on his way to headquarters, at sixty-one years of age,
the wild throbs of his noble heart pressed too sorely

24

upon his aching brain, and the strong man fell ; those
muscles, which never before had refused to obey the
commands of his sovereign will, gave no response.
It was a sad ride back to his loved Mortlake, and the
fields which he had made green, and the flocks which
he had guarded, and the friends for whom he had
long hazarded his life. But it was to be. He must
wait, with moist eyes and lifted prayer, for the good
end of whose coming he made no doubt. For eleven
years, with unclouded mind, until the surrender of
Cornwallis, and the final peace, and the recognition
of the union by the European nations, and the
adoption of the constitution, and the oath of the first
President, watched by admiring friends, telling over
and over again the adventures and victories of the
past, he lived close to the spot where he now sleeps,
until the 29th of May, 1790, when he went on to join
the patriot Governor, Jonathan Trumbull, and the
patriot martyr, Nathan Hale, and to wait awhile to
welcome Washington and LaFayette.

Think not as you read of Putnam's bravery that
it was the bravery of thoughtlessness ; his courage
was of the kind that thinks. Think not, as you see
him soiled in the grime of battle and red with blood
stains, that he rejoiced in destruction; he was as
sensitive to the sufferings of others as a mother.
Think not as you study his rugged features that he
was vulgar and brutal, he guarded the honor of
woman with the chivalry of a knight. Think not as
you hear him hiss imprecations, in his lisping accent,
upon the British troops, that he was a blasphemer;
so were their enemies cursed by the devout Hebrew
prophets and psalmists, whose battle hymns Putnam

25

studied as models inspired from heaven. Think not
he loved war more than peace, the battle-field more
than the farm, the camp more than home. He
loved war for the sake of peace and freedom, he
loved the battle-field because he loved his farm,
he loved the camp because he saw through and
beyond its tents the rest of home.

Let us never for a moment believe that the
fathers fought for military glory or for war's sake.
They fought for peace and for law; for states which
they loved and for a Union whose future they but
dimly guessed. Indeed when the war was over,
and the independence of the United States was
assured, and the representatives of the states were
convened to form a constitution, how little did even
they know in what supreme architecture they were
building, and how great things they were creating.
There has never been assembled in the history of
the world, in the name of country, or science, or
religion, a company of men of like numbers, who
brought to their duties larger intellectual capacity,
and higher moral qualities and purer patriotism, nor
one that was more apparently under the special guid-
ance of the great Father of all men, than the little
band of statesmen which met in Philadelphia to or-
ganize a constitution for the people of the thirteen
confederated states. And Connecticut was there by
a representation inferior to none — by Sherman, sec-
ond only to Franklin in wisdom, by Ellsworth, unsur-
passed in eloquence, and by Johnson, unexcelled in
scholarship. As to-day wc have a lineal descendant
of President Dwight to lead our devotions, so are we
fortunate in having a lineal descendant of Dr. Wil-

26

liam Samuel Johnson to sound the rythm of our
verses.

In passing, let me remind you that our Connect-
icut Sherman was the only man who enjoys the sin-
gular place in history of having signed the four
supreme papers of American independence : the
Articles of Association of the congress of 1774,
the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of
Independence, and the Constitution.

Had that little body of men really felt the full
greatness of their work, for themselves and their
children, for the American people, and for humanity,
they must have risen above their environment to
heights of seership never before scaled. With
local attachments, strong and dominant, and yet
bound together by the success of a union against
oppression, and conscious of the weakness of a con-
federation which had no element of nationality in it,
they wrought out that matchless instrument which
reserved to the several communities self-government
in the matters which are best left to local control,
and bound a people into unity in those matters which
make a nation for national defense, and national
commerce, and national welfare. The rights of the
states are safest in the sovereignty of a nation, and
the nationality of the Republic is safest in the self-
government of the states. So are the waves distinct,
but it is one sea ; so are the trees distinct, but it is
one forest ; so are the mountains distinct, but it is one
range. And the older nations are copying more and
more our example of home rule in local matters, and
national control in national things, and the will of

27

the people, limited only by the solemn, catholic,
unimpassioned principles of organic law, supreme in
each.

