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Common-place is published quarterly, in October, January, April, and July.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay in September 2000, the same month that Arming America appeared in print. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the Final Report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

 

From Michael Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Knopf, 2000). Permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

There is a powerful and pervasive myth that America has always had a gun culture. This perception of the past informs works of scholarship, art and literature, film and television, and contemporary political debate. Few people question that frequent Indian wars and regular gun battles in the streets of every western town inured Americans to the necessity of violence. Many if not most Americans seem resigned to–indeed, even find comfort in–the notion that violence is immutable, the product of a deeply imbedded historical experience rooted in our frontier heritage. That frontiers elsewhere did not replicate America’s violent culture is thought irrelevant. Any questioning of this imagined past can bring harsh denunciations from defenders of the traditional vision, apparently because they find political capital in a vision of American history littered with guns. Even historians without a political objective accept this formulation of an America universally armed from the first days of European settlement. As one historian began her study of popular uprisings in early America, “Since the first adventurers waded ashore at Jamestown, Americans of all persuasions let their guns be heard when their voices in protest were ignored.” 1

 

The startling truth is that very little research has been undertaken into the history of America’s gun culture. Statements that eighteenth-century America was the most heavily armed society in the world are presented as logically obvious, sociological equivalents of Thomas Jefferson’s self-evident truths. Yet an examination of the social practices and cultural customs prevalent in early America suggest that we have it all backwards. Gun ownership was exceptional in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even on the frontier, and guns became a common commodity only with the industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century, after which gun ownership became concentrated in urban areas. America’s gun culture grew with its gun industry. That industry, in turn, relied on the government for capital development and for the support and enhancement of its markets. From its inception, the United States government worked to arm its citizens; it scrambled to find sources of weapons to fulfill the mandate of the Second Amendment. From 1775 until the 1840s the government largely failed in this task, but the industrialization of the arms industry allowed the government to move toward its goal with ever-increasing speed, in spite of public indifference and even resistance to gun ownership. 

The myth of universal gun ownership in early America is a perfect example of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. There is an assumption that what is must have been. It is nearly impossible to believe that the current advanced civilization of the United States could be so violent unless its more primitive predecessor had been even more enamored of guns. Such a perspective is, of course, profoundly unhistorical. But more importantly, it occurs in the absence of evidence; it is supported only by rational deductive logic: early Americans must have needed guns, therefore they must have had them. Often, the lack of evidence to support this argument is simply explained away: early Americans did not talk about their guns because they all had guns; probate records contain few firearms because the heirs looted the estate before the inventory. When confronted with evidence that the vast majority of young men in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century America had no idea how to use a gun, advocates of an eternal, universal American gun culture look the other way. Best to ignore such information and retain the myth, for otherwise it just might be conceivable that we are responsible for our own culture.

The modern United States, even after the various efforts to tighten restrictions on Federal Firearms Licenses with the 1994 Crime Bill, has more than 140,000 authorized sellers of firearms. There are far fewer bookstores and schools than gun shops, a situation that would have shocked the toughest resident of the early American frontier. For the modern U.S., guns are determinative; for early America, they served a limited function. It is possible, of course, to extract a few ripe quotations here and there which argue otherwise. But the aggregate, the normal experience of ordinary Americans, matters. In tracing that experience, the Civil War is critical; it is the moment when a large proportion of the country tried to replace elections with guns, and when millions of Americans first learned the art of war–and how to use a gun. An exact historic coincidence of increased productivity and demand occurred during the Civil War. American armsmakers took advantage of the latest technological breakthroughs to mass produce firearms, reaching levels of production which for the first time matched those in Europe. From that precise historical moment emerged a distinctive American gun culture, by which is meant not only a shared and widespread culture idolizing firearms, but also a fascination distinct from the popular attitude toward guns in all other cultures with which the U.S. shares basic values.

All historical investigation is tentative; this work is no exception. Historians build upon one another’s research, and test sources against generalizations. History, Gordon Wood reminds us, is “an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs.” It is my firm conviction that this precise accumulation of knowledge imparts at least one valuable lesson: that nothing in history is immutable.

Nowhere is the contradiction between fact and fancy more glaring than in the study of gun ownership in colonial America. Despite our popular perceptions of armed militiamen, gun-toting rebels, and firing Indian fighters, firearm usage was strictly limited for most of the colonial period. The ownership and use of firearms were constrained not merely by the law but also as a consequence of minimal availability and cultural attitudes. There were no gun manufactories in North America in the colonial period. None. All American firearms–with a very few exceptions–came from Europe. France, England, and the Netherlands led the world in gun production, with the lion’s share of that production going to their armies. But in England, at least, that production was far from sufficient even for military purposes. The disappointment of Charles I with the unarmed state of his volunteers during the Civil War was palpable. It is no wonder that Queen Henrietta rushed off to the Netherlands to trade her jewels for arms of all kinds. 2

Those firearms made for private use tended to be works of great beauty, the product of skilled European craftsmen creating luxury goods for the rich. Few of these guns found their way to North America in the seventeenth century. The vast majority of firearms crossing the Atlantic were sent by the government for military use. It was not until the end of the colonial period that any sort of market existed to justify the regular importation of firearms by merchants, or their production by the few gunsmiths scattered through North America. It is not surprising then that guns rarely saw use outside of warfare. 3

This is not to say that colonial America was a nonviolent society. It is to say that the vast majority of violence was state sanctioned, as demanded by contemporary political and cultural attitudes, and that individuals rarely used guns in their personal quarrels. Just as a close examination of seventeenth-century battles undermines the notion that guns were the decisive weapon, so court records and contemporary accounts of crowd actions are notable for the absence of firearms. It is important here to distinguish between violence and aggression. The first is a commission of physical harm upon another person, while the second is a posturing intended to frighten or intimidate without actual physical conflict. 4 Crowds in America were like those in Europe, relying primarily on intimidation to effect their ends, on the aggressive display of social power rather than on destructive injury. When they employed weapons, American crowds, like their European counterparts, wielded stones, clubs, and farm implements–not guns.

Whites rarely assaulted other whites and almost never killed each other. This attitude toward violence was no different from that in England, except in that urban hothouse of London. Crime rates in England remained very low through the eighteenth century, and it was not until 1829 that the English created their first police force. 5 Colonial court records offer very few cases of violence. There were 559 criminal actions in North Carolina between 1663 and 1740, forty-three of which (7.7%) were murders, an average of one homicide every two years. A study of eighteen years of Virginia’s seventeenth-century court records discovered twenty-three murder trials resulting in eleven homicide and four manslaughter convictions, or less than one murder a year. In the four years of 1736 to 1739, there were ten murders in Virginia, a notable increase to 2.5 murders per year. Only one murder is mentioned in the records of New Haven Colony, while in forty-six years Plymouth Colony’s courts heard five cases of assault, and not a single homicide. More common was Edward Jenkins’s charge that Morris Truant threatened to “break his scythe.” William Byrd exaggerated, but not much, when he wrote in 1726 that “We have neither publick Robbers nor private, which Your Ldsp will think very strange, when we have often needy Governors and pilfering Convicts sent among us.” 6

Until the 1760s, expressions of popular resistance to government authority remained localized, collapsing almost immediately and without violence in the face of a concerted display of force. Such a pattern was set early on. In the 1620s, the notorious “Lord of Misrule,” Thomas Morton, made himself obnoxious to the leaders of Plymouth Plantation by enjoying himself with drunken parties and trading guns and powder to the local Indians in violation of James I’s proclamation of 1622 (which was re-issued in 1630 at the request of the government of Massachusetts). Morton, who mocked the religiosity of the Pilgrims, refused to limit his trade or his festivals in any way. With evident reluctance, Plymouth sent a force of militia under Miles Standish to arrest Morton at his trading post at Merrymount. Morton and his followers vowed to defend their right to bear and trade arms, warning Standish that their muskets were loaded. According to William Bradford, it was fortunate that most of the muskets were not in fact properly loaded, for the people of Merrymount “were so steeled with drink as their pieces were too heavy for them.” No one was hurt, “save that one was so drunk that he ran his own nose upon the point of a sword . . . but he lost but a little of his hot blood.” And thus ended the story of free trade in firearms in colonial America. From that date forth, the gun trade would be regulated by the colonial legislatures and by the crown. 7

Probably the first civic uprising of any kind came in Virginia in 1635. Dr. John Pott, the man who had poisoned Powhatan in 1623, led a number of the local elite in opposing the governor, Sir John Harvey. When Harvey charged most of his council with treason, Pott called in a band of forty armed men led by Captain William Pierce. No one was injured, or even threatened, and the assembly approved these actions by Pott and Pierce. Harvey agreed to resign and returned to England, where he acknowledged to the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations that Virginia’s government lacked the force to maintain its authority, “nor had I the means or power to raise any force to suppress this meeting.” He returned to Virginia in January 1637, with his powers clearly spelled out in his royal orders, and arrested and dispossessed the leaders of the uprising without resistance. In this, as in every succeeding conflict other than Bacon’s Rebellion in which the province acted, its success was total and courts of law settled the issue. 8

When Leonard Calvert, governor of Maryland, purchased land from the Yaocomicoe Indians, he found that they were far more interested in such metal goods as axes, hatchets, and rakes than in firearms. Calvert appreciated the advantages of the state’s maintaining a monopoly on firearms, and not merely in the event of a possible Indian threat. In December 1636, he moved against the upstart William Claiborne on Kent’s Island with a group of musketeers, kicking Claiborne out of the colony. Claiborne remained a thorn in the side of the Calverts for two decades, but whenever the state moved against him and his supporters with force, Claiborne gave way without violence. 9

In times of unrest in North America, competing sides jostled for control of public arms to supplement the few in private hands. During the English Civil War of the 1640s, for instance, American adherents and opponents of King Charles never actually did battle, but they certainly maneuvered a great deal. While the English were busily hacking away at each other, most Americans waited and hoped for the best. But just in case, a few activists tried to prepare for the future by hoarding firearms. In Maryland in 1643 the acting governor, Giles Brent, seized a cargo of arms from the ship Reformation, captained by Richard Ingle, a known supporter of Parliament. Ingle managed to get his ship back and returned two years later to seize control of the colony from the Catholic Calvert family. A year later, Leonard Calvert gained the help of Virginia’s governor, William Berkeley, and had no trouble reclaiming control of the government. These actions occurred without loss of life. But in 1651 Parliament decided that Governors Berkeley and Calvert remained emotionally attached to monarchy and sent four commissioners and five hundred soldiers to the Chesapeake to reorganize government. The Virginia burgesses agreed with the governor that they should resist this force, especially in the face of the new Navigation Act that eliminated all foreign trade with the North American colonies. Despite this incentive and the legislature’s pledge, the entire colony, which boasted a militia of nearly seven thousand troops, collapsed before a small military force. Again, the government met no resistance, armed or otherwise. 10

Maryland proved even easier to subdue, abandoning all resistance when faced with a force of two commissioners. The proprietor, Lord Baltimore, was charged with selling arms to the Indians and confiscating the arms of Protestants, and Governor William Stone was cast out of office. Oddly, in January 1655, Oliver Cromwell declared that the commissioners had gone too far in upsetting Baltimore’s government. There followed a “petty civil war,” as Stone seized the public arms in the name of Lord Baltimore and moved against the “Puritans” led by Captain William Fuller. On March 25, the two forces met at the “battle of the Severn.” Stone was able to arm his roughly two hundred followers with the supplies he had seized from the provincial armory, but that did not make them effective soldiers. When confronted by a force of 120 well trained troops from a Commonwealth ship, Stone’s forces opened fire, killing the standard bearer with their volley. Fuller’s troops fired a single volley and then charged, most of the royalists throwing down their guns and fleeing or begging for quarter. Forty men were killed, only a few by gunshot, and several executed on Fuller’s orders after the battle. The supporters of the Commonwealth controlled the colony for the next five years, and then this government also collapsed without a fight upon the restoration of Charles II. 11

The pattern was little different in Dutch New Netherlands. There, in 1653, John Underhill tried to rouse the English settlers on Long Island into rebellion. But there were few guns and no violence, and a Dutch official ordered Underhill to leave Long Island, which he did. This was one of three such rebellions on Long Island between 1653 and 1657, none of which exhibited any violence. In 1663 John Scott of Connecticut tried to seize the island for his province. He arrived with two hundred followers who waved their swords around a great deal and looted freely. As was almost always the case, the locals did not rise in self-defense. Their militia units did not rush onto the field to protect family and home. Instead, negotiations terminated this effort, with Governor John Winthrop Jr., of Connecticut arresting Scott and seizing the island with a body of troops. The whole farce came to an end in 1664 when Colonel Richard Nicholls arrived at Manhattan with four hundred regulars. Stuyvesant surrendered when his militia refused to fight, and Dutch rule ended. The English confiscated what arms there were and looted the city.12

In 1669 the Dutch in New York attempted to reverse their fate with a rebellion, but the insurrection was quelled simply by arresting the leaders. 13 All of these uprisings–except the one in Maryland–were thus short-lived, and in each the near uselessness of the militia comes across clearly. The militia’s performance was equally unimpressive whether the enemy was internal or external. When the Dutch attacked the coast of Virginia in 1667 and seized several ships of the valuable tobacco fleet, they met no resistance from the militia, though Governor Berkeley did raise a force that waited for the Dutch to come to it. Seven years later the Dutch returned and again raided the coast unhindered by local forces; only “the timely appearance of the royal navy saved the day.” 14

At the time of this latter crisis, in 1673, the governor ordered all arms and ammunition in the colony seized for use by the militia. But there was just not enough to go around; a “diligent search and inquiry” discovered that few Virginians owned serviceable arms. In desperation, the government offered to pay for the repair of all “unserviceable armes,” and, for the first time since the 1630s, spent public funds to purchase weapons. But it was a slow process. Two years later they discovered that four companies of one regiment needed two hundred muskets and swords for their 280 men. Several other companies reported similar shortages, with three-quarters of their men owning no firearms. The guns purchased in England were stored in a communal center, generally the home of one of the local “great men.” While these weapons arrived too late to do much good against the Dutch, they did serve to arm most of the followers of Nathaniel Bacon. 15

Virginia enjoyed a long peace with the Indians from the end of the final Powhatan war until 1675. As the royal commissioners reported in 1677, “Few or none had bin the Damages sustained by the English from the Indians, other than occasionally had happen’d sometimes upon private quarells and provocations, untill in July, 1675, certain Doegs and Susquahanok Indians on Maryland side, stealing some Hoggs,” from a settler named Matthews who had cheated them, “were pursued by the English . . . beaten or kill’d and the hoggs retaken.” 16 In retaliation, some Doeg Indians killed two of Matthews’s servants and his son. The Virginians responded by attacking an Indian village. The whites surprised the peaceful village with a volley and then moved in to slice and hack at the Indians with their axes and swords. Only later did they discover that this was not a Doeg but a Susquehanna village. Maryland’s government was furious and Virginia’s prepared for the expansion of the war, offering a coat to every Indian who brought in a scalp from a hostile Indian and calling on the King for help, appealing for arms and ammunition based on “their inability to furnish the same themselves.” These actions by the settlers were an astounding case of projection. As Robert Beverley wrote, the Indians, “observing an unusual Uneasiness in the English, and being terrified of their rough Usage, immediately suspected some wicked Design against their Lives, and so fled to their remoter Habitations. This confirm’d the English in the Belief, that they had been the Murderers, till at last they provoked them to be so in Earnest.” 17

It was to combat these enemies they had just created that so many Virginians turned to the leadership of “that Imposture,” Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon organized his followers around a demand for more guns and a more belligerent Indian policy, insisting that the government had failed to adequately arm its subjects–and he never suggested that they should arm themselves. Governor Berkeley should have arrested Bacon immediately, but he liked the young man, had appointed him to the council, and hated to admit such a lapse in judgment. Berkeley also hoped that Bacon might prove useful in channeling the passions of the lower orders, especially those on the frontier that were begging for arms. As Beverley wrote a few years later, the settlers, their “Minds already full of Discontent” because of the collapse of tobacco prices, were “ready to vent all their resentment against the poor Indians.” Bacon led a large force against the Susquehanna, but the vast majority of his troops had little interest in any military activity beyond the alcohol which accompanied their musters. So Bacon hired the Occaneechee to attack the Susquehanna, who fled before this onslaught. Bacon and his followers then attacked the Occaneechee, probably to avoid paying them. The whites set fire to the Indian village and cut down everyone who fled the burning huts. 18

Flushed with victory, Bacon marched on Williamsburg with six hundred followers to intimidate the burgesses. Fearful of “having their throats cut by Bacon,” as Thomas Ludwell put it, the legislature and Governor Berkeley submitted. Bacon followed this success with a looting expedition, his troops seizing all the guns they could find. Berkeley responded by secretly taking the arms and ammunition out of Tindall Fort on the York River, leaving it defenseless. But Berkeley did not move yet, nor did he intervene when Bacon sent a force into Dragon Swamp in pursuit of hostile Indians–and thanks to Bacon and his followers, there were only hostiles. Bacon’s followers succeeded in hacking some women and children to death. A frustrated Bacon turned his attention on the peaceful Pamunkey, until recently allies of Virginia who, as the royal commissioners wrote, “had [never] at any time betray’d or injuryed the English.” Even though they met no resistance, their queen having ordered “that they should neither fire a gun nor draw an arrow,” the whites attacked viciously, killing or taking prisoner the entire tribe. 19

Berkeley finally confronted Bacon at Jamestown with a force of unenthusiastic militiamen. Each side sat behind their defenses until the governor launched the only battle of the rebellion. The militia attacked “like scholers goeing to schoole . . . with hevie harts, but returnd hom with light heeles.” Bacon’s forces fired a single volley and Berkeley’s men threw down their guns and ran, suffering about a dozen casualties. Bacon then set the capital on fire and fled as well. He died of disease shortly thereafter, his rebellion collapsing within days. Berkeley moved with alacrity to punish the Baconites, charging Sarah Grendon with high treason as the chief “encourager” of the rebellion for having supplied the rebels with gun powder. 20

In February 1677, twelve hundred English regulars under the command of Colonel Herbert Jeffreys arrived to clean up the mess left by the rebellion. Jeffreys brought with him the largest arsenal the British had yet carried into North America: one thousand muskets, seven hundred carbines, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, and even a crate of hand grenades. England was taking this uprising very seriously. Not that it mattered much. Governor Berkeley was now creating the most problems, denying Jeffreys’ authority, seeking to punish all those who had supported Bacon, and refusing to return home as ordered by the King. But a quick show of force by Jeffreys settled the matter. Berkeley left for England and Jeffreys became acting governor.21

There was an unusual last act to Bacon’s Rebellion. The uprising had begun in a debate over the lack of arms for colonial defense. In 1678 Jeffreys reduced the pay of his forces since the Rebellion had been crushed and they were no longer on active duty. The troops began to mutter ominously. To forestall a mutiny, Jeffreys sent most of his forces home, leaving only a few hundred in Virginia until 1682. But he sent his troops home without their guns, distributing most of the seventeen hundred firearms he had brought with his force to the militia of Virginia. This act doubled the number of guns in the hands of the Virginians, who built two new armories for their storage. 22

The militia almost had an opportunity to use these guns the same year they became available. In 1682 a number of planters threatened to revive the memory of Bacon by calling for a moratorium on the tobacco harvest as a way of raising its price. Those who did not go along with the “plant-cutters’ rebellion” found their fields attacked by angry neighbors. Acting Governor Sir Henry Chicheley responded to this “strange Insurrection” by calling on the militia rather than the regulars still in Virginia, but only “soe many of them as may, in this juncture, bee admitted to arms.” The plant-cutters dispersed whenever the militia appeared but took to destroying crops at night. Despite the presence of the militia, two hundred plantations lost their tobacco crop in Gloucester County, and then the movement spread to Middlesex, York, and New Kent Counties. The movement just faded out after that with no violence, much like any of the contemporary fence-destroying movements in England. 23

Though it came closer than any colony to civil war in the first 160 years of English settlement, Virginia itself suffered little from Bacon’s Rebellion. With the exception of the one encounter at Jamestown, whites did not kill whites. They threatened and terrorized one another, but they reserved their murderous rage for the Indians. And the rebellion ended even before the arrival of English regulars. In the 1630s the English had learned the danger of allowing firearms to fall into the hands of Indians; in 1676 they discovered that it was equally dangerous to let poor whites have access to guns. Yet battling the one seemed to necessitate the arming of the other. Unable to resolve this paradox, colonial governments began every new crisis by begging the crown for guns and troops, and ended it by frantically trying to recover those guns and get rid of the troops. The result, according to a careful student of the colonial Virginia militia, was that the militia never recovered from Bacon’s Rebellion but instead sank into insignificance. 24

Roughly the same pattern was evident in the response of the New England colonies to the reign of James II (1685-88). James effectively overturned the entire system of government and social relations in New England by his creation of the Dominion of New England, and further alterations were promised. His officials were harsh and arrogant, their lack of respect for the Puritan way of life callous and offensive. The people of New England received every provocation, and yet they were unwilling to break out of the traditional modes of complaint via petition and noncompliance until they received word that William had invaded England in the name of Protestantism. It was in his name that many New Englanders finally acted, and then only to arrest James’s officials and appeal to William of Orange for the restoration of their charter. There is little evidence here of a tradition of an armed people defending their rights. Their resistance was expressed with words not guns, and no shots were fired. 25

The people of New York also put up with what was widely seen as arbitrary government until after William’s invasion of England. In fact it was not until May 1689 that the public responded in any way to the perceived tyranny. Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson shocked the city by pulling a pistol on a militia lieutenant with whom he was arguing. Such an action alone was without precedent; but Nicholson compounded public anger by threatening to burn the city to the ground. A militia captain named Jacob Leisler led four hundred militiamen in a peaceful invasion of Fort James, a disappointing exercise. They had hoped for a stockpile of English guns, but found instead, as Leisler reported, only fifteen usable cannon and one barrel of powder “fit to sling a bullet halfway [to] the river.” 26

Leisler’s forces then took over the city. They disarmed the Catholics, finding only four guns, and seized the arms of political opponents as well as gunpowder in private hands. One of his enemies wrote that “Capt. Leysler with a party of Men in Arms, and Drink, fell upon [the new customs officers] at the Custom-House, and with Naked Swords beat them thence, endeavouring to Massacree some of them, which was Rescued by Providence.” These “arms” were swords and clubs, and no one was actually hurt, despite the effort “to Massacree some of them.” 27

When Albany refused to go along with the New York junto, Leisler sent some militia under the command of his son-in-law, Jacob Milbourne. Milbourne spent a great deal of time talking with the leaders of Albany but was persuaded to return to New York by the presence of a group of Mohawks who promised to intervene on behalf of the people of Albany, with whom “they were in a firm Covenant chain.” There were no casualties. 28

The “rebellion” began to take on comic form. Desiring an end to the whole charade, a group of thirty-six prominent New Yorkers appealed to William and Mary to terminate this rule “by the sword.” A group of thirty men confronted Leisler and some companions. Leisler was almost felled by a blow from a cooper’s adz, but ducked just in time. Waving his sword before him, Leisler made good his escape–again no one was seriously hurt. It is surprising that none of these men, all of whom supposedly owned guns, thought to bring one with them. 29

The only confrontation between these competing forces occurred in late 1690. Major Thomas Willett, a veteran of the assault with the adz, organized a march of 150 Long Island militiamen on New York City. They were confronted by three hundred militiamen under Jacob Milbourne’s command. The two sides began shoving one another, Milbourne using his musket as a club to knock down a militia captain. Suddenly, Milbourne’s troops fired, an unheard of action. Firing at point-blank range, roughly one hundred militia men killed one of their opponents. The rest ran before Milbourne’s troops could reload.30

This violent encounter was the last straw. Unwilling to fight Leisler themselves, his opponents called in English regulars. On January 31, 1691, two companies of English soldiers under the command of Major Richard Ingoldesby arrived at New York. Leisler called out the militia to defend the government in the name of William and Mary. For six weeks there was no confrontation between the militia and regulars, but they did exchange proclamations. The soldiers were quartered in city hall, three hundred militia in Fort James. On March 16, for no apparent reason, Leisler’s militia began firing its cannon at the city. A few civilians were killed, nine British regulars wounded, and several of Leisler’s followers killed when one of their misloaded cannon exploded. On March 19 the new governor, Sir Henry Sloughter, arrived. He immediately threatened to attack Fort James if the militia did not surrender. When Leisler hesitated, his forces threw down their guns and surrendered. And so Leisler’s Rebellion came to an end, not with a battle, but with a pathetic whimper as bystanders spat on Leisler as he was marched off to jail. 31

