is permitted to be stopped at this post."

No complaint was made, but merely a statement of facts; for Putnam must
have known that many of the soldiers under his commander were at that
very time half starved and half naked at Valley Forge. The day after
writing this letter to Washington, having secured permission for a
brief furlough, General Putnam went home to attend to private affairs
which demanded his attention. He had applied for this leave of absence
two months previously, but before receiving it had attended to the
exigent matter of fortifying West Point, like the good soldier that he
was.

Since he last left home much had happened to distract and break him
down, including the loss of his wife by death, and the loss of
Washington's friendly support, through no fault of his own. He was
deeply grieved over the change in the commander's attitude toward him,
as well as puzzled to account for it, knowing full well that he had done
nothing to incur his displeasure, now so plainly manifested, not alone
to General Putnam but to others.

The change was probably due to their radical differences of temperament,
habits of life and education. While Washington the soldier recognized
the sterling qualities of Old Put, the veteran fighter, yet Washington
the aristocratic planter shrank from contact with Putnam the blunt, and
at times perhaps uncouth-appearing, farmer. Writing about that time, a
surgeon in the American army said: "This is my first interview with this
celebrated hero, Putnam. In his person he is corpulent and clumsy, but
carries a bold, undaunted front. He exhibits little of the refinements
of a well-educated gentleman, but much of the character of the veteran
soldier."

This was not the style of soldier that the Commander-in-Chief liked to
have about him, and he allowed his personal prejudices to pervert his
judgment.

"What shall I do with Putnam?" he breaks out in a letter to Gouverneur
Morris. "If Congress mean to lay him aside _decently_, I wish they would
devise the mode."

"It has not been an easy matter to find a just pretense for removing an
officer from his command" (he writes to Chancellor Livingston on the
12th of March, 1778) "where his misconduct rather appears to result from
want of _capacity_ than from any real intention of doing wrong...."
Livingston had written complaining of Putnam's "imprudent lenity to the
disaffected, and too great intercourse with the enemy"--or, in other
words, t