First Freedom Page 9

  It was the English Bill of Rights, a document cataloging the crimes of James II and codifying the “ancient and indubitable” rights of English citizens in 1689, that would in many ways be the blueprint for the American revolutionaries. It was a unique document because it listed the ways that the authority of the Crown was to be limited. One such limitation forbid the disarming of the populace (in part a reaction to James II’s Catholic officers disarming Protestants). “These the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law,” it read. Whether this clause largely concerned a potential Catholic coup or not, it transformed into something much deeper in American life. By 1765, William Blackstone, whose writings helped define the English common law legal system, affirmed “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.”6 The revolutionaries relied on Blackstone’s writing to confirm their own claim to resist tyranny with the musket. “To vindicate these rights, says Mr. Blackstone,” wrote Samuel Adams in 1769, “when actually violated or attack’d, the subjects of England are entitled first to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law—next to the right of petitioning the King and parliament for redress of grievances—and lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.”7

  The responsibility of self-defense—for yourself and your community—would be coupled with the right to own property. Republicanism was an American credo, and colonists—not only among political leaders, businessmen, and intellectuals, but men of God as well—took these ideas and shaped them to make sense in their own situation. “Some of the ministers,” wrote a Tory in the days leading up to the Revolution, “are continually in their sermons stirring up the people to resistance.”8 It was true. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the colonists would see themselves in both the political and moral right.

  One such man, Reverend Jonathan Parsons, a well-regarded Presbyterian minister in Newburyport, Massachusetts, told his flock in 1774 that defending one’s liberty—or “repair[ing] our injuries at the point of the sword”—was a moral imperative, “for if one man may defend himself and his rights against an assailant, much more may a whole country defend themselves when their rights are invaded, because the concern is greater.”9 The Reverend Simeon Howard, speaking the same year, argued that Christianity was not incompatible with the notions of self-defense of those who fought in the Revolution: “Defending ourselves by force of arms against injurious attacks, is a quite different thing from rendering evil for evil. The latter implies doing hurt to another, because he has done hurt to us; the former implies doing hurt to another, if he is hurt in the conflict only because there is no other way of avoiding the mischief he endeavours to do us: the one proceeds from malice and revenge; the other merely from self-love, and a just concern for our happiness, and argues no ill will against any man.”10

  Howard would go on to praise militias over standing armies, an idea that soon became one of the sticking points over the ratification of the Constitution. Many American notions of self-defense had been codified by the anti-military and anti-government sentiments that had been festering among English Protestants during the 1600s. The American apprehension over standing armies would persist for years.

  The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights lists the most vital freedoms of man. The second lists the only way to attain them and preserve them. Without the second, there is no first. It was in this context that the newly minted nation enshrined this natural right. The words written by James Madison in 1791, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” would not be controversial until the twentieth century when a seemingly ungrammatical comma plunked in the middle of this sentence offered a generation of gun-control advocates a justification to question whether individuals were afforded the right to self-defense.

  Modern anti-gun advocates argue that the Founding Fathers never imagined individuals would have a right to bear arms. The Second Amendment, they claim, was intended only to arm the militia. It is an expedient historical fantasy. In late eighteenth-century America, there was no debate over what those words meant. They were so self-evident that the only question was whether they were even necessary.

  As Justice Antonin Scalia noted two centuries later when reaffirming the right to bear arms, “The Amendment’s prefatory clause announced a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.” The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people,” just as the Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments do, all of which have been found to protect individual rights.

  Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, stressed the importance of self-defense and the individual right to bear arms. John Adams, in his 1770 defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, argued that all men had the inherent right to defend themselves. “Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority,” Adams said in his opening statement, “I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defense, not for offence.” But, the future president added, even soldiers of the Crown, even if they were unwanted and intrusive, had cause to defend themselves when assaulted by a mob. Self-defense was “the primary canon in the law of nature,” Adams argued, quoting Blackstone (emphasis mine).