Bacon’s and Leisler’s Rebellions were the only colonial uprisings in which whites fired on whites. More typical were the brief little insurrections like those in Maryland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In June 1676, a group of sixty men in the Patuxent region took advantage of the recent departure of Governor Charles Calvert to London to petition against taxes. When the governor’s council rejected their petition, the group marched on St. Mary’s, threatening to battle any militia called out. But no militia was called out. The council declared the group in rebellion but offered a pardon to those who went home. They all went home, except the two leaders, who were hanged. 32

In 1681 former governor Josias Fendall of Maryland attempted to follow Nathaniel Bacon’s example, using fear of Indian attacks and the failure of the proprietary government to supply arms to the settlers as a route to power. His effort never came anywhere near success. Fendall joined with the eternal gadfly John Coode to attack the proprietor as an arbitrary governor who imposed excessive taxes and had failed to build the local arsenals required by law. Fendall and Coode apparently organized a large following along both banks of the Potomac, recruiting, as Calvert wrote, “most of the rascals” in the region. But the insurrection evaporated with the arrest of the two leaders. 33

When news of William’s invasion of England reached the Chesapeake in early 1689, the Maryland government ordered the recall of all arms which had been distributed to the militia. The council announced that the guns were just being brought in for routine maintenance and would be returned, but they intended to hold on to the firearms until they discerned which way the wind was blowing. Maryland had still not built the county arsenals ordered by the legislature more than a decade earlier, so these recalled guns were brought to the central armory in St. Mary’s, under the watchful eyes of the council. 34

In July, John Coode, whom the government kept mistakenly freeing, organized a protest demanding the return of the “public arms” to the militia. In the name of the new monarchs, William and Mary, he marched on St. Mary’s with several hundred men armed with clubs, axes, hoes, and such. In response, the council called out the St. Mary’s militia, arming them with the recalled guns, and declared the insurgents in rebellion. On July 27 the four hundred militiamen occupying Fort St. Mary announced that they would not fire upon their fellow citizens and turned the fort over to Coode’s followers. 35

With the fort, and the state’s guns, now in Coode’s hands, the council immediately reached a deal. All Catholics left office, and Coode took effective control of the new papist-free government. He immediately ordered the confiscation of all guns in Catholic hands. In July 1691, Maryland became a royal colony. The first royal governor arrived the following year and expelled Coode from power. Coode continued to complain for another fifteen years, but no force rose in opposition to this heavy-handed exercise of arbitrary authority. 36

With the exception of Bacon’s Rebellion, most encounters between dissidents and governors in that colonial period were nonevents. In the 1660s a group of sword-waving opponents threatened but did not attack Governor Samuel Stephens of North Carolina. The only political uprising in the colony’s first hundred years came in 1677 when the customs collector seized the ship Carolina for nonpayment of plantation duties. Aboard the ship was a small consignment of swords, guns, and ammunition intended for the colony. The sailors of the Carolina seized the collector and distributed the arms to the public. 37 The new governor died of a fever within days of his arrival, and the next governor was, amazingly, captured by Algerian pirates while on his way to America. The colonial proprietors chose to ignore the whole affair, afraid that if word got out that they had lost control of North Carolina, the king would take the colony for himself. No one was hurt, and not a single shot was fired in what historians call “Culpeper’s Rebellion.” For two years the assembly ran the colony until a temporary governor arrived. It was as though the uprising had never occurred. 38

What one mostly sees in colonial America is calm and peace punctuated by some rather nasty Indian wars. Most settlers were too focused on the prosperity of their families and the health of their souls to bother about political and social issues. In January 1683, New Hampshire’s governor, Edward Cranfield, arbitrarily prorogued the assembly, a unique act in New England. One member of the assembly, Edward Gove, tried to start an uprising with the cry of “liberty and reformation.” Traveling from town to town, Gove raised a force of sixteen men, half of whom ran away at the first sign of trouble. The governor arrested the remainder and charged them with treason. Thus ended that rebellion. 39

Another insurrection started the following year, as Governor Cranfield ignored the tradition of assemblies’ voting taxes and ordered a series of new “fees,” hoping the name change would baffle the public. There were a few sporadic attacks around the colony, and a great deal of noncompliance. In December a club-wielding crowd in Exeter chased off the sheriff attempting to collect the fees. In Hampton another crowd actually beat a sheriff. The militia was called out in Hampton, but no one showed up since the militia was the crowd. The deputy governor lost a tooth in a fight with an assemblyman, the chancellor of the colony was pushed into a fireplace, and a sheriff who entered a religious meeting in Dover to collect a fee was knocked flat by a woman wielding her Bible. There were no further casualties, and no guns in evidence during any of these battles. The governor resigned his position, and another rebellion reached a peaceful conclusion. 40

These colonial insurrections were conservative in nature. The sovereignty of Great Britain was never questioned, the goal of uprisings generally a return to some real or imagined traditional relation, or, more often, a dispute among factions over who would enjoy the perquisites of power, each side claiming to act in the interests of the monarch. As long as white Americans had difficulty acquiring firearms and ammunition, there would be little chance of a real threat to England’s colonial rule. As Gary Nash has written, the American lower class was “far more moderate in their proposals and far less violent” than the contemporary London crowd. 41

And yet one historian of colonial uprisings concluded, “The heavily armed adults of the provinces were far different from the domesticated residents of England. In Britain, guns and shot were reserved only for gentlemen, but in the colonies arms were the everyday tools of all citizens. Provincial men and women were well versed in fighting techniques and not to be trifled with.” 42 Where were the guns? Where the evidence that they were used in any circumstances other than war? At some level the image of the armed settler appears a grand mythology intended to formulate a portrait of Americans as many would like to see them: people not to be trifled with, not willing to put up with ill treatment, and very violent. 43 The history of the first 150 years of settlement in America is of a people fairly hesitant to act, and then usually in a nonviolent manner, except, tragically, when race was involved.

The colonial militia and its guns

One searches in vain through the colonial period for evidence of Americans armed with guns rising to defend their liberties, whether in organized militia units or unorganized crowds. There were some insurrections, the first act of which was generally an effort to lay hands on English muskets. But these uprisings peaked in the period from Bacon’s Rebellion through the Glorious Revolution, and there would not be another major domestic upheaval until the Stamp Act Crisis in 1765. 

 

White Americans would, however, rise up to defend slavery. Colonial governments were willing to distribute, use, and even give away their valuable firearms in support of slavery. Virginia was typical in its offer of a gun and two blankets to any Indian who returned a runaway slave to bondage; South Carolina offered two guns or four blankets. 44 Faced with the slightest threat to their system of slavery, white Americans did not hesitate to battle and kill black Americans. But then, suppressing slave rebellions was the primary function of the militia in several colonies.45

In New York in 1712, a group of slaves spent weeks stockpiling weapons for an uprising against tyranny. But ironically, it was the very fact that the blacks had guns that doomed the effort. Their strategy was to set a fire and then kill whites rushing to put out the blaze, a tactic which initially worked, as the slaves killed or wounded with knives and axes the first fourteen whites who rushed to the scene. But they had a gun, and a fatal shot fired by that weapon gave away the ambush. Governor Robert Hunter acted very quickly in calling out the militia and crushing the rebellion. Tellingly, when faced with a slave uprising, militia units from other communities rushed to the scene to help the New Yorkers, an unusual event. 46

The Stono Rebellion of 1739 tested the militia’s ability to respond to domestic insurrection. The rebels began with a successful attack on a militia arsenal, and then, well armed with guns and ammunition, the slaves set off for Florida and freedom. But the blacks were completely unfamiliar with firearms, and their defense crumbled before Lieutenant Governor William Bull’s first charge. A dozen insurgents were quickly killed and most of the rest taken prisoner. The colony spared no expense in pouring the militia onto the roads and into the swamps of South Carolina in search of escaped rebels, and even hired local Indians to help put down the uprising. Such sustained efforts contrast dramatically with the feeble earlier responses to local white insurrections. Slavery touched the way most whites lived in a manner that politics never could. 47

In 1740 a second slave uprising was discovered. Rather than fleeing south to Florida, these insurgents, numbering between one and two hundred, planned to seize the Charleston arsenal and then take over the government of the colony. An informant gave away the plan and the government hanged fifty rebels. 48

That same year a similar conspiracy was broken up in Prince George County, Maryland. Here again the initial target was the arsenal, this one at Annapolis. Whites understood that firearms had their uses, but could also pose a major threat if not carefully controlled and protected, leading southern colonies to keep regular guards at their armories. 49

Jumping ahead a bit, a final indication of the basic racism inherent in the use of violence by colonial whites can be found in the notorious Paxton Boys. In 1763 this group of frontier thugs did not hesitate to kill dozens of friendly Christian Indians, for they were easier to get at than the hostiles who would put up a fight. The Paxton Boys mostly beat their victims to death, though they did not scruple at using axes. Yet when they marched on Philadelphia to press their claims for more funding and arms for a war against the Indians, they were met by an armed militia, and their forces melted away. Only some 250 Paxton Boys remained, and they were intellectually outnumbered by Benjamin Franklin, who offered these “white savages” a face-saving out. The western insurgents presented a pro-murder petition to the legislature, an amazing exercise in projection that argued that Indians should be killed because they were prone to massacre innocents. The point is, again, that these white rebels contented themselves with a petition and then went home. The legislature ignored their drivel. 50 In brief, then, personal violence in colonial America appears to have been reserved for despised races.

And yet, it would appear that a great number of these settlers took seriously the injunctions of Christianity against killing, for they showed little interest in owning, maintaining, or even holding firearms. 51 One consequence was a long crisis in the maintenance of the militia system, which entered a period of decrepitude in the 1690s from which it would not emerge until the onset of the Seven Years’ War in 1756.

Efforts by colonial governments to correct the problems in the militia by arming and training them met one frustration after another. On the one hand was a seemingly widespread public indifference, as when the New Hampshire assembly flatly refused to vote funds to arm the militia. On the other hand, the insufficiency of supply played a role as well. Part of the latter concern may have been the product of corruption. A prime complaint of Bacon and his followers was that the government of Virginia was not spending the money allotted to buy arms for the militia but was instead diverting funds to individual use. Even the established garrisons along the coast had insufficient arms. But of far greater importance was the unavailability of guns in the colonies. In the 1670s the Virginia legislature appropriated funds for the purchase of firearms but had little success in acquiring them in England, while it was nearly impossible to purchase more than one or two guns at a time in North America. 52

Virginia was the richest colony. Poorer colonies, such as North Carolina, had few militia and fewer firearms. The settlers complained often that the proprietors had not supplied them with arms and ammunition for self-defense, or offense, against the Indians, leaving them to rely on blades and axes. In 1672 the council sent Governor Peter Carteret to England to request arms, but he was rebuffed by the Privy Council. Fortunately for these settlers, the Indians seemed uninterested in waging war. 53

Opponents of Sir Edmund Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, accused him of deliberately supplying the New England troops marching against Indians in Maine with bullets so malformed that they could not be used. It emerged, however, that these bullets were fairly standard in their inconsistency of shape, just as the powder available in America tended to be weak or damaged. Andros himself had observed the shocking inferiority of Massachusetts’s few usable guns and had written directly to the crown begging for new muskets and ammunition. The Lords of Trade ignored his request.54

Andros detected what most contemporaries noted but historians have missed: the shortage of firearms in the possession of the American militia. Unless these men were hiding their guns, it would seem that at no point in the colonial period after the 1630s, when the population began its steady rise, did the American militia units own sufficient firearms. This paucity should not be too surprising, for nearly every single gun had to cross the Atlantic from Europe. Through the entire seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth, the English government reserved the majority of firearms production for its own army. As noted earlier, the American colonies tended to receive small shipments of the older, generally damaged military firearms, except in times of crisis, when the crown would send over a few hundred usable muskets for the militia. These guns–numbering, according to government figures, some eleven thousand firearms in the seventeenth century–formed the bulk of guns available in the American colonies in 1700. Yet more than that many men were eligible to serve in the Virginia militia alone. Any additional arms were independently purchased by the richer planters and merchants directly from Europe. 55

The reason for this misunderstanding on the part of historians seems to arise from a too casual reading of the word “arms.” Thus an historian can read of people rushing to battle with their “arms” or “rising up in arms” in England as evidence that most people had guns in the mid-seventeenth century. But “arms” and “guns” are not exact synonyms. Thus slaves were often reported as “rising up in arms” despite the fact that they did not have a single gun. 56 Arms can be pikes, swords, hoes, and clubs, as well as firearms; thus the need for scholars to look very closely at the source documents for the militia. Those who have done so with care, military historians, have long reported that it was well known in the colonial period that few firearms were available and militia units generally practiced with pikes, as they were required to in England. 57

All military service was ordained by the state, not by individuals. It was illegal in the British empire for groups of men to form themselves into military units without state sanction. Such an effort would be officially proclaimed a riot. As the first militia law in Plymouth stated, every adult male settler was “subject to such military order for trayning and exercise of armes as shall be thought meet, agreed on, and prescribed by the Governor and Assistants.” 58 The government determined whether the colony had a militia or not, where it would meet, how often, who should belong, and what it should do. In practice, colonial militias tended to meet in peacetime once a year for a parade, a counting and inspection of arms, and to drink.

Maryland was not unusual in starting with high ambitions for its militia, aspirations quickly abandoned. The proprietors ordered the first governor to organize the militia with musters weekly or monthly. In 1639 the legislature considered and rejected a militia bill following this standard, instead delegating authority for provincial defense to local captains. The next act in 1654 compounded this loose organization with an equally obscure charge that all eligible men would be provided with arms, but with no reference as to where those arms should come from. The first detailed militia act did not pass until 1661, yet even after that event, the governor called for volunteers when they were needed, with the towns to provide arms to each of these rangers. From that point on, Maryland kept a provincial armory with commissioners appointed to impress arms and men from the counties as needed, the government mostly drafting indentured servants, with their masters responsible for supplying arms. In 1675 Maryland abandoned the pretense of a militia and shifted to reliance on paid rangers, though they rarely called upon them. From time to time the legislature would request the proprietor or the crown to supply arms for the militia, but the militia itself remained a spectral presence, not even existing on paper. Maryland tried to preserve its militia’s arms by employing an armorer, Isaac Miller, who also served as an arms dealer, purchasing guns in England for several colonies. In 1690 Lord Baltimore “thought fitt to call in all arms held by the Publick to fixe and make them fitt for Service & upon Occasion to Distribute the same until such Hands as shall faithfully serve the King.” Yet when the legislature ordered a census of arms at the end of the seventeenth century, they found 20 muskets, 38 carbines, 16 bayonets, 16 swords, 56 fusees, 16 horse pistols, and 78 barrels of powder accumulated over the previous twenty-five years but never used. Not a formidable array of weapons. 59

When a colonial government made the militia a high priority, improvement was noticeable. Thus in 1632, Governor John Winthrop issued an alarm to test the readiness of the Massachusetts militia. He reported that this practice revealed “the weakness of our people, who, like men amazed, knew not how to behave themselves, so as the officers could not draw them into any order.” Over the next decade the government exerted every effort to arm and train these men, so that by 1641 Winthrop could report with some pride that “about 1200 men were exercised in most sorts of land service; yet it was observed that there was no man drunk, though there was plenty of wine and strong beer in the town, not an oath sworn, no quarrel, nor any hurt done.” 60

Massachusetts enjoyed a qualified success with its militia by expending money and energy on the effort. Other colonial governments demonstrated less interest and produced lesser results. Francis Howard, Baron of Effingham and governor of Virginia in the 1680s, came up with an obvious solution to the problem of the militia. In 1672, according to muster reports, only one-tenth of those eligible for militia service owned guns. By 1680 the colony had purchased or been given by the crown enough guns for one-half of the 8,500 men in the Virginia militia. Effingham, observing that most Virginians “cannot afford to equip themselves,” reversed the logic; rather than trying to arm the entire militia, he limited the militia to those who bore arms, either their own or the province’s. In 1689 the militia consisted of 4,300 men, all of whom held guns. Thus, out of a population of fifty thousand, 8.6% possessed guns, or 28.7% of the adult white males who should have been serving in the militia; and this number was reached only because England had just given more than one thousand muskets to Virginia. As William Shea has written, this “exclusionary trend” in the Virginia militia produced “an English-style ‘bourgeois militia.'”61 In 1688 William Fitzhugh observed that such a completely armed force “with a Soldier like appearance, is far more suitable & commendable, than a far greater number presenting themselves in the field with Clubs & staves, rather like a Rabble Rout than a well disciplin’d Militia.” It is ironic that Fitzhugh did not include himself in that number. Though he owned thousands of acres, fifty-one slaves, and two stores, and was a colonel of militia, Fitzhugh’s role was entirely administrative. He did not own a gun himself. 62

And yet, when Sir Francis Nicholson arrived as Effingham’s successor in 1689, he was appalled at the condition of the militia, even in its supposedly more efficient form. With King William’s War now in progress, Effingham called on the crown to send over thousands of arms for the use even of the “poore and Indigent” who should also serve in the militia but could not afford to buy a gun even if the law did require such. The local elite, and the crown, thought this idea bordered on insanity, and proposed instead the creation of a specialized force of rangers who would hunt down their enemies, without the need to arm the potentially dangerous poor. Nicholson found these efforts inadequate and worried that only a major infusion of arms from England could possibly save the militia, the vast majority of whose members remained unfamiliar with the use of firearms. He was ignored, and the “militia naturally began to atrophy.” By 1702, Robert Quary could report that the militia is “so undisciplined and unskillful and in such great Want of arms and ammunition proper and fit for action, that not one fourth of the militia is fit to oppose an Enemy.” And this in the midst of Queen Anne’s War. The crown was so concerned over the lack of military readiness in Virginia that it sent a gift of 1,400 swords, 1,000 muskets, and 400 pistols in 1702 for use by the militia. The government attempted to sell the arms and ammunition to the militia members, but found few takers. Somehow this new weaponry failed to excite the Virginians with a proper willingness to fight and die for queen and empire. 63

The 1710 panic in Virginia over the approach of a French fleet, as reported in William Byrd’s diary, indicates the failure of previous efforts to reform the province’s militia. On August 15, Governor Alexander Spotswood ordered Byrd, commander of the militia in two counties, to call out his troops. Byrd sent directions to his captains and then went about his business for the next week, largely ignoring two further expresses from the governor about the crisis. Byrd talked with some of his captains but, by his own account, did nothing else until August 23, when the governor warned him that the French fleet was present on the James River. The next day Byrd “sent for my guns and ammunition from Appomattox,” where the militia’s arms were stored. Two days later he received a request from the falls for powder, as the settlers feared an Indian attack. Byrd sent off a pound of powder, but saw no cause for concern. Twelve days after the alarm was sounded, Byrd finally met with all his officers, having received orders from Spotswood to march to Williamsburg. Unable to delay the matter further, Byrd called out the militia. The next day Byrd learned that the ships were English. “This was just as I suspected,” he wrote, and ordered the militia not to bother to appear. Thus ended the crisis. 64

In the aftermath of this nonevent, the governor ordered more inspections, and Byrd dutifully went around to the militia companies under his command and reviewed them. The first of these musters, Byrd reported, went very well. The officers were all “drunk and fighting all the evening, but without much mischief.” Byrd found another company “in as good condition as might be expected,” while at a third he “found several without arms.” More dramatic was a review postponed because of poor attendance, leading Byrd and Captain Thomas Jefferson to spend a great deal of time drinking together. Finally, “I caused the troops to be exercised by each captain and they performed but indifferently for which I reproved them.” Shockingly, one of the soldiers “was drunk and rude to his captain, for which I broke his head in two places.” At several musters the troops held contests, running and wrestling but not shooting. After one such muster, many of the whites watched some Indians shoot for prizes, but did not do the same themselves. 65

In the last half of the seventeenth century all the European powers figured out that the settlers themselves were hardly capable of holding onto their colonies. Contingents of regulars which would have been considered insignificant by European standards, but which appeared as overwhelming demonstrations of power, arrived in North America. In 1665 the French sent twelve hundred veterans under General Alexandre de Prouville, all armed with the new flintlocks, to Quebec, immediately making them the largest and best armed military force in North America. 66 England had no desire to follow suit, preferring to keep its expenses down by sending troops over only as a last resort. Unfortunately for the budget, that last resort arrived on many occasions.

The biggest problem with the militia was that they tended not to want to fight. In the winter of 1666, a starving French company stumbled into Schenectady and ransacked some houses. Thirty Mohawk attacked the French and drove them into retreat. At this point, in the classic formulation, the militia should have rushed to battle; but instead, the mayor told the French commander that his town was undefended and offered to surrender. The French officer gratefully declined this offer, as he did not realize that the colony was now English, bought some provisions, and left. Neither side knew that England and France had been at war for a month. But with or without a declaration of war, Schenectady’s militia had shown itself completely unwilling to defend the town against hostile forces. 67

England’s second problem was that when the militia showed a willingness to fight, they did not always have guns. Since only a limited number of any given militia company ever went on a military campaign, the governments generally requesting one or two soldiers from each company, this gun shortage was not too significant as a gun could simply be loaned to the draftee. Thus when a member of the militia company in Salisbury, Massachusetts, was pressed into service for a winter campaign to Canada in 1706, Captain Henry True saw that the man “was fitted out by myself with a gunn flints bullits and a paire of good Snow shoose which he ingaged to returne to me againe and or to pay for them.” But in a general crisis, as in New England in 1746, it would turn out that the majority of volunteers did not possess arms, while almost all of those conscripted did not have a gun. There was no consistent pattern in this regard, though Providence and Hartford had the highest percentage of ownership. Individual volunteer companies in these towns reported those entirely unarmed to number between 16% and 54%. And again, the majority of those men with arms carried government guns. The New England colonies therefore had to spend hundreds of pounds to purchase arms for the unarmed militiamen. 68

Even when armed, the militia showed an unfamiliarity with guns. At their greatest victory, the 1745 capture of Louisbourg, the New England troops, all paid volunteers, earned the contempt of their commander, William Pepperrell, who complained that his troops were entirely unfamiliar with any aspect of warfare and that “the unaccountable irregular behaviour of these fellows . . . is the greatest fatigue I meet with.” When the New Hampshire troops arrived, Pepperrell found it necessary that they all be “Taught How to Use the firelock.” At that first training, when one of them fired his musket by accident, “the Bullet went thro a mans Cap on his head.” In fact, half of the casualties came from accidents with guns and artillery, and the New Englanders initially refused to attack Louisbourg. The victory itself was aided by the capture of the French munitions bound for the fortress, with which Pepperrell was able to arm his forces. 69 

Efforts by colonial governments to correct the problems in the militia by arming and training them met one frustration after another. On the one hand was a seemingly widespread public indifference, as when the New Hampshire assembly flatly refused to vote funds to arm the militia.

