Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.

• Author: Finkelman, Paul
• Position: Review

ARMING AMERICA: THE ORIGINS OF A NATIONAL GUN CULTURE. By Michael A. Bellesiles. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2000. Pp. 16, 603. Cloth, $30; paper, $16.

Every American had a musket hanging over his fireplace at night, and by his side during the day. Like Cincinnatus, time and again Americans dropped their plows to shoulder their arms, to fight the Indians, the French, the Indians, the British, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Indians yet again, and then, from 1861 to 1865, each other. American men were comfortable with guns; they needed them and wanted them. They felt at home in woods, in search of food, or in defense of their homesteads.

It is a story as old as our first pulp novels and earliest movies. It is larger than John Wayne and as real to us as Ronald Reagan narrating Death Valley Days. And, as Michael Bellesiles (1) persuasively demonstrates, it is largely untrue.

In Arming America, Michael Bellesiles challenges -- indeed, demolishes -- the pervasive notion that America was always a nation of gun owners, gun users, and most importantly, gun lovers. While vulnerable to some criticism, (2) this is one of the most important books in American history of the last decade. It has gathered great praise and at least one major award, the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history. Bellesiles offers a full scale, and for the most part successful, attack on one of the most persistent myths of American culture: that throughout our early history Americans were a gun-toting people, skilled at shooting and hunting, often violent, using their guns to defend their honor or just to settle an argument, and ready at a moment's notice to grab musket and powder horn to defend their homes and homeland.

The story Bellesiles tells is different, persuasive, and, most of all, logical. Bellesiles makes many contributions to our understanding of guns in early America, many of which run counter to our myths but logically dovetail with what else we know about society. For example, Bellesiles demonstrates that:

1) Guns, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, were expensive, costing the equivalent of two months' wages (p. 106). Before the 1750s, few outside of the upper class could afford them. From the first settlement until the eve of the Civil War, guns were scarce and largely unavailable. Indeed, there was a persistent shortage of guns, even for military purposes, from the earliest English settlements until the middle of the Civil War.

2) Hunting was a time consuming, inefficient way of finding food or making a living. While some men on the frontier hunted for a living, they were rare and relatively unsuccessful. Most Americans on the frontier were farmers, raising corn, hogs, and cattle. As scholars of the European invasion of the Americas have long known, domesticated animals and the ability to grow crops, especially wheat, were keys to the success of Europeans on the frontier. (3) Thus, as Bellesiles notes:

If a settler wanted meat, he did not pull his trusty and rusty musket, inaccurate beyond twenty yards, off the hook above the door and spend the day cleaning and preparing it.... To head off into the woods for two days in order to drag the carcass of a deer back to his family -- assuming he was lucky enough to find one, not to mention to kill it -- would have struck any American of the Colonial period as supreme lunacy. Far easier to sharpen the ax and chop off the head of a chicken or, as they all did in regular communal get-togethers, slaughter one of their enormous hogs, salting down the meat to last months. [p. 103] Even on the overland trail, hunting was time consuming and potentially dangerous. People who spent time hunting might not make it across the great plains in time to miss winter (pp. 341-42).

3) Americans had notoriously poor skills with weapons, and most did not know how to handle guns. Guns were complicated and difficult to maintain. Many fell into disrepair, became rusty, and were mostly useless. Almost every account of military recruiting and militia musters -- from the earliest colonial records through the beginning of the Civil War -- describes vast numbers of American men who never held a gun, had no idea how to shoot one, and most importantly, had no interest in learning.

4) The American militia was almost universally incompetent, and with a few notable exceptions, in all of America's wars the militia was rarely successful in battle. During the colonial wars, the Revolution, and the Civil War, Americans had to be trained not only to march and dig fortifications, but also to load and fire guns. Contrary to our popular myths, the American Revolution was not won by the militias, although clearly in a few important battles the militias were heroic, competent, and successful. Rather, the war was won by the national army, trained for the most part by professional soldiers from Europe, like Baron von Steuben, Tadeusz Koscuiszko, and the Marquis de Lafayette. (4)

5) Before the Civil War, guns were extremely complicated tools, requiring practice and skill to load and fire. A small miscalculation in the amount of powder placed in a gun could turn it into a harmless noisemaker or, just as easily, into a dangerous exploding device more likely to injure the one holding the gun than anyone else.

