Trained to fight the
battles of Britain, yet those ten years of experience in warfare with
the Indians were to prepare him for a wider, vaster field. He must now
have felt this, his patriot friends must have believed it, for their
eyes were turned expectantly toward Israel Putnam, as soon as the first
blood was shed at Lexington and Concord.
See that sturdy figure, hurrying on horseback over the rough roads,
through the darkness of the night, toward the goal of duty! The British
had marched out of Boston at night, on the eighteenth of April, their
purpose and their route foretold by Paul Revere (who, by the way, was in
the campaign at Lake George, if not a comrade of Israel Putnam at that
time). At or near daybreak of the nineteenth, at Lexington, the shots
were fired "heard round the world"; at noon the British were in retreat
from Concord, where they had been routed by the minutemen, and by night,
exhausted, disgraced, defeated, they had reached Charlestown, under the
escort of Lord Percy and his 1,200 reenforcements, where they were
protected from the enraged militia by the guns of the fleet.
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