Harvard’s year of exile
Lexington and Concord. April 19, 1775. Where and when the Revolutionary War started is well known. Not so well known is the fact that Harvard played an important, if odd, role afterward in the early days of the Revolution, turning its campus over to the nascent American army. On May 1, 1775, undergraduates were dismissed and given an early summer vacation. Classes resumed on Oct. 5 in Concord, 20 miles away — the beginning of a wartime academic sojourn. Student safety was a factor in the move, said historian John L. Bell, a specialist in the early days of the war, but so was a worry that students would consort with rough and tumble soldiers. “There was discipline,” he said of the American army gathering in Cambridge. “But it wasn’t college discipline.” Harvard’s move to Concord also served a practical military purpose. Provincial troops fortifying Cambridge during the siege of Boston needed places...