SALEM — Four days shy of its 250th anniversary, the important but little-known Revolutionary standoff called Leslie’s Retreat played out with similar results Saturday morning on the cold, ice-caked streets of Salem.
Nearly 100 smart-stepping British regulars, bayonets fixed to their muskets, marched up North Street and onto a downtown concrete overpass, fifes and drums playing as 21st-century traffic whizzed by underneath.
On the other side of the bridge, a roughly equal number of armed Colonial militia stood their ground, mimicking the determination on Feb. 26, 1775, to prevent the British from crossing and seizing cannons that they believed were stored nearby.
More than 300 heavily bundled spectators watched the theatrics Saturday, jeering at the Redcoat reenactors, cheering the Salem militia, and tossing “huzzah” after “huzzah” into the chilly air.
“It’s the Lexington and Concord that almost happened,” said Jonathan Lane, executive director of Revolution 250, a nonprofit group that helps Massachusetts communities tell their stories of rebellion and independence.
Similar to the original retreat of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie and 250 soldiers from the 64th Regiment of Foot, the British reenactors considered their dire options, accepted a face-saving compromise, marched a little farther, and then promptly turned around.
This time, the Redcoats headed to warmth, lunch, and a few nearby pubs. In 1775, they marched to Marblehead and sailed the short distance back to Boston, without the cannon that General Thomas Gage had dispatched them to discover, and without a shot being fired by either side.
“The reason more people don’t know about this is that it was an event that ended peacefully,” Lane said. “A lot of people respond to the events that raise our heart rate.”
Only 51 days later, British troops and Colonial militia exchanged deadly gunfire at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where yet another North Bridge played a role in the “shot heard ‘round the world.”
But Leslie’s Retreat was a tense foreshadowing of those hostilities and showed that colonists, angered by years of punitive treatment from London, were willing to fight the vaunted British army, and that the spark could occur at any time.
“Something incredible happened right here in Salem,” said Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, the city’s former mayor.
The British troops in 1775 had landed in Marblehead on a quiet Sunday morning when townspeople would be at church services and presumably less likely to notice. But they were discovered, and messengers sped the short distance to Salem to warn its residents that the regiment was afoot.
The drawbridge over the North River in Salem was raised to impede the British advance. Armed colonists gathered on the far side, where they admonished Leslie that he had no right to cross the bridge because it had been privately built and was not the king’s property.
Charles Thorland of Salem, playing Leslie in the reenactment, indicated how close the resulting confrontation had come to bloodshed.
“It may be necessary to fire on the mob!” Thorland announced to militia Captain John Felt, portrayed by Jonathan Streff, a history teacher at St. John’s Prep in Danvers.
“Fire, and you’ll all be going to hell!” Streff angrily replied, standing his ground in the middle of the overpass.
“Do you apprehend the danger you are in?” Thorland asked.
“Do you apprehend the danger you are in?” Streff shouted.
According to a contemporary account in the Boston Gazette, Leslie told the Colonial militia that “he had orders to cross … and he would cross it if he lost his life with the lives of all of his men.”
Leslie, a Scottish aristocrat, also told the colonists that he would stay a month if necessary. The assembled people of Salem joked that Leslie “might stay as long as he pleased; nobody cared for that.”
As in 1775, the Rev. Thomas Barnard, an Anglican minister portrayed Saturday by the Rev. Maxfield Sklar of Hamilton, helped broker a compromise in which the British would be allowed to cross the bridge, as Gage had ordered, and reverse course after marching a short distance.
The colonists lowered the drawbridge, and the set piece played out as negotiated. “It’s a Solomonesque moment where Leslie achieves the most basic part of his orders,” Lane said.
On Saturday, the British “lobsterbacks” were booed as they marched away. “I will see you all in Hades!” said George Weghorst of Litchfield, N.H., dressed in Colonial garb as he taunted the Redcoats.
Although Salem has marked Leslie’s Retreat with a small annual ceremony since 2017, the 250th anniversary featured a large commemoration, including reenactor groups such as the Lexington Minute Men and the British 10th Regiment of Foot.
“The story of Leslie’s Retreat has been pretty well known within Salem, but it really hasn’t escaped from the community. It’s our little secret that we want to share with the rest of the world,” said Virginia Cherol, coordinator of Salem 400+, which commemorates the settlement’s founding by Europeans in 1626 and the Indigenous people who preceded them.
“Since we were able to talk everyone off the ledge, we don’t have the flash and the pomp of the war starting. It easily gets forgotten and glossed over,” Cherol said.
Still, Leslie’s Retreat can resonate in these contentious times, she said, showing “how important it is to to be able to come together during periods of heightened emotions … and actually listen and come to middle ground and compromise.”
“People were able to come together and see the benefits of diplomacy and tact.”