The evidentiary record behind this site's claims: primary sources from 1775 and 1818, Washington's own general orders, and the secondary literature.
Daniel Putnam. A Letter to Major-General Dearborn, Repelling His Unprovoked Attack on the Character of the Late Major-General Putnam; and Containing Some Anecdotes to the Battle of Bunker-Hill Not Generally Known. Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1818.
Available via Internet Archive →
Included in the 1818 Munroe & Francis pamphlet: John Trumbull, letter to Daniel Putnam. Trumbull – military artist present at Bunker Hill and later painter of the famous battle scene – defended Putnam's character and reported confirming Putnam's presence at the rail fence during the second assault — where he saved the life of British Colonel John Small — not at the redoubt.
Included in the 1818 Munroe & Francis pamphlet: Sworn affidavits from eyewitnesses to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Sixty-three witnesses are cited across the evidentiary record.
Daniel Putnam to John Adams, 23 May 1818. The Adams Papers (Early Access). Daniel Putnam encloses the Munroe & Francis pamphlet and asks the former President whether any contemporary dissatisfaction with General Putnam's conduct at Bunker Hill in fact existed.
John Adams to Daniel Putnam, 5 June 1818. Adams's reply defending General Israel Putnam's reputation, source of the often-quoted line: "I never heard the least insinuation of dissatisfaction with the conduct of General Putnam during his whole life." The existence and content of this June 5 letter are confirmed in Adams's subsequent letter to George Brinley of 19 June 1818, in which Adams authorizes its publication "in whole or in part."
Adams to George Brinley, 19 June 1818 (Founders Online) →
The canonical Founders Online identifier for the 5 June 1818 letter itself is to be confirmed and added here.
Elbridge Gerry to Samuel Adams, 9 October 1775. NIU Digital Library.
Samuel Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 26 September 1775. American Archives, 4th Series, Vol. II, p. 1438 (see entry below). The letter in which Adams concedes he had not heard of Prescott's valor until visiting Cambridge in August 1775, and proposes that the merits of Massachusetts officers be promoted "as far as decency will permit."
Daniel Putnam, letter to the Bunker Hill Monument Association, 1825. Published in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, 1860. Source for the Cambridge 1775 Washington–Putnam toast exchange and other eyewitness recollections by Daniel Putnam, who was present at his father's wartime headquarters.
George Washington to Major General Israel Putnam, 2 December 1777. Washington explains the strategic importance of obstructing British navigation on the Hudson – "the only passage by which the enemy from New-York could ever hope to coöperate with an army from Canada" – and urges Putnam, "in the most urgent terms," to direct his "whole force and all the means in your power" to the river's defense. The order set in motion the work that, by January 1778, had identified West Point as the controlling site for those obstructions.
General Orders, 7 July 1775. The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1. Cashiering of Captain John Callender for cowardice at Bunker Hill. The editorial annotation records that Putnam himself drove the prosecution, declaring the defeat at Bunker Hill was owing to "the ill-behaviour of those that conducted the artillery."
General Orders, 27 February 1776. Standing order: soldiers who skulk or retreat without orders are to be instantly shot.
General Orders, 13 August 1776. Standing order authorizing "all good Officers" to instantly shoot down any officer or soldier who flees during an enemy attack.
General Orders, 23 August 1776.
William Tudor (Judge Advocate General) to George Washington, 23 August 1775. Tudor's report on the post-Bunker-Hill courts-martial; the source for the often-quoted "I never heard any insinuation against the conduct of General Putnam."
William Tudor to John Adams, August 1775.
David Bushnell to Thomas Jefferson, 13 October 1787. Bushnell's first-hand description of the construction and operation of his submersible vessel, the Turtle – including the September 1776 attack on the British flagship HMS Eagle in New York Harbor. Putnam, then in command at New York, oversaw the operational deployment.
Force, Peter, ed. American Archives, 4th Series, Vol. II. Washington, 1837–1853. Cited throughout this site for:
pp. 1119–20 — Prescott's June 27, 1775 reimbursement petition and the Massachusetts Provincial Congress's June 29 response giving the petitioners "leave to withdraw their petition."
p. 1438 — Samuel Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 26 September 1775, including the "as far as decency will permit" passage and Adams's concession that he had not heard of Prescott's valor at Bunker Hill until visiting Cambridge in August 1775.
