Once Upon a Time in Connecticut Part 6

The battle of Bunker Hill was fought at Boston in June, and he took part in it. "The brave old man," says Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, "rode about in the heat of the action, with a hanger belted across his brawny shoulders over a waistcoat without sleeves, inspiriting his men by his presence, and fighting gallantly at the outposts to cover their retreat."

When Was.h.i.+ngton arrived at Cambridge to take command of the American army, Israel Putnam received from him his appointment by the Continental Congress as major-general. He held this rank through the rest of his life and fought in many campaigns of the Revolution. He was with the army in New York, and at the battle of Long Island; he was sent by Was.h.i.+ngton to Philadelphia to protect that city when it was threatened by the British, and later, he was put in charge of the defenses of the Hudson River.

One of his last exploits in the Revolutionary War was his famous ride down the stone steps at Horseneck, near Greenwich. The British, under General Tryon, invaded Connecticut in 1779, and threatened Greenwich, and General Putnam, who was in command there, after placing his men in the best position for defense, hurried off alone, on horseback, for Stamford, to bring up reinforcements. Some British dragoons, catching sight of him down the road, started in pursuit. They were better mounted than he and gained on him steadily. Putnam, looking back, saw the distance between them grow less and less. In a moment more they would overtake him; what should he do? He was on the top of the hill near the Episcopal Church, there was a curve in the road ahead, and a precipice at the side, with some rough stone steps up which people sometimes climbed on foot on Sundays, to the church, from the lower road at the bottom of the hill.

Putnam struck spurs into his horse and dashed around the curve at full speed. The instant he was out of sight he wheeled and put his horse over the precipice down the steep rocks. The dragoons came galloping around the corner and, not seeing him, stopped short in astonishment. Before they discovered him again, he was halfway down to the lower road. They sent a bullet after him which went through his beaver hat and he turned, waved his hand in a gay good-bye, and rode on to Stamford. It is said that General Tryon afterward sent him a suit of clothes to make up for the loss of his hat.

That same year he had a stroke of paralysis which disabled him so that he could never again take part in the war. He lived at home in retirement until his death on May 19, 1790. Perhaps no brave deed in his life was quite as brave as the cheerful and resolute way he met this hard blow near its end. He did not die as he would have liked, in the roar and thunder of battle; he was laid aside and the war went on without him. But after the first bitter disappointment, he regained his courage and good spirits, and no one heard him complain. People gathered about him and his last days were honored in his own home. When the war ended in 1783, Was.h.i.+ngton wrote him a letter which he counted as one of his greatest treasures.

Any number of stories are told of "Old Put," as the soldiers called him, of his adventures, and his odd humor. It is said that once "a British officer challenged him to fight [a duel]; and Putnam, having the choice of weapons, chose that they should sit together over a keg of powder to which a slow match was applied.

The officer sat till the match drew near the hole, when he ran for his life, Putnam calling after him that it was only a keg of onions with a few grains of powder sprinkled upon it."

We have several descriptions of his personal appearance. He "was of medium height, of a strong, athletic figure, and in the time of the Revolutionary War weighed about two hundred pounds. His hair was dark, his eyes light blue, and his broad, good-humored face was marked with deep scars received in his encounters with French and Indians,"

"Putnam, scored with ancient scars, The living record of his country's wars,"

as a poet of those days expressed it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL PUTNAM--A drawing from life by John Trumbull]

There were greater generals in the Revolution than Israel Putnam, men who, partly because they were better educated, were better fitted than he to plan and carry out large operations. But he excelled as a pioneer, as a bold leader, and a brave, independent fighter. As a well-known historian says, "He was brave and generous, rough and ready, thought not of himself in time of danger, but was ready to serve in any way the good of the cause.

His name has long been a favorite one with young and old; one of the talismanic names of the Revolution, the very mention of which is like the sound of a trumpet."

REFERENCES

1. Humphreys, Colonel David. Essay on the Life of the Hon.

Major-General Israel Putnam. Boston, 1818.

2. Livingston, William Garrand. Israel Putnam. Pioneer, Ranger, and Major-General. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York and London, 1901.

