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Foreword

David Humphreys, author of An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam, is today remembered less as a writer than as a historical personage. As principal aide-de-camp to Putnam and subsequently to George Washington, Humphreys passed through the darkest hours of the American Revolution, when a tiny, ragged, sickly band of citizen soldiers struggled to keep up the pretense that they could oppose the greatest military power in Europe. He was present at Yorktown when, with the aid of a French fleet, the same army miraculously brought about the surrender of British forces under Cornwallis. In a signal demonstration of the regard in which Humphreys was always held by his Commander-in-Chief, he was chosen by Washington to carry the surrendered British colors to Congress in Philadelphia. After the war Humphreys pursued a distinguished career as diplomatic representative of the new United States in Portugal and Spain. He spent the closing years of his life as a successful manufacturer and energetic promoter of American self-sufficiency in manufactures in his home state of Connecticut.

The irony is that Humphreys thought of his contribution to American literature as being as significant as any of his achievements in war or diplomacy. A member of the talented group of Yale undergraduates now known as the Connecticut Wits, who among them would produce such notable examples of early American writing as M’Fingal (John Trumbull), The Triumph of Infidelity and Greenfield Hill (Timothy Dwight), and The Vision of Columbus (Joel Barlow), Humphreys worked steadily in the interludes of his career on a body of verse celebrating the young American republic as an embodiment of what, in classical republican political theory, is called virtus: simplicity, hardihood, a willingness to live for the community rather than for narrow or egoistic self-interest. For Humphreys, it was virtus that explained the rise of republican Rome in the ancient world—before, as the victim of its own success, it had sunk inevitably into luxury and corruption—and it was virtus that explained the victory of the American colonies over England.

Yet Humphreys’s poetic talents were modest, and today his poetry is of interest only to specialists in early American literature. His one work of lasting value was produced quickly at a historical moment when the new confederation of American states seemed to him quite literally to be disintegrating. This work was An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam. The word “essay” in the title, retaining its older meaning of “trial” or “attempt,” was meant simply to signal the occasional nature of Humphreys’s short biography, which he composed for the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati in 1787, when it was not possible for him to be present to address the Society’s annual meeting. The significance of the Life of Putnam derives from Humphreys’s attempt in it to epitomize, in the form of a short Plutarchan biography, the myth of virtus or civic virtue that he believed to be at the heart of the American Revolution.

For Americans of the revolutionary generation, nothing more powerfully summarized the myth of virtus than the story of Cincinnatus, the retired Roman consul who had been called from his plough to lead the Roman army against an invading enemy, and who, having won the victory, immediately surrendered his power and returned to the plough. Here were all the elements that led so many eighteenth-century Americans to identify their own state with that of the early Roman republic: an agrarian society uncorrupted by luxury, a life of field and vineyard still close to the miraculously regenerative powers of the earth, a moral simplicity that viewed the glittering attractions of public or political life—power, wealth, influence—as no more than unwholesome delusions. Our meaning of dictator, which summons up the Hitlers and Stalins of the modern age, suggests how unimaginably far we have traveled from that memory of mythic simplicity. For to the early Romans, a dictator was an honored and trusted leader to whom the people temporarily granted, as they did to Cincinnatus, absolute power in a time of national peril. This is the early Rome, in short, of Livy’s history, or Rollin’s or Goldsmith’s Roman histories, or Dyer’s The Ruins of Rome, a poem that would have been familiar to most readers of Humphreys’s Life of Putnam:

From the plough

Rose her dictators; fought, o’ercame, returned,

Yes, to the plough returned, and hailed their peers;

For then no private pomp, no household state,

The public only swelled the generous breast.

Humphreys’s Israel Putnam is an American Cincinnatus, as brave and honest a man, as Humphreys says in his dedicatory letter to Jeremiah Wadsworth, as ever America produced. Thus it is, for instance, that when we first meet Putnam he is a simple yeoman with no more education than is needed by a farmer in a nation of farmers, but with native qualities of fearlessness and integrity that make him a natural leader. This is the Putnam who goes down into the darksome den of a ferocious she-wolf—in Humphreys’s narrative a naturalized version of the hero’s journey to the underworld—to reemerge as a half-mythic figure to his neighbors. It is the Putnam who displays an inexhaustible bravery and resourcefulness in the Seven Years’War, and who survives a brutal Indian captivity in Canada to return to his home in Connecticut. It is, finally, the hero whose circumstances are identical with those of Cincinnatus when news comes of the shots fired at Concord and Lexington. Putnam, Humphreys solemnly reports, “who was plowing when he heard the news, left his plough in the middle of the field” to set off instantly for the theater of action.

