An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam
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David Humphreys was aide-de-camp to Washington during the American Revolution. His Life of Israel Putnam, originally published in 1788, has rightly been described as “the first biography of an American written by an American.” It is, as William C. Dowling observes, “a classic of revolutionary writing, very readable and immensely interesting in what it says about the temper of the new republic in the period immediately after the American Revolution.” The subject—General Israel Putnam—is remembered to history and legend as exclaiming: “Don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes!” to American soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill. As Professor Dowling notes, “All the episodes are retold—Bunker Hill, the Battle of White Plains, the crossing of the Delaware, the Battle of Princeton—but from the perspective of one who was there throughout, and who always permits us to see Putnam as the sort of character by whom history is, in the last analysis, made.” Humphreys wrote the biography when formation of the Society of the Cincinnati, composed of men who were officers in the Revolution, “focused debate in the new republic about the competing claims of individual liberty and the good of the community.”William C. Dowling is a Professor of English at Rutgers University.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
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An Essay on the Life of theHonourable Major-General Israel Putnam
Foreword
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The spirit of the first half of the Life of Putnam is nowhere better caught than in an episode in Humphreys’s poem On the Happiness of America, written immediately after the Revolution when Humphreys, then abroad in Europe, was reflecting on his society from a certain idealizing distance. The scene in the poem is an American homestead in winter, the wind howling and the snow drifting along the roads. The crops have been harvested, the cattle are warm in their stalls, and now family and neighbors have gathered around the cheerful blaze of the hearth to, as Humphreys says, indulge in tales, news, politics, and mirth. The tale they hear on this occasion is told by an “old warrior, grown a village sage,” and it begins with his early adventures and proceeds to the Revolutionary War battles in which he took part—"The big bomb bursts, the fragments scatter’d round"—until, at the last, he pulls aside his shirt to reveal his scars. The children, listening wide-eyed, suddenly understand that this fireside tale is their own story, that this tiny community around the hearth is able peacefully to gather only because others have gone forth to distant fields of battle willing to die “in freedom’s name.”
The second half of the Life of Putnam is, in the conventional sense, more soberly “historical,” more concerned with dates and events and the movements of British and American troops in various campaigns. The new factor introduced into the narrative is, of course, Humphreys’s own first-person perspective, for during much of this portion of the story he was at Putnam’s side as events unfolded, and even later when he served as Washington’s aide-de-camp he was continuously aware of Putnam’s day-to-day movements. Yet the shift toward a more matter-of-fact perspective is not altogether owing to Humphreys’s participation in the story, for what he understands as having occurred is that American society, under the disintegrative pressures of war and competing political loyalties, has begun to lose that quality of spiritual coherence that had sustained a younger Israel Putnam in a sort of natural or spontaneous heroism.
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