July 3 · This Day in America
Under an elm on Cambridge common, George Washington rides out before the army gathered around besieged Boston and draws his sword. He is taking command of something that barely exists — a loose crowd of New England militia, each colony with its own officers, its own habits, no shared discipline and almost no powder. He is a Virginia planter sent north partly so the South would feel the war was theirs too. He could not yet know it would take eight years, that he would lose more battles than he won, that the cause would survive mostly because he refused to let the army dissolve. He knew only that he had accepted command of a rebellion against the strongest empire on earth. He rode the lines, and the men cheered, and the United States had its first general.
Source: www.army.mil
Also on this day · 1863
On the third day at Gettysburg, some 12,500 Confederates step from the tree line and march a mile uphill across open ground toward the Union center. Lee has staked everything on it. The Federal guns wait, then tear the lines apart. A few hundred men reach the stone wall and the angle before they are killed or captured. The survivors fall back. It is called the high-water mark of the Confederacy — the farthest the tide ever came, and the place it began to go out.
Source: www.nps.gov