Of Arms and Men:
Arming America and Military History

Ira D. Gruber

IN Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles has undertaken to use the past to reform the present.1 He asks why the United States is the most violent of industrialized nations--why the American people are so tolerant of the guns that kill thousands of their fellow citizens each year. A principal reason, he says, is that Americans believe guns and violence are an "immutable" (p. 5) part of their heritage, that there is nothing they can do to change a gun culture that was established with the first permanent English settlements in the New World nearly four hundred years ago. Such a perception is, he argues, not only inaccurate (the United States did not develop a culture of guns and violence until after the Civil War) but also obstructive of efforts to curb our violent ways.	1
A large part of Bellesiles's argument rests on his reading of Anglo-American military history, a reading that minimizes the importance of guns, militia, and warfare during the colonial and early national periods of the United States. According to Bellesiles, firearms were not well suited to American warfare before the Civil War. The smoothbore musket, used by Anglo-American forces from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, was so expensive and fragile that governments could not provide such weapons for more than small regular forces and a fraction of the militia. Those militia who were armed with muskets frequently found that swords, axes, and torches were more deadly than muskets in frontier warfare. Even British and United States regulars relied primarily on bayonets and cannon to win battles from the Seven Years' War to the Mexican War.	2
Although Americans celebrated their militia and sought to rely on it for defense, the militia was almost never, Bellesiles argues, an effective fighting force. After the first few decades of English settlement, the militia was not properly trained or armed, and the colonists relied on volunteers, friendly Indians, and British regulars to provide security--to keep hostile Indians as well as other Europeans at bay. When the English colonists had serious fighting to do, they depended on the British army or, eventually, on their own Continental army. They wanted to believe that the militia had won their colonial wars and their independence, and they hoped to rely on that militia to defend the new United States. But after the militia proved ineffective in pacifying Indians and resisting the British in 1812, Americans turned increasingly to volunteers and a small regular army to fight their wars. Indeed, the regular militia collapsed in the 1830s and 1840s, giving way to volunteer militia units that were more interested in uniforms and entertainment than in weapons and training. Those volunteer units were the first to serve when the Civil War began.	3
Americans were satisfied with their poorly armed and trained militia because, Bellesiles says, the colonies and new nation were remarkably secure and peaceful until the middle of the nineteenth century. Whites did treat slaves, Indians, and other minorities brutally. But whites rarely assaulted other whites, almost never killed one another, and offered little armed resistance to their governments. Whatever historians might have said about the British colonies being at war more than one-third of the time between the founding of Jamestown and the end of the Seven Years' War, Bellesiles found that "in this vast expanse of time from 1607 to 1775, peace was the norm" (pp. 71–72, 296)--just as it would be from 1815 to the Mexican War. The colonists and citizens of the new nation were sometimes drawn into wars by Europeans. But even then, battles in America tended to be less costly than those in Europe; and not until the Civil War did Americans learn to use mass-produced weapons to kill one another and to turn their peaceful culture into one of guns and violence.	. . .