Recording of “The First Commander Remembered” Panel

The Cambridge Room at the Cambridge Public Library has shared the video recording of last week’s panel discussion on “The First Commander Remembered: Washington’s Legacy in Cambridge.”

This event was organized by a group of local historical organizations and moderated by Christopher Beagan, site manager of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The first part of the event is my fast analysis of why George Washington was in Cambridge from different perspectives: how that town became the headquarters of the provincial and then Continental army, why the Continental Congress chose Washington to lead that army, what he thought his mission was, what he really learned during his months in Cambridge, and how historians of the nineteenth century portrayed his work.

Then Charles Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, discussed how the city has commemorated Washington, particularly the long life, death, and latter-day commemoration of the Washington Elm.

We then discussed themes of memory and answered questions from the audience. Though this event happened on a night with a somewhat gloomy weather forecast, there was a robust and curious crowd.

I think my favorite part was getting the inside story of how William Dawes’s ride through Cambridge came to be commemorated through the unique bronze horseshoes in the sidewalk at Harvard Square rather than a conventional equestrian statue.

Though I suppose an equestrian statue might have been unconventional, too, if it were really modeled after the description traced back to Dawes’s cousin Josiah Waters, Jr.: “mounted on a slow jogging horse, with saddle bags behind him, and a large flapped hat upon his head, to resemble a countryman on a journey.”

The recording of the series’s first event, “From Revolution to Remembrance: Memory of the American Revolution” with Michael Hattem, Nikki Stewart, and Beth Folsom is also available for viewing.

“The First Commander Remembered” Panel in Cambridge, 2 Dec.

On Tuesday, 2 December, I’ll take part in a panel discussion on “The First Commander Remembered: Washington’s Legacy in Cambridge.”

This is the second in a series of Sestercentennial events on “Washington in American Memory” to be held at the Cambridge Public Library through April 2026.

The panel will include:

• Charles Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission and coauthor of Building Old Cambridge: Architecture and Development.
• Christopher Beagan, site manager at the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, moderator.
• me, drawing from a study of the commander-in-chief’s months in Cambridge in 1775–76 and any thoughts that have occurred to me since. 

We’ll talk about how Gen. Washington came to Cambridge, how authors have portrayed his time there, and how he’s been commemorated in Cambridge by, among other things, a tree, a park, a monumental gate, a hotel (shown above), and a National Park Service site. What do all those landmarks tell us about how we like to think of Washington? And could we remember and teach that period of history more accurately?

This event is scheduled from 6 to 7:30 P.M. in the Cambridge Public Library’s Lecture Hall. It will also be livestreamed and recorded for online viewing.

This program and all the series will be free and open to the public. Follow this link to register.

The main supporter of this series is Eastern National, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. It has been organized by the National Park Service/Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, History Cambridge, Cambridge Public Library, Cambridge Historical Commission, and Cambridge MA250.

“Stories of the Washington Elm” in Cambridge, 14 Mar.

Last month the Bonhams auction house sold this fragment of the Washington Elm, about 3" by 6" across, for $4,864.

That was considerably above the estimate. Even though this is far from a unique specimen of that tree, and the auction house undercut the story its label tells by saying:

Today, most historians agree that there was likely never a grand ceremony beneath the elm to install Washington as leader, though he did arrive in Cambridge on July 2, 1775, and seems to have spent the 3rd inspecting and introducing himself to smaller groups of troops.

That sale offers another example of how our culture has imbued this elm with deep meaning. The stories Americans have told, and not told, about that tree reflect our changing values and understandings of the past.

For a much lower price—in fact, for free—you can come hear me speak about “The Stories of the Washington Elm” at the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge on Thursday, 14 March. That is this year’s Evacuation Day Lecture, sponsored by the Friends of Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters and the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.

Our event description says:

Cambridge Common has multiple monuments to the “Washington Elm,” a tree held up (eventually by steel rods) as a symbol of American patriotism. Henry W. Longfellow is said to have composed the text on one of those markers: “Under this tree WASHINGTON first took command of the American Army, July 3, 1775.” After the elm finally collapsed in 1923, more skeptical researchers concluded that its fame was based on little more than legend. In this talk, J. L. Bell digs into how the Washington Elm came to be celebrated, what its story says about the national memory of the Revolution, and why we really should remember this tree.

This talk is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. on Thursday, 14 March. The neighborhood has limited parking, though it does open up in the evenings.

This venue also has limited seating. There is no plan to livestream the talk though we might record it to post online later. Register for a seat through this site.

The End of the Washington Elm

This photograph comes from the Leslie Jones Collection at the Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth.

The webpage dates the image as “ca. 1917–1934,” but we can be more specific. In his essay “The Washington Elm Tradition” Samuel F. Batchelder wrote:

Finally, on October 26, 1923, the whole wretched ruin was accidently pulled over by workmen trying to remove another dead branch, and crashed against the iron railing surrounding it. Examination showed that the trunk was hopelessly rotted below the ground, a mere mass of punk: the wonder was that it had stood so long.