Clearly some companies were better supplied than others, even within the same colony. It was the captain’s responsibility to find weapons for those who lacked them. For many, that meant passing out pikes, which were in great supply. Other captains simply took note of the unarmed. At one muster in 1689 the clerk reported that he “did Acordingly go through the company and found the souldiers most of them furnished acording to Law with arms and amunition and thos that were not so furnished I gave acount of in writeing to the Leftenant.” Another officer inspecting a Massachusetts company in 1744 reported that most of the soldiers had “arms yet I find several of them was borrowed.” Both officers reported that nearly all of these guns were government issued military muskets. 70

Drills occurred at these musters, but the real importance of the militia lay in maintaining social connections. “The Foot-Companies, after having perform’d their Exercise, were discharged by their several Captains, but the Gentlemen Troopers with their officers return’d to the Bowling Green, where they and the Officers of the Foot Companies were regaled with a handsome dinner.” Most musters demonstrated a predilection toward merriment. As the South Carolina Gazette reported in 1735, “four Companies mustered on Tuesday last, heads of Companies read their Commissions, and Concluded the Day in regaling and Merriment.” One observer concluded that the militia drill was a “burlesque of everything military.” 71

By the start of the eighteenth century, the militia was the subject of some popular contempt. The author of a captivity narrative in 1748 changed the words of Dryden’s popular “Cymon and Iphigenia” from “And raw in Fields the rude Militia swarms,” to “And raw in Arms, the rude Melitia Swarms.” At this time it became very common for great numbers of men to attempt to avoid militia duty, often bargaining their way out. Thus Samuel Carter convinced the Salisbury, Massachusetts, militia company to “free him from paying any fins for Neglecting to trayn provided he give them a barrell of Sider yerely and to bring it” to where they were training so that “they may Conveniently drinke it.” Even those who stayed in the militia came to treat it with a certain lack of respect. In July 1668, Governor Nicholls was so upset with the performance of the Flushing militia that he ordered it disarmed on the spot. Or as Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary, “Exercise Regimentally in the Afternoon; when concluded, Mr. Mather prayd.” Sewall’s next entry records his resignation as captain. 72 

Hunters and gunsmiths

The records of the colonial militia, and the story of their generally abysmal showing in early American wars, may seem counter-intuitive. Surely there must have been more guns hiding someplace? After all, one of the most popular and persistent visions of the American past is that every settler owned a gun in order to hunt, “to put meat on the table,” in the oft repeated phrase. This is a very strange perception. Hunting is and always has been a time-consuming and inefficient way of putting food on the table. People settling a new territory have little time for leisure activities, and hunting was broadly understood in the European context to be an upper-class leisure activity. One of the most significant advantages that European settlers enjoyed over their Indian competitors for the land of North America was their mastery of domesticated animals. 73 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. Nor did he then hike miles to the nearest trading post to trade farm produce for powder and shot. To head off into the woods for two days in order to drag the carcass of a deer back to his family, assuming that he was lucky enough to find one (not to mention 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 enough meat to last months. Colonial Americans were famously well fed, based on their farming, not their hunting. 74

There were restrictions on who could and could not hunt in America, just as in England. But in America the privileged group was much larger and there were few restrictions on when and where one could hunt. For instance, most colonies banned hunting at night because it led to the death of too many cows and horses. In England only the wealthy were allowed to trap game. In the American colonies nearly everyone could trap, and most free white landowners could hunt with firearms. Nonetheless, not many people did so. When John Lawson came to the Carolinas in 1701 to explore and hunt, one of his first observations was that “the meanest Planter” in America could enjoy hunting. Even “A poor Labourer, that is Master of his Gun” might hunt under the law. Yet Lawson also noticed that these settlers all worked hard on their land and devoted little or no time to hunting, leaving that pleasure to the Indians. When Lawson went exploring with two settlers, he discovered that his was the only gun: “We had but one Gun amongst us [with] one Load of Ammunition.” “Relying wholly on Providence,” the three men, like so many others in early America, traveled among and with many different Indians for the next few weeks without mishap. 75 Lawson concluded that journey by noting that the local Indians were mostly friendly and “hunt and fowl for us at seasonable rates.” He thought no place “so free from Blood-shed, as Carolina,” though he warned his readers that they would have to bring their own arms and ammunition with them to America. 76

 

Account books, which offer very complete portraits of local economies, demonstrate that throughout the American colonies most merchants carried little gun powder and shot–and almost never had a gun for sale–and few of their customers purchased either in times of peace. Outside of the few colonial cities, merchants faced the danger of seeing their gunpowder rot, as it had a short shelf life, especially in moist or humid climates. But very few people appear in these account books as regular purchasers of gunpowder, buying an ounce or two every six months. With the vast majority of people never bothering to buy powder, it seems safe to say that they may have trapped animals, but they rarely hunted them. 77

Hunters were specialists. Individuals like Ethan Allen made their living by learning the routines of the forest and the best places to lay their traps, following the old Indian trails, and often, as in Allen’s case, getting to know the local Indians and learning from them. Professional hunters relied on their traps, not their guns. Traps were reliable and required little time; one set them up and then checked them from time to time. Hunters like Allen were not out to put meat on their table, though they might do that as well. It was hides they were after. Every account of hunters prior to the nineteenth century speaks of their heading off on long journeys, generally of several weeks, checking their traps, trading with the Indians for furs and hides, seeking new areas that had not yet been developed, carrying their musket or rifle, but almost never using it. Again, it was not the most efficient way to kill an animal, and these were very practical people. 78

But white hunters were the exceptions. Given the abundance of animals along the coast in the early eighteenth century, John Phillip Reid has pointed out, “it might be thought that the British settlers could have hunted them on their own.” Yet the Indians did almost all the hunting, not only because they alone had the numbers and time to do so, but also because they were better at it and, as Reid says, only they “were willing to work for beads, guns, . . . blankets, and rum” (which is to say, for peanuts). In 1707 the Cherokee traded at the rate of thirty-five deerskins for a gun, thirty for a coat. 79 Given the wide availability of land and the demand for labor in the towns and cities, few free men could afford hunting as a livelihood, and those few generally did not succeed. Ethan Allen, for instance, gave up hunting in his early thirties and settled down to farming. And that, after all, is what most European Americans did: farmed. Historians have found that nearly 95% of the non-Indian population of colonial America farmed, either by choice or through coercion as indentured servants and slaves. These farmers often had to deal with varmints, and laid traps, then as now, as the most efficient way of addressing that problem. Occasionally a pest eluded their traps, or they had a particularly bad bird problem. On those occasions they would certainly use a gun, if they had one. If not, they would borrow a musket or a fowling piece from a neighbor, often entering the exchange in their account books, noting that they owed that neighbor a return of some sort. But they certainly did not keep a gun to put meat on their tables. They kept knives and axes for that purpose. 80

And the other five percent of the population? They were mostly urban artisans. To put meat on their tables they behaved like their European contemporaries: they went to the market to purchase food. 81

It was not easy to acquire a firearm, should an individual want one for some reason. The simplest route was to become an active member of the militia, and be supplied with one by the government from its stores, or the next time the crown sent over a shipment. But these guns were supposed to be used only at musters and during emergencies. To purchase a gun was a more difficult and expensive matter. In an age when £3 a month was considered a very good income for any trade, skilled artisan or prosperous farmer, and the average wage for a worker was £18 a year, a flintlock cost £4 to £5. In addition, the American colonies were cash poor, and most merchants insisted on payment in cash for firearms, which were among the most expensive single items they could carry. For the average free American in the colonial period, who devoted half of his income to diet alone, a gun represented the equivalent of two months wages and could easily claim all his currency.82

“Account books, which offer very complete portraits of local economies, demonstrate that throughout the American colonies most merchants carried little gun powder and shot–and almost never had a gun for sale–and few of their customers purchased either in times of peace.”

Adding to the difficulty of purchasing a firearm was the fact that almost every single one had to cross the Atlantic from Europe. There were only a handful of gunsmiths in America in its first century and a half of settlement. Most of their labor was devoted to making and repairing other forms of metal work. These men were more smiths than gunsmiths, and in fact most labeled themselves blacksmiths. 83 Those few guns that were made in the British colonies were largely assembled from parts purchased in Europe. But then it was extremely rare to find a gunmaker who made an entire gun himself; it generally took three or four working together. Most European shops had one gunsmith specializing in locks, another in the stock, and a third in the barrel, while a fourth generally assembled and finished the gun. 84 No one in America could make the key part of the gun, its lock, until the Revolutionary era, and even tools had to be imported. 85 A very few gunsmiths did craft their own barrels, most notably for the famous Pennsylvania rifles, but their most common repair was stocking, putting new wood stocks on old firearms.86 Simply finding someone to repair a gun required a major effort, as every colonial government discovered at the beginning of every war.

For instance, there was only a single gunsmith in South Carolina’s first quarter century of European settlement. Thomas Archcraft understood his value to the colony as the only one capable of repairing its weapons and he extorted preferential treatment from the government. Archcraft soon discovered that the real profit was not in weapons repair but in the manufacture of Indian hatchets, and the council received many complaints that he was not repairing guns that had been “lying along time in [his] hands,” but devoted his time instead to making axes. The council ordered Archcraft to stop making Indian hatchets until the necessary repairs were completed, and then tried to set repair rates–another edict ignored by Archcraft. When the threat of imprisonment evoked no response, the council ordered Archcraft into custody, to finish his repairs in jail. But Archcraft went on strike, refusing to repair any firearms, so the council ordered his release and tried other forms of persuasion, none of which worked. It finally took away his tools. The amazing aspect of this story is that the government found Archcraft a terrible gunsmith. The council reported that he either “altogether neglects the mending of [guns], or else returnes them as ill, sometimes worse than when he received them.” But it had no choice, as there was no one else in South Carolina with training as a gunsmith. 87

Study after study reveals a surprisingly low number of gunsmiths in early America. There were a few German gunsmiths who emigrated to Pennsylvania and continued in the trade over many decades; the Henry family becoming something of a dynasty in this regard. But Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was the great exception. No other area in North America could boast even half as many gunsmiths. 88 Harold B. Gill’s exhaustive search of Virginia’s records found three, possibly four, gunsmiths in the years from 1607 to 1676, with two additional artisans who performed the task of gunsmiths. In the following six decades, 1677 through 1739, there were seven gunsmiths and seven, possibly eight, artisans working on guns. And it was one of these men, Charles Parkes, who was the first known to have made a gun in Virginia, though he probably only stocked parts made in England. The thirty years from 1740 through 1770 witnessed a jump to seven gunsmiths and seventeen artisans in a colony with a population of 447,000 in 1770 (259,000 white), including the first, the Geddy brothers, able to rifle gun barrels. In other words, no more than eighteen gunsmiths served Virginia in its first 150 years. Gill’s study further revealed that the major task of these gunsmiths was cleaning guns, which was seen by the government as a task requiring the services of a professional. 89

Likewise, studies in other colonies reveal a rather muted enthusiasm for guns at best. In the fifty years from 1726 to 1776, only two gunsmiths advertised their services in New York City’s fifteen newspapers. Guns were occasionally offered for sale in shops dealing in other goods, though never in a large number. The jeweler John Richardson advertised that he had some guns and a brace of pistols for sale. Similarly, repairs were undertaken by people in a variety of other trades. Thus James Yeomen and John Collins, watchmakers, advertised their ability to repair guns for “Gentlemen.” All the advertisements targeted gentlemen and promised guns “as neat as in England.” 90 This desire to link their goods to English quality appears in the advertisement of one of the two gunsmiths in the city, Edward Annely. He did not have a shop, but operated at the “fly market,” selling guns and pistols “all Tower proof” (meeting the standards of the Tower of London) and “Cheap.” He also “makes Guns and Pistols as any Gentleman shall like, and does all Things belonging to the Gun-Smith’s Trade; and engraves Coats of Arms on Plate.”91 A similar examination of three Boston newspapers from 1704 to 1775 reveals just four gunsmiths, two of whom advertised as importers of guns, and a third who did not have a shop. 92 And, most amazingly, Alfred C. Prime’s examination of twenty-two Philadelphia newspapers during the colonial period produced not a single gunsmith or ad for gun repairs.93

Unlike in Europe, there was no guild system in America to impose quality control over gun production. In England, each journeyman was rigorously examined, as was each gun, which required a government proof mark before it could be sold. In America anyone could claim to be a gunsmith, and any gun which could find a customer could be sold. Every American gun was thus not only different, but often very different, with bullet molds made to suit the individual gun and each repair specific to the gun–there was no standardization of any kind. It was little wonder that Americans often complained, as of Thomas Archcraft, that the gunsmith’s work worsened the problem. Becoming a good gunsmith required years of study with a master of the craft and there were few to study with in the colonies. It could also be a dangerous task, as the Virginia gunsmith John Brush made evident in 1723 when he petitioned the government for support after “his misfortune in being blown up and hurt in firing the Guns on his Majtys Birthday.” 94

But then, not many Americans demonstrated much interest in becoming gunsmiths. In fact, the opposite: keeping the few gunsmiths at their work troubled the colonial legislatures. Most gunsmiths who came to America found it more profitable to enter other lines of work. In 1633 the Virginia assembly ordered that gunsmiths and other artisans “be compelled to worke at theire trades and [be] not suffered to plant tobacco or corne or doe any other worke in the ground.” In 1662 the assembly tried incentives instead, exempting smiths from paying taxes if they followed their trade. But such extraordinary legislation did not prove sufficient, and in 1672 the legislature fined any smith who failed to “lay aside all other worke” and devote himself to the repair of firearms. Twenty years later the legislature had to repeat this expropriation of labor in ordering that every smith in Virginia “fix all Armes . . . brought them by any of the Souldiers of this Countrey.” In 1705 the assembly granted all militia officers the authority to “impress any smith . . . or other artificer, whatsoever, which shall be thought useful for the fixing of arms.” 95

One revealing aspect of this legislation is the way in which the assembly lumped all smiths together as competent and needed to handle gun repair. Repeatedly through the colonial period governments turned to artisans in other trades for assistance with their firearms. 96 These artisans cleaned and repaired guns; they did not make them. In 1692 the Virginia council reported that no guns were “to be had but from England,” and they worried that this supply was erratic. In 1699 the council reported that they had only three “good muskets” in the Jamestown armory and begged for more guns. The crown indicated little sympathy for Virginia’s plight. 97

Gunsmiths sought income elsewhere, it appears, because there was just not a sufficient market for their services in colonial North America. 98 As the probate records of the period evidence, gun ownership was far less widespread than is generally assumed. It is vital to emphasize that these probate inventories scrupulously recorded every item in an estate, from broken glasses to speculative land titles to which the deceased claimed title, including those which had already been passed on as bequests before death. 99 It is a bit difficult to discover complete runs of these inventories and wills (which would record any items given up until that time) for the period prior to the 1760s. But gun ownership in those complete probate inventories which do exist run the range from 7% in Maryland to, curiously, 48% in Providence, Rhode Island. Apparently gun ownership was linked to prosperity, not to the frontier.

The Providence records serve well to indicate the nature of gun ownership in colonial America. These 186 probate inventories from 1680 to 1730 are all for property-owning adult males, or the top quarter of Providence society. Ninety of them mention some form of gun, from pistols to “a peice of a Gun Barrill.” More than half of these guns are evaluated as old and of poor quality. Two-thirds of those inventories containing guns fall into the last twenty years of this fifty-year period, after the distribution of firearms by the British government to the New England militia in Queen Anne’s War. A great many inventories explicitly list “one of ye Queens armes,” which officially still belonged to the government. The inventories also note when a gun was on loan, such as “A Gun at Henry Mores.” Fifty-one of these ninety men owned one gun of some kind, twenty-five owned two, nine held three, three owned four guns, and two owned five guns. Four of the five men holding four or five guns were militia officers. If one could imagine these 186 men as a militia company, half would be unarmed and a third armed with guns which were broken or too old for service. And yet they would have been one of the best armed forces of their time.100

There is a traditional belief that gun owners were emotionally attached to their favorite weapon, passing them on to their eldest sons in moving manhood ceremonies. There is no contemporary evidence for such rites of passage in the colonial period. It is hard to imagine that Epenetus Olney felt a strong attachment to his only gun, “an old short Gunn without a lock,” or John Whipple to his only weapon, a “pistol without a lock.” Nor could William Ashley give his “Queenes Arm” to his son, since it officially remained government property. Just two of the 186 wills accompanying these probate files specifically mention guns: Captain Joseph Jenckes left his only gun to his son; and William Vincent, who owned two guns, left “my shortest Gunn” to William Jr. The other wills are all silent on the distribution of guns.

It is difficult, therefore, to credit the unsupported statements of historians that “the callused hand of the pioneering settler cradled a musket as easily as a pitchfork, and military training of a sort was nearly as much a part of his diet as salt pork.” 101 Contrary to the popular perception which imagines all settlers as hunters as well as farmers, the vast majority of those living in the British North American colonies had no use for firearms, which were costly, difficult to locate and maintain, and expensive to use. For those few Americans who did own guns–and the evidence from the militia records is very compelling on this point–a gun was an object which sat gathering rust.

Notes

1. Sally Smith Booth, Seeds of Anger: Revolts in America, 1607-1771 (New York, 1977), ix. One gets the feeling that Booth did not read her own introduction, for nearly every conflict she describes ends “through peaceful, not violent means” (39).

2. Peter Young and Wilfred Emberton, The Cavalier Army: Its Organization and Everyday Life (London, 1974), 31-38; Quentine Bone, Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 143-44.

3. Board of Trade, Plantations, Colonial Office 323/4, Public Records Office; Wallace B. Gusler and James D. Lavin, Decorated Firearms, 1540-1870 (Williamsburg, Va., 1977).

4. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston, 1995); Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York, 1963).

5. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 (London, 1984), 143-67; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London, 1996), 21-85; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 74-198; D. Rumbelow, I Spy Blue: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria (London, 1971). For a completely different perspective, see Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 79-91.

6. Donna J. Spindel and Stuart W. Thomas Jr., “Crime and Society in North Carolina, 1663-1740,” Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Crime and Justice in American History: The Colonies and Early Republic (2 vols. Westport, Conn., 1991) 2: 699-720; Arthur P. Scott,Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago, 1930), 314-19, Byrd quoted p. 321; Hugh F. Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings in the General Court of Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg, Va., 1965), 204-15; Charles Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New-Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, Conn., 1857), 22; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C. , 1995), 8n, 144; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (12 vols. Boston, 1855-61) 7: 6, 35, 56, 58, 116. Carl Bridenbaugh insists that “crimes of violence” were on the rise throughout American cities in the 1730s. He offers no statistics, only one amazing event, in which a “Troop of young Ladies” set upon a man walking across the Boston Neck and “strip’t down his Breaches and whip’t him most unmercifully.” A compelling story, though hardly compelling evidence. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York, 1955), 382, quoting the New York Journal November 8, 1736.

7. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. by Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1952), 210; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (5 vols. Boston, 1853-61) 1: 48; Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (2 vols. Boston, 1893), 194-208; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1937) 1: 332-34, 362-63.

8. J. Mills Thornton III, “The Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey: A Seventeenth Century Rebellion,”Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 11-26; Sir John Harvey, “The Mutiny in Virginia, 1635,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1893): 416-30; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 1607-1688(Princeton, N.J., 1914), 60-84; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (2 vols. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960) 1: 82, 137-46. Oddly, Thornton, who labels this “America’s first rebellion against royal authority,” and considers it a “triumph” (12), fails to mention Harvey’s return to power. Harvey was removed from office by the Privy Council in 1639.

9. Clayton Colman Hall, ed. Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684 (New York, 1910) 73, 107-08, 150-54, 158-59.

10. William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1983) 73-77; Edmond S. Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975) 147-48, 400-04; Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 99-101; Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 171-73.

11. Andrews, The Colonial Period 2: 319; Browne, B. Bernard, “The Battle of the Severn: Its Antecedents and Consequences, 1651-1655,” Maryland Historical Magazine 14 (1919): 154-71; Matthew Page Andrews, History of Maryland: Province and State (Hatboro, Pa., 1965), 117-29; Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 235-44, 256-67.

12. Alexander C. Flick, ed., History of the State of New York (10 vols. New York, 1933-1937) 1: 310-13, 315-17, 2: 56-57, 75-80; E. B. O’Callaghan and B. Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (15 vols. Albany, 1856-87) 1: 550-55, 14: 213, 231-32, 237-40, 544-48, 551-59; Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), 107-08.

13. Flick, ed., History of New York, 2: 92-95.

14. Shea, Virginia Militia, 89-94.

15. Shea, Virginia Militia, 75, 92-93; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 244-48. South Carolina found itself in a similar position at the beginning of an Indian war in 1671. The council voted that “it is thought unsafe” to keep all its twelve barrels of powder–barely enough for a month’s campaigning–in one central location, so it sent several barrels for safekeeping to two militia officers. Alexander S. Salley Jr., ed., Journal of the Grand Council of South Carolina (2 vols. Columbia, S.C., 1907) 1: 9-10.

16. Charles M. Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 1675-1690 (New York, 1943), 105.

17. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. by Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1947) 77; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 16-19, 105-07; W. L. Grant and James Munro, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, 1613-1680 (6 vols. Hereford, 1908-1912) 1: 593; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 250-59; Shea, Virginia Militia, 97-99.

18. Beverley, History of Virginia, 78; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 20-22, 108-12, 123-24; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 259-62; Shea, Virginia Militia, 100-04.

19. Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 22-27, 121-28; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 262-69; Shea, Virginia Militia, 104-11.

20. Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 27-39, 66-71, 128-40; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 269-70; Shea, Virginia Militia, 111-18.

21. Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 39-40; Beverley, History of Virginia, 85-86; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 271-79; Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts, 196-201, 207-11; Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 278-80, 288-90.

22. CO 5/1355: 68-75, 5/1371: 48, PRO; “Virginia in 1682,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 28 (1920): 227-28; Shea, Virginia Militia, 118-20.

23. “Virginia in 1682,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 28 (1920): 117-27, 229-33; Beverley, History of Virginia, 92; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 286-88; Shea, Virginia Militia, 125-26.

24. Shea, Virginia Militia, 120-21; W. Noel Sainsbury, et al., eds., Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina, 1663-1782 (36 vols. Columbia, S.C., and Atlanta, Ga., 1928-1947) 5: 109-111.

25. David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York, 1972), 122-59, 235-50.

26. E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New-York (4 vols. Albany, N.Y., 1849-1851) 2: 3-4, 14-15; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 362-63; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 106-14, 251-57.

27. Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 364; O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History 2: 6, 68, 185.

28. Flick, ed., History of New York 2: 109-16; O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History 2: 40, 106-108, 113-14, 120-32; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 338; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 313-14.

29. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History 2: 263, 268-69; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 312-24, 330-31.

30. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History 2: 309-10; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 322-23.

31. O’Callaghan, ed., Documentary History 2: 320-30, 340-46, 358-64; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 368-70, 390-93; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 337-40. For a more sympathetic treatment of Leisler’s Rebellion, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 44-49, 88-93.

32. Andrews, The Colonial Period 2: 343-44; Aubrey C. Land, Colonial Maryland: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1981), 79.

33. William H. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland (72 vols. Baltimore, 1883-1972) 5: 312-34; Andrews, The Colonial Period 2: 347-51; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 84-87; Land, Colonial Maryland, 79-80, 83-84.

34. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 8: 56-57, 65-67; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 257-60; Lois G. Carr and David W. Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution of Government, 1689-1692 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), 17, 41, 46-48.

35. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 8: 100-12; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 265-66; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 311-13; Land, Colonial Maryland, 86-93; Carr and Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution, 53-61.

36. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 8: 134-38, 147-56, 181-204, 211-28, 263-70; Carr and Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution, 74-83, 158-63, 201-16; Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 267-68, 302-307, 364-67.

37. Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: The Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689 (Raleigh, N.C., 1962) 16-17, 27-30, 36-39.

38. Ibid., 40-48, 62-63.

39. Gove was the only one tried. Convicted and sentenced to death, he was pardoned by the Privy Council and set free. Jere R. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire: A History (Millwood, N.Y., 1981), 90-95.

40. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-Hampshire (2 vols. Dover, N.H., 1831) 1: 98-100.

41. Nash, Urban Crucible, 43. There have been a number of studies of crowd action in colonial America, most focusing on the Revolutionary period. Those studying the years prior to the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 have found surprisingly few incidences compared with contemporary Europe, only a handful involving violence. In addition to those crowd actions mentioned here, there were three nonviolent mobs in Boston in 1689, 1710, and 1736 protesting economic issues; and some election crowds in Philadelphia in 1727-1729 and 1742; a bloodless anti-impressment riot in Boston in 1747, to which the militia refused to respond; a small nonviolent protest against the overevaluation of pennies in New York in 1753; a minor anti-impressment demonstration in New York in 1758, and another in 1759 concerning a food shortage; an anti-inoculation riot in Marblehead, 1730; and two attacks on houses of prostitution in Boston, 1734 and 1737. Nash, Urban Crucible, 38-44, 76-80, 132-33, 152-54, 222-23, 228-31, 266; Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 70-71, 383-84, 388-89; Christine L. Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (New York, 1984), 304-313. Bridenbaugh, who has a much looser definition of “riot,” locates several more: officials attacked in the streets of Boston, 1701 and 1741, and New York, 1705; the governor’s coach damaged in Boston, 1725; “vile Miscreants” tore up the Mayor’s plants and sailors stole a city pump in Philadelphia, 1729 and 1741; a “rabble” drinking confiscated claret in front of the customs officers in Newport, 1719; and a crowd of women who threw chamber pots at returning soldiers in 1707. Cities in the Wilderness, 223-24, 382-83. Only one of these riots may have involved a gun. Nash identifies a Boston riot in 1713 in which the lieutenant governor was shot; Bridenbaugh says he was wounded. Nash, Urban Crucible, 77; Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 196. Their source, Samuel Sewall’s diary, says only that a riot “Wounded the Lt. Govr. and Mr. Newton’s Son.” There is no reference to a gun or gunshot. Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, vols. 5 and 6 of Collections of the Massachusetts History Society, 5th ser. (Boston, 1878-1888). I can locate no contemporary account of what must have been a very dramatic event that surely would have evoked a royal response. On colonial and revolutionary traditions of crowd action see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1756-1776 (New York, 1972); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York, 1977); Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore, 1981); Michael A. Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlotesville, Va., 1993); Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).

