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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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