The photographs must have been taken shortly afterward as people in Cambridge debated whether the patriotic symbol had been felled by Communists. (Seriously.)

Here are two more photographs from the series. The traffic island where the tree stood was removed, a metal plate left in the road to mark the exact spot.

On the Road with President Washington

As I announced yesterday, on 21 January Prof. T. H. Breen will speak at the Cambridge Forum about President George Washington’s visit to New England in the fall of 1789, and the political issues it raised.

As newly elected President of a new nation, Washington was trying to thank the American people and also to bind them together. On his trip through the northern states he avoided entering Rhode Island since it hadn’t yet ratified the Constitution or sent representatives to Congress.

In some ways I think the President’s visit was like a royal progress, full of pomp and celebration. But Washington was trying not to appear too kingly. Even though as President he was the commander-in-chief of the federal forces, and had also commanded the nation’s army during the war for independence, he didn’t want to be seen as claiming any power over state militia troops.

And yet, as his diary entry for 23 October shows, those state militia troops kept coming out to show off to him:

Here [in Worcester] we were received by a handsome Company of Militia Artillery in Uniform who saluted with 13 Guns on our Entry & departure. At this place also we met a Committee from the Town of Boston, and an Aid of Majr. Genl. [John] Brooke of the Middlesex Militia who had proceeded to this place in order to make some arrangements of Military & other Parade on my way to, and in the Town of, Boston; and to fix with me on the hours at which I should pass through Cambridge, and enter Boston.

Finding this ceremony was not to be avoided though I had made every effort to do it, I named the hour of ten to pass the Militia of the above County at Cambridge and the hour of 12 for my entrance into Boston desiring Major [Joseph] Hall, however, to inform Genl. Brookes that as I conceived there was an impropriety in my reviewing the Militia, or seeing them perform Manoeuvres otherwise than as a private Man I could do no more than pass along the line; which, if he thought proper might be under arms to receive me at that time.

These matters being settled the Committee and the Aid (Colo. Hall) set forward on their return and after breakfast I followed; The same Gentlemen who had escorted me into, conducting me out of Town.

At the border of Worcester and Middlesex Counties a militia troop of light horsemen awaited the President.

Then came Jonathan Jackson, the state’s first U.S. marshal (shown above), who insisted on accompanying the President throughout the state. Jackson was a federal employee, so Washington could have told him to get back to his job—but who’s to say that the U.S. marshal’s job was not to escort a visiting President?

Washington slept that night in Weston before pressing on. He had lived in Cambridge for nine months during the siege of Boston, so he was probably interested in seeing it again. In a letter dated 21 October, Brooks had promised “a body of about 800 men, will be under arms at Cambridge on the day of your entering into Boston. The troops will occupy the ground on which the continental army was formed for your reception in the year 1775.” (Memories of that “reception” in 1775 were probably the seed of the “Washington Elm” legend in the next century.)

Here’s how Washington described the next morning in his diary:

Dressed by Seven o’clock, and set out at eight—at ten we arrived in Cambridge, according to appointment; but most of the Militia having a distance to come, were not in line till after eleven; they made however an excellent appearance, with Genl. [John] Brooks at their Head. At this place the Lieut. Govr. Mr. Saml. Adams, with the Executive Council, met me and preceeded my entrance into town—which was in every degree flattering and honorable.

President Washington was probably not happy about the hour’s wait between his arrival in Cambridge and the militia parade he hadn’t wanted in the first place. But at least those troops made “an excellent appearance.”

TOMORROW: What the President didn’t see?

Walking Tour and Colonial Comics in Cambridge, 20 Dec.

On Saturday, 20 December, I’ll sign copies of Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750 at the Million Year Picnic comics shop in Harvard Square, along with the book’s main editor, Jason Rodriguez, and some of the other writers and artists contributing to this anthology of historical comics. The signing is from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M.

At 4:00, in conjunction with that event, I’ll lead a free walking tour of central Cambridge focusing on colonial sites for anyone who wants to come along. We’ll gather in the lower alcove of the Million Year Picnic’s building at 99 Mount Auburn Street.

The tour will include the location of the first printing press in America (subject of a story in Colonial Comics), the burying-ground that Cambridge established in 1635, and the house where Gen. George Washington first slept in town. Weather permitting, we’ll go as far afield as the Georgian mansion that Harvard keeps tucked inside one of its dorms and the mythical Washington Elm before ending up back at the Million Year Picnic.

Although Colonial Comics focuses on the first century of British settlement in America, most of the sites we’ll visit will date from the eighteenth century, and most of my stories will be about the Revolutionary period. That’s because of what survives, and what I know best. My goal is to point out some of the oldest things we see around Harvard Square every day.