42. Booth, Seeds of Anger, 150.

43. Michael A. Bellesiles, “Guns Don’t Kill, Movies Kill: The Media’s Promotion of Frontier Violence,” Western Historical Quarterly (Fall, 2000).

44. Alexander S. Salley Jr., ed. Journals of the Commons House of Assembly (21 vols. Columbia, S.C., 1907-1946) 1736-39: 110; Wood, Black Majority, 53, 260-62.

45. Sally E. Hadden, “Colonial and Revolutionary Era Slave Patrols,” in Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination, 69-85.

46. There was a hysterical terror of a slave uprising in New York in 1741, which led to the official torture and execution of 35 people. Nash, Urban Crucible, 108-11; Kenneth Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 43-74; Farenc M. Szasz, “The New York Slave Revolt of 1741: A Re-Examination,”New York History 48 (1967): 215-30; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1983), 168-73, 192-96.

47. Wood, Black Majority, 308-23.

48. Ibid., 321-23; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1983), 187-91.

49. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 28: 188-90; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 191-92.

50. Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (10 vols. New York, 1905-1907) 4: 289-314.

51. For example, Massachusetts Historical Society, “Instructions from the Church of Natick to William and Anthony,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 1st ser., 6 (1799): 201-03; Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913) 5, 8-17; Shurtleff and Pulsifer, eds., Records of New Plymouth 10: 439-40; Edward Wharton, New-England’s Present Suffering under Their Cruel Neighboring Indians (London, 1675), 4-6; William Hubbard, The Happiness of a People (Boston, 1676), 46. Colonial Americans seem to have lacked a coherent justification for war. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1988) 97-121.

52. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire, 91-92; Andrews, ed. Narratives of the Insurrections, 21-25; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 253-57; Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society 13: 247-48, 257-58.

53. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle, 12-13, 20-22; Alexander S. Salley Jr., ed. Narratives of Early North Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York, 1911), 328-29.

54. Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution, 218; Andrews, ed., Narratives of the Insurrections, 196-97; Sir Edmond Andros to William Blathwayt, April 4, October 4, 1688, William Blathwayt Papers, Colonial Williamsburg.

55. Board of Trade, Plantations, CO 323/4, PRO; Beverley, History of Virginia, 269; Grant and Munro, eds., Acts of the Privy Council 1: 422-23; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 252. Another problem was that all the gunpowder came from Europe as well. Gunpowder was thus expensive, difficult to transport, and just simply dangerous to handle or store. And it was essentially useless if shaken into a dust form or if it got wet. There were drying areas in European powder mills; but that was considered the single most dangerous part of the mill, and none existed in America. Jenny West, Gunpowder, Government and War in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), 7-22.

56. Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, Mass., 1994) 20-21.

57. Military historians who have looked at militia records: Shea, Virginia Militia, 87-96, 127-34; Harold E. Selesky, War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven, Conn., 1990) 3, 13-14; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 1-23; Don Higginbotham, “The Military Insitutions of Colonial America: The Rhetoric and the Reality,” in Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1988), 19-41.

58. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, eds., Records of New Plymouth 1: 22.

59. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 1: 77-78, 84, 347, 406-08, 410-13, 2: 475-76, 3: 107-08, 130-34, 344-51, 411, 502, 5: 21, 7: 53-63, 8: 223 (quote), 15: 47-49, 97-99, 124-27, 142-44, 20: 186, 313, 315, 317. Some other colonies were even more lax in maintaining militia musters, their legislatures struggling for decades to keep their militia alive in the face of public indifference. In 1677, for instance, the Rhode Island legislature informed the crown that the colonial militia was defunct and the colony “at this time is in effect wholly destitute of the military forces for the preservation of itself.” John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England (10 vols. Providence, R.I., 1856-1865) 2: 567-58. See also ibid., 1: 153-55, 218, 381, 2: 51-52, 114-18, 190, 211-12, 215-19, 3: 15, 4: 149, 155, 173, 211; Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer, eds., The Grants, Concessions, and Original Constitutions of the Province of New-Jersey (Philadelphia, 1758), 17-19, 85, 94, 135, 277, 331, 348, 424; State of New York,The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution (5 vols. Albany, 1894) 1: 49-55, 161-62, 219-20, 231-36, 454-55, 500-07, 546-48, 611-12, 675, 706-07, 745, 778-79, 781-82, 868, 885-88, 917, 1001; Thomas Cooper and David S. McCord, eds.The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (10 vols. Columbia, S.C., 1836-41) 1: 22-40, 48-49, 135, 148; 2: 9-12, 15, 20-21, 25, 44-50, 254-55, 623-24, 691; 3: 23, 108-11, 183, 255-57, 272, 301, 362, 395-98, 465-66, 568-73, 577, 595-96; 4: 104-06, 113-28, 144-48; 7: 1-12, 22-27, 33, 49-56, 346-49, 417-19; 9: 617-24, 638-57, 664-65, 682-88; Hoadly, ed.,Records of the Colony and Plantation, 1: 131-32, 202-205; Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New-Haven, from May 1653, to the Union, (Hartford, Conn., 1858) 173-75, 603-604.

60. John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,”1630-1649, ed. by J. K Hosmer (2 vols. New York, 1908) 1: 91-92, 2: 42.

61. Fifteen thousand men were eligible for service in the militia in 1690. Chicheley to Privy Council, July 16, 1672, Winder Transcripts, Virginia State Library, 1: 277; Lord Effingham to the Lords for Trade, May 28, 1689, CO 5/1358: 1, PRO; Effingham to the Lords for Trade, May 12, 1691 in W. Noel Sainsbury, et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies (44 vols., London, 1860-1969) 1689-1692, 434-35; Henry Chicheley to Thomas Chicheley, July 16, 1673, CO 1/30, PRO; Shea, Virginia Militia, 130; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 252, 395-410; Fredrick Stokes Aldridge, “Organization and Administration of the Militia System of Colonial Virginia” (PhD diss., American University, 1964) 66, 211.

62. Richard B. Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1676-1701 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), 238. Fitzhugh’s will and probate carefully record every bequest, right down to which son gets which waistcoat and his favorite chocolate pot, as well as every detail of his personal possessions; but there is no reference to a gun. See ibid., 38-39, 373-85.

63. Sir Francis Nicholson to Lords of Trade, August 20, November 4, 1690; January 26, 1691; February 26, July 16, 1692; December 2, 1701, CO 5/1305, 1306, 1358, 1360, PRO; Abstract of Militia Lists, October 1701, CO 5/1312, PRO; Query to Commissioners for Trade, March 1702, and to Lords of Trade, March 17, 1702, CO 5/1312, CO 5/1360, PRO; Gov. Edward Nott to Lords of Trade, 1705, CO 5/1315: 26-29, PRO; H. R. McIlwaine, et al., eds.,Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 1680-1754 (6 vols., Richmond, Va., 1925-1926) 1: 111-14, 117-21, 132-34, 141-42, 2: 333-34; William P. Palmer, et al., eds., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts (11 vols. Richmond, Va., 1875-1893) 1: 80-81; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 351-54; Aldridge, “Organization and Administration,” 92-104; Richard L. Morton, Struggle Against Tyranny (Williamsburg, Va., 1957) 50. Nicholson’s successor as governor, Edmund Andros, shared the view that the militia was “very Indifferently Armed,” and “unsuiteably (and not well) Armed” but concentrated on coastal defenses. Andros to Commissioners for Trade, 22 July 1693, CO 5/1308, PRO; Shea, Virginia Militia, 131-34.

64. William Byrd, The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712, ed. by Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond, Va., 1941), 389-96.

65. Ibid., 234, 399, 403, 405, 414-17, 424.

66. Jack Verney, The Good Regiment: The Carignan-Salieres Regiment in Canada, 1665-1688 (Montreal, 1991), 37-40.

67. Ibid., 45-53; W. J. Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV, 1663-1701 (London, 1964) 39-41. For a different reading of these events, see Trelease, Indian Affairs, 242-43.

68. Henry True, Memorandum and Account Book, 1696-1719, New York Public Library [Mss. Room]; Connecticut Historical Society, Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (31 vols., Hartford, Conn., 1860-1967) 13: 83-85, 269-76, 15: 133-36, 191.

69. Robert E. Wall, “Louisbourg, 1745,” New England Quarterly 37 (1964): 64-83; Louis Effingham De Forest, ed., Louisbourg Journals, 1745 (New York, 1932), 5-6 (quote), 10-28, 174-76; G. A. Rawlyk, Yankees at Louisboug (Orono, Me., 1967), 98-117.

70. Thomas Proctor to Samuel Waldo, May 26, 1744, Samuel Waldo Papers, John Marshall Diary, Massachusetts Historical Society.

71. South Carolina Gazette for November 8, 1735, March 6, 1736 (in reverse order); H. Telfer Mook, “Training Day in New England,” New England Quarterly 11 (1938): 681; John W. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 6; Ronald L. Boucher, “The Colonial Militia as a Social Institution: Salem, Massachusetts, 1764-1775,”Military Affairs 37 (1973): 125-30; Morison Sharp, “Leadership and Democracy in the Early New England System of Defense,” American Historical Review 50 (1945): 252; Louis Morton, “The Origins of American Military Policy,” Military Affairs 22 (1958): 75-82; Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York, 1956), 22-23.

72. Isabel M. Calder, ed., Colonial Captitivies, Marches and Journeys (New York, 1935) 36, 56; Henry True, Memorandum and Account Book, 1696-1719, NY Public Library [Mss Room]; O’Callaghan, and Fernow, eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History 14: 597-609; Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729 5: 350.

73. On the mythology of hunting, see Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

74. Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1925); Bettye H. Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 333-64.

75. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709), 14-42; Lawrence J. Burpee, ed., “Journal of Matthew Cocking, From York Factory to the Blackfeet Country, 1772-73,” Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3d ser., 2 (1908): 89-119; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins & Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 (Lincoln, Ne., 1993), 66. For other legal limitations on hunting, see for example, State of New York, Colonial Laws, 1: 585-86, 618-20, 888, 2: 323-24; Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, Md., 1996), 15-17.

76. Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, 86, 88.

77. See, for instance, the account books of William Heywood, Stephen Peabody, Thomas Vail, Elijah Washburn, American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.); Jonas Fay, Isaac Greene, Nathan Stone, Samuel Thrall, Vermont Historical Society (Montpelier, Vt.); the Brownson family, David Mallory, Arlington Library (Arlington, Vt.); Stephen Fay, Bennington Historical Museum (Bennington, Vt.); Stephen Fay, Ambros Hubbert, Bennington Probate Records; Asa Sanger, Keene Public Library (Keene, N.H.); Harold B. Gill Jr., The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg, Va., 1974), 63-68.

78. Indians also relied heavily on traps for hunting. Very little research has been done on hunting in colonial America. The topic is better developed in the nineteenth century. Michael A. Bellesiles, “The Autobiography of Levi Allen,” Vermont History 60 (1992), 85-87; Beverley, History of Virginia, 309-10; Thomas E. Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686-1776 (Madison, Wi., 1974), 60-120; Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman, Ok., 1990), 132-42; Calloway, ed., Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, N.H., 1991), 193-211; Paul C. Phillips, The Fur Trade (2 vols. Norman, Ok., 1961) 1: 377-403; Burpee, ed., “Journal of Matthew Cocking, 106-107; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 66-73.

79. John Phillip Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet: Law, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Cherokee Nation during the Early Years of European Contact (University Park, Pa., 1976), 34-36; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 61- 66; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 90-91; Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York, 215-25. Rhode Island employed Indians as hunters; Bartlett, ed., Records of Rhode Island 1: 125-26. Maryland attempted in 1650 to outlaw the practice of employing Indians as hunters for white settlers. Nothing came of this effort. Browne, et al., eds.,Archives of Maryland 3: 260.

80. Michael A. Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), 27; Jackson T. Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 18-27, 50-54, 104-13; Walter Nugent, Structures of American Social History (Bloomington, In., 1981), 39-53.

81. Main, Social Structure, 34-44, 67, 75-83, 112-13, 132-35; Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (New York, 1990) 121-88.

82. Main estimates the average annual income of a skilled artisan at £25 to £30. Main, Social Structure, 68-114; Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer, 123-33. On the paucity of currency in British North America, see John J. McCusker, Money And Exchange In Europe And America, 1600-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978), 125-31; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 337-41.

83. Gill Jr., The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, 22-32, 63-68; James Whisker, The Gunsmith’s Trade (Lewiston, N.Y., 1992), 144-63.

84. S. James Gooding, The Canadian Gunsmiths, 1608 to 1900 (West Hill, Ont., 1962), 31-32. The first gun known to be made in Canada was in the early nineteenth century though some forty smiths and armorers, mostly employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, repaired and maintained firearms in the eighteenth century. Ibid., 34, 59-185.

85. James Blair, president of the Virginia Council, wrote in 1768 that “We do not make a saw, auger, gimlett, file, or nails, nor steel; and most tools in the Country are imported from Britain.” Quoted in Gill,The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, 45. The few surviving gunsmith account books from the eighteenth century, such as those of James Anderson of Williamsburg which cover the years 1778 to 1799 (Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg), indicates that he repaired but did not make guns. And colonial assemblies regularly paid smiths to repair arms, but almost never purchased guns from these smiths.

86. Gill, The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, 21-32; Whisker, The Gunsmith’s Trade, 47-66. The Jager rifle, an ornamental German gun with a short barrel and large bore, came to Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century. Those few gunsmiths making rifles in America reduced the caliber to conserve powder and lead, and lengthened the barrel. Felix Reichman, “The Pennsylvania Rifle: A Social Interpretation of Changing Military Techniques,”Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 69 (1945): 8-9.

87. Salley Jr., ed., Journal of the Grand Council, 1: 7-8, 39-40, 46, 51-52, 62; Theodore Jabbs, “The South Carolina Colonial Militia, 1663-1733” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1973) 96-97. There is a smith named John Dandy who appears in the Maryland records of the 1640s. In 1644 he may have made or assembled the first gun in the American colonies–the parts were surely imported. On at least one occasion Dandy stocked a gun, and in 1647 he claimed to have made a gunlock eight years earlier, though that must have been in England, if true, since he arrived in Maryland in 1642. Dandy was charged with murdering an Indian boy in 1644, but found innocent. In 1650 he beat an indentured servant to death and was hanged. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 4: 122, 247, 254-55, 284, 10: 283.

88. Reichman, “The Pennsylvania Rifle,” 9-10; James B. Whisker, Arms Makers of Colonial America (Selingsgrove, Pa., 1992), 102-104, 129-30; M. L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792 (Washington, D.C., 1980), 256-59, 264.

89. Gill, The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, 6-7, 27-29, 69-108. On David and William Geddy’s ability to rifle barrels, see the Virginia Gazette August 8 1751.

90. Rita S. Gottesman, comp., The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726-1776, vol. 69 of Collections of the New York Historical Society (New York, 1938), 82, 165, quoting New-York Gazette September 18 1769, November 7, 1774 (in reverse order). On other artisans repairing guns, see also ibid., 197, 201, for a brass founder (Rivington’s New York Gazetteer May 18, 1775) and a cutler (The New-York Gazette April 6, 1767). As Rita S. Gottesman writes in the introduction, “The early New York artisan had apparently not yet won the confidence of his community, for most articles offered for sale in New York were imported. Even repairs were made abroad” (xiii).

91. Ibid., 304; quoting New-York Gazette August 1 1748.

92. George F. Dow, comp., The Arts and Crafts in New England, 1704-1775 (Topsfield, Mass., 1927), 264-65.

93. At the very least one can safely say that gunsmiths saw no advantage in advertising their services. Alfred C. Prime, comp., The Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia, Maryland, and South Carolina, 1721-1785 (Philadelphia, 1929). During the Revolution, fifty artisans from trades as diverse as clockmaker to tinsmith cleaned and repaired firearms for Pennsylvania, not one of them was a gunsmith. Whisker, The Gunsmith’s Trade, 88; Roy Chandler, et al., Arms Makers of Eastern Pennsylvania (Bedford, Pa., 1984).

94. H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Legislative Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia, 1680-1774 (3 vols. Richmond, Va., 1918) 2: 695; Whisker, The Gunsmith’s Trade, 68-73.

95. William W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia (13 vols. Richmond, Va., 1809-1823) 1: 208, 2: 85, 294, 3: 363; McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council 1: 215. Other colonies also expropriated the labor of gunsmiths, often in similar wording. In 1661, for instance, the Maryland council ordered “That all Smiths which have tooles be forced to fixe armes for the Soldiers.” Four years later Connecticut’s assembly proclaimed that no smith could do any other work until all the militia’s arms were properly repaired. Browne, et al., eds., Archives of Maryland 3: 531, 4: 46, 19: 586; J. Hammond Trumbull, et al., eds., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (15 vols., Hartford, Conn., 1850-1890) 2: 19-20.

96. Gill, The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia, 17-18, 33-44. Though many different artisans were involved in gun repair and maintenance, it is unclear how often they conducted such work. For instance, Jonathan Haight, a rural New York blacksmith, kept an account book between 1771 and 1789. His 5,200 transactions involving 350 customers included only one minor gun repair. Jonathan Haight account book, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

97. McIlwaine, ed., Executive Journals of the Council1: 215; The Council to the Board of Trade, CO 5/1309: 223-24, CO 5/1358: 29-33, 41-45, PRO. See also CO 323/4, PRO.

98. Gill, The Gunsmith in Colonial Virginia , 21-31. There are a few instances of gunsmiths coming to America as indentured servants and finding themselves with little opportunity to use their skills, eventually turning to other lines of employment. See for instance John Austin and John Spencer of Maryland and Henry Hawkins of Pennsylvania; American Weekly Mercury November 28 1728; Maryland Gazette July 31, 1755; Whisker, The Gunsmith’s Trade, 96.

99. One critic explained the paucity of firearms in probate inventories by stating that “it is well known that the inventory of a estate is what is left after family members pick over the items.” Maybe that is the way people behave in his family, but it was and remains highly illegal to ransack an estate before a court-appointed executor can conduct an inventory. Anyone who works with the probate court records from this early, perhaps more honest, period, knows that exact reference was made to every item, no matter how trivial, that had been passed on to a friend or family member before the death of the testator. The courts are packed with suits between family members arguing over who gets the sheets, plow, and family Bible. Mike Brown, “Constitution Framers backed the right to bear arms,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch December 5, 1998.

100. This data is drawn from Horatio Rogers, et al., eds., The Early Records of the Town of Providence (21 vols. Providence, R.I., 1892-1915), vols. 6, 7, and 16.

101. Douglas E. Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607-1763 (New York, 1973) 12. Incredibly, Leach demonstrates this assertion with a fictional account of a militia muster (24-38).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Michael Bellesiles, who taught at Emory University, is the recipient of the Louis Pelzer and Binkley-Stephenson Awards (1986 and 1996). He is the author of Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville, 1993).

This curious comment appeared in 1810–in a review of “Parson” Mason Locke Weems’s cherry-tree biography of George Washington–but it might just as well have been written about Edmund Morris’s 1999 Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, a book that historian Joyce Appleby labeled “literary Forrest Gumpery” and commentator George F. Will called weird and perverse.

Biographies make strange bedfellows. Or at least the controversies over them do. The fracas over Dutch united journalists and academics, liberals and conservatives, onetime Reagan staffers and longtime Reagan detractors. Most critics claimed that the flap revealed more about contemporary culture wars than about Ronald Reagan, but few observed that it marked a shift in how we think about biography itself.

The comparison with Weems seems apt: Morris, like Weems, stands accused of inventing fictions about a larger-than-life American president. Over the past century, “Parson Weems” has become synonymous with mythmaking, hero-worship, and bad history. Yet, for much of the nineteenth century, Weems’s name meant something different to American readers. His work provided patriotic inspiration to generations of young Americans. Abraham Lincoln read Weems’s Life of Washington as a boy and, as president-elect, cited it before the New Jersey state senate. Ellen Humphreys, the child protagonist in Susan Warner’s best-selling 1850 novel The Wide, Wide World, couldn’t put the book down. Yet Weems, like Morris, was embroiled in culture wars of his day. Understanding those battles, and Weems himself, may help explain why he and the cherry tree remain with us nearly two hundred years later–and why Dutch has raised so many hackles.

The Dutch reviews split over Reagan himself, of course. In the online magazine Slate and on radio and TV, conservative critic Dinesh D’Souza noted that Morris didn’t “credit Reagan’s force of intellect” or consider Reagan’s role in creating “the political and social framework for the silicon revolution,” among other omissions. In the Washington Post, the noted historian of early America Joseph Ellis emphasized the controversies–implicitly, the downsides–that Morris failed to appraise systematically: the tax cuts and defense spending that “produced those unprecedented deficits”; “his complicity in the arms-for-hostages deal labeled Iran-Contra.”

Critics focused mostly on Morris’s approach to biography: inventing fictional characters–including a version of himself–whose lives intersect with Reagan’s, inserting himself as biographer into the narrative. In this conceit, the teenaged Morris sees Reagan as a teenaged lifeguard; is it character Morris or biographer Morris who writes, “Watching him [swimming]–indeed, trying to imitate him–helped me understand at least partly the massive privacy of his personality” (61)? The critics’ complaints recurred across ideologies and occupations. Historians may have made more of Morris’s endnotes–which include correspondence from his fictional characters beside authentic documents–than did the journalists and pundits. But the larger critique was the same: Morris’s book was “a tragic ruin” (wrote editor Charles Krauthammer), even “dung biography” (political scientist Larry Sabato, who was connecting the controversies over Dutch and the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensations” exhibit [Weeks, “Can Put It Down!” 1999]).

“Weems, like Morris, was embroiled in culture wars of his day.”

But look at where the critics placed deeper blame, and another story emerges. D’Souza argued that Morris reflected “the prejudices of the intelligentsia,” and that Dutch was “an attempt to avenge Reagan’s rout of the intellectual class.” George Will went further: “Down from the academy has trickled the poison of postmodernism,” in which “facts hardly matter, only interpretations are real.” Postmodern history “invests the historian with the heroism of an artist, creating reality rather than fulfilling the mundane role of describer and interpreter of reality.” (Never mind that romantic historians such as Francis Parkman and George Bancroft practiced history as heroic literary art a century and a half ago, before anyone coined the term “postmodernism.”)

From the academy came a different interpretation. Joyce Appleby admitted that “some would say that questions of truth, accuracy, and representations of realities have been rendered moot by postmodernists.” Appleby’s postmodernists, though, included “20th-century philosophes, literary scholars, science skeptics and social critics”–not historians. Indeed, the historians identified another source for Morris’s approach: up from popular culture, not down from the academy. Appleby included historical novels and movies and a “cultural milieu . . . imbued with factoids, infomercials and so on” in explaining Morris’s “latest hybrid–bio-fiction, imagino-realism, history lite.” Joseph Ellis linked Dutch to “docudramas” such as Oliver Stone’s JFK. In the historians’ eyes, Dutch wasn’t the logical result of current trends in academic history. It was what happens when a writer ignores the historian’s sine qua non: sticking to the evidence, at the possible cost of boring readers.

Historian Alan Brinkley reminded us that some recent historians have blended fact and fiction. He credited John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive and Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties with doing so more successfully than Edmund Morris’s Dutch. Brinkley’s point is important: this wasn’t simply a debate between conservative pundits and the supposedly liberal intelligentsia who have re-created history writing. It was also a debate within the historical profession about how far it’s fair to imagine one’s way into the past.

Biography, however, isn’t just a branch of history. It has been a literary genre at least since Plutarch. When critics connected Dutch to James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, they placed Morris in literary company–even if, as Ellis noted, Morris’s Boswellian touches were only a literary conceit. For centuries, biographies have been criticized for blurring the line between truth and fiction. One reviewer in the 1850s lambasted James Parton, America’s first career biographer, for erring “on the side of conjecture” rather than spoiling “a good story.” When Harriet Beecher Stowe thanked Parton for making biographies “more interesting than romance,” she hoped parenthetically that “it is not by making them in part works of imagination.”

