Raise a Bridge
On February 26, 1775, the American Revolution nearly began in Salem, Massachusetts.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie led more than 250 soldiers of the British 64th Regiment onto transport vessels in Boston Harbor, acting on orders from General Thomas Gage. Loyalist informants had tipped Gage to artillery that colonial militias were secretly stockpiling near the North River in Salem, and he sent Leslie to find it—sailing from Castle Island to Marblehead, then marching inland to seize it. The mission was timed for a Sunday, when the British expected the townspeople to be at church and the roads to be clear. Leslie anticipated no resistance.
He anticipated wrong.
Locals in Marblehead spotted the redcoats disembarking almost immediately, and word spread fast. Messengers rode for Salem as the column of soldiers fixed bayonets and began their march inland. Later accounts would credit Major John Pedrick with racing ahead on horseback to the North Church to sound the alarm. But that story is likely apocryphal. Writer J. L. Bell has noted that the tale first appeared in print more than a century after the event, traced only to family reminiscence, and contemporary records do not place Pedrick at the center of the confrontation. In fact, he says that some evidence suggests he was aligned with the royal government at the time.
What is certain is that Salem was warned. Bells rang. Drums sounded. Minutemen assembled. By the time Leslie and his men reached the North River—the only practical crossing into town—the drawbridge had been raised. The river itself was impassable without it. Militiamen stood on the far bank while townsmen moved the artillery out of reach.
What followed was a standoff neither side seemed eager to settle by force. Leslie’s soldiers waited on the riverbank as daylight faded and the air turned cold. The townsmen, for their part, had no interest in firing the first shot. Instead, they offered Leslie a way to “save face.” The bridge would be lowered. The regiment could cross and march a short, symbolic distance into town. Then Leslie and his men would withdraw.
Leslie agreed. His men crossed, advanced only far enough to satisfy their orders, found nothing, and turned back. They returned to Marblehead and sailed to Boston. No shots were fired.
The episode might have vanished entirely from the historical record, as Robert Pushkar observed in Smithsonian Magazine, had Charles Moses Endicott not published his 1856 account, Leslie’s Retreat at the North Bridge in Salem. That it survived is fortunate because what happened at the North River that afternoon is more relevant today than Endicott probably could have imagined.
Salem did not defeat the British Army, but the townspeople refused to yield. Leslie had the means to force a crossing, but he understood what forcing it would entail. So he withdrew. And the colonists were right to hold that bridge. They had no voice in Parliament when armed men were dispatched to seize their property. There was no warrant, no magistrate, no legal process they had consented to or participated in. And their defiance was orderly—no riot, no burning down of their own town, no mob, not even a shot fired.
Today’s resisters will draw the wrong lesson from this episode in history, concluding that all resistance to government authority is noble, that any crowd willing to stand its ground is righteous. But that mistakes the form for the substance.
Federal immigration enforcement operates through courts, warrants, and legal processes built by representatives citizens actually elect and can remove. We have a duly elected president enforcing laws enacted by a duly elected Congress. Those laws make it illegal to enter this country without authorization. Those who obstruct federal agents today are not standing up against arbitrary distant power; they aren’t resisting illegal search and seizure. They are refusing to accept the outcome of a political argument they lost—and rather than wait for the next election or win the argument on its merits, they have chosen a shorter path: disorder, intimidation, and chaos as substitutes for law.
The ones who need to retreat are those who believe mob pressure can nullify the will of the majority. But if federal agents withdraw in the face of that intimidation, they will only teach the mob that it works.
Mr. President, if you’re hearing me: raise the bridge, hold the line, and force the mob’s retreat.
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