The crowning glory in the life of the great elm was at hand. On the twenty-first of June, Washington, without allowing himself time to take leave of his family, set out on horseback from Philadelphia, arriving at Cambridge on the second of July. Sprightly Dorothy Dudley in her Journal describes the exercises of the third, with the florid eloquence of youth.
"To-day, he (Washington) formally took command, under _one of the grand old elms_ on the Common. It was a magnificent sight. The majestic figure of the General, mounted upon his horse beneath the wide-spreading branches of the patriarch tree; the multitude thronging the plain around, and the houses filled with interested spectators of the scene, while the air rung with shouts of enthusiastic welcome, as he drew his sword, and thus declared himself Commander-in-chief of the Continental army."
Dorothy does not specify under which elm Washington stood. It is safely inferable from her language that our tree was one of several noble elms which at this time were standing upon the Common.
Although no contemporaneous pen seems to have pointed out the exact tree beyond all question, happily the day is not so far distant from us that oral testimony is inadmissible. Of this there is enough to satisfy the most captious critic.
Where the stone church is now situated, there was formerly an old gambrel-roofed house, in which the Moore family lived during the Revolution. The situation was very favorable for observation, commanding the highroad from Watertown to Cambridge Common, and directly opposite the great elm. From the windows of this house the spectators saw the ceremony to good advantage, and one of them, styled, in 1848, the "venerable Mrs. Moore," lived to point out the tree, and describe the glories of the occasion, seventy-five years afterward. Fathers, who were eyewitnesses standing beneath this tree, have told the story to their sons, and those sons have not yet passed away. There is no possibility that we are paying our vows at a counterfeit shrine.
Great events which mark epochs in history, bestow an imperishable dignity even upon the meanest objects with which they are associated. When Washington drew his sword beneath the branches, the great elm, thus distinguished above its fellows, passed at once into history, henceforward to be known as the Washington Elm.