Artemas Ward combined Massachusetts public office with military service before the Revolution. A veteran officer of the French and Indian War, he sat in the colonial legislature and served as a justice. The Provincial Congress made him a brigadier general in October 1774. After Lexington and Concord he helped direct the army surrounding Boston and became commander in chief of the Massachusetts forces in May 1775.

Ward authorized the occupation of the Charlestown heights before the Battle of Bunker Hill, while officers on the ground directed the fighting. Congress appointed him the Continental Army's senior major general in June, second in command to George Washington. He supervised troops around Boston during the siege. After the British evacuation in March 1776, Washington took the main army to New York and left Ward commanding the Eastern Department. Ill health led him to relinquish military service in 1777.

Ward continued in civil government as a judge and legislator. He presided over Massachusetts's Executive Council in 1777–1779, served in Congress in 1780–1781 and became speaker of the state House in 1785. During Shays' Rebellion he resisted efforts to close the courts. A supporter of the new federal government, he represented Massachusetts in the United States House from 1791 to 1795. He spent his later years at Shrewsbury, where he died in 1800. His papers and home document the overlap of local administration, revolutionary command and national politics in his career.