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"OLD PUT"
THE PATRIOT
BY
FREDERICK A. OBER
AUTHOR OF CRUSOE'S ISLAND, THE STORIED WEST INDIES, PUERTO RICO AND ITS
RESOURCES, ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1904
Copyright, 1904, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published, September, 1904_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--Birthplace and Youth 1
II.--"Old Wolf Putnam" 11
III.--First Taste of War 25
IV.--A Partizan Fighter 39
V.--The Adventurous Soldier 53
VI.--Fighting on the Frontier 65
VII.--Strategy and Woodcraft 79
VIII.--A Prisoner and in Peril 92
IX.--A Campaign in Cuba 106
X.--Tavern-Keeper and Oracle 120
XI.--On the Side of His Country 134
XII.--At the Battle of Bunker Hill 150
XIII.--Holding the Enemy at Bay 171
XIV.--In Command at New York 184
XV.--Washington's Chief Reliance 198
XVI.--Defending the Hudson Highlands 212
XVII.--Last Years in the Service 226
XVIII.--The Disabled Veteran 243
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
"Old Put" escaping from the British at Horseneck _Frontispiece_
The Wolf Den at Pomfret, Connecticut 18
Fort near Havana where the Colonials landed 112
Israel Putnam 188
_From a painting by Trumbull._
Statue to General Putnam at Brooklyn, Connecticut 254
"OLD PUT," THE PATRIOT
CHAPTER I
BIRTHPLACE AND YOUTH
This is the life story of one who was born on a farm, and died on a
farm, yet who achieved a world-wide fame through his military exploits.
It has been told many times, it will be told for centuries yet to come;
for the world loves a man of high emprise, and such was Israel Putnam,
the hero of this story.
He was born January 7, 1718, in Danvers, then known as Salem Village,
Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England. His father's Christian
name was Joseph, his mother's Elizabeth, and Israel (as he was called at
baptism, after his maternal grandfather, Israel Porter) was the
great-grandson of his first American ancestor, John Putnam, who had
come from England, where the original name of the family was Puttenham.
He had settled at Salem more than eighty years before, and his son,
Thomas, built, in 1648, the house in which Israel was born in 1718. On
the death of Thomas it had become the property of Joseph, who first
occupied it in 1690, after his marriage to Elizabeth Porter.
Here the young couple passed through the perilous "witchcraft times,"
during the worst period of which, in 1692 (it is a tradition in the
family), Joseph Putnam kept a loaded musket at his bedside every night
and his swiftest horse saddled in the stable, ready for a fight or a
flight in case the witch-hunters should come to carry him off to jail.
They had accused his sister, who saved her life only by fleeing to the
wilderness and remaining in hiding until the insane furor was over. He
and his wife survived that gloomy period, and in the ancestral homestead
lived happily for more than thirty years, raising a "baker's dozen" of
children, of whom Israel was the eleventh.
On both the maternal and paternal side Israel Putnam was descended from
a line of sturdy, prosperous farmers. The grandfather whose name he bore
had married a daughter of William Hathorne, who came from England and
settled in Salem about the year 1630, and who was an ancestor of the
famous romancist Nathaniel Hawthorne. John Hathorne, son of William, was
a military man and a magistrate. He presided at the infamous witchcraft
trials in Salem, and, like the near relatives of Joseph Putnam, looked
with severe disfavor upon any one who showed sympathy for the persecuted
witches.
Joseph Putnam died in 1723, leaving his widow with eleven surviving
children, nine older than Israel, who was then but five years of age,
and one, little Mehitable, only three. Several of the older children
were already married, and when, in 1727, Mrs. Putnam took a second
husband, one Captain Thomas Perley, of Boxford, only the younger members
of her family went with her to live in the new home. There Israel
resided until he was about eighteen, and Boxford being only a few miles
distant from his birthplace, in the same county (Essex), he made
frequent visits to the old farm, to which he finally returned as part
owner before he attained his majority.
Numerous anecdotes are still related of him in Danvers, all tending to
illustrate the early development of those high qualities for which in
after-life he became conspicuous. Courage, enterprise, activity, and
perseverance, says his original biographer, were the first
characteristics of his mind. His disposition was frank and generous, as
his mind was fearless and independent. From his earliest years he
craved, and was always in pursuit of, some daring adventure, yet he was
the most sober and apparently contented youth in the village, loving
hard work, even seeking to perform a man's task at daily labor, while
yet a mere stripling. Brought up mainly on the farm, spending his days
in severe labor and his nights in sweet slumber, he became the peer of
all his companions in athletic feats involving strength and skill. He
could "pitch the bar," run, leap, wrestle with the best of them, and
more than held his own with the most doughty champion. But he never
boasted of his strength, nor sought occasions to display his skill,
being content with their mere possession.
