Arming America

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 11:58 PM -0400 8/23/02, JCWisc at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 08/23/2002 9:53:11 PM Central Daylight Time,
>co015d5200 at blueyonder.co.uk writes:
>
>  >Recently got round to reading Michael A. Bellesiles' book, "Arming America",
>  >and having some serious qualms about a fair bit of his evidence, I wondered
>  >if any non-ideological historians had examined his arguments. I think he
>  >overstates his case, but all I can find on the internet are attacks from the
>  >predictable gun nuts. Well, and "Joyce Lee Malcolm", but I find it hard to
>  >take her very seriously given her latest book.
>
>This is an issue that I haven't really gotten a handle on yet.  My guess is
>that he probably "overstates his case," but that he is nevertheless "right"
>on the whole.  For those not in the know, Bellesiles argues that firearms
>were not terribly prevalent in the US until they were cheaply mass produced
>after the Civil War.  Before that, he says, they were expensive, finely
>crafted items that most people could not afford.  Thus, the image that has
>been painted (for ideological reasons) of an early America in which
>"everyone" was armed and routinely used weapons is wrong.  I am
>professionally concerned with the study of  US history, especially as
>manifested in material culture.  All I can tell you is that in my region of
>the US, the upper midwest, I find few references to hunting or firearms in
>pre-1860s primary sources.  I rarely see firearms listed in probate
>inventories.  Almost all of the iconographic evidence of
>firearms--photographs, lithographs, etc.--is from the 1880s and later, not
>surprising, given the history of technology.  Over the past four weeks or so,
>I have been looking at 1860 Wisconsin census records and the extant letters
>and diaries of Civil War soldiers from a particular region of the state.  I'm
>not seeing any "gunsmiths" or the like in the census records, and have found
>only one reference to hunting in the letters and diaries. Most tellingly,
>there are very few pre-1860s firearms in museum collections in this
>region--they are vanishingly rare.  If firearms were so ubiquitous in the
>early days of European settlement here, you'd expect to see more surviving
>material examples.

I basically agree with you.  What's even more interesting than the 
controversy regarding the scarcity, unreliability, and dearness of 
firearms in pre-Civil War America (that is, in America prior to the 
Industrial Revolution) is Michael Bellesiles's argument concerning 
class, race, and the state:

*****   ...Though it came closer than any colony to civil war in the 
first 160 years of English settlement, Virginia itself suffered 
little from Bacon's Rebellion. With the exception of the one 
encounter at Jamestown, whites did not kill whites. They threatened 
and terrorized one another, but they reserved their murderous rage 
for the Indians. And the rebellion ended even before the arrival of 
English regulars. In the 1630s the English had learned the danger of 
allowing firearms to fall into the hands of Indians; in 1676 they 
discovered that it was equally dangerous to let poor whites have 
access to guns. Yet battling the one seemed to necessitate the arming 
of the other. Unable to resolve this paradox, colonial governments 
began every new crisis by begging the crown for guns and troops, and 
ended it by frantically trying to recover those guns and get rid of 
the troops. The result, according to a careful student of the 
colonial Virginia militia, was that the militia never recovered from 
Bacon's Rebellion but instead sank into insignificance. 24...

One searches in vain through the colonial period for evidence of 
Americans armed with guns rising to defend their liberties, whether 
in organized militia units or unorganized crowds. There were some 
insurrections, the first act of which was generally an effort to lay 
hands on English muskets. But these uprisings peaked in the period 
from Bacon's Rebellion through the Glorious Revolution, and there 
would not be another major domestic upheaval until the Stamp Act 
Crisis in 1765.

White Americans would, however, rise up to defend slavery. Colonial 
governments were willing to distribute, use, and even give away their 
valuable firearms in support of slavery. Virginia was typical in its 
offer of a gun and two blankets to any Indian who returned a runaway 
slave to bondage; South Carolina offered two guns or four blankets. 
44 Faced with the slightest threat to their system of slavery, white 
Americans did not hesitate to battle and kill black Americans. But 
then, suppressing slave rebellions was the primary function of the 
militia in several colonies. 45

Michael Bellesiles, "Disarming Early American History," 
<http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-01/arming/>, & 
<http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-01/arming/arming-2.shtml> 
*****
-- 
Yoshie

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