  The revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine would note that locals in Boston “found it necessary to arm themselves with heavy Walking Sticks or Weapons of Defence” when they went outside. “Arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe . . . ,” he wrote. “Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.”11

  When Pennsylvania became the first colony to explicitly guarantee the right to bear arms, it was Benjamin Franklin who presided over the conference. In 1776, the year he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia stated, “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” (By the third draft, the sentence read: “No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements].” Many anti-gun advocates point to this parenthetical as evidence that Jefferson didn’t envision guns being carried outside of private property. But it is far more reasonable to suggest that parenthetical was an admonishment of the potential of British-style gaming laws that prohibited common men from hunting on their own lands.)12

  Jefferson’s amendment came too late and, in the end, it wasn’t adopted in the Constitution of Virginia. Instead the state used George Mason’s Declaration of Rights, which included the right of “the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state.” The same Mason also noted the importance of the militia and right to bear arms by reminding his compatriots of England’s efforts “to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them . . .”

  Many Americans, in fact, would soon see the Second Amendment as superfluous in a world filled with weapons. For one thing, they made little if any distinction between the militia and the individual, as the former does not function without the latter. While it is convenient for contemporary advocates of gun control to claim that evidence for individual gun rights is still inconclusive, what we do know for certain is that not a single soul in the provisional government or at the Second Continental Congress or any delegate at the Constitutional Convention—or, for that matter, any new American—ever argued against the idea of individuals owning a firearm. Not a single militia leader asked his men to hand over their firearms after the t
own’s drills had ended.

  The real point of contention between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Second Amendment was never about individual ownership. The Federalists argued that the Bill of Rights was not necessary because states would be empowered to run their own affairs. Anti-Federalists argued that the Bill of Rights would be another safeguard that protected individual liberty from federal control. Though no one debated the right of people to arm themselves, one of the most contentious debates over the Constitution revolved around who would have control of the militias, the states or the federal government.

  The skepticism regarding a standing army during peacetime went back to the English, and was regarded as one of the most obvious abuses of the Crown. The Boston Massacre in 1770 had moved many Americans further into the British Whig camp, which viewed peacetime armies as anathema to liberty. William Pitt, friend of the colonists, warned that in America, “these three millions of Whigs—three millions of Whigs, my Lords, with arms in their hands—are a very formidable body.”13 The founding generation was equally fearful of the idea of soldiers suppressing the rights of the people. An army should be temporary, raised and paid to fight foreign adversaries, not internal threats. Americans believed that militias, stocked with unpaid, ordinary civilians (which is to say armed), could repel invasions, deal with insurrections, and rise to the threat of tyranny.

  The Federalists’ position in this debate, however, is also testament to just how widespread individual ownership of guns was among the populace. They contended that concerns over protections from government were overblown because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable that any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the general public. Noah Webster, writing as “A Citizen of America,” reasoned that “the supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.”14

  During the debate over the Bill of Rights, Samuel Adams proposed that the Constitution should “never [be] construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies . . .”15 Richard Henry Lee, Sam Adams, and Patrick Henry littered their constitutional arguments with explicit mentions of individuals keeping arms.

  In Federalist 46, Madison also defended the Constitution by offering the opinion that a standing army was acceptable because the size of the armed civilian population creates a balance of power that guards against abuses. “Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,” Madison wrote, “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments of the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

  The Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, by nine of the original thirteen colonies. However, five states—Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire—demanded the Bill of Rights be adopted by Congress. Within that text of these demands, every one of them asked that the right to bear arms be afforded special mention. New Hampshire’s language was the most compact: “Congress shall never disarm any Citizen unless such as are or have been in Actual Rebellion.”16 (Emphasis added.)

  Robert Whitehill, a delegate from Pennsylvania, proposed a number of amendments to the Constitution that many historians believe were used by James Madison as a guide for his own text. One of them was a right to bear arms. “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals . . .” After numerous drafts, James Madison simplified the language and distilled it to its essential parts, throwing in a comma, as we’ll see, that would be seized upon many years later.

