An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam

Foreword

Putnam_i-xxvi.indd 9 4/27/12 8:04 AM Foreword D avid Humphreys, author ofAn Essay on the Life ofthe 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 ofhis life as a successful manufacturer and energetic promoter of American self-sufficiency in manufactures in his home state ofConnecticut. The irony is that Humphreys thought ofhis contribution to American literature as being as significant as any ofhis achievements in war or diplomacy. A member ofthe talented group of Yale undergraduates now known as the Connecticut Wits, who among them would produce such notable examples of early lX Putnam_i-xxvi.indd 10 4/27/12 8:04 AM Foreword American writing as M'Fingal (John Trumbull), The Triumph ofInfidelity and Greenfield Hill (Timothy Dwight), and The Vision ofColumbus (Joel Barlow), Humphreys worked steadily in the interludes of his career on a body of verse celebrating the young American republic as an embodiment ofwhat, 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 ofits own success, it had sunk inevitably into luxury and corruption-and it was virtus that explained the victory ofthe American colonies over England. Yet Humphreys's poetic talents were modest, and today his poetry is ofinterest 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 ofthe 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 ofthe Cincinnati in q87, when it was not possible for him to be present to address the Society's annual meeting. The significance ofthe Life ofPutnam derives from Humphreys's attempt in it to epitomize, in the form ofa short Plutarchan biography, the myth ofvirtus or civic virtue that he believed to be at the heart ofthe American Revolution . For Americans ofthe 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 X Putnam_i-xxvi.indd 11 4/27/12 8:04 AM Foreword 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 ofdictator, which summons up the Hiders and Stalins of the modern age, suggests how unimaginably far we have traveled from that memory ofmythic simplicity. For to the early Romans, a dictatorwas 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, ofLivy's history, or Rollin's or Goldsmith's Roman histories, or Dyer's The Ruins ofRome, a poem that would have been familiar to...