And, of course, to sell books.

“Washington Elm” Exhibit in Cambridge

On Thursday, 13 November, the Cambridge Historical Society hosts an opening reception for its special exhibit on “The Washington Elm,” featuring the photography of Bruce Myren (one example shown here).

That elm, as I’ve discussed, was associated in the late 1800s with a moment on 3 July 1775 when Gen. George Washington was said to have taken command of the Continental Army, often pictured as drawn up in ranks for his review.

In reality, Washignton probably took command indoors on 2 July 1775 when he met Gen. Artemas Ward, and he and Gen. Charles Lee inspected the troops in their various positions around Boston over the next several days.

But the tree became a national symbol. This exhibit explores the artifacts it gave rise to:

historic representations of the Elm, pieces of the tree, collectibles made from the Elm’s wood, and Myren’s large-format pictures of scions, cuttings grown to create clones of the original tree. . . . Images of the Elm appeared on teacups, on stationery, and in paintings, while scions were planted by the hundreds across the country.

When the tree fell in 1923, it was cut into pieces, with cross sections going to the capitals of the forty-eight states, the White House, and the Capitol, and blocks going to prominent citizens across the country.

Myren quotes the English philosopher Bernard Williams when describing the show: “A myth is a fanciful picture of the past designed to justify certain activities in the present.”

The reception is from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. on 13 November at the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street. The exhibit will also be open for viewing on Saturday, 22 November, from 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. The society will announce additional hours on its website.

Seeking Large House, River View, Must Be Available Immediately

Once the Second Continental Congress chose Gen. George Washington as commander-in-chief of the army it was adopting outside of Boston, he had to travel to Boston and take command. The third chapter of my report Gen. George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts describes that journey and his arrival in Cambridge on 2 July 1775.

That evening, according to the diary of Ens. Noah Chapin, he and Gen. Charles Lee reviewed troops on Prospect Hill. In 1797 the artist Elkanah Tisdale depicted Washington taking command of the army drawn up in formation at Cambridge on 3 July, and in 1826 Edward Everett connected that undocumented event to a large elm beside the town common. I discussed the myths and realities of the Washington Elm on this blog, and this part of the report benefited from the comments those postings produced.

At that time, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had arranged for Washington and Lee to share the house of the Harvard president, Samuel Langdon, “excepting one room reserved by the president for his own use.” That building, shown above, is now known as Wadsworth House, and it contains administrative offices. It’s not clear whether Langdon was still on the premises or needed the room to store his stuff.

By 6 July, the Committee of Safety had to ask Washington “if there is any house at Cambridge, that would be more agreeable to him and General Lee than that in which they are now.” Clearly the congress had received hints that the Wadsworth House was unsatisfactory. Lee announced that he planned to take up his own headquarters. And on 8 July the committee recommended making John Vassall’s vacated house ready for Gen. Washington.

I explored various reasons for that move. The Vassall house was bigger, with no rooms set aside, and Washington would need space for his staff. However, Cambridge village could surely have offered another house or two nearby. Why did the general prefer to move over half a mile from the town center?

One possible explanation was security. Wadsworth House was closer to the front and the Charles River in case of British raids. In 1861 Eliza Susan Quincy described hearing from a former army surgeon about a Royal Artillery shell landing in modern Harvard Square, as I quoted back here. So I floated that explanation, and heard back that central Cambridge was well beyond mortar range in the eighteenth century.

So I finally concluded that Washington most likely chose the Vassall house as his headquarters because:

• as a big house looking out on a river, surrounded by outbuildings and farmland (and staffed by slaves), it made him feel at home.
• it was a mile away from the hundreds of enlisted men housed in Harvard Yard.

Gen. Artemas Ward had been content to have his headquarters in the Harvard steward’s house near those soldiers. Washington, with his emphasis on hierarchy, might well have preferred more distance.

Washington at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge

The Commander Hotel in Cambridge opened in 1927 during the Colonial Revival. Located near the site of the “Washington Elm,” the hotel was named in honor of George Washington, the commander-in-chief. Some of its architectural details are modeled on Mount Vernon.

A couple of decades later, Frank A. K. Boland was the hotel’s owner. He had once been an attorney representing the American Hotel Association. (He had been disbarred in 1909 for bribing a court clerk and reinstated in 1912; that seems have to have been a normal way of doing business in New York then.)

I haven’t found out exactly when, but at some point a visitor told Boland that a bronze reproduction of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s statue of Washington was available in Somerville. The T. F. McGann & Sons Company was offering it for sale, advertising in School Executive and School Management and Institution. Obviously, the firm thought that it would be appropriate for a school.

Boland went to see the statue. It had turned black from standing out in a storage yard since 1932. The McGann company had made it for Manchester, Connecticut, but “financial disagreement resulted in final cancellation of the order.” Perhaps the Depression had also been part of the problem.