3. Tarbox, Increase N. Life of Israel Putnam ("Old Put").

Lockwood, Brooks & Co. Boston, 1876.

4. Fiske, John. "Israel Putnam," in Appleton's Encyclopaedia of American Biography. Boston, 1891.

THE BULLET-MAKERS OF LITCHFIELD

In the Museum of the New York Historical Society there is a large flat stone with an inscription cut into one side of it, and in the other, three deep holes for three legs of a horse. Lying on a table near it are several large pieces of heavy metal with the old gilding almost worn off. One piece looks like the tail of a horse and another like a part of his saddle. These fragments of metal and the stone slab are nearly all that is left of a statue of King George the Third on horseback that stood on Bowling Green, at the lower end of Broadway in New York City, before the Revolutionary War.

One evening early in the war a mob gathered on Bowling Green. Led by the Sons of Liberty and helped by some of the soldiers, the crowd tore down the king's statue and broke it into bits.

Bonfires were blazing in the streets and by the light of these ropes were thrown over the king and his charger and both were pulled down and dragged through the streets. An entry in Was.h.i.+ngton's Orderly Book at this time, forbidding his soldiers to take part in anything like a riot, shows that he did not fully approve of this proceeding. But the people were very much excited. It was the night of the 9th of July, 1776, and news of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had just reached New York that afternoon. At evening rollcall the Declaration was read at the head of each brigade of the army and "was received with loud huzzas."

Independence was declared in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, and that day has been kept ever since as the birthday of the United States, but news traveled so slowly before the telegraph was invented that it was not known in New York until Monday, the 9th.

Then bells rang, and as night drew on people lighted bonfires to show their joy, and not content with this, they hurried away to Bowling Green and pulled down the statue of the king and cut off his head. They acted at once on the statement of the famous Declaration which they had just heard read to them, that "A prince whose character is marked by every act that may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

Once off his pedestal, however, the king suddenly became valuable and precious to them, for he, as well as his horse, was made mostly of lead and he could be melted down and run into bullets.

Lead was dear and scarce, and bullets were needed in the army.

The king's troops now "will probably have melted majesty fired at them," some one wrote in a letter to General Gates. So the pieces of the statue were carefully saved and most of it was sent away secretly by ox-cart, so it is said, up into the Connecticut hills to the home of General Wolcott in Litchfield, for safe keeping. The general was returning there himself about this time from Philadelphia, and perhaps he took charge of its transportation. We shall hear of it again in Litchfield, for this story, which begins in New York, ends in Connecticut.

The story should really begin in London, for the statue was made there. The colonists sent an order for it after the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. This act had excited great resentment in the colonies because it was an attempt to tax the people without their consent. When it was at last repealed, they were overjoyed, and New York determined to express its renewed loyalty to the king by erecting a statue of him. The laws of the colony state that it was set up "as a monument of the deep sense with which the inhabitants of this colony are impressed of the blessing they enjoy under his [King George's] ill.u.s.trious reign, as well as their great affection for his royal person."

The statue was of lead, dark, heavy, and dull like the character of the king it represented, but it was richly gilded outside and looked, at first, like pure gold. Some of the pieces in the museum still show the gilding. It must have been a brilliant ornament in the little city when, on August 1, 1770, it was placed on Bowling Green, facing the Fort Gate. But it did not stand there very long in peace, for the stormy days of the Revolution were approaching. England continued to impose taxes and the colonies to resist them, until the discontent of the people broke out in many ways. More than one attempt was made to injure King George's statue before it was finally torn down on the night of July 9, 1776.

[Ill.u.s.tration: KING GEORGE THE THIRD

Courtesy of Mr. Charles M. Lefferts and the New York Historical Society

A drawing by Mr Lefferts from descriptions and measurements of fragments of the statue]

If we want to know what the British thought of this last insult to their king, we shall find out by reading the journal of Captain John Montresor, an officer in the British army.