Tarbox, Increase N. The Life of Israel Putnam: Major General in the Continental Army. Boston: Lockwood, Brooks & Company, 1876. Cited throughout this site for:
p. 3 — project framing ("…but simply to bring back to its old anchorage ground an important piece of American History…").
pp. 112–113 — Putnam's commission timing; Washington kept him at the centre of his command and, in Tarbox's phrase, "treated him as his second self."
pp. 114–117 — the Prescott-was-never-promoted analysis, with the comparative list of contemporaries who were promoted to brigadier or major general during the war.
p. 117 — the Massachusetts Provincial Congress's rejection of Prescott's reimbursement petition (citing American Archives, 4th Series, Vol. II, pp. 1119–20).
p. 119 — Frothingham's transcription of the 1776 Committee of Safety letter to Putnam.
pp. 178–179 — Tarbox on the British rate of fire and the exposure of the top of Bunker Hill, drawing on Captain John Chester's account.
pp. 252–256 — analysis of Samuel Adams's September 26, 1775 letter to Elbridge Gerry, and the framing of Dearborn's 1818 Port Folio attack.
pp. 257–258 — Tarbox turning Dearborn's own "forty-nine balls out of fifty passed… over our heads" against him to refute the safety-of-Bunker-Hill premise.
Humphreys, David. An Essay on the Life of the Honorable Major-General Israel Putnam. 1788. Reprinted as Memoirs of the Life, Adventures, and Military Exploits of Israel Putnam, 1845. Written at Mount Vernon with Washington's active participation and editorial review.
Frothingham, Richard. History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Boston: Little, Brown, 1849. Source for the Committee of Safety letter to Putnam, 1776 (p. 165, note); also reproduced and discussed in Tarbox, p. 119.
Swett, Samuel. Historical and Topographical Sketch of Bunker Hill Battle. Originally published as an appendix to David Humphreys, An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam: Addressed to the State Society of the Cincinnati in Connecticut. Boston: Samuel Avery, 1818. Also published separately in 1818, and in a revised and expanded edition by Munroe and Francis in 1826 with "Notes to his Sketch of Bunker-Hill Battle" (December 1825) appended.
Cited throughout this site for:
The 63 sworn eyewitness affidavits collected in defense of General Putnam, appearing in the 1826 revised edition. (The same affidavits had already been published in the 1818 Munroe & Francis pamphlet; see the affidavits sub-entry under the 1818 Corpus above.)
The Charlestown Neck narrative – Putnam riding through British fire to drive reinforcements forward – quoted on the Rebuttal page.
Note on Swett's posture: in his own 1825 introduction to the Notes, Swett acknowledged that he wrote "for the defence of Gen. Putnam, did he need any." Swett's narrative prose is openly partisan, written within months of Dearborn's March 1818 Port Folio attack, drawing on documents collected from veterans in defense of Putnam's reputation. Many of those original documents were deposited in the Boston Athenaeum and have since been lost; Swett's surviving publications preserve substantial primary-source material – including the sworn affidavits – that would otherwise be unrecoverable.
Webster, Daniel. Defense of General Israel Putnam. North American Review, July 1818. Webster's lawyerly attack on the structural weakness of Dearborn's evidence – a junior officer's negative testimony, from a position of limited vantage, set against multiple positive eyewitness accounts of Putnam in active command.
Lowell, John. Articles in defense of General Israel Putnam. Boston Centinel, July 1818. Boston lawyer's contemporaneous defense of Putnam, noting that "General Putnam was detached for the purpose of fortifying [Bunker Hill], and Colonel Prescott was placed under his orders." Original Centinel issues not yet pulled; the articles are listed in the appendix of Tarbox (1876).
Wells, William V. The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1865. Vol. II, p. 323. Source consulted by Tarbox for Samuel Adams's letter to Elbridge Gerry, September 26, 1775.
Hubbard, Robert Ernest. Major General Israel Putnam: Hero of the American Revolution. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2017.
"Dearborn–Putnam controversy." Wikipedia.
"Monuments and Memory: The Battle of Bunker Hill Debate." Journal of the American Revolution, August 2016.
"American Legend General Israel Putnam." Revolutionary War Journal.
Beck, Derek W. "The Courts-Martial following the Battle of Bunker Hill." derekbeck.com.
"From Cowardice to Courage." HistoryNet.
American Battlefield Trust. Biographies of Israel Putnam and Henry Dearborn.
"Israel Putnam." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
This site has prioritized claims that can be traced to verifiable primary sources – official records, published contemporary correspondence, sworn affidavits, and documentary collections such as Founders Online. Where claims from earlier drafts could not be independently verified against a named primary source, they have been excluded rather than carried forward.
Inline footnote markers have been added throughout the homepage, the Political Context page, and the Rebuttal page, linking individual claims back to the entries on this Sources page. The remaining open work item is per-affidavit citations on the Eyewitnesses page; this will follow in a later update as the affidavit transcriptions are verified against the 1818 Munroe & Francis pamphlet.