The Life of Israel Putnam divides into two halves, the first being largely taken up with Putnam’s deeds in the Seven Years’War—the “French and Indian War” of American history—the second being devoted to his role in the American Revolution. The first half, it is sometimes said, is closer to romance than to biography or history. This is especially true if by “romance” one means Hawthorne’s sense of the strangeness of an America that is still trackless wilderness, with a mysterious world of wild beasts and hostile Indians lurking just beyond the feeble glow of light cast by isolated settlements. It is no wonder that James Fenimore Cooper would when writing The Last of the Mohicans turn to the Life of Putnam for details of frontier war, for innumerable scenes in Humphreys’s early pages—scalpings, eviscerations, Indians howling around the pyres where captives are burning alive—belong to a familiar mythology of the early American frontier.

The usual reason given for the resemblance of this portion of the Life of Putnam to fable or romance is that Humphreys was working from anecdotes sent to him by Dr. Albigence Waldo, a former army surgeon who had interviewed Putnam at length about his experiences in the French and Indian War, and who was therefore able to provide a sort of oral history of events as Putnam remembered them. It is true enough that Humphreys was working from these materials—a footnote in the Life takes an early opportunity to thank Waldo for his help—but it is also true, as Humphreys makes clear, that he had himself gone over much of this same ground with Putnam, taking the trouble to check or verify various points. Yet the atmosphere of romance, an ethos closer to myth or heroic legend than mere factual narrative, survives unaltered.

The reason why this is so takes us to the heart of the literary and cultural significance of the Life of Putnam. For while Humphreys is always interested in telling the truth—in the opening pages of the Life he is quite hard on previous writers who have circulated “fables and marvellous stories” about the heroes of the Revolution—he is also consciously writing within a Plutarchan tradition that takes the truth about a biographical hero to be moral rather than circumstantial or factual. The Life of Putnam is meant to be, in the phrase coined by John Dryden in a famous essay on Plutarch, philosophy teaching by example. This is what Humphreys has in mind, for instance, when he states, early in the Life, that his ends will have been served if he produces in his American readers a desire to imitate the “domestic, manly and heroic virtues” of Israel Putnam.

The point of Plutarchan biography, still the commanding model in that classically oriented age, is to give back to the community a sustaining image of its own deepest values in the personality of the hero.

Consider, from this perspective, the likelihood that Putnam, like Cincinnatus in the episode from Livy, should have been actually plowing his field when news of the battle at Concord and Lexington arrived. To modern ears, conditioned by nearly two centuries of the “scientific” history that began with Ranke’s dictum that the historian’s task is to recreate the past wie es eigentlich gewesen the implausibility of such a story is nearly overwhelming. But, to Dr. Albigence Waldo, taking down Putnam’s stories of his earlier adventures, or to David Humphreys, asking his old commander to recall the events that had preceded his important role in the American Revolution, nothing could be more natural than that an aging warrior, brought up on stories of Cincinnatus and Regulus and Horatio at the bridge, should remember his own story in such terms. To set the story down in the way it is told is, therefore, simply to assent to the truth that a society lives by its myths, and that myth at a certain level functions as something very like collective or cultural memory.

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.

A sense that the onset of the Revolutionary War marked the collapse of a mythic dimension in American life, the end of a period when ordinary men and women had, all unawares, moved about the world as though in an atmosphere of song or legend, is something one encounters repeatedly in the writing of this period. One gets a strong sense of it in, for instance, the letters exchanged between John and Abigail Adams during his absence at the Continental Congress, with both husband and wife aware that they have somehow become characters in a momentous story in which people like themselves, ordinary enough souls in any other epoch, have been given a momentous role to play. This is what Humphreys is trying to get at when, in the Life of Putnam, he remarks that his own generation has “fallen upon an era singularly prolific in extraordinary personages, and dignified by splendid events.” More particularly, this is what gives full meaning to Humphreys’s declaration that Putnam, whom he has by implication chosen as biographical hero for this reason, “seems to have been formed on purpose for the age in which he lived.”

