Arming America

The epigraph to Michael Bellesiles’s brilliant new book is taken from one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, “The Sign of the Broken Sword”:

“I am only looking for one word,” said Father Brown. “A word that isn’t there.” … “Right you are,” said the big man called Flambeau cheerfully. “Let us be gin at the wrong end. Let’s begin with what everybody knows, which isn’t true.”

What “everybody knows” about Americans and guns is that we have always been a gun-toting people. In the Colonial era, the distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin explains, “the requirements for self-defense and food-gathering had put firearms in the hands of nearly everyone.” Similar observations appear again and again in scholarly works and popular histories.

And these statements about America’s unique gun culture often go further still, not simply asserting that our forebears packed iron out of practical necessity but insisting that guns answer to something intrinsic to the American psyche, rooted in the fierce spirit of in dependence and the lightly suppressed readiness for violence celebrated in movies like The Patriot.

So, Bellesiles observes, faced with extraordinarily high levels of gun violence—with schoolyard massacres and drive-by shootings and lethal rampages by disgruntled employees—”many if not most Americans seem resigned to, or find comfort in, the notion that this violence is immutable, the product of a deeply imbedded historical experience rooted in the frontier heritage.” After all, everybody knows that it has always been this way.

Everybody knows—but as Bellesiles shows in the course of this massively documented, superbly argued narrative, what “everybody knows” is simply not true. Far from being nearly universal in early America, “gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier.”

Much of Arming America is devoted to making the case for that counterintuitive conclusion. By the time Bellesiles is done, the conventional wisdom has been demolished. Along the way he touches on many familiar subjects in American history, from relations between whites and Indians in the Colonial era to the fabled shootouts in Dodge City and Tombstone. Always he challenges preconceptions, offering in their place fresh perspectives.

Arming America will thus be both a blessing and a curse for many readers, for its abundant notes and references will leave them with a formidable list of books that they too now want to read, spurred by Bellesiles’s narrative. “It is the nature of the historian to always want to look further,” he confesses, “to uncover more buried truths, to allow those who once lived to speak again in their own voices.” You believe him when he says, in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, that he worked on it for ten years—and you believe him, too, when he thanks his editor at Knopf for persuading him to stop and publish his findings, else he would still be rooting around in obscure archives. Clearly this is a man who is interested in everything.

The story begins long before the first European colonists came to North America. With a quick overview of “The European Gun Heritage,” Bellesiles reminds us just how long it took for the gun to become an efficient weapon. In England as late as the 1700s there were campaigns to bring back the longbow! Whereas guns and powder were expensive, and guns required skilled maintenance that was always in short supply, bows and arrows were cheap (arrows were generally reusable) and did not require the equivalent of gunsmiths to be maintained in working order.

To attain proficiency for military purposes, intensive training and routine practice were required for gun and bow alike. As the English army increasingly relied on firearms, the government “not only outlawed the use of guns by commoners, but also discouraged their use of bows and arrows.” The notion was that these arms should be restricted to military use by trained personnel. So “by the dawn of the seventeenth century, firearms ownership in England had been limited to the elite and the government.”

But even when used by trained men, seventeenth-century guns were highly unreliable. And this introduces a theme that runs all the way through Arming America: the vast majority of our conceptions of gun use prior to the American Civil War are grossly distorted by anachronisms. We see historical movies in which combatants shoot and reload their weapons with a rapidity and an accuracy never attained before the modern gun era. And unless it is a Monty Python film, say, we rarely see the routine accidents that added a hideous black comedy to gun use.

This was the setting, then, from which the first colonists came: hardly a picture that accords with the popular image of the frontiersman with his ever-present gun. Moreover, as Bellesiles notes, the England from which these colonists came in the seventeenth century was among the

least militaristic of European powers. … Like all European nations, England had its forms and rituals of violence. But guns did not enter into the common understanding of violence. Few common people, except those serving in the military, ever had occasion to even hold a gun, let alone own one.

