Going off half-cocked: a review essay of Arming America.

THE PROFESSION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS IS NO MORE IMMUNE FROM THE toils of notoriety than the business world with its corporate meltdowns. One popular historian seems to have borrowed lengthy passages from compatriots as coolly as some Houston executives cooked their financial books. Likewise, another, often seen on television, admits paying off an author whose work was exploited without attribution. Amid such sensational breaches in public trust, assaults on Michael A. Bellesiles's book Arming America (1) have become almost a cottage industry, with articles appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, national journals of opinion, academic newsletters, and elsewhere. (2) In this case the author's problem is neither greed nor the convenience of plagiarism. Instead, Bellesiles stands accused of allowing political aims to override scruples of historical accuracy.

Michael Bellesiles claims that myth alone has deposited firearms in the hands of most Americans from earliest settlement. His interpretation postpones the rise of a genuine "gun culture," as he calls it (p. 15), to the mobilizations of the Civil War. Arming America proposes that, thereafter, munitions makers tempted civilian buyers with cheap weapons. Such marketing led to increased homicides, gun accidents, and other misadventures.

Bellesiles's thesis does not arouse firearms zealots alone. Leaders of the generally liberal and anti-gun academic community have also complained, though for different reasons. In fact, Bellesiles has garnered more faultfinders than any historian in recent memory. For instance, in four pieces published in the January 2002 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, Gloria L. Main, Ira D. Gruber, Jack N. Rakove, and Randolph A. Roth--though no friends of the National Rifle Association--almost unanimously refute his findings. (3)

Gloria Main, an expert on wills, rejects Bellesiles's assertion that if an inventory failed to mention weapons, the household had none. Main states bluntly, "This is nonsense." She points out that wills rarely included all property. Anything from cows to children's toys might be omitted because these paraphernalia had already been distributed. Worse, Main finds his methods inexact and his claims to extensive research inflated. Her own work revealed a 76 percent ownership of weapons (chiefly guns) in six Maryland counties between 1650 and 1720, whereas Bellesiles comes up with a mere 7 percent for Maryland (p. 109). Such a wide discrepancy "boggles the mind," she concludes. (4)

No less dismayed than Main, Ira Gruber criticizes Bellesiles for failing to acknowledge studies that long ago exploded myths of a venerable, sturdy citizen army. Instead, Bellesiles mentions predecessors but infers that his own views are almost sui generis. Like Main, Gruber also disputes Bellesiles's argument that muskets were impractical in colonial times. If that were the case, Gruber asks, why did Indians, not to mention colonists, generate such a lust for them? (5)

In perhaps the most devastating essay, Randolph Roth convincingly repudiates Bellesiles's statement that "Hamilton, Washington, and every member of Congress ... knew that most Americans did not own guns and had no interest in buying them" (p. 229). Roth summarizes the recent findings of James Lindgren and Justin Lee Heather and other scholars, many of whom have used the colonial probate inventories painstakingly compiled decades ago by the prominent economic historian Alice Hanson Jones. Across the board, the results appear to undermine Bellesiles's thesis of low gun ownership rates. For example, whereas Bellesiles claims that only 18.3 percent of the late-eighteenth-century southern probate inventories that he examined listed firearms (p. 445, table 1), Lindgren's analysis of Jones's inventories indicates that 69 percent of colonial-era southern households owned guns--the highest ratio among all early American regions. And the other scholars whose work Roth describes (who, unlike Bellesiles, have been forthcoming about both their sources and the sophisticated quantitative and statistical methods they employed) reach similar conclusions, with estimated gun ownership rates all in the range of over 50 percent of American households during this period. Roth also maintains that southern men and teenagers, though militarily untrained, prized their firearms passionately throughout the first two centuries of settlement. In field and forest, they expertly shot vermin, snakes, and other creatures great and small. Roth persuades us that Bellesiles defies common expectations--and the historical record--quite breathtakingly. (6)

From another perspective, one might expect that Bellesiles, the former director of Emory University's Violence Studies Program, would have explored interdisciplinary work that seeks to understand cultural patterns with regard to weaponry and violence. But without clarifying the exact meaning of culture through time and space, Arming America persistently refers to the presence or absence of a "gun culture." The terminology is much too vague; it is informed by neither psychology, anthropology, nor any other relevant field of study. Furthermore, Bellesiles neglects the historical work of Edward L. Ayers and James M. Denham, among others. Their explorations illuminate the truculent, sometimes lawless spirit of the nineteenth-century South. (7) Social scientists have also analyzed southern troublemaking propensities, in which guns have played no small part. (8) Ignoring such useful material, Bellesiles seemingly proposes an antebellum South as tranquil as a windless summer day. In the mid-1830s, however, Bishop Benjamin Bosworth Smith, who led Kentucky's Episcopalians, offered a different perspective. The clergyman compiled statistics demonstrating statewide tolerance for the frequency and sweep of homicides. And Kentucky juries, reported the prelate, almost invariably acquitted murderers. (The good bishop was himself happily spared from the statistical record and lived to the ripe old age of ninety.) (9)

