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. As to lack of capacity, and being responsible for the loss of Forts Clinton and Montgomery, the court of inquiry, which sat in the spring of 1778, entirely vindicated him, holding that they fell, "not from any fault, misconduct, or negligence of the commanding officers, but solely through the want of an adequate force under their command to maintain and defend them." Who was responsible for the lack of that "adequate force" none knew better than the Commander-in-Chief, who had withdrawn Old Put's veterans on six different occasions and compelled him to clothe the skeleton ranks with raw militia, so that it ill became him to write (in his letter to Livingston): "Proper measures are taking to carry on the inquiry into the loss of Fort Montgomery, agreeable to the direction of Congress, and it is more than probable, from what I have heard, that the issue of that inquiry will afford just grounds for the removal of General Putnam." But the "issue of that inquiry" was in favor of Putnam, who demanded not only a court of inquiry, but a trial by court-martial, "so that my character might stand in a clearer light in the world." For, as he justly observed in a letter to Congress, "to be posted here as a publick spectator for every ill-minded person to make remarks upon, I think is very poor encouragement for any persons to venture their lives and fortunes in the service."