  The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

  There are modern Americans who find the very notion of the individual right in the Second Amendment violent, ugly, and antiquated—particularly the idea that it empowers individuals to rise up against domestic tyranny. It is true that the founding generation didn’t intend to bestow Americans with a license to rebel. Rather, they believed in the right to rebel against a government that undermines the rights of the people and thus the nation itself. Whether it required repelling hostile Indians, the French, the Dutch, or ultimately the British, for the founding generation self-defense was the principal manifestation of their rights, universal and inalienable. Now guns would take on a different role. The onetime colonists were in charge of their own destinies. They turned their gaze from Europe to the vast lands of the West over the next one hundred years. They waged war against the indigenous populations of those lands and, soon enough, each other. In the meantime, they constructed a system of unimaginable wealth. They did most of it with the help of guns.

  PART II

  DISCOVERY

  Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap

  8

  GO WEST

  “A good gun, a good horse and a good wife.”

  —Daniel Boone

  Daniel Boone by Alonzo Chappel, 1862

  On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery, the unit of the United States Army that would form the nucleus of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, gathered in Camp Dubois, near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, to kick off their historic journey. As the final provisions were being loaded onto the keelboat and two pirogues that would sail north up the Mississippi and then into the largely unknown continent, one of the men went from boat to boat testing out the swivel guns that had been mounted on each of the vessels.

  One of the guns the men tested that day was likely a small-bore cannon, while the other two were blunderbusses. The blunderbuss was a short smoothbore gun, typically with a flared muzzle that looked something like a bell-bottom. Some historians believe the gun’s name originated from the Dutch words meaning thunder and pipe. Whatever the case, the brawny weapon could be loaded with up to seven musket balls, scrap or iron, and stones.1 Its lock could withstand moisture more effectively than the average musket’s, making it popular with the British Navy and other seafaring types. In some ways it was like the shotguns of the future: devastating at close range. To mount such guns on swivels allowed for a wide arc of movement, making it perilous for anyone who might be thinking about ambushing the boats.

  These guns would, as far as we know, be loaded only twice in anticipation of violence. More often than not, they were used to impress the locals—or, more specifically, to impress and deter locals from any thought of attacking—or for saluting crowds, which was why they were fired at around four p.m. the day the men left on their journey. The guns were shot again to greet the boats in St. Louis two and a half years later, on September 23, 1806. Between those two dates, Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark traversed more than 8,000 miles of largely unexplored terrain, losing only one of their men due to a ruptured appendix.

  Lewis and Clark departed the East Coast right before the dawn of the first industrial age, an era that saw great leaps forward in gun technology. At the time Lewis was first procuring his muskets for the western expedition, most of the soldiers and hunters in North America might be able to fire their guns twice in a minute. By the end of the century, men would be able to shoot hundreds of times in that span without ever having to manually reload. They would be able to do this with smokeless powder, self-contained cartridges, and telesc
opic sights. In a number of ways, Lewis and Clark’s journey portended the technological possibilities of the coming century.

  With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States had attained approximately 828,000 square miles of territory from France, stretching from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. At the eminently affordable price of three cents per acre, President Thomas Jefferson had doubled the size of the republic. Fifteen states would, fully or in part, be carved out of the land procured in this one deal. In the same year, Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery to follow the Missouri River west, past the Continental Divide, to the Columbia River, by which the men could journey to the Pacific Ocean.

  The entire Lewis and Clark trip cost the United States government approximately $40,000 (around $8 million today). Yet it helped to forever cement the nation as the dominant power of North America, setting the stage for a century of explorers, trappers, traders, hunters, adventurers, prospectors, homesteaders, ranchers, soldiers, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and masses of Americans spurring a rapid settlement of this vast land. The peopling of the West gave birth to a new culture, disrupted the cultures of the American Indian, and ultimately created the most dynamic economy in the world. Guns would be a vital tool in this project, not only as a means of self-defense and war, but for hunting, trading, and exploration.