As mentioned yesterday, when George Washington came to Cambridge, he found a bit of a mess there: several disorganized groups of men, with more on the way, along with supplies still in transit.

The first thing he needed to do was to get the fighting force organized, so he began a log book of his official orders. His first set, which came out on this day in 1775, took up about five pages of manuscript. But Washington wasn’t done, not by a long shot. Every few days he’d come up with something new, but it was all reasonable and made sense in the bigger picture. It’s not as though Washington had grabbed power with no intention of relinquishing it later on; he just wasn’t wired that way.

Eventually his book of orders grew to over 500 pages over the next couple of years.

P.S. Happy Independence Day! Our 250th anniversary is exactly one year away, but there’s a lot of stuff before, and after, that date that we’ll need to look at in order to get the entire story.

The post July 4, 1775: Washington’s First Orders appeared first on 250 and Counting.