UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1775-1776. Washington in command at Cambridge. The British forced out of Boston. Washington "arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 2d of July [1775], and on the following day presented himself at the head of the army. His head-quarters remained at Cambridge, till the evacuation of Boston by the royal forces on the 17th of March, 1776. The position of affairs was one of vast responsibility and peril. The country at large was highly excited, and expected that a bold stroke would be struck and decisive successes obtained. But the army was without organization and discipline; the troops unused to obey, the officers for the most part unaccustomed, some of them incompetent, to command. A few of them only had had a limited experience in the Seven Years' War. Most of the men had rushed to the field on the first alarm of hostilities, without any enlistment; and when they were enlisted, it was only till the end of the year. There was no military chest; scarce anything that could be called a commissariat. The artillery consisted of a few old field-pieces of various sizes, served with a very few exceptions by persons wholly untrained in gunnery. There was no siege train, and an almost total want of every description of ordnance stores. Barrels of sand, represented as powder, were from time to time brought into the camp, to prevent the American army itself from being aware of its deficiency in that respect. In the autumn of 1775, an alarm of small-pox was brought from Boston, and the troops were subjected to inoculation: There was no efficient power, either in the Provincial Assembly or the Congress at Philadelphia, by which these wants could be supplied and these evils remedied. Such were the circumstances under which General Washington took the field, at the head of a force greatly superior in numbers to the royal army, but in all other respects a very unequal match. Meantime the British were undisputed masters of the approaches to Boston by water. Washington's letters disclose extreme impatience under the inaction to which he was condemned; but the gravest difficulties attended the expulsion of the royal forces from Boston. It could only be effected by the bombardment and assault of that place; an attempt which must in any event have been destructive to the large non-combatant population, that had been unable to remove into the country, and which would have been of doubtful success, for the want of a siege train, and with troops wholly unused to such an undertaking. Having in the course of the year received some captured ordnance from Canada [from Fort Ticonderoga], and a supply of ammunition taken by privateers at sea, Washington was strongly disposed to assault the town, as soon as the freezing of the bay on the western side of the