Young Putnam's education, as may have been inferred already, was
obtained mostly in the woods and open fields. While he possessed great
mental endowments, as afterward displayed in his career, yet his early
education was grossly neglected, in the school and college sense. Having
mastered the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he was
considered well equipped for his destined calling, which was to be that
of a farmer. Throughout his whole life he suffered from this neglect of
early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they always
"displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his
native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an
unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made,"
the despair of his correspondents and the ridicule of his enemies.
It is doubtful if he had any greater ambition than to become a good
farmer, as good as was his father before him, and like him, attain to a
competency. He was already fairly well to do the year he became of age,
for his father, after providing generously for the other children, had
bequeathed to him and his brother David the homestead, house and farm
attached.
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