Fall From Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal (Part 1)
Bellesiles has
dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early
history in America. He
provides overwhelming evidence that our
view of the gun is as
deep a superstition as any that affected Native
Americans in the 17th
century.
—Garry Wills, New
York Times1
Before
there was a scandal, there was a book—Michael A. Bellesiles’s
Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. In this Review, I
not
only discuss the book, benefiting from some of the substantial published
and
unpublished literature on it, but review a little of the controversy—at
least
the controversy as I understand it at the beginning of 2002.
Let
me state my biases up front: I dislike guns; I have never owned a
gun;
I have not touched one since the age of nine. Yet I don’t understand
the
passion that people bring to the issue of their regulation. My own prior
writing
on guns has been on the pro-gun-control side of the dispute, and
some
of it is so free from passion as to be soporific.2
Arming
America is
a well-written and compelling story of how early
Americans
were largely unfamiliar with guns until the approach of the Civil
War.
It tells a wide-ranging, detailed, but relatively unnuanced story of
gunlessness
in early America. Bellesiles writes: “[T]he vast majority of
those
living in British North American colonies had no use for firearms,
which
were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use.” 3
According
to Bellesiles, in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early
nineteenth-century
America there were very few guns.4 Privately owned
guns
were mostly in poor working condition.5 By law, guns were not kept
in
the home but rather stored in central armories,6 and guns were too
expensive
for widespread private ownership.7 He even claims that men
generally
were unfamiliar with guns and that they did not want guns8—
preferring
axes and knives instead, in part because guns were so inaccurate
that
they were of little use. He argues that few settlers hunted,9 and implies
that
axes made very good weapons in hunting.10 According to Arming
America, in battle “the ax [was
often considered] the equal of a gun.” 11
Bellesiles
claims that states enacted laws that restricted gun ownership
to
white Protestants who owned property.12 White-on-white homicide was
rare
in colonial America, according to Bellesiles, and guns were rarely the
weapon
used in homicides.13
Guns were not
culturally important, either:
Travel
narratives do not show that guns were part of everyday life,14 even
on
the frontier, and few people even wanted to own guns.15 At least in
probate
records, women did not own guns.16 Since
there were few guns, the
laws
passed in the early nineteenth century restricting the right to carry
concealed
weapons were directed at knives,17 not
guns. He further claims
that
the background of the Second Amendment shows that the Anti-
Federalists
had no problem with restricting militia membership to those
above
the lower social classes.18
Last, with a
few exceptions, the militia
were
extremely ineffective.19
Two
meta-arguments by Bellesiles might have direct public policy
applications
(though, as a work of history, Arming America does not
directly
advocate any gun policies). One is that guns and violence go
together.
In early America, he claims, we had very low gun ownership and
low
homicide rates; after the Civil War, we had lots of guns and high
homicide
rates.20 The second is that if guns
were not widely owned, then it
is
unlikely that gun owning was understood as an individual right in the
Second
Amendment.
Since
the book’s publication, scholars who have checked the book’s
claims
against its sources have uncovered an almost unprecedented number
of
discrepancies, errors, and omissions. When these are taken into account,
a
markedly different picture of colonial America emerges: Household gun
ownership
in early America was more widespread than today (in a much
poorer
world).
Arming
America is
changing the way that some historians think about
their
own profession and how some scholars in fields allied to history
regard
historical research and publishing. Understanding this book and the
scandal
it generated is important for scholars and teachers across the social
sciences,
humanities, and law. Any graduate or professional student who
aspires
to be an academic might profit by exploring the twists and turns of
the
Bellesiles scandal.
I. BEFORE THE BOOK
In
1996 a well-regarded, but relatively obscure, historian at Emory
University,
Michael A. Bellesiles, published an article in the Journal of
American
History (JAH).21 It urged a mostly novel
thesis about early
America—that
there were few guns and that there was no gun culture until
the
approach of the Civil War. His primary evidence was low counts of
guns
in probate records, gun censuses, militia muster records, and homicide
accounts.
The
data fit together almost too neatly. In particular, if anyone had
looked
closely at the probate data, they would have seen that it did not look
right.
The regional differences were suspiciously slight; the increases over
time
were extremely regular; the study did not indicate which counties were
in
which categories; and in most unconventional fashion, the probate data
were
published with no sample or cell sizes. The results were directly
contrary
to the existing literature counting guns in probate records,22
including
one source Bellesiles cited but did not discuss,23 all of which had
found
substantial numbers of guns.
Last,
the 1765-1790 data were mathematically impossible if there were
more
than about 200 cases in his sixteen Southern counties over the twenty-six-
year period,