The division between the two halves of the Life of Putnam is thus meant to signal Humphreys’s own sense of a chasm or rupture in the continuity of American history, the loss of a world in which someone like Israel Putnam could appear as a Plutarchan hero because he was, in a manner of speaking, dwelling within a Plutarchan society, a world in certain essential respects resembling that of ancient Athens or early republican Rome. In the second half of the Life of Putnam, it is this sense of an all-sustaining virtus, a moral medium able to make heroes and heroines out of otherwise ordinary souls, that has vanished. The outbreak of the Revolutionary War represents, in Humphreys’s narrative, a fall into history-as-such, a world of power and intrigue and competing interests that is a very old story to the corrupt and cynical states of Europe, but whose appearance on this side of the Atlantic marks the vanishing of what Humphreys once calls the golden age of “equality, innocence, and security” into which Americans of Putnam’s generation had been born.

The obvious tension that works to dissolve the spiritual coherence of American society once war has broken out is, of course, that between Whigs and Loyalists, those who support American independence versus those who remain loyal to King and Parliament. But this tension is backlighted in the second half of Humphreys’s Life of Putnam by the more tragic dissolution of American society into narrow self-interest or atomistic egoism, a new Hobbesian social reality in which people are avidly learning how to disregard the interests of the community in favor of this or that specific advantage to themselves. In Humphreys’s telling of the story, the British forces ranged against Washington’s tiny army are only the visible enemy. The invisible enemy is the growing sway of self-interest, the most fore-boding symptom of which is that so many Americans during this time of trial profess support for liberty while leaving the soldiers of their own army without food, clothing, shelter, supplies, or pay that could be sent to their families.

Thus it is that, in the second half of the Life of Putnam, the themes of virtus and Plutarchan heroism are transposed from the Putnam who went down into the cave to fight the wolf, the Putnam who battled fire in a frontier barracks until the skin burned off his hands, and the Putnam who went out as a solitary scout against ferocious Indians, to what Humphreys calls the patriot army—the small band of militia, minutemen, and volunteers who remain with Washington through the long dark winter of the revolutionary struggle, sustained by little more than a dogged loyalty to their leaders and their cause. As a larger-than-life Putnam is the hero of the first half of the biographical story, so the hero of the second half is this ragged band of largely anonymous souls, a tiny community of virtus that symbolizes collectively what the younger Putnam had symbolized as an individual. It is an army which, as Humphreys states,

Having vindicated the rights of human nature, and established the independence of a new empire, merited and obtained the glorious distinction of the patriot army—the patriot army, whose praises for their fortitude in adversity, bravery in battle, moderation in conquest, perseverance in supporting the cruel extremities of hunger and nakedness without a murmur or sigh, as well as for their magnanimity in retiring to civil life, at the moment of victory, with their arms in their hands, and without any just compensation for their services, will only cease to be celebrated when time shall exist no more.

The story of the patriot army in the American Revolution is, therefore, the subject of the second half of the Life of Putnam. Parts of the story are merely entertaining, as when Putnam, whose forces in his winter encampment at Princeton have been reduced to a mere 50 men, is compelled by circumstances to permit a British officer to visit his headquarters. The stratagems through which he convinces the officer that his troops actually number in the thousands—by putting candles in the windows of Nassau Hall and every vacant house in the town of Princeton, and by marching the same 50 men around all night in detachments of five, ten, and twenty—borders on comedy, but Humphreys never lets the reader forget that such episodes mask an underlying desperation. For a large garrison of British troops is camped a mere 15 miles away in New Brunswick. Should the British learn just how few soldiers Putnam actually commands at Princeton, or how few Washington has a few miles away at Morristown, or how little the Congress has done to clothe or supply even these tiny forces, the American Revolution would, the reader understands, be over in a week.

An even grimmer note is struck as the Revolution comes, against all odds, to a victorious close, and it becomes clear that the same Congress that has refused to support its army in the field is going to allow it to disband without being paid. Men who have given up everything, who have risked their lives and left their families to subsist on the charity of their neighbors, will be sent home destitute, without money even to pay for seed for next season’s planting. A foreshadowing of this bitter situation occurs near the very end of the Life of Putnam, when the Connecticut brigade then under Putnam’s command, having brooded all winter on the ingratitude of a nation that has been willing to starve them before sending them forth to die in battle, decides to march on Hartford to demand its back pay from the General Assembly. Putnam saves the day on this occasion by getting early word of the mutiny, riding into camp at the last moment, and making a stirring speech on duty and patriotism. “You have behaved like men so far—all the world is full of your praises,” he declares—and orders the troops, chastened, back to barracks, but not before we have seen that he understands and sympathizes with his soldiers’anger.