As we recall the history of the fathers, reverence
and gratitude bid us bend at many a battle field and
in many a council chamber. And how often are we
tempted to say of this or that or the other one, that
his strong arm, or his heart s blood, or his foresight,
or his patience, or his genius at harmonizing discord,
or his zeal of enthusiasm, or his inspiring magnetism,
or his clarion word of command, or his silent act of
obedience, was the salvation of the young nation, as
it escaped destruction in ten thousand crises !

But it is neither easy, nor wise, nor necessary to
separate too sharply the greatness of the revolution-
ary heroes into its individual forces. It is seldom
that nature resolves her shafts of light into prismatic
colors and writes their elemental hues upon the sky.
The dash of Wayne, the daring of Putnam, the tire-
less strategy of Greene on the field, the wisdom of
Trumbull, the courageous and tenacious counsel of
Adams and Quincy, the eloquence of Ellsworth, the
sagacity of Franklin and Sherman, the genius of
Hamilton, and the foresight of Morris, in the state^
and the supreme and unique judgment, patriotism,
and leadership, both on the field and in the state, of
the one and only Washington were all blended in
the harmonies of a historic whole which has bathed
humanity with a flood of light leading on toward a
perfect day.

Putnam was not learned in martial lore, he was
not a master of the alleged chess-board of war;
he was not a combiner of great military causes to
bring about great strategic results. In managing

28

divisions, corps, and brigades, in distributions of the
different arms of the service, artillery, cavalry, in-
fantry, commissary, and hospital, in generalizations
of campaigns, or of a single battlefield, he was sur-
passed by many of his revolutionary associates — by
many, whose commissions ran out for one cause or
another before the end — as well as by Washington
and Greene. Like Wayne and Arnold, he fought
whatever was in front of him ; battle-line, fortress,
bushman, hostile boats, white man, black man, red
man — if it hindered his cause, if it stayed his ad-
vance, it must go away or go down. He believed in
hard pounding in attack, so did Wellington and
Grant. He was fertile in plan within certain
ranges, and could fight the fire of stratagem with
the fire of counter stratagem. Like Grant again,
he moved very early in the morning, and like
that same great general and greater man, he never
learned that there was a time to quit the field
while a ray of light flamed in the sky. He was a
military leader rather than a great general. His
leadership was marked by enthusiasm and faith, by
daring and tenacity and endurance. And he was in
every fibre of his being a true man — kind, honest,
pure, conscientious, devout. He loved goodness, and
good men, and good things ; he hated jealousies, and
envies, and bitterness, and injustice.

Putnam was not a scholar ; he knew nothing
of the dead languages of Virgil and Herodotus,
but he needed no pedagogue to translate for him
the legend " E pluribus unum," nor clerkly min-
ister to interpret for him the motto " Qui trans-
tulit sustinet. " He was unfamiliar with the
written philosophies of state craft, but he knew

29

that freemen were competent to make a state
without the consent of a king. He knew nothing of
navigation, but when duty called him to descend the
rapids of the Hudson, he found a new course through
boiling waves, and past sharp edged rocks. He
knew little about the scientific distinction between
original and reflected light, and he never heard of
the spectroscope, but he knew that the moonlight on
the river was his ally to scourge the treacherous In-
dians. He had never heard of evolution nor studied
the birth of nations, but out of the travails of cam-
paigns in Canada, and bitter suffering by Lake
Champlain, by the stone walls of Lexington, and the
hay-fence ramparts of Bunker Hill, he felt the certain
birth of an independent nation at that early hour,
when even the great Washington and Adams only
dared to hope for a better and more honorable
dependence upon the mother country. The fibres
of his being were neither by nature nor by
culture delicate or refined, but his heart beat
and his nerves thrilled with a patriotism as pure and
true as the on-rushing waters of Niagara. If there
was no place in his garden for tropical flowers, there
was no room there for poisonous grasses. If he had
little conception of the great universe of stars and
planets, he knew there was to be a new day, and he
stood and waited for the dawn with his sword in hand.

What went ye out into the wilderness to see } a
reed shaken with the wind ?

But what went ye out into the wilderness to see ?
a man clothed in soft raiment ? Behold they that
wear soft raiment are in king's houses.

But what went ye out to see.^* a prophet.?

Yea, I say unto you and more than a prophet.

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