[4] Livingston's Life of Israel Putnam. An exhaustive work, by a conscientious and painstaking author.
In this respect he was no worse than his former Commander-in-Chief, though he may have been oftener culpable, being so much more excitable than the phlegmatic Washington.
The final summons came on Saturday, the twenty-ninth of May, 1790, when, in a lower room of the house he had built nearly fifty years before, the battle-scarred warrior, life's fitful fever ended, passed peacefully away to his rest.
Israel Putnam was well prepared to die, declared his pastor in his funeral sermon, and perfectly resigned to the will of God.
"He had been for years," says Major Humphreys, "in patient yet fearless expectation of the approach of the King of Terrors, whom he had full often faced on the field of blood."
On the first day of June the earthly remains of Israel Putnam, attended by a distinguished company of former comrades and sorrowing friends, were taken to the Brooklyn burying-ground, and placed in a brick tomb.
Upon the slab of the tomb was carved the lengthy epitaph, printed on the next page, as composed by Dr. Timothy Dwight, Putnam's former friend and chaplain in the army, who subsequently became President of Yale College.
