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"OLD PUT," THE PATRIOT

CHAPTER I

BIRTHPLACE AND YOUTH

This is the life story of one who was born on a farm, and died on a
farm, yet who achieved a world-wide fame through his military exploits.
It has been told many times, it will be told for centuries yet to come;
for the world loves a man of high emprise, and such was Israel Putnam,
the hero of this story.

He was born January 7, 1718, in Danvers, then known as Salem Village,
Province of Massachusetts Bay, in New England. His father's Christian
name was Joseph, his mother's Elizabeth, and Israel (as he was called at
baptism, after his maternal grandfather, Israel Porter) was the
great-grandson of his first American ancestor, John Putnam, who had
come from England, where the original name of the family was Puttenham.
He had settled at Salem more than eighty years before, and his son,
Thomas, built, in 1648, the house in which Israel was born in 1718. On
the death of Thomas it had become the property of Joseph, who first
occupied it in 1690, after his marriage to Elizabeth Porter.

Here the young couple passed through the perilous "witchcraft times,"
during the worst period of which, in 1692 (it is a tradition in the
family), Joseph Putnam kept a loaded musket at his bedside every night
and his swiftest horse saddled in the stable, ready for a fight or a
flight in case the witch-hunters should come to carry him off to jail.
They had accused his sister, who saved her life only by fleeing to the
wilderness and remaining in hiding until the insane furor was over. He
and his wife survived that gloomy period, and in the ancestral homestead
lived happily for more than thirty years, raising a "baker's dozen" of
children, of whom Israel was the eleventh.

On both the maternal and paternal side Israel Putnam was descended from
a line of sturdy, prosperous farmers. The grandfather whose name he bore
had married a daughter of William Hathorne, who came from England and
settled in Salem about the year 1630, and who was an ancestor of the
famous romancist Nathaniel Hawthorne. John Hathorne, son of William, was
a military man and a magistrate. He presided at the infamous witchcraft
trials in Salem, and, like the near relatives of Joseph Putnam, looked
with severe disfavor upon any one who showed sympathy for the persecuted
witches.

Joseph Putnam died in 1723, leaving his widow with eleven surviving
children, nine older than Israel, who was then b