On a frigid Sunday afternoon in 1775, the townspeople of Salem in the Province of Massachusetts Bay sat huddled in their pews trying to stay warm. The Rev. Thomas Barnard was delivering his sermon when Col. David Mason burst into the church. “The regulars are coming and are now near Malloon’s Mills!” he cried. The congregation bolted toward the doors, headed for a confrontation known forever after as Leslie’s Retreat.
Prelude to Leslie’s Retreat
Salem, then a town of about 5,000, had reached a fever pitch of anxiety by Feb. 26, 1775.
The town had suffered more than most from the harsh dictates of Parliament—the heavy taxes, the closing of the Port of Boston, the restrictions on the market for codfish. The latter banned the lucrative trade with the French, a setback for the vessels that crowded Salem Harbor. Salem schooners fished for cod off the banks of Newfoundland and merchant vessels traded with Spain, Portugal and the West Indies. The French Sugar Islands, now off limits, were the best Caribbean market for dried cod.

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.
Ever since Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1767, most of the colonies resisted in some way. In 1772, Rhode Island’s Sons of Liberty captured the crew of a British customs schooner, HMS Gaspee, and burned the vessel to the waterline. In 1774, colonists from York, Maine, to Charleston, S.C., showed their displeasure with the Tea Act. They boycotted it, burned it, confiscated it or threw it into the water.
By late 1774, the colonies had already formed a loose-knit shadow government and begun to build up stores of gunpowder, artillery and arms. The British sought to keep military supplies under their own control. In the fall of 1774, Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Gage had ordered British regulars to confiscate gunpowder from the powder house in Somerville, Mass. On rumors that the redcoats had shed patriot blood, thousands of militia men assembled across the country. Then in December, the word that Gage was sending more troops to Portsmouth, N.H., inspired several hundred patriots to seize Fort William and Mary and confiscate the powder.
The shot heard ‘round the world could have happened at Leslie’s Retreat. But it served as a dress rehearsal for the Battles of Concord and Lexington.
Hide Those Cannons
The Massachusetts Committee of Safety had instructed Col. David Mason of Salem to gather military supplies for the coming war. Mason bought 17 12-pound cannon, captured from the French during the French and Indian War. He then hired Capt. Robert Foster, a blacksmith, to attach the guns to wooden carriages. Mason’s wife and daughters, meanwhile, made 5,000 cartridges for the cannon.
Foster happened to have his workshop on the north side of a drawbridge, the North Bridge. As he worked, he hid the cannon as well as he could on his premises.

Gen. Thomas Gage
A loyalist who worked for Mason somehow communicated the information about Salem’s cannon to Gage. Gage then ordered Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie to march 250 or so men in the 64th Regiment of the Line to Salem and seize the guns.
On Saturday night, February 25, Leslie and the troops left in transport ships from Castle William in Boston. They sailed north to Marblehead, but not until Sunday afternoon did they land in a quiet cove on Marblehead Neck. Leslie hoped to march through Marblehead and take Salem by surprise. He clearly didn’t know Marblehead very well.
Not Much of a Surprise
The soldiers were below decks when the citizens of Marblehead left for afternoon Sunday meeting. Then when the coast was clear, the soldiers swarmed onto the decks, loaded their muskets and fixed their bayonets. They quickly disembarked and marched in double-quick time toward Salem, the regimental band playing “Yankee Doodle.”
Several Marblehead patriots guessed where they were going and sent messengers to warn Salem.
Mason, who lived by the North Bridge, was one of the first people told about the British. As soon as he heard, he rushed into the North Church and shouted the alarm. The service broke up. Bells pealed, drummers beat their drums and shouts rang through the street: “The foe! They come! They come!” Mason mounted his horse and rode to Foster’s workshop to remove the guns.
Soon anyone with a team of horses was on the scene hauling away cannons. They hid some in a wood under piles of dry leaves and buried some in a gravel pit in Danvers.
The Redcoats Arrive
The regiment’s vanguard arrived at the bridge and saw that some of the planking had been removed. They quickly repaired it and marched to Long Wharf. The main body of the regiment arrived shortly afterward, colors flying, drums beating and bayonets glistening. They stopped at the courthouse, where Leslie held a conversation with a young loyalist lawyer Mason knew. Mason figured he told Leslie the cannons’ location. Mason then rode to the bridge even as the regiment marched in formation toward it.

