Cambridge

Cambridge at War: The Unlikely Capital of an American Revolution

On the morning of July 3, 1775, a tall Virginian in a blue and buff uniform rode into Cambridge, Massachusetts, and everything about the American rebellion changed. George Washington had traveled for eleven days from Philadelphia to take command of what the Continental Congress optimistically called the Continental Army. What he found upon arrival was less an army than a sprawling, loosely organized encampment of New England militia clustered around Harvard College, short on powder, shorter on discipline, and operating under the informal command structures of men who had rushed to arms after Lexington and Concord three months earlier. Cambridge was not a place anyone had planned to make the nerve center of a revolution. It was a quiet college town of perhaps 1,600 souls, known for its elm-shaded lanes and its ancient university. Yet for the better part of a year, from the summer of 1775 into the spring of 1776, this small town west of Boston served as the headquarters of the American war effort—the place where a ragged collection of citizen soldiers was forged, through crisis after crisis, into something resembling a national army. What happened in Cambridge during those months shaped not only the outcome of the siege of Boston but the character of the American military tradition itself.

But Cambridge's role in the Revolution predated Washington's arrival by nearly a year. On September 1, 1774, Cambridge residents responded to the news that General Thomas Gage, royal governor of Massachusetts, had ordered the removal of gunpowder from a magazine in what is now Somerville.

By the following morning, approximately 4,000 people—two and a half times the town's population—had gathered on Cambridge Common.

They soon marched down Brattle Street and surrounded Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver's house, demanding his resignation. He stepped down, writing that his house was "surrounded by about four thousand people, and in compliance with their commands, I sign my name."

Charles William Eliot II, presiding over the Cambridge Historical Society, once said that "the Revolution started in Cambridge in 1774."

The seat of the Massachusetts government itself moved to Cambridge when British General Thomas Gage occupied Boston.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress, formed on October 5, 1774, served as a provisional revolutionary government , and by December 5, 1774, the Provincial Congress was meeting in Cambridge, passing resolves appointing delegates to the Continental Congress and urging an end to all commerce with Great Britain.

Wealthy loyalist families who had moved to Cambridge from Boston for the relatively wide stretches of land on which they could build their estates fled back to Boston when sentiment became fervently patriotic.

During the eighteenth century, seven mansions had been built along the main road to Watertown. Because many of their owners were Loyalists during the American Revolution, these houses got the nickname "Tory Row."

Townspeople vandalized the house of Massachusetts attorney general Jonathan Sewall, and a handful of Tories who brought tea into Harvard Hall were "nearly lynched" by students — faculty had to ban tea to keep order. Within months of the Powder Alarm, the grand houses along Brattle Street stood empty, their owners having fled to the protection of British-held Boston—or ultimately to England and the Caribbean.

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the town was transformed almost overnight into an armed camp. Patriot militias, and later the fledgling Continental Army, transformed Harvard's dorms and classrooms into makeshift hospitals and crude barracks for 1,680 Patriot troops, and Wadsworth House served as the officers' headquarters.

Soldiers tore off the lead roof of Harvard Hall to melt it down into bullets.

With Harvard Yard turned into an armed encampment, the College packed up its scientific instruments and some 2,000 books, dispersed them across the countryside for safekeeping, and searched for temporary quarters , ultimately holding classes in Concord in an old grammar school, a courthouse, and a Congregationalist meetinghouse until June 1776.

Mansions that the Tories had vacated became barracks and hospitals.

After Penelope Royall Vassall vacated her estate, the local Committee of Correspondence seized it and converted it into the central hospital for the Continental Army during the Siege of Boston.

Washington took formal command beneath what tradition identifies as a large elm tree on Cambridge Common, though we now know that this tale was a 19th-century fabrication.

The lack of military discipline and training in the army upon Washington's arrival makes it unlikely that any proceeding could be described as "ceremonious." Even so, that elm tree was sufficiently symbolic in later years to warrant its inclusion on the city seal.

The tree came crashing down in a 1923 storm , but a scion of the famous tree still stands at an alternative site on the Common today.

Washington initially used the Benjamin Wadsworth House at Harvard College as his headquarters, but he decided that he needed more space for his staff.

Uncomfortable confining Harvard president Samuel Langdon to a single room of his own house, Washington instead chose the mansion of John Vassall, Jr., a Tory who had fled to Boston.

The house had been built in 1759 for the Jamaican plantation owner , and in the chaotic weeks before Washington's arrival it had served as a temporary hospital after Lexington and Concord, and Colonel John Glover and the Marblehead Regiment had occupied it as their temporary barracks in June 1775.

Washington occupied it as his headquarters beginning on July 16, 1775, and it served as his base of operations during the Siege of Boston until he moved out on April 4, 1776. The grand Georgian mansion on Brattle Street — vacated by the Vassall family before the Revolutionary War — became the place from which Washington directed the successful outcome of the Siege of Boston, ultimately forcing British troops to evacuate the city in March 1776.

For the next eight months, the house buzzed with activity as Washington directed the Siege of Boston; within its walls, Washington and his advisors devised military strategies, debated political matters, and pursued diplomatic efforts.

It was a bustling place with military officers, administrative staff, free and enslaved laborers, representatives from Congress in Philadelphia, delegations from Massachusetts and the other colonies, and other interested parties constantly coming and going.

Washington was visited at the house by John Adams and Abigail Adams, Benedict Arnold, Henry Knox, and Nathanael Greene.

A delegation of congressmen led by Benjamin Franklin convened at headquarters to determine the best way ahead with the siege.

Many of those enslaved by the Vassall family remained at the property through the Siege of Boston, including young Darby Vassall.

A woman named Dinah, whose name appears in financial records from August 1775 through April 1776