"Hearing," he writes, "that the Rebels [that is, the Americans]

had cut the king's head off the equestrian statue in the centre of the Ellipps [near the Fort] at New York, which represented George the 3rd in the figure of Marcus Aurelius, and that they had cut the nose off, clipt the laurels that were wreathed round his head and drove a musket bullet part of the way thro' his head and otherwise disfigured it, and that it was carried to Moore's tavern adjoining Fort Was.h.i.+ngton, on New York Island, in order to be fixt on a spike on the Truck of that Flag-staff as soon as it could be got ready, I immediately sent to c.o.x, who kept the tavern at King's Bridge, to steal it from thence and to bury it, which was effected, and was dug up on our arrival and I rewarded the men, and sent the Head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed country."

And there, in London, a year later, Governor Hutchinson, of Ma.s.sachusetts, saw it at Lord Townshend's house in Portman Square. Lady Townshend, he said, went to a sofa and uncovered a large gilt head which her husband had received the night before from New York, and which, although "the nose was wounded and defaced," he at once recognized by its striking likeness to the king. We do not know what became of it after this, or whether it is still in existence.

There were one or two other pieces of this monument which also had eventful histories. The slab, on which the horse had stood with one foot in the air, was used as a gravestone for Major John Smith, of the Forty-second, or Royal Highland, Regiment, who died in 1783, and later it served for a time as a stepping-stone in front of a well-known house in New Jersey.

Nearly one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence the tail of King George's horse was dug up on a farm in Wilton, Connecticut, and a piece of his saddle was found there at about the same time. The tradition in Wilton is that the ox-cart carrying the broken statue pa.s.sed through Wilton on its way to Litchfield, and that the saddle and the tail were thrown away there. Just why, no one knows; perhaps the load was too heavy; possibly--some people think--because it was found that they were not of pure lead and could not be used to make bullets. Most of the statue, however, seems to have reached Litchfield safely.

On the beautiful broad South Street of that village, high in the Connecticut hills, the house of General Wolcott, afterwards Governor Wolcott, of Connecticut, still stands under its old trees much as it stood in the summer of 1776.

When the pieces of the leaden statue reached Litchfield, they were buried temporarily in the "Wolcott orchard under an apple tree of the Pound variety" that stood near the southeast corner of the house. And then, sometime later, there came a day when King George, who had once sat so securely on his solid steed, close to his fort in his good city of New York, was taken out of this last hiding-place and, together with his leaden horse, was melted down and run into bullets to be fired at his own soldiers.

Bullet-moulds of the time of the Revolution can be seen now in historical museums. Some of them are shaped like a large pair of shears. The work of running the bullets that day in Litchfield was done by women and girls, for the men were away at the war.

The only man who took part in it, besides the general himself, was Frederick, his ten-year-old son, and he, many years later, told how he remembered the event, how a shed was built in the orchard, how his father chopped up the fragments of the statue with a wood-axe, how gay the girls were, his two sisters a little older than himself and their friends, and what fun they all had over the whole affair. A ladle, said to have been used in pouring the lead into the moulds, is still kept in the Historical Museum at Litchfield, and among Governor Wolcott's papers is a memorandum labeled, "Number of cartridges made."

Cartridges Mrs. Marvin, 6,058 Ruth Marvin, 11,592 Laura, 8,378 Mary Ann, 10,790 Frederick, 936 Mrs. Beach, 1,802 Made by sundry persons, 2,182 Gave Litchfield militia on alarm, 50 Let the Regiment of Colonel Wigglesworth have, 300 ------ 42,088

Mary Ann and Laura were Frederick's sisters, twelve and fourteen years old. Some of the bullets made, and which were given to the "Litchfield militia on alarm," were probably used the next year to repulse a British invasion of Connecticut, so that it was said then that "His Majesty's statue was returned to His Majesty's troops with the compliments of the men of Connecticut."

REFERENCES

1. Proceedings of the New York Historical Society.

October, 1844.

2. Proceedings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society.

2d Series, vol. 4.

3. Montresor, Captain John. "Journals." Collections of the New York Historical Society for the year 1881. Printed by the Society.

4. Kilbourne, Payne Kenyon. Sketches and Chronicles of the Town of Litchfield, Conn. Case, Lockwood & Co. Hartford, 1859.