“Lay down your arms”: Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 189–91.
Firing a victory volley: Arthur Bernon Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 138.
“The farmers gave them ball for ball”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2000), 365.
“The fighting on this day”: Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 202–3.
four thousand militiamen: John R. Galvin, The Minute Men (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 1989), 2–3.
“hearing the Lexington Alarm”: A point made by Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, xvi.
being armed was a duty: For a comprehensive and groundbreaking look at how Founding Era Americans saw bearing arms as a civic right, see Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Machiavelli’s ideas were widely influential: See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, Revised and with an Introduction by Neal Wood (New York: Da Capo, 2001).
a book of science fiction: James G. Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’ and ‘A System of Politics’ (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; paperback ed.), 55.
the colonists believed powerfully in duty: See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1992; rev. ed.) and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).
influenced by so-called radical British political thought: Bailyn notes that the Anti-Federalists who later opposed the Constitution drew much inspiration from the political thought present at the beginning of the Revolution in 1776. Two important early articles spelled out the implications of this ideology for militia policy: Lawrence Delbert Cress, “An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms,” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (1984): 22–42. A different early approach to the same material is found in Robert E. Shalhope, “The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment,” Journal of American History 69, no. 3 (1982): 599–614. Shalhope argues that the Founders did intend an individual right to bear arms, but were influenced in this by their belief in the militias.
“trained band”: Lois Schwoerer, No Standing Armies: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 14–15.
militia service was for everyone: Robert H. Churchill, “Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment,” Law and History Review 25, no. 1 (2007): 144–49.
Sir Francis Bacon: Quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989; paperback ed.), 155.
“In a militia, the character of the labourer”: Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV–V (New York: Penguin, 1999), 287.
“a species of animals”: Pamphleteers quoted in Morgan, Inventing the People, 162.
One colonist explained: Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe 44 (1956), quoted in David C. Williams, “Civic Republicanism and the Citizen Militia: The Terrifying Second Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 101 (1992–93): 551, 574.
“near neighbourhood of the Indians and French”: Contemporary writer quoted in Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia, 13.
They mustered often, drilled frequently: Galvin, The Minute Men, 6–7.
In New England, militias elected their commanding officers: John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 22–34.
At times they were balky: Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 163–64.
Some paid others to do their time: John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987), 17–18.
Exemptions and excuses abounded: For discussion of the weakness of the militia, see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 27.
“it seems never to have crossed the introspective mind of young John Adams”: Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 31. Perhaps, like a future vice president, Dick Cheney, he had “other priorities . . . than military service.” Katherine Q. Seelye, “Cheney’s Five Draft Deferments During Vietnam Era Emerge as a Campaign Issue,” New York Times, May 1, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/politics/campaign/01CHEN.html?pagewanted=print.
Colonial legislatures repeatedly passed laws: Wills, A Necessary Evil, 28.
militia members demanded that the government provide guns: Kevin M. Sweeny, “Firearms, Militias and the Second Amendment,” in Saul Cornell and Nathan Kozuskanich, eds., The Second Amendment on Trial: Critical Essays on District of Columbia v. Heller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 364.
The colonies had few gun factories: When the American Revolution began, the colonists first seized British arms. Virginia and Pennsylvania opened state foundries. The colonies also signed contracts with gunmakers, and tried to buy arms in Europe. (Ultimately, France became the arsenal of our nascent democracy.) See Lee Kennett and James LaVerne Anderson, The Gun in America: Origins of a National Dilemma (Westport: Greenwood, 1975), 84–85.
Many militiamen showed up: Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 161.
“When no danger was in the offing”: Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992; 3rd ed.), 68.
“But most Americans were content with the festivity”: Morgan, Inventing the People, 170.
Britain’s Stamp Act of 1765 changed that: For a general discussion of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and the colonial response, see Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, 70–173.
Britain imposed an arms embargo: Stephen Halbrook, The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 74.
Massachusetts’s Provincial Congress responded: Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 151–53.
townspeople kept the powder beneath the pulpit: Ibid., 159.
Massachusetts enacted a law: Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 24.
Rage Militaire: See Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2012), 3. He notes that “Virtue, the old Roman credo, clad itself in a uniquely American garb. Hunting shirts, belts, and leggings became fashionable, what a later era might term militia chic.”
yearning for democracy: The militias that formed at the Revolution’s outset in Pennsylvania, for example, included many men who did not appear on the tax rolls. Militias were “the first step from crowd activity to organized politics.” They were a “school for political democracy.” Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; paperback ed.), 64–65.
Declaration of Rights passed by the Virginia legislature: Bernard Schwartz, ed., The Bill of Rights: A Documentary History, Volume I (New York: Chelsea House/McGraw-Hill, 1971), 235.
“every man who pays his shot”: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009; rev. ed.), 12.
Pennsylvania’s charter: Schwartz, ed., The Bill of Rights, I, 263.
citizens could “keep” as well as “bear” arms: For a concise description of the differences among the state constitutions, see William S. Fields and David T. Hardy, “The Militia and the Constitution: A Legal History,” Military Law Review (1992): 27–31.
The men who wrote the Constitution: See generally Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
the bumbling first expedition: For Washington’s sour experiences in the Virginia militia, see Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 71.
“Colonel Washingt
on appears at Congress”: John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 29, 1775, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0138, ver. 2013-08-02; source: Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., vol. 1 of The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, December 1761–May 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 207–8.
“He has so much martial dignity”: Chernow, Washington, 183.
“now the troops of the United Provinces”: Ibid., 195.
as he rode through camp: James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 68.
He wrote his brother: George Washington to Samuel Washington, July 20, 1775, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0083, ver. 2013-08-02; source: Philander D. Chase, ed., vol. 1 of The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, 16 June 1775–15 September 1775 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 134–36.