Unsurprisingly—though contradicting the received wisdom—Bellesiles finds the same patterns in Colonial America. “The history of the first hundred and fifty years of settlement in America,” he writes, “is of a people fairly hesitant to act, and then usually in a nonviolent manner, except, tragically, when race was involved.” Indeed, when during this period colonists were drummed into militias to fight the French, their British officers were exasperated and often disgusted by the ineptness of the American troops, who not only displayed ignorance of firearms but seemed altogether unmilitary.

Few colonists used guns even for hunting. Cooper’s Deerslayer was the exception, not the rule. Few colonists hunted at all, in fact—they bought or traded for their meat—and those who did hunt largely relied on trapping. In contrast, Indians were hunters—and in their warrior cultures, so different from the farming culture of the colonists, guns were enormously valued.

Here Bellesiles takes down another myth:

Guns supposedly granted European settlers the technological edge in their conquest of North America. Yet in reality it was disease and the devastation wrecked by the continual flow of European immigrants that guaranteed their victory. Guns played a lesser, though interesting role, especially as a trade object that tied many Indians to the Europeans. Paradoxically, the Europeans transformed those they feared most, the American Indians, into the world’s first true gun culture.

While Bellesiles focuses on this paradoxical transformation, his chapter on Indians and firearms is one of the best concise accounts I have ever read of this bitter conflict at the origins of America: unsentimental about the Indians and the colonists.

The Revolutionary War introduced thousands of colonists to the military use of firearms, but its effect on American attitudes toward guns and their peacetime use was far less significant than might be expected. In part this had to do with the nature of late eighteenth-century warfare. In a fascinating and sobering excursus, Bellesiles shows how, beginning with the Duke of Cumberland’s bloody victory over Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746, the terrible efficiency of the bayonet was established.

British troops at Culloden and thereafter were trained to “hold their fire until the enemy came into firing range (about ten yards), fire once, and then use the bayonet,” if possible catching the enemy in the act of reloading. Bayonets did not miss, or misfire, or explode, as guns of that period often did. (“In 1811,” Bellesiles writes, “the English armaments experts William Muller determined that, at best, the contemporary musket had a one-in-four misfire rate and that only half of those balls that did leave the barrel of a musket could impart harm at one hundred yards.”) In the Revolutionary War, de spite the much-advertised success of “wilderness warfare” tactics learned from the Indians, the American colonists suffered a number of defeats in which the superiority of the bayonet was demonstrated. Indeed, Bellesiles writes,

The deadly thrusts of the bayonet at Culloden were replicated in every major land battle at least through World War II, and probably to the Falklands War in 1982. Frederick of Prussia simplified the lesson to an aphorism: “Fire as little as possible with infantry in battle: charge with the bayonet.”

The ultimate American victory in the Revolutionary War depended on the ability of trained soldiers to teach largely reluctant militiamen “to fight according to European standards.” Needless to say, this reality bears almost no resemblance to the myth “still evident in standard textbooks though long abandoned by historians of the period,” according to which “the heroic militia rushed to arms and picked off the British with excellent marksmanship from behind trees. That such a version is not validated by the sources, or by logic, is irrelevant,” Bellesiles observes: “Far too many people in the new nation required an idealized version of events to be troubled by the facts.”

But if even after the Revolutionary War only a relatively small percentage of the American people routinely handled firearms—Bellesiles estimates that “at no time prior to 1850 did more than a tenth of the people own guns”—and if, despite the myth of the sharpshooting militia, the gun was not writ large in Americans’ conception of their national identity, what happened to bring about the transformation to the gun culture we know so well?

The answer, Bellesiles suggests, lies not in the distinctive propensity to violence that many cultural psychoanalysts claim to have detected in the dark recesses of the American psyche but rather in an unpredictable convergence of events: the rise of an American “sporting culture” on the English model in the 1820s and 1830s; the industrialization of the arms industry beginning in the 1840s; and finally and most crucially, the Civil War.