Boland bought the statue and mounted it on the Commander Hotel’s lawn on “a stately base of rough finish granite.” With its base, it stands 6'10" tall and weighs 1,034 pounds. Every so often it gets to wear a Bruins, Celtics, Red Sox, or Patriots jersey during a championship run.

In 1949 Boland started a campaign to commemorate the Washington Elm, which had fallen twenty-six years before. Artist Leonard Craske was already at work on a bas-relief showing Washington reviewing troops under a tree, much like Washington Elm images going back over a century. But by that point historians had turned against the elm legend. The final text on Craske’s monument says nothing about the tree:

General George Washington, having taken command of the Army of the United Colonies at Cambridge, inspects the troops near this spot on the fourth day of July 1775.

Undaunted, Boland planned an unveiling on 3 July 1950, the traditional day of the Washington Elm ceremony. At noon on 2 May he led a committee of Cambridge notables to meet with President Harry Truman and invite him to the unveiling. The Truman Library shows the President’s schedule for that day. Corbis offers a photograph of the committee giving the President a relic of the fallen elm. Boland is the man looking happily at the camera.

The young man at left who looks like an office intern was Rep. John F. Kennedy, who had arranged the meeting. Truman didn’t come, but Kennedy was one of the main speakers at the ceremony that July.

(Photograph above by Wally Gobetz, available via Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Thanks to Ed Guleserian, current owner of what’s now the Sheraton Commander Hotel, for a copy of Boland’s press release about the statue.)

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.

Not the Washington Dogwood!

Last month I posted a series of articles about the Washington Elm on Cambridge common (starting here), which tried to trace the growth and felling of a famous Revolutionary War myth. In doing so, I fear that I launched another myth.

In this posting, I wrote: “Dutch elm disease probably brought down the 1932 replacement elm, so since the 1980s a hardy dogwood has stood in.”

But Cambridge historian Charles Bahne gently told me that the tree on the city common sure looked like an elm to him. My horticultural knowledge is so small I don’t claim to know one deciduous tree from another. I got the dogwood idea from this photograph of a plaque found while searching for online photos marked “Washington Elm.”

In doing so, I missed the fact (unmistakable in Flickr’s new layout) that that plaque describes a “Washington Elm” which stood in New Jersey; it was a descendant and namesake of the one in Cambridge. So the “Washington dogwood” is also, necessarily, in New Jersey.

I’ve now corrected my “The Washington Dogwood?” posting—thanks, Charlie! I even got out to Cambridge common myself this month, and confirmed that the tree near the city’s historic “Washington Elm” monuments is…deciduous.

(Photo above by Wally Gobetz, available through Flickr via a Creative Commons license.)

Cambridge’s Revolutionary Elm

Cambridge’s Washington Elm died in 1923 after over two centuries of life, not always in the best of circumstances. The legend of that tree collapsed under its own weight soon afterward. From being what the New England Magazine called “perhaps the best known of all living American trees” in 1900, it went to being a slightly embarrassing lesson in believing everything one saw in one’s textbook.

Yet that tree had stood beside Cambridge common for over two hundred years. It was there when the Rev. George Whitefield preached outdoors, a moment in what a century later was dubbed the “First Great Awakening.” It was there from 1769 to 1772 when the royal governors, Francis Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson, insisted that the Massachusetts legislature meet in Cambridge instead of Boston. It was there when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had a short session in the Cambridge meetinghouse.

The elm was standing when Earl Percy passed through central Cambridge with his reinforcement column on 19 Apr 1775. It was there when provincial troops assembled to march to Charlestown and fortify a part of Bunker Hill on 16 June. It was there on 8 September when volunteers for Benedict Arnold’s march through Maine to Quebec assembled on the common, where, orders said, “tents and everything necessary is provided for their reception.”

I think the most important Revolutionary event the elm “witnessed” was the Powder Alarm of 2 Sept 1774. On that day four thousand Massachusetts men were estimated to have marched onto Cambridge common from the west, mostly along the Watertown road and thus past that elm tree. Alarmed by rumors of an attack on Boston, they refused to leave until all the royally appointed Councilors in Cambridge had resigned their seats and the county sheriff had promised not to assist the Gov. Thomas Gage in further disarming the militias.

This was the Revolution “out of doors,” with the people en masse demanding change from their social superiors. Even the Boston Whigs were worried that the people would go too far. Yet that crowd was orderly enough to choose committees and take votes. On hearing that the worst rumors weren’t true, they had already left their muskets at a tavern near the town border and let their numbers do the talking. It was a hot day, so some men almost certainly stood in the elm trees’ shade.

Violence threatened to erupt when the Customs Commissioners happened by, and later as the crowd surrounded the house of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver to demand that he resign as well. There was a lot of intimidation, but nobody was hurt that day.