“are nearly of the same kidney”: Chernow, Washington, 196.
“Whole divisions”: Ibid., 261.
“To place any dependence upon Militia”: George Washington to the President of Congress, September 24, 1776, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 112.
General Charles Lee: The maneuverings of Washington’s rival are described in Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 41. Lee was court-martialed for retreating against orders during the Battle of Monmouth, convicted, and died before war’s end.
“zeal and alacrity of the militia”: Ibid.
“As to the Minute Men”: Ibid.
Congress drafted: Articles of Confederation, sec. 6, par. 4, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/artconf.asp.
“remained primarily a technique”: Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 267.
But only one third of the American forces: John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 41.
General Jeremiah Wadsworth reported: Morgan, Inventing the People, 162, quoting The Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States, 3rd Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C., 1855) (Annals of Congress, III), 162, January 6, 1794. Cf. ibid., II, 796.
“Would any Man in his Senses”: Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 37.
“I had as many sore legs”: Thomas Jefferson to John Page, October 29, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0564.
Militias kept order: Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 45.
In parts of the country: Mark V. Kwasny, “Militia Guerilla Warfare, Tactics, and Weaponry,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 314–15.
In the South, militias were beefed up: A. Leon Higgenbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 259–61.
“In the early stages of this war”: George Washington to John Sullivan, December 17, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-04257, ver. 2013-08-02.
Communities celebrated with giant feasts: Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 360–63.
By March 1783: Washington’s performance at Newburgh is underappreciated as a key moment in American history. See Flexner, Washington, 168. (“Almost every revolution in the history of the world, however idealistically begun, had ended in tyranny. The American Revolution had now reached its moment of major political crisis.”) For compelling retellings, see Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father (New York: Free Press, 1996), 41–45; Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), 6–9.
“open the flood Gates”: George Washington address to Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783, www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/t-2437.09443.pdf.
When news finally arrived from Paris: H. Richard Uviller and William C. Merkel, The Militia and the Right to Arms, or How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 117.
Society of the Cincinnati: The society drew its name from the Roman general Cincinnatus, who was returned to civilian life after military service. For a discussion of the impact of classical history on eighteenth-century American leaders, see Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment.
Mercy Warren: Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle in Philadelphia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 188.
he sketched out a plan: Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians (New York: Free Press, 1973), 181.
Washington persuaded the state’s governor: Morgan, Inventing the People, 172.
“critical period”: Adams’s address is quoted in Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 379; see also John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888).
“Notwithstanding the most pressing orders”: David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of An Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 80.
ordered militiamen to march into Great Barrington: Leonard L. Richards, Shays’ Rebellion: The Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12.
agrarian army: Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 85–86, 104–5.
Properly rattled: Washington’s friends did all they could to alarm him about the rebellion. David O. Stewart, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 14–16.
Virginian James Madison arrived early: For Madison’s outsized role and biography, see Irving Brant, James Madison: Father of the Constitution (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1950); Ralph Ketchum, James Madison (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971). For a brisk description of Madison’s eagerness and his influence at the convention, see Richard Brookhiser, James Madison (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 50–54.
he confessed to Washington: Letter from James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, in The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, chap. 8, doc. 6, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch8s6.html, University of Chicago Press; The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77, vols. 1–10; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977– vols. 11– ).
“enlarge the sphere”: Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985) (first published in vols. 2–3 of The Papers of James Madison, Washington, 1840) (June 6, 1787), 76.
“control the centrifugal tendency”: Ibid. (June 8, 1787), 89.
Fully one third had served as officers in the Continental Army: Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787, 317.
many of the most influential backers of the Constitution: Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly 76, no. 2 (1961): 181–216. David Hackett Fischer argues this thesis was considerably overstated, and that there was little statistically significant difference in the ages of Federalists and Anti-Federalists. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 105–6. Pauline Maier notes that the leading voices of the pro-Constitution forces—especially Madison, John Jay, and Hamilton—were born decades after Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Samuel Adams. See Pauline Maier, “On Faith and Generations in Revolutionary Politics,” The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Random House, 1980), 269–94; see also Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 238.
Many who laud him as “Father of the Constitution”: A point made by Brant, James Madison, 155.
the Constitution gives Congress the power: U.S. Constitution, art. 2, § 8, cl.
12–16.
A division of military authority: See Uviller and Merkel, The Militia and the Right to Arms, 78.
“The particular two-year cutoff meshed perfectly”: Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 51.
“two or three thousand” men: Notes of Debates (August 18, 1787), 482.
“no foreign enemy should invade the United States”: George Washington’s stage whisper is recounted in David Robertson, The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Really Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 207. See also Charles Warren, The Making of the Constitution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), quoted in Collier and Collier, Decision in Philadelphia, 323.
“A standing army is like a standing member”: Gerry’s blue humor is found, among other places, in Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972; rev. ed.), 398–99.
“subdue a rebellion in any state”: Notes of Debates (August 6, 1787), 389.
“One senses the excitement”: Bowen, Miracle in Philadelphia, 218.
“letting loose the myrmidons”: Notes of Debates (August 17, 1785), 475.
“We first form a strong man to protect us”: Ibid.
“call forth the aid of the militia”: Notes of Debates (August 6, 1787), 389.
“Thirteen states will never concur in any one system”: Ibid., (August 18, 1787), 478.
Madison made clear: Ibid., 484.
John Dickinson of Pennsylvania proposed: Ibid., 483.
“The states will never submit to the same militia laws”: Ibid., 484.
“make laws for organizing, arming”: Ibid., (August 23, 1787), 512.
“is making the states drill-seargents”: Ibid., 513.
“The primary object”: Ibid., 514–15.
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