Alexander Leslie
But Leslie didn’t notice the drawbridge was raised until he was almost upon it. Leslie marched with determination toward the bridge, and not until he was 15 yards away did he realize the bridge was raised. On the other side stood a crowd of Salem patriots, unarmed except for someone who had pistols hidden under his cloak. People climbed to the upraised leaf of the bridge and sat there like hens at roost.
Leslie demanded the bridge be lowered immediately. He stamped his feet, swore and again ordered the bridge lowered.
“Why?” came voices from the crowd.
“I have orders to cross the bridge, and I will do it if it cost my life and my men’s lives,” said Leslie.
Leslie then went over to an officer and said, “You must face about this division and fire upon those people.”
Capt. John Felt
Capt. John Felt, a square, stout workingman who at 50 was still not someone to mess with, had dogged Leslie from the courthouse.
Felt cried out, “Fire! You had better be damned than fire! You have no right to fire without further orders. If you do fire you will all be dead men!”
A Quaker, William Northey, stood nearby. He tried to calm Captain Felt. “Do you know the danger you are in, surrounded by armed troops, and an officer with a drawn sword in his hand?” Northey said.
But Felt had a point. Express riders had rushed out to all parts of the county to rouse the people to arms.
Men as far as 40 miles away heard the alarm, mustered and raced to the scene. Had the soldiers fired, thousands would have come to the bridge. And in Marblehead, nearly the entire male population of the town — a thousand men and boys — had assembled under Col. Azor Orne. Orne ordered them to station themselves behind houses and fences along the road. If the British shot anyone in Salem, they were to fall on them. If not, they were not to show themselves.
Blood Drawn
Leslie did not give the order, the company did not face the crowd and no one fired.
The crowd, though, did not stop jeering at the soldiers, who were shivering in the cold.
Felt then noticed three flatboats on the river and suggested they be scuttled. Men went to work putting holes in the boats with axes.
Leslie realized his only chance of getting across the river was in the boats. He ordered his soldiers into the flatboats, but the men kept striking them with their axes. A scuffle ensued and two men opened their shirtfronts to the regulars and dared them to use their bayonets. One did, pricking Joseph Whicher, the foreman in a local distillery. Whicher exhibited the wound for the rest of his life.
Leslie withdrew and summoned his officers. The crowd got bolder every minute, the troops more exasperated. Leslie announced he would cross the bridge before he returned if he stayed until autumn. Then he declared he’d make barracks for his troops at the stores on the wharf.
“Nobody would care for that,” said Felt.
“By god I will not be defeated,” exclaimed Leslie.
“You must acknowledge that you have been already baffled,” said Felt.
Time to Talk
The Rev. Thomas Barnard stepped in and tried to calm things down. He asked Leslie not to fire on those innocent people.
“Who are you, sir?” said Leslie.

The Rev. Thomas Barnard
“I am Thomas Barnard, a minister of the Gospel and my mission is peace,” he said. Leslie told Barnard his soldiers were much insulted and he was determined to cross the bridge. It was on the King’s Highway, he said, and he would not be prevented. The citizens objected that it wasn’t the King’s highway because it had been built by the owners of the lots on either side of the bridge.
An argument then broke out over the ownership of the bridge.
By then the sun was going down, and Leslie decided he should figure out a compromise. He talked to Felt, Barnard, Mason and Timothy Pickering, who would become President George Washington’s secretary of state. Mason negotiated from a ladder at the top of the raised leaf. He knew Leslie, and he trusted him.

Timothy PIckering
Leslie’s Retreat
Negotiations finally ended with Leslie pledging his word of honor: If the inhabitants would lower the bridge, he would march not 275 yards (50 rods) beyond the bridge and then return without touching any person or property. His orders were to pass the bridge, and he could not disobey them.
The crowd wouldn’t lower the bridge until Felt said they could. Felt agreed to the deal. The drawbridge was lowered. The regulars quietly passed over it, marched 50 rods beyond it, wheeled around and quickly marched back to their ship. The regimental band played a tune, “The World’s Turned Upside Down.” The Marblehead militia stayed hidden.
Felt later explained why he stuck so close to Leslie from the courthouse. If any regulars had fired, Felt said, he would grab Leslie and jump into the river with him for a fight to the death.
Across the Atlantic, the British statesman Edmund Burke commented on Leslie’s Retreat.
Thus ended their first expedition, without effect, and happily without mischief. Enough appeared to show on what a slender thread the peace of the Empire hung, and that the least exertion of the military power would certainly bring things to extremities.
Leslie’s Retreat: Celebrating the Sesquicentennial
Salem will commemorate the 250th anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat over two weekends of celebration that coincide with the city’s 400th anniversary. (Click here, here and here to learn more.)
The events are only the beginning of commemorations planned for the sesquicentennial. Find out more at the New England Historical Society’s events calendar. Or you can read about events planned throughout the year as well as every Revolutionary landmark in New England in the New England Historical Society’s book, “Revolutionary War Sites in New England.”
Updated for 2025, the sesquicentennial of the American Revolution. Click here to order your copy today!
Images: Old North Bridge postcard and Leslie’s Retreat Nelson Dionne Salem History Collection, Salem State University Archives and Special Collections, Salem, Massachusetts, CC By 2.0. Salem Courthouse courtesy John Carter Brown Library, CC BY-SA 4.0. With thanks to ENDICOTT, Charles M.. Account of Leslie’s Retreat at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday, Feby 26, 1775. United States, n.p, 1856.