17751776 Club
Washington names a Boston lawyer to police his own army's discipline
William Tudor, once John Adams's law pupil, becomes the Continental Army's first Judge Advocate.
Three months after Lexington and Concord, the Continental Army was still a loose collection of colonial militias camped outside Boston, with no shared system for punishing theft, drunkenness, or desertion in its ranks. On July 29, 1775, General George Washington appointed William Tudor, a Boston lawyer who had trained under John Adams, as Judge Advocate of the Continental Army, with the rank of colonel. Tudor had already been advising Washington informally from camp in Cambridge. The office he filled was the first legal arm of the American military…