6) Bellesiles demonstrates that gun ownership did not become common until after the Civil War. The reason is largely economic and technological. During the war the United States rapidly and successfully expanded its production of weapons, developing new manufacturing technologies and new kinds of weapons. The end of the war left the nation with a surplus of guns and, just as significantly, a number of companies that faced bankruptcy if they did not find a new market for their product. Thus, advertising, entrepreneurship, and economies of scale led to the arming of America after the Civil War (p. 431). Tied to this development was the existence of millions of veterans now skilled in the use of guns, and thus able safely to handle them (pp. 428-29).

These are just some of the basics Bellesiles teaches as he forces us to unlearn our myth and to relearn American history.

For legal scholars, Bellesiles teaches a vital story that helps explain both our modern gun culture and the origin of the Second Amendment. The story shows that the personal ownership of weapons was not a central aspect of early American society and that, for the most part, guns were regulated. In addition, Bellesiles shows that while the militias of early America were for the most part underarmed, undertrained, and relatively incompetent, the image of the militia was a central myth in the development of the nation. At the end of the Revolution, Americans knew that "Republican ideology had not won the Revolution. The militia, Jefferson's repository of courage and virtue had not come through in times of ultimate crisis; the Continental army, the professional soldiers, had" (p. 207). But Americans desperately wanted to believe in the myth of the citizen-soldier. Thus, they enshrined the myth of the militia into their ideology. As historian Charles Royster notes, "Americans reclaimed the war from the army to whom they had tried to entrust it" and thus "[t]he future security of American independence would rest not on a military establishment but on public virtue. To believe that public virtue had the strength to sustain independence, Americans wanted to believe that public virtue had won it."(5)

Thus, after the Revolution, America wanted to assign the national defense to the militia. This was necessary because Americans had invested so much of their ideological energy in attacking the very idea of a standing army or a professional army that it was antithetical to the Revolution now to admit that Independence had been won by professional soldiers. But of course, many Americans who lived through the war, including such delegates to the Constitutional Convention as George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and General Charles Cotesworth, Pinckney knew better. They knew that a well-armed standing army, not an incompetent and underarmed militia, was necessary to the security of a free state. In framing the Constitution they provided for the development of such an army. The military provisions of Article I of the U.S. Constitution bear this out. (6) To satisfy the mythmakers and the need for the myth, however, the First Congress agreed to enshrine the militia, promising not to disarm it, as long as it was "well regulated" and under the authority of national government, as set out in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. In fact, as Bellesiles shows, the Second Amendment's promise not to disarm the well-regulated militias was meaningless, because for the most part the militias had no arms to begin with. As Bellesiles demonstrates, the people, both collectively and as individuals, were basically unarmed at the time the Bill of Rights was written.

1. HOW BELLESILES CLARIFIES WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW

   One of the central contributions of this book is that it helps make sense of American history and, by extension, American constitutional law. Since almost all scholars have labored under the myths about guns and the militia, there has always been a disconnect between what we knew about history and what we "knew" about guns and the militia. (7) A few examples of what almost all educated Americans "know" about our history underscore how Bellesiles's findings help us make sense of things. Essentially, by demythologizing our understanding of arms, gun ownership, and the militia, Bellesiles allows for a more coherent understanding of our past.

   1. Myth and Reality: Gun-Toting Americans and the Revolution

      We "know" that all Americans had guns at the beginning of the Revolution. They are over the fireplace in every colonial house that we have seen in the movies and on television. (8) But we also know from historical research that at the beginning of...