In his person he is corpulent and clumsy, but carries a bold, undaunted front.

He exhibits little of the refinements of a well-educated gentleman, but much of the character of the veteran soldier." This was not the style of soldier that the Commander-in-Chief liked to have about him, and he allowed his personal prejudices to pervert his judgment.
"What shall I do with Putnam ?" he breaks out in a letter to Gouverneur Morris.

"If Congress mean to lay him aside _decently_, I wish they would devise the mode." "It has not been an easy matter to find a just pretense for removing an officer from his command" (he writes to Chancellor Livingston on the 12th of March, 1778) "where his misconduct rather appears to result from want of _capacity_ than from any real intention of doing wrong...." Livingston had written complaining of Putnam's "imprudent lenity to the disaffected, and too great intercourse with the enemy"-- or, in other words, that he had not persecuted the people Livingston disliked, and had shown generosity to the foe when in distress.

Yet he felt compelled to add: "For my own part, I respect his bravery and former services, and sincerely lament that his patriotism will not suffer him to take that repose, to which his advanced age and past services justly entitle him." But Congress did not, fortunately, share the views of these white-fingered, thin-skinned gentlemen, to whom a man's personal appearance was vastly more than his distinguished services.

They held, with the doughty hero of many battles himself, that, as a soldier's duty in war was to fight, it mattered not so much how he fought, nor in what garb, so long as he won the victories.