As Judith Shulevitz noted in Slate, the twentieth-century penchant for biographical leaps of imagination began with Lytton Strachey, biographer of Queen Victoria, who reacted against the fact-filled, ponderous “lives and times” of great men. The twentieth century’s innovations in biographical technique usually came in literary biographies. Authors and artists seemed to summon their biographers to imaginative acts of their own. Some of Dutch‘s critics speculate that Reagan–or the frustration of capturing his essence–cast a similar spell on Morris. Or perhaps Morris gave our first postmodern president, the man who blurred history and the movies, exactly the biography he deserved (Kakutani 1999; Vidal 1999).

For his part, Morris placed his work outside his critics’ worlds. He told the Washington Post‘s Linton Weeks that he was more interested in how “Gore Vidal, Richard Holmes, John Updike, people of that caliber” viewed his book than in the responses of academic historians, journalists, or pundits (Weeks, “How to Pen One for the Gipper,” 1999). In fact, before reading Dutch, Vidal wrote about it in the New York Times, humorously seconding Morris’s “fictionalizing himself”–since, after all, show business shaped Reagan’s entire ascent. Morris and his publishers envisioned a broad audience, with whom Dutch would pass what the author in 1991 called the “ultimate test of any piece of nonfiction writing”: “its success in saying something–or quoting something–that a majority of readers ‘can’t help but believe'” (Will 1999). Morris yoked two audiences, literary writers and the book-buying public, that supposedly transcended the political and cultural wars of the talk shows and the academy.

Parson Weems never tried to have it both ways. Like Morris, he may have invented his sources. Did “the aged lady, who was a distant relative” of George Washington, really exist? Or the “very aged gentleman, formerly a school-mate of his” (Cunliffe 1962, 9, 19)? Like Morris, Weems claimed unprecedented access: his title page announced him (falsely) as “rector of Mount Vernon parish.” Unlike Morris, however, Weems knew that his life of Washington would not satisfy critics of a literary bent.

To join America’s foremost promoters of patriotism, Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825) traveled far from his early education. Born to wealthy parents in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Weems received an elite education in England–first medicine, then the ministry–while the Revolution raged in America. He was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1784, just when many patriots in the newly independent United States came to shun Anglican ministers. (His ordination was permitted without the customary oath of allegiance to the crown, thanks to a 1784 parliamentary act dispensing “persons intending to serve in foreign lands” from taking the oath.) Weems returned to serve as a rector in several churches in Maryland. After he married Frances Ewell of Belle Air, Virginia, in 1795, he relocated to nearby Dumfries in Prince William County, on the Potomac eighteen miles below Mount Vernon.

Sometime before 1791, Weems started selling books for Philadelphia’s Mathew Carey and other publishers. This new career took him into towns and countryside from New York to Georgia, where he met the American common reader: the farmer or tradesman whose books might include little besides a Bible, a book of hymns or psalms, and the latest almanac. A full-time book peddler by 1793, Weems often preached in the towns where he brought his wares. Much of this preaching was melodramatic. So were the twenty-five-cent religious tracts he started writing and selling in the 1790s, the decade when revivalism took hold in America’s backcountry. Full of lurid tales of sin and excess, these included Hymen’s Recruiting Sergeant (1799), God’s Revenge Against Murder (1807), God’s Revenge Against Gambling (1810), The Drunkard’s Looking Glass (1812), God’s Revenge Against Adultery (1815), and The Bad Wife’s Looking Glass (1823). Weems the parson stood at the vanguard of a new evangelical culture and a newly democratic ethos. Weems the traveling salesman was also at the forefront of a new American capitalism. Ever the promoter of himself and his work, he exclaimed to Carey in 1807 that “I am sure–very sure–morally & positively sure that I have it in my power (from my universal acquaintance, Industry, & Health) to make you the most Thriving Book-seller in America. I can secure to you almost exclusively the whole of the business in the middle & western parts of all these Southern states from Maryland to Georgia inclusive” (Skeel 1929, 2:362).

“It is not then in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life.”

When George Washington died on December 14, 1799, Weems had been working on a biography for six months. Just weeks later, he wrote to Carey, “Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly prim’d & cock’d for ’em” (Skeel 1929, 2:126). Weems’s first edition (not published by Carey, who soon regretted the mistake) ran just eighty pages. A memorial volume not unlike dozens of other tributes to Washington, Weems’s little book consoled Martha Washington on her loss of “that best of husbands.” It also used Washington’s death to plead for national unity during the 1800 presidential election between President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson–a contest that had really begun with Adams’s 1796 victory over Jefferson (Weems 1800, dedication page). Washington may have been the father of his country, but by the middle of his presidency partisan conflict roiled the nation, with Washington identified with the Federalists. Adams’s Federalist presidency was more bitter still, and the 1800 rematch produced charges of atheism and libertinism against Jefferson, and of monarchism against Adams.

In 1800, Weems envisioned his book as “a feast of true Washington Entertainment and Improvement, both to ourselves and our children.” By 1808, the book was in its sixth edition–now published by Carey. It had a new title, The Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself, and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. It contained many of the anecdotes that would become American legend: not just the cherry tree, but also the story of Mary Washington’s dream, in which little George’s mother dreams that her son extinguishes a rooftop fire on the family’s home (a homespun metaphor for the Revolution). For the first time, this edition identified Weems as “formerly rector of Mount-Vernon Parish.” In fact, he had preached for several months at Pohick Church in Washington’s family parish of Fairfax.

 

How did this celebration of Washington become fodder for the culture wars of the Jeffersonian era? In one letter to Carey, Weems called his little book “moralizing & Republican” (Skeel 129, 2:362). He meant that it wasn’t something else: Chief Justice John Marshall’s historical, five-volume, Federalist biography of Washington. Weems knew Marshall’s work well, because he was one of its traveling salesmen for the publisher C. P. Wayne. He also knew that Marshall’s work was a tough sell. It was expensive. Its volumes came out slowly: the first in 1804, the last not until 1807. Its fifth volume, on Washington’s presidency, was so contentiously Federalist that Jefferson considered writing a rebuttal. Marshall and the Federalists had made Washington one of their own. Weems told a different story: of a Washington above parties, a Washington whose successor could easily be the Republican Jefferson. In Chapter 13, “Character of Washington,” Weems contrasted Washington’s spotless character with the errant ways of four other men: Benedict Arnold, Charles Lee (the general who envied Washington), Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. The last two, of course, were Jefferson’s great antagonists, a fact that could not have been lost on contemporary readers (Onuf 1996, xvii-xviii).

At the same time, Weems’s Life of Washington participated in a conflict over biography itself. In the new United States, two concepts of biography vied for supremacy. One derived from England–specifically, from the literary essays of Samuel Johnson, the great English lexicographer. Johnson and his disciples argued that biography ought to reveal its subjects in their “domestic privacies”: how they appeared off the public stage. Their purpose was not to tear down the reputations of great men (and occasionally women), but to get behind the “vulgar greatness” of public appearance. Presenting the “invisible circumstances” of a subject’s life would offer readers “natural and moral knowledge” and enhanced “virtue.” Johnsonian theory, in other words, made biography into a branch of moral education.

So did the other concept of biography: a republican vision that other critics championed as uniquely American. If American republicanism focused on individuals’ role as citizens–and if biography ought to offer examples for the next generation to follow–should not republican biographies present America’s heroes astride the public stage? Most early American biographers believed so. Their subjects rarely appeared outside their places on the battlefield or in the councils of state. This concept of biography virtually ensured women’s absence: indeed, the classical republican notion of “virtue”–the word itself derived from vir, Latin for “man”–emphasized masculine civic virtue (even if a concept of republican womanhood also emerged after the Revolution). For the most part, Johnsonian ideas about biography appeared only in literary magazines, some of which took their cues from British quarterlies, while republican ideas dominated biographies themselves.

Weems declared in the introduction to his life of Washington, “It is not then in the glare of public, but in the shade of private life, that we are to look for the man. Private life is always real life. Behind the curtain, where the eyes of the million are not upon him, and where a man can have no motive but inclination, no excitement but honest nature, there he will always be sure to act himself; consequently, if he act greatly, he must be great indeed.” Nobody had ever told Washington’s private life before, Weems wrote. His story wouldn’t offer “domestic privacies” in the Johnsonian sense: it would not reveal the foibles that made Washington human and thus familiar to the ordinary reader. Instead, Weems’s story would display Washington’s glorious traits outside the political and military realms: “the dutiful son–the affectionate brother–the cheerful school-boy–the diligent surveyor–the neat draftsman–the laborious farmer–and widow’s husband–the orphan’s father–the poor man’s friend” (Cunliffe 1962, 1-3). Nevertheless, it would teach a rising generation of Americans the private virtues needed to sustain a democratic republic (though surely not to lead revolutions of their own).

The key distinction here was between private virtues and privacy. In the introduction, Weems wrote that he would not discuss details of Washington’s marriage or of Martha Washington’s life. It was “contrary to the rules of biography,” he explained, “to begin with the husband and end with the wife.” Weems meant that there were bounds of propriety that biographers were obliged to respect. These boundaries would keep women–the wives of male subjects–out of most biographies for the next fifty years. These were not the familiar republican boundaries, in which women vanished because they weren’t citizens in the classical sense. Instead, Weems helped lay the groundwork for the idea of “separate spheres,” in which domestic privacy would be a hallmark of a new middle class.

Mason Locke Weems hailed from the Maryland elite–perhaps even Tories, depending on which account one reads (Onuf 1996, xix). George Washington was a scion and leader of Virginia’s landed, slave owning gentry. Their bloodlines and birthrights suggested eighteenth-century men. Yet in his own professional life, Weems seemed to mark America’s future: evangelical, capitalistic, even hucksterish. In depicting Washington’s character, he helped delineate the virtues of the nineteenth-century middle class: duty, religion, benevolence, industry, patriotism. Even in whom he left out–Martha–he offered a glimpse into the future. And his books sold.

The literary elite generally scorned Weems’s Life of Washington. As would be the case with Edmund Morris’s Dutch nearly two centuries later, some reviewers probably had political objections: they wished for a more Federalist treatment. But also like the controversy of 1999, another issue was at stake: the line between fact and fiction. The problem here wasn’t postmodernism perverting history. Rather, fiction itself was suspect in the early republic. Would fanciful tales turn readers’ heads away from practical duty and virtue? Would fiction, particularly of the sentimental variety that allowed readers into the hearts and inner thoughts of (often female) protagonists, displace more useful reading? Or could trappings of fiction help sell messages of morality?

To Weems, the boundaries between genres were permeable. Different genres could be complementary, not contradictory. As his sensational sermon-tracts revealed, he never refrained from adding romance to enhance appeal. At least one reviewer appreciated Weems’s Life of Washington for its romantic dimensions: “the Writer makes us alternately weep and laugh. . . . There is a kind of poetic fire running through every sentence of this History, that irresistibly fixes the Attention, warms the Heart, and brings to the Eyes those delicious Waters which flow from Piety, Love, and Admiration” (Skeel 1929, 1:28-29). In 1809, Weems accepted Brigadier General Peter Horry’s invitation to write a biography of General Francis Marion, Horry’s commander in the Revolution. Horry had tried but failed to write the book himself, so he sent his reminiscences to Weems. The parson promised to “polish and colour it in a style that will, I hope, sometimes excite a smile, and sometimes call forth the tear.” When The Life of Francis Marion was done, Weems told Horry, “knowing the passion of the times for novels, I have endeavoured to throw your facts and ideas about Gen. Marion into the garb and dress of a military romance” (Skeel 1929, 1:100-01, 2:427).

“Would fanciful tales turn readers’ heads away from practical duty and virtue?”

To others, the boundaries mattered. Hence Dr. Bigelow complained in the Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review that he couldn’t decide whether Weems’s life of Washington was “a biography, or a novel, founded on fact” (Skeel 1929, 1:55). That last phrase referred to contemporary novelists’ professions that their stories had real-life bases: thus Susanna Rowson’s best-sellingCharlotte Temple was originally called Charlotte: A Tale of Truth. Peter Horry was indignant at Weems’s Life of Marion: “A history of realities turned into a romance! The idea alone, militates against the work. . . . Most certainly ’tis not my history, but your romance.” Except for Horry, who had a personal stake in Marion’s story, Weems’s critics tended to be the literati of northern cities and southern plantations. Virginia writer and jurist St. George Tucker wrote to his friend William Wirt, also a Virginia statesman, that he had barely been able to stomach Weems’s first paragraph–after which “I shut the book . . . and have no desire to see it again” (Kennedy, 1:352-353). New York’s Monthly Magazine and American Review called Weems’s original edition “eighty pages of as entertaining and edifying matter as can be found in the annals of fanaticism and absurdity” (Skeel 1929, 1:14).

But Weems was a traveling bookseller in America’s backcountry. Hawking books and preaching in western Pennsylvania or North Carolina, he did the closest thing in the new United States to book tours and appearances on “Larry King Live.” Weems’s customers were his audience, and he knew just what they wanted to read.

Parson Weems has had an afterlife that’s likely to outlast Dutch. In the nineteenth century, millions of Americans read his biographies of Washington and Marion (although his lives of Benjamin Franklin and William Penn probably sold less well)–even if critics and historians ridiculed them as didactic fiction. The story of Washington and the cherry tree became an American legend, not just repeated in images of Washington, but also invoked in political cartoons to poke fun at current political leaders. The twentieth century was less kind. The 1920s penchant for debunking historical icons produced W. E. Woodward’s George Washington, The Image and the Man (1926), whose title spoke volumes: the Weemsian image wasn’t the real man, whose faults ranged from vanity to horse racing and card playing. Weems himself became associated with sanitized, didactic pseudo-history–to put it more bluntly, mythmaking. Historians tended to dismiss him.

The Iowa artist Grant Wood offered a more humorous commentary. In his 1939 painting Parson Weems’ Fable (Amon Carter Museum, Houston), Weems stands in the foreground, lifting a curtain to reveal little George.

 

Complete with head from Gilbert Stuart’s portrait, George stands before his father and points to the hatchet in his left hand. The cherries dangling from the tree mimic the tassels on Weems’s red curtain. On the eve of World War II, Wood hoped to counter fascist propaganda with “the preservation of our folklore.” He also aimed to show how American myths differed from Nazi ones: Americans could recognize that their fables were simply stories, and story telling and humor themselves were American traditions. In other words, to borrow a phrase from that other 1939 American classic, The Wizard of Oz, Wood knew that there was a man behind the curtain.

In the background of Parson Weems’ Fable, two slaves labor at another tree–a fact not lost on seventh-grader Taylor Davis of Hidden Valley Middle School near San Diego. Davis’s 1998 poem, “Overlooking Mount Vernon: After Wood’s ‘Parson Weems’ Fable,'” appeared in the Oak Grove Review, an local annual anthology of student poetry:

The boy
with the gray hair
holding the axe
that cut down the cherry tree,
his father is happy,
for he didn’t tell a lie.
I am the man pulling back the curtain.
I know the situation.
Little George’s dad
shouldn’t worry about George.
He holds the lives of the slaves
in the back of the picture,
their fingers tired
from picking cherries all day.

Grant Wood isn’t the only American artist to take Weems as a subject. In 1975, the American composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) wrote the score forParson Weems and the Cherry Tree, a ballet suite commissioned by Erick Hawkins. Thomson drew on “songs, marches, and parlor pieces from the Federal period.” The ballet was a comic one, inspired perhaps by the bicentennial; its twelve sections included “The Parson Writes His Book,” “The Parson Instructs George,” and “Chopping the Tree.”

Today, the phrase “Parson Weems” evokes multiple responses. The most common, of course, is Parson Weems the unreliable storyteller, whose myths aimed to inculcate values but whose history was half-baked at best. Several commentators have noted how the false history undercut the moral message. Commenting on the biblical doctrine of bearing false witness on the eve of the Clinton impeachment hearings, a North Carolina minister noted that Weems’s story hadn’t done its job: it “has succeeded in making George Washington the sworn enemy of all young children,” but it “certainly has not made them more truthful. The funny part of it is that this story about the virtue of telling the truth is itself not true–Parson Weems or somebody made it up.” Maybe the message is utterly different, at least for a generation of capitalists. In the New York Times, Michael Lewis, author of the best-selling Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, suggested that the “true significance” of the cherry-tree story is that “it pays to lie, if you have the knack for it. And if you lie as well as Weems you can make a lot of people happy, simply by telling them what they think they want to hear.”

At the same time, historians and literary critics have rediscovered Mason Locke Weems as a major American cultural figure. Historians of American publishing always knew Weems: his letters to Carey and other publishers, a treasure trove about early American bookselling, were published in 1929, and numerous historians of print culture have examined his bookselling career. What’s new is the sense that Weems possessed larger cultural significance. R. Laurence Moore writes that “Weems’s marriage of aggressive marketing with a moral mission was one important starting point of America’s nineteenth-century culture industry,” especially the selling of religion. Steven Watts identifies Weems as “a captain in the swelling moral militia of bourgeois culture in early-nineteenth-century America.” Jay Fliegelman sees the cherry-tree story (“Run to my arms, you dearest boy”) as part of America’s revolution against stern patriarchal authority, a parable for the nineteenth-century culture of family sentiment. Conversely, T. Hugh Crawford argues that Weems made Washington into a new patriarch to stem the tide of revolution. Weems’s Life of Washington shows up in college courses on early American literature and the history of the early republic, thanks to this new interest and especially to a 1996 scholarly paperback edition.

“In the nineteenth century, millions of Americans read his biographies of Washington and Marion–even if critics and historians ridiculed them as didactic fiction.”

Weems isn’t without his political uses, either. The cherry-tree story appears in the “Buchanan Brigade Library–Our American Heritage,” a web site created in tandem with Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign. According to Buchanan, today’s schools poison children “against their Judeo-Christian heritage, against America’s heroes and against American history, against the values of faith and family and country.” His library–whose contents range from the Declaration of Independence to Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” to the West Point Cadet’s Prayer–aimed to level the playing field. The day after President Clinton admitted his liaison with Monica Lewinsky, conservative columnist Linda Chavez wrote a piece called “How America Lost Its Moral Compass.” Once upon a time, Chavez wrote, children learned the value of truth from the story of Washington and the cherry tree. “But then a few decades ago, Americans became too sophisticated for the likes of Parson Weems’ popular tale. After all, it wasn’t strictly speaking a true story about the nation’s first president, whose reputation was busily being deconstructed by a new breed of historians committed to exposing the atrocities of dead, white, European males.” Shades of the controversy over Morris’s Dutch–where, too, conservative critics worried about the aftershocks of academic history.

Of all the current manifestations, I think Weems would most appreciate the Weems-Botts Museum in Dumfries, Virginia. Weems bought the building in 1798, probably to use as his bookshop, depot, and overnight lodging. He sold it four years later. Today the museum houses exhibits and hosts events, including a 1999 cherry-pie eating contest judged by an actor dressed as Weems. It also charges $3.00 admission and maintains the “Peddling Parson Book and Gift Shoppe.” Weems’s marketing methods were his own itinerant peddling, his sermons, and the advertisements he placed in local papers. But were he alive today, Weems would surely do exactly what the Weems-Botts Museum did last year. Dressed in eighteenth-century garb, then-curator Jeanne Hochmuth showed the house and talked about Weems in local classrooms. She insisted we’ll never know whether his stories were true or not. And the museum doesn’t need a traveling salesman. It has a web site.

Whether Edmund Morris’s Dutch has the staying power of Mason Locke Weems’s cherry tree has yet to be determined. Either way, the complaint that biographers blur the line between fact and fiction is nothing new. Perhaps some of the motivations for that blurring are also the same. Weems sold books by telling the people “what they think they want to hear,” to borrow Michael Lewis’s phrase. Morris’s line sounds eerily similar: the acid test of nonfiction isn’t its literal truth, but “its success in saying something–or quoting something–that a majority of readers ‘can’t help but believe.'” Morris may not mean “marketability” when he says “success,” or perhaps his literary aspirations don’t allow him to admit the mercenary motives that Parson Weems never denied. What changes is the context and language of the debate. Two centuries ago, it was Federalists vs. Republicans, domestic privacies vs. public deeds, and history vs. romance. Today, it’s Reagan and the intelligentsia, postmodernism and docudrama, Oliver Stone and Forrest Gump.

Bibliographic Essay

Mason Locke Weems’s colorful prose–in his biographies, tracts, and letters–remains a delight to read and a marvelous window onto the early nineteenth century. His Life of George Washington appeared in dozens of nineteenth-century editions, originally as M. L. Weems, A History, of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits, of General George Washington (Georgetown, 1800). The sixth edition (Philadelphia, 1808) introduced many of the famous stories, including the cherry tree. The two important scholarly editions were edited by Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962) and by Peter Onuf (Armonk, N.Y., and London, 1996). Onuf’s introduction places Weems’s Washington squarely within the Jeffersonian context and provides useful biographical information on Weems (see xvii-xx). The other essential primary text is Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, 3 vols. (New York, 1929), which contains Weems’s extant correspondence, descriptive bibliography for all the editions of Weems’s works, and copious extracts from contemporary reviews including elusive newspaper squibs. St. George Tucker’s April 4, 1813 letter to William Wirt appeared in John P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney General of the United States(Philadelphia, 1849).

Recent scholarship on Weems is voluminous, as the peddling parson has become a cultural icon of the early republic. I’ve referred here to R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York and Oxford, 1994), 20-24; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore and London, 1987), 142-144; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982), 201; T. Hugh Crawford, “Images of Authority, Strategies of Control: Cooper, Weems, and George Washington, “South Central Review 11 (Spring 1994), 61-74. Lewis G. Leary’s biography, The Book-Peddling Parson: An Account of the Life and Works of Mason Locke Weems, Patriot, Pitchman, Author, and Purveyor of Morality to the Citizenry of the Early United States of America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), is also helpful; and Catherine Clinton, “Wallowing in a Swamp of Sin: Parson Weems, Sex and Murder in Early South Carolina,” in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York and London, 1997), 24-36, provides useful information on Weems’s sermon-tracts. My own book, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), explains the early-republican debate over biography at greater length and discusses Weems extensively. The quotations about James Parton and biographical truth appeared originally in “Aaron Burr,” Southern Literary Messenger 26 (May 1858), 322-323; Harriet Beecher Stowe to James Parton, n.d., James Parton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. For an article geared toward a more popular audience, see Will Molineux, “The Cherry Tree, the Silver Dollar, and Parson Weems: Blessed by Imagination, a Preacher Takes for his Text the Parables of George Washington,” Colonial Williamsburg 22 (Spring 2000) 36-43.

Weems’s letters to Mathew Carey and other publishers, which appear in Skeel’s Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways, reveal much about print culture in the era before mass production and distribution. Secondary scholarship draws heavily on this correspondence: see James N. Green, “‘The Cowl Knows Best What Will Suit in Virginia’: Parson Weems on Southern Readers,”Printing History 17 (1995): 26-34; James Gilreath, “Mason Weems, Mathew Carey, and the Southern Booktrade, 1794-1810,” Publishing History 10 (1981): 27-49; Ronald J. Zboray, “The Book Peddler and Literary Dissemination: The Case of Parson Weems,” Publishing History [Great Britain] 25 (1989): 27-44; Jason Epstein, “The Rattle of Pebbles,” New York Review of Books 47 (April 27, 2000), 59.

For earlier twentieth-century material on Weems and Washington’s reputation, see Robert Partin, “The Changing Images of George Washington from Weems to Freeman,” Social Studies 56 (February 1965): 52-59. On Grant Wood’s painting, see Cecile Whiting, “American Heroes and Invading Barbarians: The Regionalist Response to Fascism,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, vol. 13, ed. Jack Salzman (Cambridge, 1988): 295-324. On Virgil Thomson’s ballet score, see Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thompson: Composer on the Aisle (New York and London, 1997), 513.

I refer to these Weems-related web sites. Taylor Davis, “Overlooking Mount Vernon: After Wood’s ‘Parson Weems’ Fable,” Oak Grove Review (1998); David E. Leininger, “The Ten Commandments. #9 – No False Witness” (sermon delivered at St. Paul Presbyterian Church, Greensboro, N.C., November 22, 1998);“Buchanan Brigade Library–Our American Heritage” (1996); Linda Chavez, “How America Lost Its Moral Compass,” Jewish World Review, August 18, 1998; and the Weems-Botts Museum, which includes links to a biographical page on Weems, activities at the museum, and the Peddling Parson shop. Weems-related newspaper articles discussed include Ann O’Hanlon, “He’s the Cherry of a Curator’s Eye: George Washington’s First Biographer Gets a Place in History at a Tiny Museum,” Washington Post, February 19, 1996, p. E1; Michael Lewis, “The Capitalist: The Lying Game,” New York Times, April 23, 1995, sec. 6, p. 24.

