Benjamin Shallop
Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025, was in many ways a perfect day in Salem until it wasn’t.
That morning I took a stroll from my home in Northfields to the North River to join in the festivities of the 250th anniversary of Leslie’s Retreat; an event that occurred in 1775 when Salem residents turned back a column of British Regulars under the command of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie who had been dispatched by General Gage in British occupied Boston to seize cannon being concealed in North Salem.
Contrary to the popular modern American mythology that sadly tends to shape modern Americans’ understanding of the period of the Revolution, the British Regulars under Leslie’s command that day were not traipsing through the countryside seizing individual firearms from farmers. They were there to seize cannon that were being concealed and made ready for war by the recently all but outlawed government of the Colony of Massachusetts. The Salemites that opposed them were an urban people who mostly made their living from various maritime trades or in support of those trades, but likely a farmer or two was there as well.
1775 was a year after the British Parliament, in response to protests over British trade and tax policy, passed a series of measures designed to strip the Colony of Massachusetts from its long held right to self government known as the “Intolerable Acts.” The crown had removed the ability of the colonists to elect members of the governor’s council, gave the crown-appointed governor the right to remove judges considered disloyal to the crown, and severely restricted the cornerstone of New England democracy that is still with us today: the town meeting. Many New Englanders were outraged by these acts, but others felt that it was warranted, and many more were just completely confused by it all and just tried to go about living their lives as normally as possible.
As I walked across the path to the train station over the now muddy creek that today is all that remains of the once mighty North River, I pondered the people of that day. I then climbed up the overpass to join my neighbors as we waited for the spectacle to unfold. I truly love Salem in February, when the weather becomes so raw that the tourist hordes leave us be and our home once again becomes our own. I chatted with neighbors and many public officials who are also neighbors and as I did, I pondered that line authored by John Adams in the preamble of our Commonwealth’s constitution that defines what government is:
“The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”
It was this concept that was under threat then in 1775: The Social Compact. The right to make decisions for how we govern ourselves as a community. It is an old Puritan concept that our ancestors inherited from their ancestors who fought for something like it during the English Civil War. It is this concept that we here in New England again find threatened today.
After the reenactment of Leslie’s Retreat, I went for lunch at the Soup Factory before picking up some fish brought in from Gloucester by Cape Ann Fresh Catch at the Cheese Shop in Salem. In many ways, my Saturday afternoon had a lot in common with a typical afternoon for generations of Salemites before me. Later that evening, my wife and I went to Boston for a show, and after it let out I made the mistake of checking social media where I saw the headline:
“Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan: ‘I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing Hell with me!’”
There’s an echo that screams through the centuries if I ever heard one. It instantly brought to mind images of jackbooted ICE agents stomping in time with British Regulars come to impose the will of a would-be tyrant upon Massachusetts: the birthplace of democracy in the New World. A blatant threat has been made against our home by Tom Homan, King Trump’s own (though infinitely less accomplished) version of Gen. Thomas Gage. Suddenly thoughts on where I would have stood 250 years ago are no longer mere fanciful academic musings — they are very real.
None of those Salemites that stood their ground that fateful February morning in 1775 could have foreseen that within a few months they would be in a state of open war with the crown, or that in 12 years they would be part of an independent United States of America. We like to think of our ancestors as great forward-thinking people, but in truth they were more like most of us today at this moment in history: reacting to the events of their day and doing the best they could while trying to hold on to those morals and values they held most dear. They were humans, Salemites, and New Englanders just like us today…but unlike us today, they were not Americans for the simple fact that there was not even the concept of a United States of America until much later.
We, like them, are living through our own confusing and troubling history. We even have some recent experiences that share a striking similarity. In 1774, the Intolerable Acts gave the king the power to replace judges and officials with those loyal to the crown; in 2025, we see Project 2025 laying waste to all manner of civil servants to replace them with loyalists to the current regime. Unfortunately their tyrant, King George III, was far more restrained by Parliament than King Trump is restrained by the United States Congress or the courts after the SCOTUS decision of Trump vs the U.S. (where SCOTUS ruled that a president cannot be prosecuted for “official acts”).
While our times are clearly different, we like them are living through a historic moment filled with strife, danger, confusion, uncertainty, and pitfalls that bears a resemblance to each other in some ways, and we like them need to rise to the occasion despite not knowing what the future holds.
We, like our ancestors who stood on that bridge on that cold February morning of 1775, are going to see profound changes in the coming years that may seem unfathomable to us now. We may be looking at a dissolution of the United States, the establishment of an Independent Republic of New England, a complete collapse not too dissimilar to Rome’s, a reordering of society along the lines of something completely alien to us now, or (to quote Monty Python) it may be “time for something completely different.”
We cannot know what the future holds, but we can know that whatever it is it will be different than what is now. We don’t get to choose what history we are a part of, and we don’t get to choose to not be a part of history. After all, choosing inaction is still a choice, and failing to rise to the occasion makes you just as much a part of history as rising to it.
This is our moment, and we should honor our ancestors by becoming ancestors worth honoring ourselves. With that in mind, I’d like to leave the last word to Tom Homan to Sarah Tarrant — a 32-year-old Salem woman who worked as a nurse and lived near the North River in Salem the day the British Regulars came to impose their will upon us. It is a quote I’ve long thought deserves to be emblazoned on t-shirts, signs, and banners throughout this city and is one far better than Patrick Henry’s, “Give me Liberty or Give me Death.” She shouted this then to Leslie’s men, and I think it’s the perfect response to Homan’s threat against us now:
“Go home and tell your master he sent you on a fool’s errand and has broken the peace of our Sabbath! Do you think we were born in the woods, to be frightened of owls? Fire, if you have the courage, but I doubt it!”
Benjamin Shallop lives in Salem and is a local historian, labor activist, and author of “The Founding of Salem: City of Peace”.