The focus today up in Cambridge, while waiting for the British to hightail it out of Boston, was getting the men ready to move to New York, and putting together Washington’s personal guard.

Washington didn’t really need a personal guard in Cambridge, at least not much of one, because he was in the driver’s seat while he was there. The British were bottled up, and he was the stopper. But to move to New York and then defend that territory? Well, that was another project entirely. New York had more access points, more deepwater harbor, and more territory overall to defend. This wasn’t like keeping the British locked up on the peninsula that was the entirety of Boston. And while Washington probably considered it a bit of vanity at first (that’s a guess on my part) to even have a group of men dedicated to being “Washington’s personal guard”, he likely began to understand the inevitability of needing the guard as the Continental Army’s Commander-in-Chief.

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