For eleven months after the Concord fight, Cambridge was a fortified camp. The college buildings, the Episcopal church and the larger houses were occupied as barracks. General Ward established his headquarters in the gambrel-roofed house which was afterwards the birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. On the lawn before the house, in the hush of the June evening, Prescott’s men were drawn up, while President Langdon of the college, in cap and gown, prayed for the success of their arms ere they marched to Bunker Hill. Two weeks later Washington reached the camp, and on July 3d, under the spreading elm at the western end of the Common, unsheathed his sword and, as the inscription reads, “took command of the American Army.” Washington lived
for a while in the president’s house, but soon made his headquarters in the fine old mansion of the Vassalls which was later the home of Longfellow.
After March, 1776, when Boston was finally evacuated by the British, Cambridge ceased to be involved in the military events of the Revolution, but in 1777 the captured troops of Burgoyne were quartered in the town, the soldiers swinging their hammocks in the college buildings and the officers occupying the deserted mansions of “Tory Row.” Burgoyne lived in the house sometimes called, in derision of its first clerical occupant, “The Bishop’s Palace,” and Riedesel and his accomplished wife in the Lechmere house. “Never have I chanced,” wrote Madame Riedesel, “upon such a charming situation,” and never has our colonial life been more charmingly described than by this brave and vivacious German lady in the letters written from her pleasant prison to her distant home.
For fifty years after the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a country town of quiet habits, its only distinguishing characteristic being the scholastic and literary atmosphere that hung about the college. It was a good
place to be born in, and it was surely good to live in the place where Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world; where Longfellow wrote his poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed; where William Story and Richard Dana and Lowell and Holmes and the rest walked to church and stopped to gossip with the neighbors at the post-office.
“No town in this country,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “has been the occasion of two literary descriptions more likely to become classic than two which bear reference to the Cambridge of fifty years ago. One of these is Lowell’s well-known Fireside Travels and the other is the scarcely less racy chapter in the Harvard Book, contributed by John Holmes, younger brother of the ‘Autocrat.’ ”