On Sunday, February 26, 1775, about 250 redcoats marched through Marblehead, sent by the royal governor to search for weapons. When that column of redcoats stalled at a drawbridge in Salem, their commander ordered locals to let them pass. Militia companies were assembling to stop them. If that confrontation had turned violent, it could have been the start of the Revolutionary War, almost two months before the first shots at Lexington.
This talk puts that confrontation in February 1775 in the larger context of the Massachusetts Patriots’ effort to assemble a military force, the royal governor’s attempts to stop them, and how that stalemate eventually led to April 19. It digs below myths attached to “Leslie’s Retreat” to highlight eyewitness accounts of a day the Revolutionary War might have begun, but didn’t.
J.L. Bell is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, as well as a book-length study for the National Park Service and many articles for the Journal of the American Revolution and other outlets. He has spoken at many historic sites and institutions in greater Boston, Mount Vernon, the American Revolution Institute in Washington, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York. Bell’s website, Boston 1775, offers daily updates of “history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution.”
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