With regard to another notoriously homicidal state, Bellesiles proposes that antebellum South Carolina was "the least violent state in the country in the thirty years prior to the Civil War" (p. 353). But Bellesiles misstates and misreads the statistics of his source, Michael S. Hindus. For example, Bellesiles claims (based on figures compiled by Hindus) that South Carolina during this period averaged just under five murders a year, as compared to nine for Massachusetts. But on closer examination, Hindus's numbers indicate an average of just over five, not nine, homicides annually in the land of the Pilgrims--not significantly different than South Carolina, particularly given Massachusetts's larger population. Furthermore, Bellesiles fails to note that Hindus's figures are for prosecutions only, not actual murders. Given the propensity toward violence against slaves and free blacks (which Bellesiles admits), and since the majority of these crimes certainly went unprosecuted, we can probably safely assume that South Carolina's homicide rate was actually higher than that of Massachusetts, perhaps considerably so on a per capita basis. Maybe the Carolinian constabulary was about as competent as Peter Sellers's Monsieur Clouseau or Stephen Fry's Inspector Thompson in Gosford Park. (10)

Other aspects of Hindus's statistics unmentioned by Bellesiles also indicate that the Palmetto State suffered in comparison to Massachusetts with regard to personal violence. For example, according to Hindus, between 1760 and 1774, homicides represented a mere 1.2 percent of prosecutions in Middlesex County (Boston), whereas over 5 percent of prosecutions in Charleston during roughly the same time period were for murder. In addition, Hindus observes that in Massachusetts only half a percent of all prosecutions were for homicide from 1833 to 1859, whereas the percentage of homicide prosecutions in the Palmetto State between 1800 and 1860 was over quadruple the Massachusetts figure. Hindus also indicates that crimes against persons, not property, were comparatively far more common in the South than in New England. In my own study, juries of Adams County, Mississippi, a wealthy Mississippi River enclave, heard 175 charges for assault but only 45 prosecutions for property crimes between 1829 and 1841. The effect of these findings is to seriously undermine Bellesiles's curiously sunny version of antebellum southern culture and custom. (11)

Worth mentioning, too, is Bellesiles's inadequate discussion of duels, which were chiefly a southern phenomenon. Dueling pistols, contrary to his dismissal, were exceedingly well crafted and, if properly aimed, far from "notoriously inaccurate" for the thirty to fifty feet or so necessary (p. 355). The weapon of choice among gentlemen was customarily the gun, not the broadsword, knife, or rapier. Pistols suited the rank-conscious character of the deadly ritual itself. In addition, when Aaron Burr and Andrew Jackson killed their challengers on the field of honor, they were not, as Bellesiles styles them, "psychopaths" (p. 355). (12) In this instance, as elsewhere throughout the book, Bellesiles's verbal overkill damages both the particular argument and the whole.

Yet, for all these criticisms, Arming America--lively and engaging as it is--should not be wholly dismissed. Bellesiles compels us to re-examine how and why Americans have developed an enchantment with firearms, whenever the mania began. Moreover, he makes a strong case for the nonmilitaristic character of American life, at least until the sectional contest of the mid-nineteenth century. He cites so many battles in which militiamen proved fainthearted or ill-disciplined that the mind almost numbs. Yet, as he notes, no popular clamor for permanent militia reform arose. In peacetime, except for New York and Massachusetts (hardly the most bellicose of states), national subsidies for distributing arms to official state units, Bellesiles affirms, went begging (p. 270). If anything, southern militias were even more unprepared for engagement than those in the free states. So disorganized were the county units in some states that just before the Civil War many disbanded their militia establishments--including Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia. Too often firearms mysteriously disappeared from local armories. Cavalierly, troops missed drills, ran helter-skelter from enemies unless protected by stockades or stone walls, and grumbled under mediocre officers. We knew all that already. But never mind. The resurrected news of an America habitually ill-prepared for unexpected varieties of warfare might have future uses. Furthermore, however it is assessed, Arming America reveals a glaring weakness in our apprehension of southern violence. For too long historians have relied on anecdotal evidence, not surveys and statistics from antebellum records. We know much less than we thought. (13)

Thus, for all its many and extraordinary faults, Arming America almost furnishes a salutary corrective to current pro-gun propaganda, much of which adopts a semireligious tone. Charlton Heston and company perpetuate myths and specious rationales about the "right to bear arms" in order to convert an instrument of death into a national talisman. If Bellesiles had been more scrupulous in collecting materials and more temperate in exposition, Arming America would have made a substantial contribution to both an understanding of the past and a contemplation of the present.