His sense of fairness and self-respect, however, would not allow him to
become the butt of other people's ridicule, and when the need arose for
putting forth his energies in a good cause, he held nothing in reserve.
Such an occasion occurred the first time he paid a visit to Boston, the
metropolis of his State. He was roaming about in rustic fashion, when he
attracted the attention of a youth twice his size, who began to "make
fun" of him. Young Putnam bore the insult as long as he could, then he
"challenged, engaged, and vanquished his unmannerly antagonist, to the
great diversion of a crowd of spectators."
There were very few diversions for the youth of Putnam's time, so long
ago; but the boys, like those of modern times, indulged in
bird's-nesting now and then. Climbing to a tree top one day, in his
endeavor to secure a nest, "Young Put" had a fall, owing to a branch
breaking in his hands. He was caught by a lower limb, however, and there
he hung, suspended by his clothes betwixt heaven and earth. His cries
attracted some companions, one of whom he commanded (as he had a gun) to
fire a bullet at the limb and try to break it. This the boy did, after
much coaxing on Putnam's part, and was so successful that his friend
came tumbling to the ground. He was bruised and lamed, but no bones were
broken; and the very next day the intrepid boy climbed up to the nest
again, and this time secured it. That was the "way with 'Old Put,'" the
man who in later years succeeded "Young Put" the youth. His motto was:
"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
He always tried, and with his utmost endeavor, to accomplish the task
that faced him at the time. What is more, he generally succeeded; and
that is the chief reason why he is considered worthy a biography. There
are few men, perhaps, who did so many things worthy of emulation, and so
few unworthy. Dangerously near the latter, however, was one act of his
youth, when he caught a vicious bull in a pasture, and, having mounted
astride the animal's back, with spurs on his heels, rode the furious
creature around the field until it finally fell from exhaustion, after
seeking refuge in a swamp.
Young Putnam's education, as may have been inferred already, was
obtained mostly in the woods and open fields. While he possessed great
mental endowments, as afterward displayed in his career, yet his early
education was grossly neglected, in the school and college sense. Having
mastered the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he was
considered well equipped for his destined calling, which was to be that
of a farmer. Throughout his whole life he suffered from this neglect of
early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they always
"displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his
native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an
unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made,"
the despair of his correspondents and the ridicule of his enemies.
It is doubtful if he had any greater ambition than to become a good
farmer, as good as was his father before him, and like him, attain to a
competency. He was already fairly well to do the year he became of age,
for his father, after providing generously for the other children, had
bequeathed to him and his brother David the homestead, house and farm
attached. His mother was to have a home there so long as she desired;
but on her second marriage she relinquished her claim upon the
homestead, and the two brothers shared it between them. Israel's
portion was set off in 1738, and the next year he built a home in a
remote corner of the farm, but within sight of the house and room in
which he was born. For, after the fashion of those primitive times, when
early matrimony was encouraged, young Israel had been "courting" a
lovely girl, the daughter of a neighbor, who lived about four miles
distant from the home farm, near the boundary-line between Salem and
Lynn. Hannah Pope was her name, and she also was descended from one of
the first families of Salem Village. Being a sensible girl, she accepted
Israel Putnam as soon as he proposed, and the 19th of July, 1739, they
were married, when he was twenty-one years of age and she only eighteen.
Taking his young wife to the little house he had built with his own
hands on the farm, there Israel Putnam and Hannah, his wife, began their
married life. The next year a son was born to them, the first of ten
children who blessed their union, and he was called Israel.
The house in which the first Israel Putnam was born, an old colonial,
gambrel-roofed structure, still stands where it was erected by his
grandfather in 1648, near the foot of Hathorne Hill, in Danvers, on the
turn-pike road half-way between Boston and Newburyport. It contains many
relics of Putnam's time, but the most interesting portion of the house
itself is the little back chamber, with its one window looking out over
the farmyard, where the infant Israel first saw the light.
Of the house which he himself built, on a distant knoll of the home
farm, nothing now remains but the cellar and foundation stones, near
which is the well he dug, now choked with rubbish and overgrown with
brambles.