Historian J.L. Bell will tell the thrilling story of Leslie's Retreat, the first armed resistance to the British crown, and its connections to Marblehead.

On Sunday, February 26, 1775, about 250 British soldiers 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 assembled to stop them.

This talk digs below myths of 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.  Bell’s website, Boston 1775, offers daily updates of “history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution.”