By the end of 2 September those men, largely from Middlesex County, had made clear that a revolution in government was already well under way. The Crown no longer had any authority in Massachusetts beyond the range of its guns. Outside of Boston, the only government would be one the people chose. That shift is what the pieces of the “Washington Elm” could signify.

It’s notable that the legend of that elm spotlights a gentleman—a wealthy Virginia planter—coming to tame such militiamen. Textbooks such as Horace Scudder’s History of the United States emphasized how the New England troops were “undisciplined.” James Russell Lowell called the new commander “The incarnate discipline that was to free / With iron curb that armed democracy.”

Basically, the Washington Elm legend captured the site of the “out of doors” revolution of 2 Sept 1774 and turned it into the site of Gen. Washington’s descent into Cambridge, his firm hand calming those too-democratic farmers. And then when it turned out there’s no good evidence that Washington stood under that tree on any important occasion, the Washington Elm’s historic significance disappeared.

If that tree had been dubbed the “Cambridge Elm” or the “Revolutionary Elm,” it would have survived the debunking of one incident. (Though it still wouldn’t have survived city traffic.)

TOMORROW: So what did George Washington do on 3 July 1775?

(Plaque photograph courtesy of Merle Braley’s Just Outside Boston. As a real estate expert, he warns that this spot—right in the middle of traffic—is not one of the more desirable.)

Relics of the Washington Elm

Though the Washington Elm beside Cambridge common died in 1923, there are remnants and relics of it everywhere in America. Seedlings from that elm tree were planted in many other places, such as the University of Washington; Rochester, Minnesota; and the state capitol grounds in Nevada and Texas.

(Washington, D.C., claimed its own “Washington Elms” on the Capitol lawn, supposedly planted by George Washington himself as he was viewing the city’s construction. Or perhaps they were already planted and he stood under them. The traditions are unclear, and unsupported by documentation.)

A lot of the wood trimmed from the Washington Elm’s branches over the years, and what was left when it died, was turned into souvenirs. Some of these relics are just scraps of wood. Others are carved artifacts, such as a bench in the Cambridge library and “a carved circular box” that resident and researcher Robert Winters has shared on his website.

Gavels were an especially popular thing to make from the elm. In 1899 the Masonic Grand Lodge of Massachusetts received a gavel with its head made from the Washington Elm. Shortly after the tree fell, Alice M. Longfellow, daughter of the poet, gave a gavel made from its wood to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. Another was given to Gen. George S. Patton in 1945. Yet another is in the Henry Ford Museum. And dozens have probably been lost in state houses since the mid-1920s.

Even the phrase “Washington Elm” retains a little resonance: the student newspaper at Washington College in Maryland is named The Elm.

So what meaning do those trees and pieces of wood and memories hold now that most people who do the reading no longer accept the Washington Elm tradition? Are they like religious icons, inspiring respect for what they represent even if people have told dubious stories about them? Or are they evidence of American civic idolatry, built on a foundation of sand?

I think those items deserve to be recalled as Revolutionary relics. But not because of Washington.

TOMORROW: The solidly documented history under the Cambridge elm.

Some People Don’t Like Myths Being Taken Away

In 1927, the editor of the Chronicles of Oklahoma, Joseph B. Thoburn, editorialized about Samuel F. Batchelder’s recent attempt to tell the truth about the Washington Elm:

A paper, entitled “The Washington Elm Tradition,” by Samuel F. Batchelder, occupies thirty pages in the “Proceedings of the Cambridge Historical Society,” for 1925, in a laborious effort to prove that the popular tradition concerning the proximity of General Washington and his army to the noted old tree at the time of his assumption of command, in July, 1775, is without foundation in fact. Numerous authorities are cited, not because any of them throw any real light upon the subject but, seemingly, because none of them even mention it.

It would seem that, if there is a reasonable doubt as to the authenticity of the popular story concerning the Washington Elm, it should be possible to state the same in a few paragraphs. Exploding commonly accepted “traditions” and resolving popular “myths” into their elemental gases seems to be a favorite pastime of some historical writers, who manifest as much zeal, display as much erudition and use as much space in print as if engaged on some really constructive historical composition.

I sometimes see this same attitude today. Thoburn didn’t find any weakness in Batchelder’s evidence or analysis. He must have recognized that quoting diaries that didn’t mention a ceremony on 3 July 1775 was relevant to the question of whether there was one and how strong the evidence was.

But Thoburn was clearly bothered by Batchelder’s conclusion, and apparently by having to accept. So he complained about his colleague spending effort on “Exploding commonly accepted ‘traditions’ and resolving popular ‘myths’.”

Thoburn didn’t seem bothered by the stacks of school textbooks, tourist guidebooks, histories, biographies, and even horticultural catalogues that had devoted many more pages to retelling the “tradition” or “myth” of the Washington Elm without a good factual basis.

TOMORROW: In discarding the Washington Elm, have we gone too far? Or, what should we do with all those souvenirs made from the tree?

The Washington Dogwood?

In 1949 Cambridge added a bronze plaque to the granite monument showing Washington on horseback reviewing ranks of troops. The sculptor was Leonard Craske, who also created the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial.

The Cambridge Historical Commission spent a lot of time trying to find correct wording for the caption on that plaque, reflecting both the tradition of the Washington Elm and what could actually be documented. In the end the brass letters say:

GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON
having taken command of
the army of the United Colonies
at Cambridge
inspects the troops near this spot
on the fourth day of July 1775.

We know from Gen. Nathanael Greene’s 4 July letter that on that day Washington did have a chance to look at some Rhode Island troops. “Having taken command” separates this scene from whatever earlier moment Gen. Artemas Ward turned over authority. “Near this spot” is vague enough to apply to anything in central Cambridge, if not the whole town. And there’s no mention of a tree.

Similarly, the websites of Cambridge’s historical commission and historical society take pains to say that there’s no evidence for the traditional story of the Washington Elm.

Yet Craske’s plaque shows Washington under a big old elm tree. The earlier markers repeating the legend—the slab of granite with the line said to be written by Longfellow shown above, the D.A.R. plaque—remain on Cambridge common because they have some historic value themselves. And there’s a big tree nearby. Dutch elm disease probably brought down the 1932 replacement elm, so since the 1980s a hardy dogwood has stood in. [CORRECTION: Whoops! That D.A.R. plaque refers to a descendant of Cambridge’s Washington Elm planted in New Jersey. The current replacement for Cambridge’s tree is a younger elm.]

As a result, tourists photograph that dogwood replacement elm beside the monument as historically important, as all these Flickr images show. The last one in that series notes how some guidebooks explain that this isn’t really the tree, and that the basis for the tree’s legend is shaky at best. So does the page for the picture above, by z0xx, which I chose to show because it has a Creative Commons license.

Apparently the dogwood that replaced the elm that was grown from an elm that was grown from another elm that stood in another place in Cambridge when Washington was in town in 1775-76 is now an important symbol of our national heritage. Symbolism’s flexible that way.

TOMORROW: Grumbling about the loss of a tradition.

The Fall of the Washington Elm

Cambridge’s Washington Elm was in poor shape even before Charles Martyn voiced doubt about its traditional story in his 1921 biography of Gen. Artemas Ward. As the 1889 photograph above shows, the aging tree was surrounded by an iron fence, pruned of several limbs, wrapped with zinc bands, and held up with iron rods.

On 26 Oct 1923, city arborists were in the middle of more pruning when the whole tree collapsed. And right in the middle of the colonial revival, too.

The city cleared away the fallen branches and trunk, cut the wood into souvenirs, and distributed cubes to every state in the union. Workers eventually placed a plaque in the pavement at the site of the tree, and moved the granite monument beside it to the common.

Meanwhile, Irving W. Bailey, a professor of plant anatomy at Harvard, examined the trunk. He concluded that the tree had been 204 to 210 years old—i.e., that it had started growing in the early 1700s. So much for nineteenth-century authors’ awe at how the elm had been standing when British settlers arrived in Massachusetts Bay.

In November 1923, A. Gardner Bartlett published a letter in the Cambridge Tribune, later reprinted in Old-Time New England, which pointed out the tree had stood in a pretty regular line with five other elms, including the “Whitefield elm.” Bartlett theorized that colonial farmers had planted that line of trees to provide shade for the common.

In December, the Tribune published a letter from another local researcher, Samuel Francis Batchelder, questioning the notion that Washington took command under the tree as much of the American army looked on. Batchelder republished this letter as a 1925 pamphlet titled “The Washington Elm Tradition—Is It True?”, then in the Cambridge Historical Society’s journal, and finally in his book Bits of Cambridge History.

Most of Batchelder’s evidence came from Martyn’s Life of Artemas Ward, but he pounded the points home. Martyn’s analysis appeared in a footnote, but Batchelder devoted a whole essay to the topic, and made his argument from within Cambridge’s historical community. Batchelder also had a nasty way with the sarcasm. “If I point out to my little boy the crack in the parlor floor where I once lost a quarter,” Batchelder wrote, “my descendants will doubtless in time show each other the very room where great-grandfather was declared a bankrupt—but it will be the same parlor.”

Even as those researchers wrote, however, other people tried to keep the Washington Elm tradition alive. Some cities offered seedlings from elms that had been grown from seedlings of Cambridge’s elm. In 1932 a “grandchild” of the Washington Elm supplied by the Maryland D.A.R. was planted on the Cambridge common, with a brass marker retelling the usual tradition.

TOMORROW: How things look today.

The First Blow Against the Washington Elm

The twentieth century brought a more skeptical approach to writing history, even the history of one’s own nation (as opposed to someone else’s). Authors began to look askance on stories based only on “tradition,” demanding support from contemporaneous documents. One casualty of that approach was the legend of the Washington Elm.

Charles Martyn’s biography The Life of Artemas Ward (1921) struck the first blow. He studied Gen. Ward’s orders book, which notes the arrival of the new commander-in-chief, Gen. George Washington, in Cambridge on 2 July, but mentions no ceremonial handover scheduled the next day, much less one involving lots of American troops.

Martyn also looked at diaries from men in the New England army besieging Boston. He found nine that mention Washington’s arrival, but none describes him taking command in a public ceremony on Cambridge common.

What’s more, Martyn reported, four “diaries specifically testify that on July 3 there happened ‘Nothing new’ or ‘Nothing remarkable’ or ‘Nothing extraordinary’.” And about other sources:

No one was sufficiently impressed by his assumption of the command to send a letter to any newspaper, though events of much lesser moment were thus reported; no one seems to have described the ceremony in any letter to family or friends; and no diary recorded it.

Only two diaries contain any hint of parading for the new commander.

Martyn quoted a letter that Gen. Nathanael Greene (shown above) wrote on 4 July:

I sent a detachment today of two hundred men, commanded by a colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major with a letter of address to welcome his Excellency to camp. The detachment met with a very gracious reception, and his Excellency returned me a very polite answer, and invitation to visit him at his headquarters.

This makes clear that after Washington’s first full day as commander in Cambridge:

• Greene still hadn’t met the generalissimo.
• Washington hadn’t reviewed most of Greene’s Rhode Island troops.
• Greene felt that sending two hundred men (less than one regiment) with some well-chosen officers and a nicely written letter was a sufficient welcome. In fact, in sending such a big delegation Greene comes across as a bit of a suck-up.

The obvious implication is that the late-nineteenth-century descriptions of Gen. Washington taking command of the entire American army, or even a lot of it, on Cambridge common were not only unsupported by contemporaneous documents, but actually contradicted by them.

TOMORROW: The Washington Elm crashes to earth.

An Earlier Allusion: “Beneath the Venerable Elm…”

I interrupt my analysis of the Washington Elm’s decline and fall to share new information on its rise to fame. Yesterday Cambridge resident Robert Winters alerted me to an allusion to the tree predating John Langdon Sibley’s 1837 magazine article that apparently produced the term “Washington Elm.”

The author was politician, academician, and orator Edward Everett (shown here), and the occasion was his speech in Cambridge on 4 July 1826. He told the crowd how fortunate they were to be right where they were:

Here the first American army was formed; from this place, on the seventeenth of June, was detached the Spartan band that immortalized the heights of Charlestown—consecrated that day, with blood and fire, to the cause of American liberty.

Beneath the venerable elm which still shades the southwestern corner of the common, General Washington first unsheathed his sword at the head of an American army; and to that seat he was wont every Sunday to repair, to join in the supplications which were made for the welfare of his country.

A footnote identified “that seat” as “The first wall pew on the right hand of the pulpit,” which suggests Everett spoke in the Cambridge meetinghouse beside the common. I’ve seen evidence that Washington attended at least one service in that church, but not that he went there habitually.

In addition, on 4 July 1842, the Rev. Charles W. Upham of Salem delivered an oration in that city which said:

A more perfectly fitted and furnished character has never appeared, on the theatre of human action, than when, reining up his war-horse, beneath the majestic and venerable elm, still standing at the entrance of the old Watertown road upon Cambridge Common, George Washington unsheathed his sword, and assumed the command of the gathering armies of American liberty.

Both speeches were reprinted and anthologized in the 1800s, and Upham’s passage was quoted in several elocution textbooks, helping to seal the image of Washington under the elm in Americans’ minds. (Everett was also, you may recall, responsible for putting the Washington Elm on Cambridge’s city seal.)

TOMORROW: But nothing lasts forever.

The Growth of the Washington Elm

To return to the Washington Elm, said to be the tree in Cambridge under which Gen. George Washington took command, one of the striking things about that story is how it grew over the years. The first print mention, back in 1837, stated:

when Washington arrived at Cambridge, he drew his sword as commander-in-chief of the American army, for the first time, beneath its boughs, and resolved within himself that it should never be sheathed till the liberties of his country were established.

The image of Washington drawing a sword shows up in many of the subsequent descriptions of the event, though it might simply have been metaphorical.

Gradually, authors and illustrators began to increase the number of troops involved, if not explicitly then implicitly. By 1864, Benjamin Franklin Morris thought it credible for a Continental Army chaplain to describe how Washington “drew his sword and formally took command of the army of seventeen thousand men.” In 1876 Currier & Ives published this lithograph of “Washington Taking Control of the American Army, at Cambridge, Mass. July 1775.” Like the 1797 engraving I started with, it shows ranks of soldiers drawn up for review, equipped with uniforms, flags, and tents. But now there are even more ranks, and the Washington Elm towers over the scene.

Another Centennial manifestation of the myth was the diary of “Dorothy Dudley,” published in a commemorative book titled Theatrum Majorum: The Cambridge of 1776. Many authors have taken that diary of a Cambridge teenager as authentic. But the writer, Mary Williams Greely (later Goodridge, born 1848), created the day-by-day account of the siege as historical fiction. The second edition states that explicitly. An 1885 reference book listed “Dorothy Dudley” as Goodridge’s pseudonym. The true nature of that diary has been stated many times, and yet it keeps getting cited and studied.

The “Dudley diary,” Currier & Ives print, and Lowell poem aren’t the crowning details of the Washington Elm legend, though. It seems impossible to top an unsourced claim that Samuel Adams Drake made in Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex, first published in 1874:

When the camp was here Washington caused a platform to be built among the branches of this tree, where he was accustomed to sit and survey with his glass the country round.

Unfortunately, I’ve found no images of the commander-in-chief in his treehouse.

TOMORROW: The great tree starts to fall.

“Soldiers Gathered Around the Tree Under Which the General Sat”

As I quoted back in 2007, as early as 1846 a story circulated about Gen. George Washington reading aloud the 101st Psalm as he took command of the Continental Army. The Rev. Daniel Waldo (shown here) told that story at an Independence Day gathering in Westfield, and it was picked up by the Abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator. Waldo was a Revolutionary veteran, but he wasn’t in the army in 1775 and never saw Washington.

In 1872 Harriet Beecher Stowe retold the tale in one of her books through the voice of a fictional character. In 1878 the Farmer’s Cabinet magazine quoted a description of the event, said to have taken place on 2 July 1775. The reported eyewitness was the late Amherst, New Hampshire, farmer Andrew Leavitt:

After the officers had succeeded in getting the men into tolerable order, Gen. Washington came upon the field and reviewed them [the soldiers], he was a large noble looking man, apparently in the full strength of manhood, mounted upon a magnificent black horse, in whose shining coat you could almost see your face, so carefully was he groomed. After the review the soldiers gathered around the tree under which the General sat, and listened to his address. At the conclusion he read to them from his Psalm book the 101st Psalm.

The local historian who wrote that passage said he’d heard the story from Leavitt about 1842. Descendants of another veteran from the same company, Joseph Wallace, recalled him telling a similar anecdote.

Leavitt and Wallace were in Capt. Josiah Crosby’s company in Col. James Reed’s New Hampshire regiment. On 21 June, according to that state’s Provincial and State Papers, that whole regiment was camped at Winter Hill in modern Somerville, and they seem to have stayed there. There’s no evidence that they were pulled away from the front line so that Gen. Washington could review them on Cambridge common. On the other hand, those two psalm-singing stories didn’t actually claim that event took place on the common, or that the “tree under which the General sat” was the Washington Elm.

The big problem with that tale is that anyone who’s studied Washington recognizes that it would be completely out of his usual pattern to sit under a tree and read a psalm to soldiers gathered around him. He valued hierarchy and rank, especially when he first arrived in Cambridge. His religious behavior was not demonstrative. His main concern on arriving in Massachusetts was to review and strengthen the siege lines.

This sort of behavior might make sense coming from Gen. Artemas Ward or some other New England officer who valued his work as a church deacon. From the new, closely-watched Virginian commander-in-chief the act would have been remarkable—yet nobody remarked on it for more than seventy years.

Another religiously tinged account of Washington taking command appeared in The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, published in 1864 by a minister named Benjamin Franklin Morris. Morris claimed to quote “from the journal of a chaplain in the American army”:

July 4th, 1775.—I have seen the new general appointed by Congress to command the armies of the colonies. On seeing him I am not surprised at the choice. I expected to see an ardent, heroic-looking man; but such a mingled sweetness, dignity, firmness, and self-possession I never before saw in any man. The expression “born to command” is peculiarly applicable to him. Day before yesterday, when under the great elm in Cambridge he drew his sword and formally took command of the army of seventeen thousand men, his look and bearing impressed every one, and I could not but feel that he was reserved for some great destiny.

Even among ardent Patriots around Boston, this would be an enraptured description of Washington.

Morris never stated the name of this chaplain. The manuscript has never surfaced. No other author that I’ve found has relied on that journal entry. The diary says the event took place on 2 July (“Day before yesterday”), but authentic contemporaneous sources indicate that Washington and Gen. Charles Lee arrived in Cambridge that day in the middle of the afternoon, when it was raining. The traditional date for Washington taking formal command or reviewing American troops is 3 July.

Morris obviously wrote his book to argue that Christianity underpins the government of the United States—a familiar claim today. He seems to have been overly credulous about, or simply invented, a quotation to support his position—again, a familiar situation today. And Morris’s book is still being cited by people who share its core idea.

COMING UP: George Washington’s treehouse.