Edmund Morris’s book is Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York, 1999). It generated widespread commentary as soon as Morris’s approach became known–even before the book appeared. I quote from the following: Joyce Appleby, “Biography Lite: It’s Tasty, But Check the Label,” Washington Post, September 26, 1999, p. B1; Alan Brinkley, “Good Writing Gone Bad,” Slate, October 4, 1999; Dinesh D’Souza, “Last Gasp of the Intelligentsia,” Slate, October 4, 1999; Joseph J. Ellis, “Role of a Lifetime,”Washington Post, October 3, 1999, p. X01; Michiko Kakutani, “A Biographer Who Claims A License To Blur Reality,” New York Times, October 2, 1999, p. A15; Charles Krauthammer, “Edmund Morris’s Whydunit,” Washington Post, October 1, 1999, p. A33; Judith Shulevitz, “Who Framed Ronald Reagan,” Slate, September 29, 1999; Gore Vidal, “A Biographer Who Writes Himself Into the Picture,” New York Times, September 26, 1999, p. A17; Linton Weeks, “How to Pen One For the Gipper: Reagan Biographer Edmund Morris Defends His ‘Dutch’ Treatment,” Washington Post, September 30, 1999, p. C1; Linton Weeks, “Can Put it Down! ‘Dutch’ Generates A Blizzard of Buzz,” Washington Post, October 4, 1999, p. C1; George F. Will, “A Dishonorable Work,” Washington Post, September 29, 1999, p. A29.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Scott E. Casper, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the author of Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1999). He’s currently working on books about George Washington’s family in American culture and about the ways Americans imagined their First Families before radio and television.

 

Historical novels can discomfit professional historians. It’s difficult enough keeping the source-based history straight. But novelists can invent dialogue, characters, events, venues, sequences, and certainly interpretations. Truth may be stranger, but fiction can be freer and more vivid, and let’s face it, more entertaining, at least in the hands of a skilled writer, and Stephen Harrigan certainly is that. I have often avoided historical novels for fear of sullying my accuracy, but I must admit to learning at least the basics about the Navajos from Tony Hillerman, about cowboys and Indians from James Michener and Larry McMurtry, about Gilded-Age New York from Henry James and Edith Wharton, and about the Napoleonic Wars from Leo Tolstoy. And I’ve had my classes read Willa Cather and William Dean Howells. Entertainment sugar coats didactic purpose, and we learn better what we enjoy.

For historians, perhaps the bottom line is whether one learns well or badly from a novel. Is Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo a good teacher about Texas in the mid-1830s? Beyond that, is it any fun, or to any purpose, to read again about the Alamo? Will we find here a “new gray story,” as Richard Etulain observes, is under construction all across the historiographic West? 1

As the historian Richard White once wrote, the two most celebrated mythopoeic battles in our history have been the Alamo and Little Big Horn, and both were defeats for the Anglo side, celebrated later because they legitimated retribution and vengeance. The Alamo was avenged a few weeks later at San Jacinto, and Custer’s defeat by the surrender of Sitting Bull and the relegation of the Lakota to reservations. So goes the triumphalist history. But there are other possible versions. The film Dances with Wolvesreversed the hero/victim roles between the army and the Indians, if rather too sweepingly. Stephen Harrigan’s novel does no such complete reversal–it hardly glorifies the Mexican caudillo Antonio López de Santa Anna–but it is a far cry from traditional Texan hagiography.

Here, the bronze-statue heroes of the Alamo become human. The legendary frontiersman Jim Bowie is seldom sober, and by the time of the siege he is too sick and delirious with typhoid to hold his eponymous knife; he is nursed by two elderly women from the Veramendi family of San Antonio aristocrats into which he had married. Twenty-seven-year-old William Travis, commander of the “regular” Texan forces, is a “complex, compelling, dangerous young man” (118), a hammer-headed hotspur who refuses to parley his way out of a hopeless situation; and Harrigan will have no truck with the legend that Travis drew a line in the sand, over which no defender jumped to escape. Joe, Travis’s black slave, understands that the Mexicans would free him, and he nearly makes a break, but is smothered by circumstances. His viewpoint, and the questions Harrigan raises through this character–above all, whether the Mexicans might have engendered a slave revolt in Anglo-Texas to possibly thwart the independence movement–invite fascinating speculation. Sam Houston, the soon-to-be first president of the Texas Republic, who was not at the Alamo, plays no great role in Harrigan’s story. But one glimpses enough of him to get the idea that his behavior was calculated: he either vacillated out of fear of defeat, or held back so as to enhance his own position among the Anglo-Texans. David Crockett is drawn as a natural leader, more Jacksonian than his by-then enemy Jackson, actually leaving the fortress to seek reinforcements but returning there to die. Harrigan explicitly rejects the account of José Enrique de la Peña that Crockett escaped but was caught and executed by Santa Anna. 2 He does employ another recently discovered Mexican source that has some dozens of defenders escaping and saving themselves, rather than staying and dying “to the last man.” On the Mexican side, Coronel Juan Almonte mitigates some of Santa Anna’s cruelest orders and appears as a merciful and intelligent officer and gentleman.

“Harrigan’s fictional characters, around whom develop most of the action, the romantic interests, the plain-to-squalid living conditions, and the Mexican-Anglo interactions, are more extensively drawn than the historic figures.”

Harrigan’s fictional characters, around whom develop most of the action, the romantic interests, the plain-to-squalid living conditions, and the Mexican-Anglo interactions, are more extensively drawn than the historic figures. Teniente Telesforo Villaseñor, who is co-opted by Santa Anna as a mapmaker and loyal adviser–Santa Anna sees directly through to the young man’s seething ambition–is an uncommon mixture of talent and, in a crucial moment, of subservient ruthlessness. The protagonists who carry much of the story are Irish Texans. James McGowan is a naturalist who has spent years botanizing in Texas until the conflict envelops him. Harrigan even has President Santa Anna, trying to run a bankrupt government in Mexico City, commissioning McGowan to investigate Yucatan chicle for its commercial chewing gum potential. (McGowan reminds me of the real Juan Pedro Walker, who like McGowan was once employed as a border surveyor by the United States, and when stiffed out of his compensation by Congress became a Mexican citizen–though Walker was active a decade or two earlier than the Alamo episode. 3) Mary Mott, the “female lead,” runs an inn near Refugio, there meeting Bowie and other historical figures. She and others in Refugio, Irish Catholics and Protestants, see Santa Anna’s Mexico as an oppressor on the English model. The San Patricio Irish settlers were, in fact, pulled both ways.

Harrigan’s description of the northward march of Santa Anna’s army is excellent and instructive. He makes clear its desperate lack of supplies, its near decimation by a blizzard, and its unreadiness to prevent Texan independence except when, as in the case of the Alamo, the Anglo rebels choose an insecure and undermanned place from which to fight. From Harrigan’s account of the Mexican army’s northward scramble, together with Santa Anna’s leadership flaws and the book’s no-punches-pulled portrayal of many Anglos’ contempt for Mexicans, their country, their religion, and their rejection of African slavery, the reader can construct a reasonable understanding of the Texans’ independence struggle from both sides–which, together with writing an engrossing yarn, is perhaps what Harrigan hoped to do. If so, he has succeeded very well.

Notes

1. Richard W. Etulain, Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry (Albuquerque, 1999).

2. On Crockett’s pre-Alamo career in congress, a fine recent account is Paul Andrew Hutton, “Mr. Crockett Goes to Washington,” American History (April 2000): 21-28. Hutton is presently completing a full-scale biography of Crockett.

3. On Walker, see Elizabeth A. H. John, “The Riddle of Mapmaker Juan Pedro Walker,” in Essays on the History of North American Discovery and Exploration, ed. Stanley H. Palmer and Dennis Reinhartz (College Station, Tex., 1988), 102-32.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Walter Nugent is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and author of Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York, 1999).

 

Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary: Conquest & Change In Colonial New York is a bold and innovative study of the transition from Dutch to English colonial rule along the Hudson river in the late seventeenth century, as seen through the experiences of one man. Proponents of strong narrative and good storytelling will find much in this book to admire, and proponents of theoretical complexity also will find much to admire. That Merwick manages to combine these two approaches, which in recent years have been so frequently at odds, is in itself a considerable accomplishment. In the process, Merwick makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of crucial differences between Dutch and English colonization in North America. Moreover, in its focus on the transition from New Netherland to New York, Death of a Notary explores the impact that imperial rivalries had on the lives of individuals who did not make policy, but who were forced to live with its legacy.

Death of a Notary offers a particularly good example of the possibilities of microhistory, although Merwick never refers to her study in those terms. Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects. Merwick notes that van Ilpendam was incidental in the larger course of imperial history. She acknowledges that “England’s grand designs did not include his death. He was so incidental” (xv). But Merwick then demonstrates that studying the effects of England’s imperial ambitions on van Ilpendam’s apparently insignificant life provides an extraordinary window onto the larger world of colonialism and imperial rivalries in seventeenth-century North America.

Merwick writes that her work has been influenced by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Greg Dening, and Hayden White, among others, and those influences are clearly present in her analysis and in her organization and presentation of the material. For instance, Merwick provides a “Notes and Reflections” section at the end, which combines traditional endnote references to primary sources with a series of interpretive and theoretical meditations on the evidence. However, Merwick has neither incorporated extensive discussions of interpretive theory into the body of the book, nor has she made extensive use of specialized theoretical vocabulary. As a result, this book is highly accessible to readers without extensive background or interest in postmodern and interdisciplinary theories, as well as to those with wider background or interest in them.

“Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects.”

In the end, many readers will value Merwick’s book for the compelling story it tells. Merwick introduces van Ilpendam by writing, “[H]e was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town’s seventeenth-century history” (xv). And the question of why van Ilpendam took such an unprecedented course is the puzzle Merwick’s book sets out to solve. In many ways, Adriaen van Ilpendam’s life in North America was ill timed. Each time van Ilpendam seemed poised to improve his financial and social situation, the colonial world shifted, as the imperial rivalry between England and the United Provinces periodically reshaped the colonial landscape in North America. Notaries, for example, were extremely important in seventeenth-century Dutch mercantile and colonial culture. Van Ilpendam became a notary in 1669 at the age of fifty-one, in the transitional period when Dutch colonists in the new colony of New York still relied on notaries. But by that time, change was on the horizon, and English law and culture would have less of a place for notaries and their work. Notaries public are not the usual choice of scholars looking for historical heroes, but Merwick skillfully makes the reader care about the struggling van Ilpendam.

In many ways, Death of a Notary succeeds so well because Merwick employs such careful contextualism, but Merwick has also made some choices that seem at odds with her otherwise careful attention to historical context. Her choice of names is a perplexing one. Throughout the book, she refers to van Ilpendam primarily as Adriaen Janse. However, she later explains that Adriaen did not use the patronymic. He referred to himself as Adriaen van Ilpendam, rather than Adriaen, son of Jan (Janse). He sought to distance himself from association with a bankrupt and disgraced father. This makes Merwick’s use of “Adriaen Janse” throughout the study curious, particularly because the study is informed by her desire to understand the seventeenth-century context on its own terms. In addition, a fuller treatment of Native Americans would have further expanded our knowledge of van Ilpendam’s life in seventeenth-century Albany. Indians are a frequent presence inDeath of a Notary, but they often appear as an almost generic presence. Merwick usually identifies Mohawk and Mahican, but just as frequently, groups of native peoples receive no identification. Instead, they are described simply as “natives.” This is perhaps because Merwick wants the reader to see Beverwijck, Albany, New Netherland, and New York through Dutch eyes, ultimately through Adriaen van Ilpendam’s eyes. But given that van Ilpendam’s world certainly included Native Americans, it is not clear why Merwick concludes that he would have known so little about them. The resulting treatment is a bit jarring amidst Merwick’s otherwise careful attention to historical context.

Similarly, some readers will find Merwick’s use of the present tense to be problematic. Death of a Notaryuses the present tense, rather than the past tense, throughout the text. In the “Epitaph,” Merwick writes, “[W]e are told that in any military adventure, the first casualty is truth. I think it is not. Janse is a reminder that the first casualties are people” (xvi). And it is clear to the reader from the first sentence that Merwick seeks to bring us into van Ilpendam’s life with immediacy. She succeeds in doing so to an extraordinary degree, and she succeeds in part, through the narrative device of writing in the present tense. In the hands of some historians, this might be a disaster, but Merwick combines extensive research and careful contextualism with her use of the present tense, and, on the whole, it works to draw the reader into sympathetic engagement with Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s world. Death of a Notary ends with the question with which it opened: why did Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam kill himself? To say that van Ilpendam committed suicide because he could not cope with the transition from Dutch law and culture to English law and culture is too simple. And ultimately, Merwick presents a more complex scenario. Indeed, Merwick points out that the exact reasons for van Ilpendam’s suicide are probably irrecoverable. In the final analysis, this is a book about a man’s life, not about his death. Significantly, Death of a Notarydemonstrates persuasively that even the life of an apparently unimportant and unsuccessful colonist was embedded in a larger Atlantic context. That context included transatlantic ties of kinship and patronage, as well as the goals and policies of European empires planned and carried out differently on both sides of the Atlantic. All of those things affected Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam. The imposition of English law and government made it very difficult for him to function as a schoolmaster and a notary, and otherwise to earn a living. He quickly found himself on the outskirts of the system of administrative appointments, and he struggled to adapt to a new legal and colonial system, one that did not rely on notaries to function smoothly.

But Merwick’s evidence suggests that other factors exacerbated van Ilpendam’s difficulties. Van Ilpendam was growing older during the years when his world changed so dramatically, and his advancing age meant that he was less able to sustain himself in uncertain circumstances. The death of close relatives who controlled an inheritance in the United Provinces, combined with English imperial restrictions on travel of colonists from the former Dutch colony of New Netherland, also dealt a crucial blow to van Ilpendam’s ability to survive in New York. He lost a much needed source of income in the shifting winds of the Atlantic World, because he was not able to maintain transatlantic connections after the English conquest of New Netherland or to travel freely between New York and the United Provinces.

And yet, ultimately, it does not really matter which aspects of the transition from Dutch to English control of the colony were more costly to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam. In the end, Donna Merwick has shown us how precarious life could be for colonists in seventeenth-century North America. Death of a Notary depicts the world of some seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, and the ways in which that world altered dramatically and painfully with the coming of the English. Scholars of early American history need to know more about the cost of empires for all who were part of them. Death of a Notary offers us a way to begin to think about those costs within a larger context, through the example of a humble and struggling man.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Cynthia J. Van Zandt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.

 

Why should we write or read history? Why should we teach or study it? Benjamin Franklin thought he knew. In Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, a 1749 pamphlet advocating the establishment of an academy in Philadelphia, Franklin proclaimed that “the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude, etc. [History also shows] the Advantage of a Religious Character among private Persons; the Mischiefs of Superstition, etc. and the Excellency of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION above all others ancient and modern.” 1

Franklin figures prominently in Jon Butler’s Becoming America, a wide-ranging and spirited book that describes the emergence of the first modern culture in a way that will satisfy many readers and provoke others. The book’s final words are drawn from the familiar, charming epitaph Franklin wrote for himself in 1728, while he was still a young man:

The body of
B Franklin Printer
(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents torn out
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding)
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended
By the author. 2

Together these two passages signal the depth and complexity of Franklin’s character and suggest the reasons why he continues to intrigue and elude us. Franklin thought the study of history shows not only the “Usefulness” but also the “Beauty” of virtue, not only the “Advantage” of a religious character but also the “Excellency” of Christianity. In his epitaph Franklin poked fun at his own mortality but also testified publicly to his faith in an afterlife, a conviction that endured throughout his life. In the “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” that the young Franklin wrote in 1728, he professed “I believe there is one Supreme most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves.” Franklin’s religious faith overflowed the boundaries of conventional Christianity without evaporating. He was a deist but never a skeptic. Six weeks before his death in 1790, in a letter to Ezra Stiles, he reaffirmed his creed: “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever Sect I meet with them.” 3

Like many other American and European philosophes, Franklin surely doubted the divinity of Jesus and the desirability of spending his own Sundays in prayer. He savaged dogmatism, scorned evangelical enthusiasm (although he befriended George Whitefield), and valued benevolence above conventional forms of religious observance. Franklin just as surely prized the virtues of prudence, temperance, and fortitude, qualities that his contemporaries as well as later commentators such as Max Weber associated with him, and that made Poor Richard’s Almanac so widely read.

Franklin can of course be interpreted, as D. H. Lawrence did, as a passionless, humorless grind. Or he can be taken as a shrewd, secular sage, a prototypical operator who appeared pious just to prosper, who did well by seeming to do good. To read him that way turns him into a denizen of our own culture of irony, a clever calculator always making rational choices to advance his own narrow self-interest; it rescues him from being a sap. But Franklin became a crucial figure in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic world–and has remained a crucial figure–not because he simply shrugged off his religious and philosophical heritage to emerge as an economic man but because he, like the equally complex Adam Smith, worked to translate the ethical impulses of Christianity from other-worldly asceticism into a worldview compatible with a market economy and a democratic culture. In place of a simplistic and historically false dichotomy that would fix Franklin as either an old-fashioned Calvinist or a new-fangled capitalist, we need to recover a richer, more nuanced understanding of Franklin as one of many who tried to take seriously and live sincerely the moral precepts of Christianity, and those of Poor Richard. Some may think those creeds irreconcilable; as historians we should acknowledge and try to understand why Franklin, like his Puritan predecessors, disagreed.

The Franklin who appears in Becoming America is no sap. He is a clever organization man engaged in establishing the Union Fire Company, the Junto, the Philadelphia Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, and the college that became the University of Pennsylvania. Whereas other historians have emphasized the civic spirit or social ethic animating such activity, Butler links what he calls “Franklin’s boosterism” to the efforts of other proto-Babbits throughout the colonies who “pursued seemingly civic-minded goals though [sic] elite, private-membership organizations” (173-74). The savvy Butler is not fooled by Franklin’s talk of “Virtue” and “Publick Spirit”: Franklin schmoozed to make the connections he needed to prosper, and when he appeared to be endorsing the idea of an afterlife in his epigraph he was instead reshaping “a crabbed seventeenth-century idea about the transmigration of souls after death . . . into an affirmation of near-modern optimism” (p. 310, n. 45).

Franklin’s witticisms, Butler claims in his concluding paragraphs, achieved their power because they “made sense of” the profound transformation of American society between 1680 and 1770. “These aphorisms tamed and disciplined an expanding, aggressive, and calculating society. They did not guarantee a moral society or even a good society. But they channeled behavior that might drift toward pure greed, asserted the virtue of labor over status, and bypassed traditional European emphasis on family inheritance, political deference, and vengeful religious dogmatism” (247). Franklin’s genius, from Butler’s perspective, lay in his ability to dismantle the obstacles of “vengeful religious dogmatism” in order to clear a path for free, independent, self-made men intent on making a new world for themselves.

Some historians who have taken seriously the words used by members of Franklin’s generation contend that many of those innovators derived their most important–and most politically radical or democratic–ideas from their Christianity. Most of the nation’s founding documents, they point out, were patterned on models with explicit, unmistakable origins in the Judeo-Christian idea of the covenant. Instead Butler urges us to watch the colonists’ feet: “the tumult of provincial politics and Whig political ideology determined the emerging contest with Britain more profoundly than did evangelical revivalism.” He contends that “religion’s role in shaping the Revolution is easily exaggerated” and chastises contemporaries such as Boston loyalist Peter Oliver for just such hyperbole. The “clergymen who supported colonial protest, including the ‘black regiment’ that Peter Oliver detested, supported causes initially made by politicians on overwhelmingly secular grounds.” Moreover, since the New England clergy spoke “from tax-supported pulpits invested with the authority of provincial government, as did pro-revolutionary Anglican ministers in Virginia” (243), Butler points out, how revolutionary could they have been?

That is, however, precisely the point. Given the absence of a state church digging in its heels against rebellion, Americans of all faiths in all the colonies lined up on both sides during the struggle for independence. As a result, nothing like the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the watershed document of the French Revolution that declared war to the death against the Catholic Church, ever divided American loyalists and republicans neatly into clerical and anti-clerical factions. Revolutionaries could, and did, use the Christian gospels on behalf of their radical political agenda with as great enthusiasm as English radicals did before and American radicals have done since, and they did so not as outsiders but as authoritative insiders.

Perhaps Butler denies the connection between colonial politics and colonial religion because he equates religiosity either with “vengeful religious dogmatism” or with witchcraft and magic (thereby neglecting Franklin’s own clear distinction between religious faith and the “Mischiefs of Superstition”). At least since Butler published “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760” in the American Historical Review in 1979, and through the publication in 1990 of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, he has adopted from the anthropologist Melvin Spiro what he calls a “substantive” definition of religion as “the resort to superhuman powers, sometimes beings, to determine the course of human events.” This definition, which begs central questions debated by generations of sociologists and anthropologists and for centuries by Christian theologians, allows Butler to place Christianity comfortably within the same category as “numerous magical and occult arts–such as astrology, divination, and witchcraft,” which many Christians (like Franklin) anathematized. Given Butler’s understanding of religion as dogmatism or magic and his understanding of politics as the straightforward pursuit of self-interest, it is not surprising that Butler can see no connection between the two. Most eighteenth-century Americans were not so shrewd.

Offering a puzzling piece of evidence in support of his pugnacious claim for the marginality of religion during the 1770s, Butler contends that the Declaration of Independence “offered remarkably nonreligious claims for independence.” He concedes that the Declaration did rely on the “laws of nature and nature’s God” and appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world.” He admits that the Declaration invoked “Divine Providence.” But, he protests, it “never mentioned Christ and never cited Old or New Testament verses to support the American cause (ironically, the deist Thomas Paine had done exactly that in Common Sense six months earlier)” (243-44).4

There is irony in the contrast, but it is not the irony Butler claims, because Common Sense worked just as the Declaration of Independence did, deriving much of its power and its popularity precisely from its biblical rhetoric and frame of reference. Like the Declaration, it helped provide ammunition for angry farmers, artisans, and merchants, and for preachers thundering against the crown from their pulpits. When Paine later denounced Christianity in The Age of Reason, he found that he forfeited his standing as an American patriot and lost his American audience. The canny Franklin, Paine’s patron and friend, advised his protégé after reading a draft of The Age of Reason: “He who spits against the wind spits in his own face. . . If men are wicked with religion, what would they be if without it?” 5 If we lacked Franklin’s writings about his own religious convictions, perhaps we could interpret his advice to Paine simply as the counsel of a wiser cynic, but Franklin clearly felt more sympathy for his contemporaries’ Christian cosmology than for Paine’s iconoclasm.

Why does it matter? Surely the role of religion in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American culture is an issue about which reasonable people may disagree. Indeed it is, and this issue returns us to our opening questions. Why should we write or read history? Why should we teach or study it? Many historians believe that describing what happened in the past is the historian’s job. Others believe the historian’s work begins where such description ends; together with Wilhelm Dilthey, they want to offer interpretations of past experience that take as seriously the perspectives of those who lived it as they take their own, and to derive from those interpretations an explanation of why things happened as they did. Together with Poor Richard, they believe that an empty bag cannot stand upright, and with E. H. Carr they believe that without interpretation facts from the past fall equally flat.Becoming America suggests that Butler has little sympathy with that hermeneutic view. I hope in this review–which raises questions not to deny the achievement of Butler’s valuable synthesis but only to point out some of the issues I think might have received fuller treatment–to suggest some of the reasons why I think hermeneutics can help us achieve a more balanced understanding of eighteenth-century America than even the vivid and valuable portrait Butler offers.

Becoming America synthesizes an enormous amount of recent scholarship on America from 1680 to 1770. Butler guides readers sure-footedly through the immensely difficult terrain of these rapidly transforming societies. He is particularly good at harvesting the bountiful studies of material culture from recent decades that have enriched our understanding of colonial America, and incorporating the worlds of those left out by earlier generations of historians, especially women, Indians, and Africans. Enthusiastic, well deserved endorsements from no fewer than eight of the most distinguished historians of early America (including one of the editors and three members of the editorial board of Common-place) grace the dust jacket; such an array of authorities will surely make reviewers inclined to criticize the book think twice about their own judgment. But much as readers learn about colonial America–and as a nonspecialist I learned a great deal indeed–they learn much less about the lived experience of those who inhabited England’s mainland colonies during these years. The book’s first three chapters carefully describe the colonies’ changing demography and ethnic composition, their economy, and their politics. A fourth chapter concerns “Things Material,” a fifth “Things Spiritual,” and a sixth relates these issues to 1776.

