Litchfield enquirer., 1879-03-06
THE GREENWICH CELEBRATION. Washington and Putnam Compared.
 MD IJOTJ Icr'ET1,C OP ATION

Washington and Putnam Compared.
 MIR. HOLLISTER'S GRAFTON.
 The day selected for this meeting presents two central figures for our contemplation of quite different outline but offering some points of resemblance The one is Of that historical cast which idcalists had for ages figured to themselves in poems, paintings and sculptures, but which had not before been wrought into fieshly nlOuid-a chevaiier statesnlan whose ambition never rOutstTpped his virtue, and who, without theories. was the embodiment of all that theorists ad dreamed of, nobility 1n thinking and feeling, of simplicity in planning and doing. The other is a type of the common people eager, impetuous, working out the problems of life as if unconsciously and by the impnsion of an invisible hand. As these two persenages were designed to fill different spheres, and that no time might be wasted by them in adjusting themselves, their orbits were prescribed by nature. They were Oorn to what they were to be. The one was stately, self poised, framed to rule by selfruling. The other thought and executed as if by one stroke. so that the very. firstlings of his heart might be truly said to be the firstlings of his hand Something of the pomp of English manorial
 
 the cheery fellowship and manly equality of rural toil quickened the sympathies and solid flied the manhood of the other Neither of them was much indebted to book culture. No adademic groves, no cloistered arches sheltered their years of development: no Castllian fountain slaked their thirst, no arcadian vis- ions exalted their young dreams The em- ployments of planting and surveying occupied the one: the other held the plough, fought the wolf from his sheep fold and felled the forest trees to make a clearing for his maize and rye Both were unrivaled in athletic sports, both were strangers to fear and to fasehood, both in early life prepared themselves for the arena of manhood by the struggles of border warfare with savages untanabe as the beasts of prey that proWled in the woods.
 FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS.
 A detailed account of the campaigns of the French and Indian wars in which Putnam was so conspicuous would lead us beyond the limits of this address At the beginning of these wars he was thirty-seven years old and with out military experience. Yet such was the confidence reposed in him that he at once re- ceved a captains commission iu tie provincial regiment under command of General Lyman, and soon found his company filled with hardy young men who were eager to follow him. This company was so often detailed for special service that it finally passed under the name of Putam's Rangers. He was very fond of this irregular mode of warfare and his genius was well suited to it. The discipline of camp life was too confining to him. He loved adventure. His fertile mind needed to work out it's own plans, whether in reconnoitering in cutting off supplies, in demoishng barracks and boats, in surprising and bringing in scouts, or hiding in woods and swamps and waylaying detached parties of the enemy. The Indians were chiefly allied to the French. These wild creatures lurked in all secret places from Albany to the head waters of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. Like wolves they prowled along lake borders and river banks, and con- mitted thcr depredations under cover of dark ness. The approaches of regular army were too slow to overtake them, too easily anticipa- ted to surprise them. British discipline was wasted upon such antagonists. It was neces- sary to hunt them as they hunted white men i; to skulk, to hover on the skirts of woods to haunt the defles of mountains, to burn, to eX- terminate. Precedent went for nothing in this contest. It called for original resources al- ways at command, sagacity, suspicion, sleep lessness, celerity of movement, silence, keen ness of observation, disregard of personal con- fort, end the utmost stretch of endurance In all these requisites Putnam's faculties were whetted to the sharpness of instinct He loved these desultory ways with passion intensified by danger. Difficulties that discouraged other men stimulated him, temporary failure quick ened him, success beckOned him on to other successes. In those enterprises he had slngu- lar control over his men on account of his un- seitishness. his courage, and his truthfulness. Whatever he said was taken for verity. It was in the campaign of 1755 which resulted in the fall of Baron Dieskau, that he saved the life of Captain Rogers by act of gallantry that was re- quilted with dsingenuousness and treacAery. The campaign of 1756 resulting in the disas- ters of Oswego and Fort George, added new laurels to Putnam and at the beginning of that of 1757. he was pronounced to be major. The incompetency of the British generals, Loudon and Webb, has rendered this campaign but too well known in our annals Had the command been intrusted to Putnam, the fate of the garrison at Fort William Henry would have been different. The next year, under the administration of William Pitt, Loudun was superseded by Abercrombie, whose blunders fill so many pages of the history of that year. The details of these several campaigns from l755 to 1761 and the particulars of that sad expedition against Havana, lie beyond our limits. The Count de Paris in his keen analy- sis Of the recent civil war in the United States, has devoted large space to the old colonial
 
 tion in which the people, both of the northern and southern states, received that peculiar training and martial bias which enabled them successfully to cope with England in the revo- lutionary war, and which during the succeed ing century confirmed certain soldierly habi tudes exhibited by no other people. The gen. jus of these wars had for four generations been working in the blood of common race with qualifying differences in the two sections of the republic, until it broke out again at Manas- sas and in the Wilderness and culmiHated in the surrender of Lee at Richmond. A citizen soldiery, made up of free-holders bred to the arts of peace. whose culture had made them averse to war, and who had resorted to it vol untarily, not for national or personal aggran- dizement, but for the protection of life and liberty and the defense of their lands who took up the sword and laid it by with equal zeal and conScientiOusness, presented such a contrast to the mercenaries of Europe that the difference could only be seen when it had been worked out in results. This citizen-soldiery, stretching along few hundred miles of coast, hemmed in by the ocean on one side, and on the other by a wilderness equally boundless and even more unexplored, who had brought with them into desert the laws and the rights of Englishmen to apply to conditions untried at home, were to overturn the theories of
 
 but the men who wield them that think Years before the breaking out of the French wars, Major General Roger Wolcott, who com manded the forces of Connecticut at Louis bourg, had forecast the value of such troops and the influence they would exert upon this continent. But without the discipline of the Colonial wars, even to such soldiers, the con- summation of American Independence would have been an impossibility.
 PUTNAM AS BORDER CHIEF AND PATRIOT.
 Of all the chiefs of this border warfare, I place Putnam foremost not only on account of his fruItfulness in resources and the fervor of his temperament, but especially on account of his long experience in it at an age when the lessons of life are indestructibly wrought into the fibre of the man. At the close of the cam paign of 1761, this farmer-soldier who had fought side by side with Lord Howe, witness ed the blunders of Loudoun, the pompous stu pidity of Abercrombie, who had contrasted the phlegm of the British regular with the mobility of the provincial, who knew alike the chlvalry of the Frenchman and the treach- cry Of ms Indian allioc baI