What Really Happened in Wadsworth House

Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell alerted me to this webpage from Harvard University. It says of Wadsworth House, once home of the college president and now office of the university marshal:

General George Washington, with the assistance of Henry Lee (then an officer in the Patriot Forces, and later father to General Robert E. Lee), set up his first headquarters in the house. From there, on July 3, 1775, Washington rode out to the Cambridge Common to take command of the Revolutionary troops. It is also said that the plans to oust King George from Boston took form in Wadsworth Parlor.

This description mixes up Charles Lee with Henry “Light-horse Harry” Lee. Charles was a former British army officer appointed major general of the Continental Army. He rode with Washington from Philadelphia to Cambridge, and spent some days sharing this house with the commander-in-chief.

Henry was a young man, still in his teens, whom Washington knew back in Virginia. By coincidence, both these Lees had visited Mount Vernon in late April, as Washington prepared for the Second Continental Congress. But in 1775 young Harry remained in Virginia, joining the Continental Army only in June 1776. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war.

The paragraph above also perpetuates the myth that Washington took command of the New England troops on the Cambridge common on 3 July 1775, a story usually set beneath the Washington Elm. Most scholars now agree that Gen. Artemas Ward handed over authority to Washington on the evening of 2 July in the college steward’s house around the corner (which is no longer standing).

Finally, it’s a stretch to say that the plans laid in Wadsworth House drove “King George” or his metonymic troops out of Boston. When Washington and Lee arrived in Cambridge, their immediate priorities were to strengthen American defenses and figure out just how many soldiers they had. Those tasks took weeks. Washington had no chance to plan an offensive until after he had moved out of this house into the abandoned Vassall mansion.