Beleaguered as he is--from gun fanatics to official inquiries at his own university--Bellesiles still deserves a full and fair hearing. Fortunately, the outcome of further examinations of his text cannot reach the level of national peril, a burden that rests instead on the shoulders of a handful of financial manipulators. Nonetheless, in our small, cloistered world, the controversy over Bellesiles's work serves as a much-needed lesson to us all--from the most celebrated senior academics to the youngest entrants into the profession. Chastened, scholars must return to the old verities about handling evidence. That long-ignored commandment--"thou shalt not fudge"--requires the same degree of exactitude from historians as should be the imperative of accountants poring over balance sheets.

(1) Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000). Page numbers of material quoted from Arming America are inserted parenthetically in the text. The author would like to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of Randolph A. Roth and Anne Wyatt-Brown in the preparation of this essay, as well as the courtesy of the staff of the William and Mary Quarterly for allowing me to view their forum on the book in advance of its publication.

(2) See Danny Postel, "Did the Shootouts Over `Arming America' Divert Attention from the Real Issues?" Chronicle of Higher Education, 48 (February 1, 2002), A12-15; Melissa Seckora, "A Prize-Winning Historian and His Gun Myths," National Review, 53 (October 15, 2001), 50-54; Robert H. Churchill, "Guns and the Politics of History," Reviews in American History, 29 (September 2001), 329-37, Matthew Warshauer, "`Shooting from the Hip': A Review of Arming America," Connecticut History, 40 (Fall 2001), 275-85; and Warshauer, "Interview with Michael A. Bellesiles, Author of Arming America," ibid., 286-98.

(3) "Forum: Historians and Guns," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 59 (January 2002), 201-68, which includes: Jack N. Rakove, "Words, Deeds, and Guns: Arming America and the Second Amendment," 205-10; Gloria L. Main, "Many Things Forgotten: The Use of Probate Records in Arming America," 211-16; Ira D. Gruber, "Of Arms and Men: Arming America and Military History," 217-22; Randolph Roth, "Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence," 223-40; and Michael A. Bellesiles's response, "Exploring America's Gun Culture," 241-68.

(4) Main, "Many Things Forgotten," 211,213.

(5) Gruber, "Of Arms and Men," 218.

(6) Roth, "Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide," 224, 226 n. 9, 227. See also James Lindgren and Justin Lee Heather, "Counting Guns in Early America," William and Mary Law Review (forthcoming, May 2002; also available online at http://www.law.nwu.edu/faculty/fulltime/Lindgren); and Alice Hanson Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, 3 vols. (New York, 1977).

(7) Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York and Oxford, 1984); James M. Denham, "A Rogue's Paradise": Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1861 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997). See also Sheldon Hackney, "Southern Violence," American Historical Review, 74 (February 1969), 906-25; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, N.J., 1996); and Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1990).

(8) See Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor.' The Psychology of Violence in the South (New York, 1996); and Raymond Gastil, "Homicide and the Regional Culture of Violence," American Sociological Review, 36 (June 1971), 412-27.

(9) See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), 368; and Robert Insko, "Benjamin Bosworth Smith, a Pioneer Kentucky Bishop," Filson Club Historical Quarterly, 39 (April 1965), 135-46.

(10) Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 64 (table 3.1), 65 (table 3.2).

(11) Ibid., 64 (table 3.1), 65 (table 3.2), 91 (table 4.3); Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 367.

(12) See Joanne B. Freeman, "Dueling as Politics: Reinterpreting the Hamilton-Burr Duel," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d set., 53 (April 1996), 289-318; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Andrew Jackson's Honor," Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (Spring 1997), 1-36. Both articles stress the patron-client relation and the structure of military-based leadership of partisan factions as factors involved in the duel. While Bellesiles correctly notes the low ratio of fatalities in duels, he sees dueling's reliance on guns as a means to assure that both parties would likely survive (p. 355)--in other words, demands for "satisfaction" were all pretense. The practice was not so unthreatening as that. Otherwise, dueling would have been laughed out of existence.

(13) A. J. Wright, comp., Criminal Activity in the Deep South, 1700-1930: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn., and other cities, 1989) indicates the paucity of firm, reliable statistics for the Old South.

MR. WYATT-BROWN is the 2001-2002 Douglas Southall Freeman Professor of History at the University of Richmond and the Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida.