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.