At the very end of the Life, Putnam suffers a stroke and loses the power of his limbs on one side of his body, and so is sent into unwilling and premature retirement on his Connecticut farm while others play out the final scenes of the Revolutionary drama. Yet, in a way, this is the most poignant section of the biographical story, as Putnam becomes a living symbol of the patriot army, all those badly clothed and poorly fed men who have kept alive the spark of liberty while thousands of others— voicing patriotic sentiments—have gone about their business, very often at considerable profit to themselves. We are meant to see, at this point—or, more precisely, the original American readers of the Life of Putnam were meant to see—that in extreme circumstances patriotism is simply another name for gratitude, a perpetual awareness of the moral debt owed by any community to those by whose selflessness or sacrifice it has been sustained.

For Humphreys and his fellow Federalists, the paradox of the American Revolution is that it has been carried out in the name of republican government, which those raised on Aristotle and Polybius understood to be perennially threatened with the dissolution of society into selfishness. The glory of republican government, from the polis of ancient Greece to the rise of Rome, had been that it awarded to every citizen a role in determining the fate of his community. The corresponding danger is that men given individual rights may begin to think exclusively in terms of individual interests, which in the Life of Putnam, especially in the relation between America and its forlorn army of patriot soldiers, is seen as a form of moral blindness. The Life ends with a letter written by Washington to Israel Putnam on his Connecticut farm. Its ostensible subject is the matter of Putnam’s back pay as a Major General. Its real subject is the question whether the America for which he and Putnam and their fellow soldiers have risked everything has turned out to be, after all, worth the sacrifice:

While I contemplate the greatness of the object for which we have contended and felicitate you on the happy issue of our toils and labours … I lament that you should feel the ungrateful returns of a country, in whose service you have exhausted your bodily strength, and expended the vigour of a youthful constitution. I wish, however, that your expectations of returning liberality may be verified. I have a hope they may—but should they not, your case will not be a singular one. Ingratitude has been experienced in all ages, and REPUBLICS, in particular, have ever been famed for the exercise of that unnatural and SORDID VICE.

In the years following the Treaty of Paris, the dark foreboding so audible in Washington’s letter to Putnam comes to seem all too prophetic. For these are the years during which the new United States nearly disintegrate into a mere collection of squabbling petty republics, each attempting to gain advantage over the others on such matters as impost duties and tariffs. They are the years during which worthless paper currency, widely manipulated by speculators to the ruin of many an honest tradesman or farmer, is circulated by apparently oblivious state governments. Preeminently, they are the years during which the grievances of the veterans of Washington and Putnam’s patriot army issue in something very close to civil war, most spectacularly in Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts. It is in this downward spiral into anarchy, a relieved Humphreys will later say in his Oration on the Political Situation of the United States in 1789, in which the new United States touched on its very “hour of humiliation.”

The Oration, which represents at once a commentary on and a cautiously optimistic coda to the Life of Putnam, is, like the Life, addressed to Humphreys’s beloved Society of the Cincinnati, the organization formed by Washington’s officers in the last weeks before Congress would send them, along with their unpaid troops, back to their homes. In form, it is simply a grateful chronicle of the events leading to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the adoption of the new Constitution by the eleven states needed to put it into force, and the election of George Washington as the new chief executive. In spirit, however, it is a hymn of praise, a celebration of the unexpected return of virtus to a nation that even Washington himself had once thought to be on the verge of disintegration. “Can we contemplate a work so vast in its import,” asks Humphreys, “and so wonderfully effected—not by violence and bloodshed, but by deliberation and consent—without exclaiming in rapturous admiration, behold a new thing under the sun?”

Yet even amidst the rapture there is a note of bleak moral realism. Human nature has in all ages been impatient of restraint, and no form of government can guarantee that the spirit of virtus—a care for the life of the whole as well as one’s own interests—will continue to sustain any historical society. Events may well yet prove, as Humphreys soberly acknowledges, “that no wall of words, that no mound of parchment, can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” No matter what occurs in the future, however, nothing can take away from Americans the shining moment in their history in which men like George Washington and Israel Putnam walked in the light of day, and when every week brought events that were, as Humphreys declares, the delight and admiration of the world. It is as a vivid memorial of that moment that the Life of Israel Putnam survives today.

William C. Dowling

Princeton, New Jersey