Just as American writers in the early decades of the republic tended to imitate British models, so Americans who sought to certify themselves as “gentlemen” looked to the sporting culture of the British aristocracy. Horse racing, fishing, hunting (a pastime widely mocked in the American popular press in the first decades of the nineteenth century): these and other outdoor activities were extolled in magazines such as Spirit of the Times and the American Turf Register.

To perform such activities in the company of one’s fellows was not only a mark of the gentleman; it was a sign of manliness. (Here was one manifestation of a larger pattern in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture: an increasing anxiety about male and female roles.) This was the context in which, “as the 1830s proceeded, the word ‘manly’ became ever more intimately linked with the use of a gun.” And in the same decade,

the first loving descriptions of every detail of a firearm appeared in print. No longer was it sufficient to say “He held a musket in his arms.” From this date the dedicated author of hunting articles had to have the precise name and maker of the piece noted, with sensual descriptions of the well-oiled stock and the long, gleaming barrel, as well as the delicate intricacies of the lock.

These forerunners of Tom Clancy spread the word, with the result that “a new gun-centered subculture could be discovered in the sudden popularity of pistols, the creation of urban pistol galleries, and the increased number of hunting clubs in the 1840s.”

At just the same historical moment, innovations in the gun industry made possible for the first time the large-scale production of more or less uniform firearms, far more reliable than anything before them. The gunmaker Samuel Colt, whose pistols were given cachet by their employment in the 1846 Mexican War, relied not only on technical ingenuity but on an uncanny instinct for the new art of advertising to create a demand for his product. By the mid-1850s, Bellesiles writes, gunmakers had

convinced an ever-wider audience that they needed guns in order to be real Americans. By the middle of the decade, the subculture of firearms enthusiasts had be come mainstream, with middle-class men joining prestigious militia units and hunting clubs, and with pistols be coming a popular murder weapon. Though the majority of adult white males remained ignorant of firearms and their use, a large minority of Americans found confidence in their guns and longed to demonstrate their proficiency. They would get their opportunity.

That opportunity came, of course, in the Civil War—which, in Bellesiles’s mordant summary, demonstrated “the need for one American to be able to kill another.” Moreover, “only the official murder ended in April 1865; an unofficial explosion of homicide followed the war.” And while popular accounts of postbellum violence in the South and the West should often be filed under Tall Tales, nevertheless the transition to a “gun culture” was complete.

Bellesiles declines to spell out the implications of his study for current debates over gun control: “What an historian says has little impact on present conditions.” Still, he concludes, “at the very least, the study of the past may impart this one valuable lesson: that nothing in history is immutable.”

Certainly Arming America provides a corrective to one strain of the propaganda disseminated by the NRA. Like abortion advocates who resist any restrictions whatsoever on a “woman’s right to choose,” even in the case of partial-birth abortions, the gun-rights absolutists reject even the most modest restrictions on the American citizen’s right to arm himself to the teeth. When, after his selection as George W. Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney was asked about his voting record in the House—where he was one of only 25 to vote against a ban of so-called “cop-killer” bullets, and one of only four to vote against a ban on plastic pistols that, so critics feared, could elude airport detectors—Cheney invoked the sacred legacy of the Second Amendment. Arming America shows that such appeals to the Constitution are a preposterous sham.1

But the tangled tale Bellesiles tells so well hardly lends comfort either to those for whom the gun is the root of all evil. If one lesson of Arming America is that our gun culture is not immutable, burned into the national DNA, another is that history defies the pious simplicities of national mythmakers and self-styled revisionists alike. What this book has to offer is nothing more and nothing less than the exhilarating quest to understand the past as it was.

Footnotes

1. See especially pp. 207-17. It should be noted that as criticism of his voting record in the House mounted, Cheney reversed himself, saying that today he would support those bans.