Rich and varied and well informed as his descriptions are, however, rarely in the book does Butler ask what these changes meant for those who lived through them. It is as if his focus on “things” excludes asking questions about the meanings of experience. In the chapter “Things Spiritual,” for example, a chapter drawn from the rich material in Butler’s much admired book Awash in a Sea of Faith, readers learn about the “sacralization of the landscape,” a topic that has long interested Butler. But they do not learn what that sacralization meant to those who accomplished it or why they felt compelled or enabled to undertake it. Readers learn about “a near frenzy of congregational expansion after 1680” throughout the colonies. “Tracing the numbers,” Butler admits, “is dizzying but illuminating.” Over 700 congregations formed in New England from 1710 to 1770, about 900 in the middle colonies, and another 550 in the South, a pattern of growth that “outpaced population expansion” (191). Why? What motivated the colonists to engage in such spirited building campaigns? Butler offers no explanation. Butler tells readers what churches looked like (some were orange, others red, yellow, blue, or green, few the white we have taken for granted since the nineteenth century), what they sounded like as bells began to toll from steeples, and what forms of decoration they contained, but he does not say what went on inside or what those who attended (or preached) thought about the proceedings. Readers learn about (and see a fine illustration of) Jonathan Edwards’s desk and how it grew, but they learn next to nothing about the books and sermons Edwards spent thirteen hours a day writing on it. Readers encounter George Whitefield, “one of the first modern celebrities,” “famous simply because he was famous,” but despite such evangelicals’ apparent successes Butler concludes that the effect of “revivalism combined with pluralism” was “debilitating,” as initial enthusiasm collapsed into confusion and exhaustion (202-03). Again, puzzled readers may wonder why revivals kept breaking out nevertheless. Becoming America is, in short, cultural history with not only most of the ideas but also most of the experience left out, history missing not only theology but phenomenology, history devoted more to describing objects and behaviors than to attempting to understand their meaning or explain their significance.

This quasi-positivist conception of his project may account for Butler’s preference–one certainly shared by many historians–for taking seriously what people did and paying less attention to what they said. It may also be inescapable given the scope of the undertaking: Butler is after all attempting nothing less than a synthetic overview of a century of American history. In his notes readers will find informative guides to much of the historical literature of the last several decades. Butler explains that he wants to direct readers’ attention to the history rather than the historiography, and he confines to the notes his discussions of those interpretive disputes that he does choose to address rather than ignore.

I do not mean to imply that Butler avoids taking positions or that it is hard to identify his perspective. He announces at the outset that the book is his response to two questions, Crèvecoeur’s classic “what then is the American, this new man?” and a friend’s less lofty “how do you synthesize colonial history after the Puritans?” Butler makes clear that he judges neither New England nor Puritanism central to an adequate overview of colonial American history. Moreover, he rejects claims that American culture was becoming increasingly hierarchical, deferential, refined, or “Europeanized” on the eve of the American Revolution. To the contrary, the colonies were diverse, boisterous, and becoming more so as America became the first fully modern culture. In his introduction Butler summarizes the features of his overall argument about the transformation of colonial America between 1680 and 1770: “its extraordinary heterogeneity of peoples; its rapid economic transformation; its energetic provincial and local politics; its evolving secular and material culture; its rapidly expanding pluralistic religions; its regionalism and sometimes unwilling creation of vigorous subsocieties within the larger culture; and a widespread drive for authority to shape individual and collective destinies” (6).

Butler’s first chapter, “Peoples,” shows the precipitous decline of Indian populations due to disease even more than war, the dramatic decline in the proportion of European colonists who traced their roots to England, and the catastrophe of the slave trade, “the largest forced human migration in history” (39), which brought more Africans than Europeans to England’s mainland colonies from 1700 to 1770. Butler’s account of slavery highlights its unimaginable cruelty and stresses that Americans did not inherit but “created the modern system of human and legal interrelationships that left a devastating and indelible imprint on America, its society and its conscience” (42). He contends that the “principal impetus” for the expansion and tightening of the slave system “was simple: profit” (37). Given the vast differences between the slave societies that did and did not develop on both sides of the Atlantic during these years, some readers may wonder whether that explanation is adequate. Butler does discuss other factors, including the decline in the availability of indentured servants, the failure of attempts to enslave Indians, and the cultural predispositions of Europeans to perceive Africans as “different, disagreeable, and dispensable, ideal candidates for an enslavement that very quickly became indelibly American” (39). Whether his account of the reasons for the development of, and the reasons for the emerging opposition to, slavery are adequate or not, Butler’s description of the system and its consequences for Europeans and Africans alike leaves a lasting impression. Butler’s discussion of the colonial economy shows the same strengths and–from my perspective–weaknesses. His descriptions of the colonies’ unprecedented economic growth from 1680 to 1770, the rapid development of domestic and international markets for the agricultural products that were central to all the colonies’ economies, the dispossession of Indian lands, the gendered division of labor that prevailed everywhere, and the increasing gap separating the richest from the poorest Americans–especially slaves–are excellent. On questions of regional variation concerning issues such as slavery or how to deal with Indians–questions frequently addressed by taking seriously the different religious convictions of different colonists–Butler has less to say. He judges all colonists accomplices in the slave system and the destruction of Indian cultures. Because European settlement throughout the colonies ultimately had the effect of enslaving or oppressing Africans and attacking or infecting or acculturating Indians, the differences separating, say, John Eliot or William Penn from many of their contemporaries on such issues fade to insignificance from Butler’s point of view. Since he concludes this chapter by pointing out, persuasively, that in these “provinces of plenty,” the patterns of wealth and privation “demonstrated how the experience of wealth and impoverishment descended not from the land, but from human invention” (88), some readers might want to know more about the reasons the colonists themselves offered, or the arguments they had with each other, as they tried to justify the cultures they were inventing. For answers to those questions they will have to look elsewhere.

In his chapter on colonial politics Butler outlines the functioning of local and imperial administration, the rise of colonial assemblies, and the incongruous expansion of the claims to authority of the crown’s representatives and the shrinking of their effective power. He challenges other historians’ claims about the importance of religion or democracy in American politics. Most local government, he points out, was conducted by appointed rather than elected officials, and even when colonists had a chance to vote, most did not. Moreover, “the law denied the vote to whole classes of people: women, servants, slaves, religious minorities, Indians, and many without property” (97). Voting was “an innovation that many eligible men used reluctantly” during a period that “represented a transition from an early modern hierarchical and quasi-deferential society to a more open, ultimately democratic nation” (99). In short, Butler insists, “Colonial politics was not democratic” (90).

Instead of appealing to voters’ interests through speeches or public appearances, colonial notables “talked to voters individually and asked for support personally and sometimes only indirectly. As a result, ‘electioneering’ implicitly stressed a candidate’s personal standing and prestige and only sometimes bore on issues or ideology” (99-100). From Butler’s perspective, an oligarchy consisting of a few families or wealthy individuals dominated colonial politics until interest groups at last emerged over issues reflecting the differences among self-interested ethnic, religious, or economic groups. Because Whig ideology, like Christian social theory, appealed to an ideal of the common good transcending individual interest, Butler argues that “it bordered on the self-contradictory” because of the “ethnic and religious heterogeneity that was not unusual in eighteenth-century America and that defied any common social analysis” (114-15). If one sees politics as nothing but the organized pursuit of self-interest, then all talk of a public purpose is bound to appear disingenuous or duplicitous. Many eighteenth-century Americans, however, whether writing pamphlets about republican liberty or delivering (or listening to) sermons on what Jonathan Mayhew called “the public welfare” or John Witherspoon “public virtue,” appear to have had a profoundly different conception of the relation between self-interest and the common good, a conviction still shared by a few stubborn Americans. Some readers may wonder whether interest-group liberalism provides a better framework for understanding eighteenth-century politics than the colonists’ own explanations of their ways of thinking about freedom and duty.

Butler’s chapters “Things Material” and “Things Spiritual” give a vivid, memorable picture of colonial life. The former describes changing patterns of importing and producing goods as colonial artisans became increasingly sophisticated, the range of houses built for rich and poor colonists in different regions, and the ways that agriculture and diet changed. Butler describes the rise of civic associations and stresses the social advantages they conferred on their well-to-do members. Although he refers to Jürgen Habermas, he writes in the spirit of H. L. Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Butler provides a detailed account of Androboros (1714), a scatological play written by New York governor Robert Hunter, and quotes from it perhaps the lengthiest passage in the book, apparently so that readers who have spent too much time obsessed with letters, speeches, pamphlets, and sermons about the “public sphere” can appreciate just how raucous, unrefined, and downright tasteless colonial politics really was. Near the end of “Things Material” readers encounter a full-page illustration of a “Masonic Mason’s chair” made by the Williamsburg artisan Benjamin Bucktrout–an object Butler describes without apparent irony as “the single finest chair known to be made in colonial America” (179)–which must be seen to be appreciated.

“Things Spiritual” is equally rich in telling details demonstrating the increasing diversity of colonial religious groups and practices, including fine treatments of the religious practices of women, Indians, and Africans. Although some might be tempted to draw conclusions about the vitality and influence of American religious faith and religious denominations from Butler’s evidence, Butler instead downplays their political salience and cultural significance in an acquisitive, materialistic society. Butler further describes the “spiritual holocaust” that destroyed African religious practices, a process so total that in British North America “slave Christianity never developed the richly syncretistic patterns that emerged in other New World slave societies” (224). Butler does concede that contemporaries traced slave revolts to the persistence of African spirituality. He seeks to resolve that apparent inconsistency in a summary sentence the tone and implications of which careful readers should ponder: “The suppression of whole African religious systems, the survival of discrete African rites and customs, especially concerning death, and the emergence of a Christianization that later became endemic in nineteenth-century America remade African-American religious practice” (224).

In his concluding chapter, “1776,” Butler sensibly denies that the Revolution was the “logical consequence” or “inevitable culmination” of eighteenth-century American colonial development, but he does insist that this first modern society, with its ethnic and religious diversity and booming economy, shaped the course of this first modern revolution. The cause of the Revolution was simple: the crown needed money to pay the costs of empire. The colonists resisted, forcing a confrontation that escalated into demands for independence. Although not driven by class or by a “single, cohesive ideology,” the American Revolution was distinctively modern in that it “created the broad-scale popular mobilization that typified the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions” (227). How did the colonists make sense of what they were doing? In contrast to those historians who have emphasized sources ranging from the traditions of British common law or natural jurisprudence to Whig ideology and Protestant Christianity, Butler stresses the importance of “British popular culture” and offers a novel explanation for the explosive appeal of Paine’s Common Sense: Americans “knew this compilation of sarcasm, wit, and satire through British politics and through their own political invective dating back to Robert Hunter’s 1714 scatological play Androboros. Now Paine used the same language” (236). Although Common Sensemay have combined the languages of rights and republicanism within a biblical framework, Butler assures us it inspired the colonists to revolution because it appealed to their taste for ribaldry.

The dust jacket of Becoming America carries an engaging illustration, “Colonial Days in New York City,” that effectively communicates the tone and the argument of the book. Front and center, standing before a motley array of tradesmen, frontiersmen, soldiers, preening gentlemen, and hard-working artisans–and directly in the path of a delicate maiden dressed in white from bonnet to slippers, a figure embodying refinement who would cross the street if she could–a gleeful boy watches a dog attack a pig. Although one should never judge a book by its cover, no illustration could signal more accurately what awaits readers of Becoming America. Benjamin Franklin, who appreciated bawdy humor as much as any of his kindred, would have relished the vitality of the street scene. But would he have judged it an adequate rendering of his America–or an accurate account of the history that he and his contemporaries made?

Notes

1. Benjamin Franklin, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 3: 397-420, quoted in Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, 1986), 40.

2. Benjamin Franklin, “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” in Papers, 1: 109, quoted in Wright,Franklin of Philadelphia, 48-49.

3. Benjamin Franklin to Ezra Stiles, March 3, 1790, inWritings of Benjamin Franklin, 10: 84, quoted in Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia, pp. 49-50.

4. See Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760,” American Historical Review 84 (April 1979): 317-46, especially 319; and Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, 1990), 1-6.

5. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Paine, July 3, 1786, in Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 9: 552, quoted in Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia, 49.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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James T. Kloppenberg is Professor of History at Harvard University.

In the fall of 1987 I was on leave and hoping to write a quick book on the Revolutionary era. My wife, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, had just returned to teaching at the University of Colorado, after giving birth to our son, Samuel, and I was on duty as daytime caregiver. Finding that he slept a good deal between feedings, I convinced myself that I could take advantage of those long naps to produce a textbook for use in upper-division Revolution courses. I set out to shape it according to the way I had been teaching my own Revolution course, with a beginning in the period of the War of Jenkins’ Ear and King George’s War (1739-48), and its end in the early 1790s.

Sam proved a good sleeper that year. By its end I found that I had written something like two hundred pages of text, but my project had altered out of all recognition. Rather than the high-level, argument-driven book I had planned, I was writing a more closely focused narrative, emphasizing contingency and driven largely by the effects of individual acts, decisions, and accidents. So I set aside my plans for a short book, threw away most of what I had written, and embarked on writing a kind of history I had never before attempted. The result ultimately became Crucible of War, a book that I came to understand as an attempt to use narrative as a means of achieving scholarly synthesis. I hoped to tell the story of the Seven Years’ War and its effects by creating an argument that would function as a plot, providing a framework both for explaining the actions of the characters and for assessing their impact on the course of events.

Half-consciously, I had undertaken to write history in the mode Bernard Bailyn advocated in his December 1981, presidential address to the American Historical Association. Bailyn argued that the “essential narratives” of modern historiography would do three things: give “a sense of movement through time”; fully incorporate the findings of what he called “the technical studies,” or monographic social histories; and “concentrate on critical transitions from the past toward the present.” To attain these goals, historians would have to accomplish three tasks. First they would need to integrate “latent events”–demographic trends, migration patterns, and other fundamental conditions that contemporary witnesses did not fully grasp, but which have become evident in retrospect–with “manifest events” such as wars and commercial depressions, on which contemporaries commented. Second, because these new narrators had to connect the latent and the manifest in history, they would need to address the “critical transitions” they described not narrowly or in isolation, but as part of world-historical processes. Finally, the writers of these narratives would have to integrate the history of culture and consciousness into the history of external events. The “comprehensive narration” that would result from all this, Bailyn maintained, would take the fragmented understanding of groups, events, and structures that the “technical studies” had produced, and

 

put the story together again, . . . [drawing] together the information available . . . into readable accounts of major developments. These narratives will incorporate anecdote but they will not be essentially anecdotal; they will include static, “motionless” portrayals of situations, circumstances, and points of view of the past, but they will be essentially dynamic; they will concentrate on change, transition, and the passage of time; and they will show how major aspects of the present world were shaped–acquired their character–in the process of their emergence. [1]

 

I do not maintain that I accomplished all of this, or even a part of it: only that I tried my best to write in that essentially story-driven mode. At the heart of my story I placed interactions between several cultural groups–metropolitan English, metropolitan French, colonial Anglo-Americans, colonial Franco-Americans, native American peoples in alliance with those groups, and native peoples who sought to stand apart from the Europeans and Euro-Americans–for I wanted to argue that the Seven Years’ War was a theater of cultural interaction. Insofar as each group had leaders, their actions, decisions, and understandings had to play a central role in creating the tapestry of stories that would make up the narrative as a whole. Because the war was also a world-girdling conflict, I tried to frame these largely North American interactions with the strategic, political, and diplomatic narrative of the war as a whole. Finally, because I intended to examine both the war and its effects, I extended the coverage of the narrative beyond the typical endpoints of 1760 (the conquest of Canada) or 1763 (the Peace of Paris) into the postwar era, in order to explain such events as the Stamp Act crisis not as harbingers of Revolution, but as results of changes in imperial relationships.

The net effect of these self-imposed requirements (several of which I discovered only as I wrote) was to make me create seven principal story lines, each with its own trajectory and cast of characters; these I wove together, as best I could, into a single counterpointed story. That story had, in effect, five parts: the colonial and imperial contexts of the war’s outbreak, the two phases of the fighting in North America (1754-58 and 1758-60), the war’s long coda in the West Indies, Europe, and around the world (1761-63), and the postwar period of adjustment to empire.

If the outbreak of the war had to do with diplomatic factors driven by American conditions and dependent on the actions of Indian peoples, the two phases of active fighting in America corresponded quite precisely to European influences. The years from 1754 through 1758 saw virtually uninterrupted French successes because the French adhered to their proven strategic formula from previous conflicts, la petite guerre. Relying on Indian allies acting in cooperation with Canadian militiamen and troupes de la Marine, the French raided English frontier settlements, killing and capturing many hundreds of civilians and throwing tens of thousands more into flight; then they attacked fortified outposts whenever the opportunity appeared. This was war waged on Indian terms, and it allowed France’s native allies to act independently in choosing targets and tactics. La petite guerre drew no sharp distinctions between combatants and noncombatants and made generous allowances for mourning-war practices of captive taking. The first commander-in-chief France sent to America, the baron de Dieskau, showed no inclination to meddle with the practice.

 

“Rather than the high-level, argument-driven book I had planned, I was writing a more closely focused narrative, emphasizing contingency and driven largely by the effects of individual acts, decisions, and accidents.”

 

But Dieskau was wounded and captured in 1755, and his more rigid successor the marquis de Montcalm shunned la petite guerre and the long-established usages of Indian warfare. Horrified by the taking of captives and trophies after the surrender of Oswego in 1756, he ransomed the hostages for gifts and brandy, and thus in the following year attracted the largest contingent of Indian warriors ever assembled to fight the English. The “massacre” at Fort William Henry in 1757 was in fact a tragic episode that Montcalm promoted by trying to treat Indian warriors as auxiliaries rather than allies. Montcalm’s commitment to the values of European professional military culture and his disdain for what he saw as barbarous Canadian-Indian practices effectively drove away the Indian allies on whom New France had relied for more than a century.

Ironically, Montcalm’s understanding of warfare as an activity that clearly distinguished between combatants and noncombatants prepared the way for the British army and its Anglo-American auxiliaries to win an unlimited victory. Montcalm’s metropolitan ideals and prejudices led him to confront the redcoats of Major General James Wolfe on professional, conventional terms on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, where they cost him his life. His successor, the chevalier de Lévis, was a more adaptable officer, but he could neither reconstruct the Indian alliances Montcalm had destroyed nor offset the numerical advantage of the British forces without reinforcements and vast quantities of supplies from France. Neither ever came.

While Montcalm was weakening the French by Europeanizing Canadian war fighting, changes in the British approach reversed a singular series of defeats and prepared the ground for an unprecedented victory. In 1755 the ministry had intervened directly in North American land operations for the first time, sending a commander-in-chief and a contingent of regular troops to fight. Major General Edward Braddock and his successor, the earl of Loudoun, were as professional in outlook as Montcalm, shared his abhorrence of alliances with Indians, and carried commissions that authorized them to stipulate the manpower and financial contributions of the various colonies to the war effort. The colonies’ reluctance to be subjected to the commanders-in-chief’s orders grew by 1757 into virtual refusals to cooperate. Colonial noncooperation contributed to the military disasters that culminated in the loss of Fort William Henry, the nadir of the war for Britain.

But the ingenious, improvised solutions of William Pitt–who as secretary of state for the southern department and chief minister from late 1757 through 1761 promised reimbursements to the colonies in proportion to their participation in the war effort, and who restored colonial autonomy by restricting the powers of the commander-in-chief–regained colonial enthusiasm and support just as Montcalm destroyed them in Canada. That renewal of morale; the thousands of redcoats Pitt sent to carry on military operations; the support of tens of thousands of provincial troops who answered the call for volunteers; and a diplomatic initiative that broke the alliance between the Ohio Indians and the French in 1758: all these reversed the course of the war. Yet neither the Anglo-American seizure of Fort Duquesne in 1758 nor the conquest of Québec in 1759 proved decisive. What finally determined the outcome of the war in America were two nearly simultaneous, reinforcing developments in 1759: the Battle of Quiberon Bay (November 20) and the Six Nations’s decision to abandon the neutral stance it had maintained since 1755 and join the Anglo-Americans in the Niagara campaign. The battle cost the French navy its ability to operate on the Atlantic, denying Lévis the reinforcements and supplies he needed to capture Québec and resist the invading Anglo-American armies. The absence of trade goods and weapons simultaneously prevented him from rebuilding the Indian alliances that Montcalm had destroyed, so that the Iroquois alliance with the Anglo-Americans tipped the strategic balance irrevocably against the French.

The final acts of what had become a worldwide war between England, France, and (from 1762) Spain saw another wave of British victories, culminating in the surrender of Havana (August 14, 1762) and Manila (October 5, 1762). These helped create the unshakable conviction that British arms were invincible, and produced a treaty that gave Britain sovereignty over the eastern half of North America, transferring Louisiana to a defeated and severely shaken Spain. Britain, preeminent in Europe, seemed about to achieve hegemony in North America.

And yet the Seven Years’ War ended as it did only because the wholesale reliance of the contesting parties on European methods gave the advantage to the better-equipped, -supplied, and -manned armies. Britain’s forces were all of those; yet the fact that they were in no sense fated to triumph can clearly be read in the history of Pontiac’s War, 1763-65. This “rebellion” of Indians formerly allied with the French, precipitated by British efforts to economize and reform long-standing practices in trade and diplomacy, cost the redcoats at least four hundred lives and the Anglo-American colonists more than two thousand, reduced the British presence in the newly conquered West to three isolated posts, and once more emptied the frontiers of settlers. In the end, the “rebels” ceased fighting not because the British reconquered the interior–they had no hope of doing that–but because the Indians ran out of arms and ammunition. Having demonstrated that Britain would occupy its interior forts at Indian sufferance, the Indians got back the terms of trade they wanted and secured promises that no settlers would cross the Appalachians. The British army reestablished only a symbolic presence in the West. Viewed in terms that the Indians would have found understandable, the treaties that ended Pontiac’s War marked an Indian, not a British, victory. The great pan-Indian uprising had demonstrated the inadequacy of coercion as a basis for imperial control; but the lingering vision of glorious victory blinded Britain to a lesson that might have saved its empire from destruction.

For indeed George III and his ministers drew exactly the wrong conclusion from the war and as a result embarked on a disastrous program of retrenchment and reform intended to bring the colonists into line. In that sense the Stamp Act crisis furnished a parallel case to the great Indian rebellion, for it too represented a local rebellion in favor of the status quo against an assertion of metropolitan authority. Both during the war and in its aftermath, resistance to the costs of empire–whether levies of men or money, or restrictions on the liberties of localities or individuals–had been most pronounced when they seemed at odds with a sense of empire that was, at bottom, supremely voluntarist. In that sense the surliness and foot-dragging of the colonists in 1755-57 reflected no more (and no less) than the impulse that underlay colonial refusal to pay taxes in support of a peacetime military establishment. Thus in small ways before 1763 and in large ones thereafter, the war catalyzed the dialectic of imperial citizenship.

The success of the British between 1754 and 1763 thus made it possible to argue about what it meant to be British. That was precisely what the colonists did–first with words, then with economic sanctions, and finally with powder and ball–over the next two decades. In the process, men like Washington and Franklin who had been passionately committed to the empire were driven to defend their notions of rights and privileges in increasingly universalist terms. The essence of their Revolution lay in the replacement of subjecthood with citizenship, which reformulated the idea of community in terms of voluntary allegiance. Their voluntarist understanding in turn formed the grounds on which the white male property holders of the thirteen colonies could create not just a new republic, but a new empire, one far more effective at projecting its power into the interior of the continent than the British empire had ever been. Thus the long process of bringing the Ohio Valley under military control, begun by a naive Virginia provincial officer in 1754, would finally reach its completion forty years later when that bumbling youth had finally grown up to become president of the United States.

 

Note

1. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87 (February 1982): 7, 10, 11, 24.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Fred Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (1984), as well as articles, essays, and reviews.

