Accompanied by Lee and Schuyler and a brilliant escort, he set forth
on June 21st for Boston. Before they had gone twenty miles a messenger
bringing news of the Battle of Bunker Hill crossed them. "Did the
Militia fight?" Washington asked. On being told that they did, he
said: "Then the liberties of the country are safe." Then he pushed on,
stopping long enough in New York to appoint General Schuyler military
commander of that Colony, and so through Connecticut to the old Bay
State. There, at Cambridge, he found the crowd awaiting him and some
of the Colonial troops. On the edge of the Common, under a large elm
tree broad of spread, he took command of the first American army. It
was the second of July, 1775.




CHAPTER IV

BOSTON FREED


Thus began what seems to us now an impossible war. Although it had
been brooding for ten years, since the Stamp Act, which showed that
the ties of blood and of tradition meant nothing to the British
Tories, now that it had come, the Colonists may well have asked
themselves what it meant. Probably, if the Colonists had taken a poll
on that fine July morning in 1775, not one in five of them would have
admitted that he was going to war to secure Independence, but all
would have protested that they would die if need be to recover their
freedom, the old British freedom, which came down to them from
Runnymede and should not be wrested from them.