 

Joyce Appleby’s Inheriting the Revolution is the boldest take on post-Revolutionary America to appear in some time. Hoping to capitalize on her earlier studies of the Jeffersonian Republicans and of the relationship between economic change and political thought during the late eighteenth century, Appleby must have known that, by the 1990s, no general interpretation could rest on politics or thought alone.1 So she sought out a different archive: the autobiographies left behind by those who had grown up in the wake of the Revolution. The title conveys an intentional double entendre: Appleby’s Americans did not fight the Revolution, nor apparently remember it, nor even spend much time celebrating or thinking about what had happened to the previous generation. Rather, they took the Revolution’s fruits–and ran toward a new future.

That future embraced, above all, prosperity and democracy as two sides of the same coin. The “autonomous individual” emerged as an actor and an ideal, and Appleby vividly stitches together the stories of a cohort of self-made men and women, many of whom rose from obscurity and disadvantage to positions of leadership. They invented new careers as doctors, teachers, writers, and evangelists; they took the distrust of established authority let loose by the Revolution, and pushed forward by the Jeffersonians in the realm of politics, into the large playing field of the social. Because the book self-consciously “follows the trajectory of liberal society fashioned in the first generation,” politics here is mainly about origins. Afficionados of political history may be disappointed, but Appleby does provide as useful an explanation as we have of how and why the battle between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians became a real social struggle, and a culture war. She goes so far as to say that by 1800, the “national elite” had, in fact, “been ousted.” With the ordinary people unleashed and limited government ratified, politics became an enabling force rather than a separate realm. As in many recent narratives of the early republic, political struggles themselves are then left behind as successive chapters move into the flowering of “enterprise,” the elaboration of “careers,” the thinning out of social “distinctions,” the new premium placed on “intimate relations” in a mobile society, and the excitement of “reform” as a new kind of personal yet public enterprise.

Appleby is at her best when describing the generational tensions that emerged from her close attention to individual life choices. She details as few have before the ways in which changes in public culture provided possibilities for those inclined to set out on their own, whether as preachers, farmers, or politicians. She finds women doing almost as many new things as men, and stresses how free blacks joined in the practice of self-fashioning in the marketplace. (She has surprisingly little to say about their exploitation in that marketplace.) Publicity, particularly print, is a large part of the story, as it linked people together, provided means for actually and imaginatively criticizing authority, and itself epitomized the possibilities of self-improvement and education. Appleby’s privileged sources, the autobiographies, stand at the pinnacle of a generation’s creation and consumption of print. For the first time, then, the burgeoning scholarship on print culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has made its way into a major synthesis, occupying a central place as a causal force and as a narrative device. Refusing to get bogged down in the poetics and politics of printedness, however, Appleby employs other sources to supplement the details gleaned from memoirs, pausing occasionally to describe how the newspapers and books allowed individuals access to a wider world even while helping them stand alone.

And yet, for all her carefulness not to allow autobiographers to define the world, Appleby gives us an early republic defined mostly as we would expect the Northern middle class of 1850 to define it. She may differ from older accounts by crediting the earlier period (rather than the “Jacksonian” or “antebellum” eras) for originating Tocquevillian liberal America, but the picture is nonetheless the same: democratic politics and territorial expansion lead to a cornucopia of economic opportunity, levelling, individualism, religious creativity, and all manner of voluntary association. The Northern middle class was indeed in a position of cultural dominance in the nation by the time most of Appleby’s culture-heroes sat down long enough to tell their life stories. But dissenting voices get short shrift when they do not join in the general chorus. We do hear of a rising racism, yet critics of consensus like David Walker are more important as black self-made men than for what they actually said about America. Appleby is all too certain when she proclaims that democracy and the “culture of capitalism” inherently contradicted the persistence of slavery and the elaboration of racism. Her own solution to the American dilemma is exactly that of the Northern middle class circa 1850: she blames it on the South, where an alleged failure to embrace enterprise, the breakup of (white) extended families, and the diversion of capital from labor (slaves) to land, machinery, and paper, left that region backward-looking and lacking in the “cultural capital” so rapidly compounding up North.

Appleby follows an evocative literature on Southern difference, but her account ignores the equally impressive evidence that Southerners, elite and plebeian, not only defined themselves as quintesentially American but also embraced the market as willingly as anyone. The abolition of slavery in the North did create real differences, as did the mounting attack on slavery launched by abolitionists; but Appleby’s neglect of actual political struggles leads her to overestimate Nothern antislavery sentiment as a property of liberal capitalist culture, and to underestimate the rise of racism as an outgrowth of those same developments (not to mention of political union with slaveholders). This might seem like a side issue, but Appleby chooses, in the book’s final chapter, to hang her interpretation of “a new national identity” on the public triumph of a Northern belief in progress, and the cultural exile of nostalgic Southern planters and their yeoman allies from this heady mix of entrepreneurialism, evangelicalism, individualism, and materialism. While such an interpretation may help explain the coming of the Civil War, it reduces culture to political economy plus myth. It fails to get at the texture of the nationalism that did emerge after the Revolution, much less at how actual battles over the meaning of the Revolution, and not merely a consensus about that meaning, shaped public life before the Civil War. Sadly, it also makes the era’s voices of failure and disappointment, many of them recorded in other kinds of contemporary narratives, quite discordant–as they no doubt were to the successful autobiographers of antebellum America. Like the memoirs flooding our own literary marketplace, Inheriting the Revolution should be widely read, but with caution. 2

Notes

1. This despite the praise and prize heaped on Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick’s 1993 paean to the lost possibilities of The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993). Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

2. For trenchant analyses of published stories of troubled (and exploited) Americans, genres Appleby seems to have ignored, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 2000); Shane White, “The Death of James Johnson,” American Quarterly 51 (Dec. 1999): 753-95; Alfred F. Young,The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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David Waldstreicher is associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and is the author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997).

Abe is a novel based on the early life of Abraham Lincoln. It draws deeply on historical scholarship, but it is not a biography. Rather, it is an imaginative recreation of life as a young Abe Lincoln might have lived it, and of the people, scenes, and influences that helped produce his character. When an historian writes a book of this kind, the reader has a right to ask why he has chosen to write fiction instead of history? And what sort of truth-value can we expect of a novelistic representation of the past?

Anyone who has worked with historical records knows that the documentation of any large, complex, or significant human event is never fully adequate or reliable. And when one attempts to account for the motives and beliefs that govern human action, information becomes even more slippery and complex. It follows that historians often know more about the stories they tell than can be proved according to the rules of the discipline. There comes a moment, therefore, when the historian must choose between telling the whole story as he or she has come to know it, or only what can be proved with evidence and argument. If you prefer the realization of the story to the perfection of the argument, what you are writing is historical fiction, not “history.” And to keep faith with the reader, you are obliged to identify it as such.

The argument most frequently made on behalf of historical fiction is that, if it is responsibly done, it can be an effective instrument of popular education, or at least a means for stimulating interest in the study of history. Most practicing historians I know were first attracted to their subjects by reading historical fiction. But I’d like to offer a stronger argument: if properly understood, the writing of historical fiction can be a valuable adjunct to the work of historians in their discipline. Historical fiction may do as well as history for telling what happened, when, and how. It can, and should, be based on the same kind of research and rigorous analysis of evidence. But the distinction and advantage of the fictional form lies in the way it uses evidence and represents conclusions.

All historical interpretation rests on hypotheses about the way things, people, and institutions work. The historian develops hypotheses analytically; the novelist may (I would say should) undertake the same kind of analysis, but the final product is synthetic rather than analytical. The historian’s authority with the reader is gained through his/her open display of the whole architecture of evidence-gathering and interpretation.

The novelist’s authority with the reader is gained by other means: the ability to give a plausible account of human motives and actions, to evoke a believable sense of the life and culture of a past time. This depends not only on accuracy of research, but on the consistency and completeness with which a novel develops its essential premises about the character and his or her world–so that what happens in the story seems necessary and appropriate, not arbitrary or anachronistic or forced. To achieve that kind of plausibility, the novelist has to alter and rearrange the facts: change the order of actual events, invent characters and happenings, supply from imagination the information missing from the record. If there is truth in this kind of representation, it is poetic rather than historiographical: it sacrifices fidelity to nonessential facts in order to create in the reader a vivid sense of what the facts mean.

If this method has its flaws as a guide to fact, it also provides a needed corrective to some of the occupational biases of historiography. History writing is governed by hindsight. But history, as experienced, is always indeterminate: historical actors cannot know what will happen next, let alone what significance events will have. The novelist has to imagine history from the inside, to understand the different subjectivities that shaped individual understandings of events, to set aside historical hindsight and appreciate the indeterminate nature of history as it is lived.

The novelist’s representation of history is less like a mirror held up to reality than it is a simulacrum or model of the historical world, miniaturized and compressed in scale and time. The making of such a model demands that the historian make historical hypotheses literal and concrete; it demands that the writer treat what he or she believes to be true as if it was certainly true, so true that a world could be constructed based upon those ideas that would seem credibly to work. Is it your theory that historical action is driven by abstract impersonal forces? or individual calculations of rational self-interest? or oedipal rage? or the play of significations? Then portray for me a human life, in which I can believe, that is lived in these terms. Through this process a kind of truth is, if not discovered, then at least tested,by a kind of thought-experiment.

As a scholar I’ve been concerned with the ways in which communities and nations transform their historical experience into the symbolic terms of myth, and then use mythological renderings of the past to organize their thinking about their values, their place in the world, their responses to crises, their projects for the future. My work has been part of that broad and complex movement toward acritical or revisionist historiography, which has shaped our profession since “the Sixties”–a movement whose project has been to demystify the governing ideologies of the nation (and the profession), and to recover the historical experience and consciousness of peoples and classes previously excluded from the history written by the “victors.” But though the classic models of historical fiction typically celebrate “victors’ history,” there is no reason why fiction cannot become a vehicle for critical historiography. The work of social historians in recovering the experience of hitherto “invisible classes” provides the novelist with a firm basis for imagining their lives. And precisely because the novelist recovers the indeterminacy of a past time, he or she is not bound simply to celebrate the mere outcome, but is free to explore those alternative possibilities for belief, action, and political change, unrealized by history, which existed in the past. In so doing, the novelist may restore, as imaginable possibilities, the ideas, movements, and values defeated or discarded in the struggles that produced the modern state–may produce a counter-myth, to offset the victors’ mythology of the traditional historical romance.

As a scholar, you engage the myths of your society analytically–holding them at a distance. As a fiction writer, you meet those myths on their own ground–the mental space in which memories, traditions, and dreams interact–and you address them in their own language of evocative symbolism. If you succeed, you may contribute directly to the mythology and the public culture that you have merely studied before. Perhaps you can even change that culture in positive ways.

I chose to write fiction about Abraham Lincoln because he is a mythic figure in American culture, because the controversies of which he was the center remain central to our national life more than a hundred years after his death, and because, for all that has been written about him, he remains a figure full of imaginative potential, symbolizing possibilities deeply yearned for but still unrealized by American history. If he had not been killed, could he–would he–have made a difference in the bitter history of racial oppression that followed the failure of Reconstruction?

The answer to that question rests, in large part, on one’s reading of his character and motives. Historians and biographers tell us what the completed man was like, what his mature ideas were, and give us an idea of the contradictory elements of his character. What I wanted to do was to imagine how he got to be that man. He was raised in poverty, and had almost no formal education. Where did the ambition and intellectual brilliance come from? What was the basis and nature of his famous compassion? What hatreds and resentments did he have to overcome to achieve it? Where did the iron come from that allowed him to hold his course through the horror of the Civil War? How did he experience, and what did he make of, the racial conflict that was at the bottom of his, and his nation’s, trial? Only in fiction does the historical writer have the freedom to fully imagine and represent for the reader the inner life of his or her subject–which can never be adequately documented.

Most incidents in the novel take off from real (or at least attested) events, although I made minor alterations in sequence and chronology, and converted some indirect or “reading” relationships with historical figures into face-to-face encounters. The guiding principle behind such inventions was always to dramatize the play of persons, ideas, and forces that shaped Lincoln’s character as I understand it. Although I would not want the novel read as factual history, I would be willing to defend my interpretation of Lincoln’s character on scholarly grounds.

Given the elements that entered into the making of his character (and our culture), Lincoln might have become a greater and more complete emancipator than he actually was. There are in his writings, there were in the society that reared him, ideas and inclinations that looked through the endemic racism of the time toward a genuine understanding of equality, justice, and democracy. There were also elements in his character, and in his culture, of racial antipathy, violence, and power seeking that might have made him a great deal worse than he turned out to be. By engaging with the Lincoln myth as a novelist, I hope to restore for the reader some sense of the rich potential of Lincoln’s character, and by analogy to enrich his/her understanding of the latent potentials of American history and culture.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Common-Place asks scholar-writer Richard Slotkin, author of such classics of American cultural history as Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation, and, most recently, of Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln: “What can you do as a novelist that you can’t as an historian–and vice versa?

Thirteen-year-old Betsy Wheeler and her younger brother returned home on the afternoon of June 8, 1805. Earlier that day, enraged by a fight with his wife, Hannah, Ephraim Wheeler had commanded the children to leave with him. Now Betsy and the boy had come back unexpectedly. Betsy brought her father’s newest orders that on the next day he planned to leave permanently with the children. The bruised and tearful child also privately told her mother that her father had raped her. Hannah asked her brother-in-law to go for the Justice of the Peace. The long, frightful day ended with Ephraim Wheeler’s arrest. With her husband in jail, he could no longer threaten Hannah and her children.

All summer the girl persisted in her story. On Friday, September 13, 1805, the state of Massachusetts tried and convicted Ephraim Wheeler, a forty-three-year-old farm laborer, for rape. Five months later, despite pleas for mercy from Betsy, her mother and her brother, and a hundred Berkshire County voters, Wheeler went to the gallows at Lenox, Massachusetts, still protesting his innocence. The case of Ephraim Wheeler is the only known example of the conviction and execution of a father for the rape of his daughter in early America.

We came upon this astonishing story in a chance reference in a pamphlet published in 1809 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Two questions first provoked our interest. According to existing scholarship, Massachusetts’s use of the death penalty for rape had ended a generation earlier. Moreover, on its face the case demonstrated an inversion of expected patriarchal power relations. Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years, and it had never executed a Yankee for the crime. Yet now, in 1805, the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome? By investigating this disquieting story, we thought we might produce an article that would enlarge scholarly understanding of criminal justice and of family relations in the early republic.

 

The Wheeler case was a likely subject for closer study because, in addition to newspaper coverage, it generated three pamphlets: a trial report, an autobiography of the criminal, and an execution sermon. These printed sources have supplied most of the evidence about the episode, but key questions could only be answered by archival research. First, we wanted to know more about Wheeler’s family, and to verify his version of his life story from other sources. We especially wanted to learn about his wife, Hannah, the mother who stood by her daughter, both in reporting the crime and at the trial. Second, in order to grasp the meaning of Wheeler’s trial and punishment, we needed to find out just how uncommon sexual prosecutions (rape, incest, sodomy) were in the early republic. Third, it was important to know why the Massachusetts authorities chose to hang Wheeler, and whether they considered other options. Finally, we wondered if Wheeler was truly the lone exception to the general understanding that after the Revolution the state stopped hanging men for rape.

To answer our questions we visited five kinds of repositories in Massachusetts: town offices, county land and probate registries, county court houses, the state archives, and specialized libraries and historical societies. Along the way we found answers to most of our questions, as well as surprises that revealed complexities in early republican Massachusetts that we had not imagined. We also learned that tracking the life histories of obscure, propertyless people who made frequent moves across town boundaries was exceedingly difficult and sometimes impossible. Students of New England history and genealogy expect to find their quarry in land and census records, tax lists, probate registries, and in church records. But because Wheeler was a poor, unchurched farm laborer unable to maintain an independent household, he and his family moved from one town to another in search of work, and so appeared only occasionally in official records.

It was here, however, that we found our first great surprise: Ephraim’s wife, whom we learned was Hannah Odel Wheeler, came from a mixed race family. Her father, Ichabod Odel, a veteran of the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, was identified in a handwritten notation as “Negro” in the manuscript censuses of 1790 and 1800. And when two of Hannah’s sisters (who bore their husbands’ names) died in the 1840s, the clergyman who recorded their deaths identified only one sister as “colored.” During Wheeler’s trial and thereafter, none of the printed sources said a word about race; but now we knew that by marrying Hannah Odel, Ephraim had entered a mixed race family. This fact gave us a deeper understanding of Wheeler’s identity at the time of the marriage and during his troubled relationship with his wife.

Archival fragments also confirmed key parts of Ephraim Wheeler’s autobiography. In the Rochester, Massachusetts, town hall we found a record of Jeduthan Hammond, the shoemaker to whom the orphaned boy was apprenticed in 1770. In the Bristol County probate records we found that Hammond’s wife–the one person from Ephraim’s youth whom he remembered favorably–had also been an orphan child. Hampshire County court records revealed that in the 1790s Wheeler called himself a “cordwainer” (shoemaker), the trade in which he had been apprenticed. This record, in which a farmer sued Ephraim for failing to fulfill a contract to clear three acres of woodland, also supplied independent confirmation of a key part of Wheeler’s autobiography.

But the richest trove of records for us is preserved in the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. Some of these, especially the records of the Berkshire County sessions of the Supreme Judicial Court, we consulted while they were still housed in the county courthouse in Pittsfield. These grand, leather-bound folios are monuments to the importance that rulers placed on record keeping. Ordered from New York stationers (whose labels are retained in the volumes), they were handcrafted from the best materials, and the records are inscribed in an elegant, regular calligraphy. In the great folios of the Supreme Judicial Court the brown ink marches regularly across the brown pages, telling moving stories of real lives according to the formulaic wording of indictments and judicial rulings. It was here that we found the record of Wheeler’s trial, as well as the records of surrounding cases stretching back to the 1790s and forward to the 1810s. Here we discovered two other cases where fathers were accused of sexual assaults on their daughters, and here, too, we found the record of Ezra Hutchinson, a young Yankee who was convicted of rape in 1813 and who, like Wheeler, was executed. Though the Wheeler case was unique, it became clear to us that charges of incest and of rape were merely unusual, not unknown.

No doubt the most varied, remarkable body of records we explored were the “Pardon” and “Pardons Not Granted” files of the governors, which we examined at the Massachusetts Archives. Here a wide array of criminals–ranging from an aged, drunken woman who stole a hunk of beef from a butcher’s cart to men and women convicted of murder–explained (often through the language of a lawyer) why they should be granted mercy and their punishments lifted or reduced. It was here that we found the four petitions that sought pardon or commutation of Ephraim Wheeler’s death penalty. One petition came from Wheeler himself, and his X marked at the end demonstrated his inability to sign his name. Another came from Ephraim’s wife and children, which led to the discovery that his mixed race wife, Hannah, could sign her name, though he and their children could not.(A facsimile of this petition with transcription is reproduced at the end of this article.) A third came from Wheeler’s two court-appointed lawyers. And a fourth, bearing the signatures of ninety-four Berkshire County voters, argued that the death penalty was the wrong punishment for rape, and that Wheeler should instead be incarcerated for life in the brand new state prison. These petitions helped us understand that neither Wheeler’s family nor his community regarded the death penalty as the only way to punish his crime.

Three other pardon cases proved especially significant for appreciating how state officials viewed Wheeler’s case. Two concerned sexual crimes: a case of sodomy with a dog, and another involving the rape of a ten-year-old girl. In the sodomy case, which dated from 1797, 446 men petitioned to free the accused eighty-four-year-old physician who, his advocates claimed, was expert in curing cancer. In the rape case from 1802, 121 men asked that a dark-skinned young immigrant of the “Hindoo race” be deported rather than executed. In all, these two cases generated eleven variously worded petitions, and helped us to grasp the elements of a successful pardon plea.

One other successful pardon petition served to instruct us powerfully: that of a forty-four-year-old Yankee burglar whose death sentence the governor chose to commute to life in prison. Because this action was taken just five days before consideration of Wheeler’s case, and because the decision rested on curtailing the use of capital punishment, an issue that the legislature had been debating for the past year, it demonstrated an alternative that officials and the public believed to be available in Wheeler’s case.

Among the records of the governor’s council we found one loose scrap of paper–a brief committee report on the Wheeler petitions–that could be only partly understood on the basis of surrounding records. Because the report was unsigned, there was no way to determine its authorship. All we knew was that its author was one of the nine governor’s councilors. (A facsimile of this report with transcription is reproduced at the end of this article.)

We found the solution to this mystery, and some others, through the help of the staff and collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston’s Back Bay. The MHS possesses a vast, well-cataloged collection of Massachusetts private manuscripts, and we asked for help in assembling known letters written by council members close to the year 1806. When we visited the spacious, oak-paneled library on Boylston Street, we found an unmistakable match in less than half an hour. An added bonus included identification of the author of a key petition on behalf of the sodomist–none other than the convict’s attorney and the future governor, Caleb Strong, the man who would rule on Wheeler’s life.

No tale of archival labors would be accurate without reporting disappointments and dead ends. For us the most daunting was the paucity of information on Wheeler and his family in the public records, apart from the evidence generated by his crime. As a result, we could not trace Ephraim’s wife and children after his death. A second disappointment was the absence of information in places where we expected to find it. One of Wheeler’s judges was Theodore Sedgwick; and his daughter, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote a story based on Wheeler’s crime. Many letters of both Sedgwicks are preserved at the MHS, but we found none that referred to Wheeler’s trial, his family, or any other aspect of his case. A third frustration is the also the mystery of the vanishing source. The Reverend Samuel Shepard, of Lenox, visited Wheeler in jail, preached his execution sermon, and witnessed his hanging. Surely the clergyman must have recorded something in the diary he is known to have kept. Perhaps so, but the diary, which was mentioned by a local historian in 1907, can no longer be located. No one can say whether it would illuminate our subject or even whether it still exists.

But now that our article length study has turned into a book length microhistory, tentatively titled Deliver Us From Evil: Rape, Incest, and the Gallows in the Early Republic, and scheduled for publication by Harvard University Press in 2002, we keep hunting and hoping. Indeed, only last week we found a record that three years before Betsy Wheeler accused her father of rape, an eleven-year-old girl in Lincoln County, Maine (then Massachusetts), charged her father, John Brown, with the same crime. Authorities jailed Brown, but court records (now kept in the vault of the registry of deeds in the courthouse in Wiscasset) show that the case never came to trial. This discovery, together with countless other archival fragments–of domestic conflict, criminal violence, and courtroom responses–enable us to understand how remarkable it was for Betsy to maintain her account of the rape through all the legal proceedings. At present we believe her perseverance was what made the case unique. 

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Petition of Hannah, Betsy, and Ephraim Wheeler Jr.

Transcription:

To his Excellency Caleb Strong Esq. Gov. of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Hon. the Council of said Commonwealth. Your unhappy petitioners, the wife, and children of Ephraim Wheeler, now under sentence of death for the crime of Rape, committed on Betsey Wheeler one of your petitioners, being his own daughter, approach your Excellency and Honors with Great anxiety, in behalf of one who hath greatly injured us, and implore your Excellency and Honors to spare his life, by inflicting such other punishment as to your Excellency and Honors may seem fit and proper – No injury however great can obliterate the remembrance, that Ephraim Wheeler is the husband of one of your petitioners and the father of the other two – Duty must require it, and our feelings strongly urge; that the crime which he committed and of which we were the immediate sufferers, might not affect his life – Your Excellency and Honors will feel that when we ask, most earnestly ask for the life of our Husband, and our Father, we perform a duty which nature points out, and that we must remain in awful anxiety, [p. 2] until your Honors [‘] determination shall be known – Hoping and trusting that your Excellency will be disposed to exercise that most invaluable attribute, Mercy, we remain your most unhappy and distressed petitioners. Sept. 26, 1805 Hannah Wheeler [Her own signature] her Betsey X Wheeler mark [Not the same hand as below] his Ephraim X Wheeler Junr. mark

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Report of the committee on the pardon appeal of Ephraim Wheeler

Transcription:

The Committee to whom the petition of Ephraim Wheeler was committed, ask leave to report that on inquiry into the circumstances of the case they do not find anything peculiar as the ground for granting the prayer of the petitioner unless questions as to the credibility of the principal witness in the trial should be considered such. It does not appear that the Court were dissatisfied with the verdict; but the Committee have reason to presume the contrary; yet from the different effect that the same evidence often has on different minds, perhaps, if the evidence had on the trial were submitted to Committee for a decision, they might doubt whether it would be perfectly safe to convict of so high an offense on such evidence.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.1 (September, 2000).

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Irene Quenzler Brown, a historian, is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Relations at the University of Connecticut. Richard D. Brown is Professor of History at University of Connecticut.