Many Things Forgotten: The Use of Probate Records in Arming America

Gloria L. Main

MICHAEL A. Bellesiles's Arming America contends that most people did not own guns before the middle of the nineteenth century because guns had been too expensive, unreliable, and not all that useful.1 The advent of mass production and aggressive advertizing by domestic arms manufacturers, Bellesiles argues, boosted the levels of ownership, contributed to rising rates of interpersonal violence among white men, and created a national "gun culture" centered on the possession and display of firearms. Much of the book discusses the manufacture and tactical use of guns in wartime, the manifold shortcomings of state militia systems, and the perennial shortage of their equipment, but the heart of the matter is what proportion of the people possessed guns in early America.	1
Bellesiles replies, "Not many." His estimates, only 15 percent before 1790 and just 21 percent in 1830, run strongly counter to folk images of our pioneer past (Table 1, p. 445). Although he cites censuses of various kinds, it is the alleged absence of guns from probate records that provides his clincher. If arms of any kind are not mentioned in inventories or wills, he argues, the odds are high that they were not there at all. Probate inventories, he says, "scrupulously recorded every item in an estate . . . including those that had already been passed on as bequests before death" (p. 109, restated at length on p. 266). This is nonsense. Anyone at all familiar with inventories from the colonial period knows that they are maddeningly inconsistent in organization and detail. They almost always contain escape phrases such as "in small things forgotten" or "lumber," which could mean anything that happened not to interest the appraisers. Nor do inventories include "every item." Custom, not law, excluded pets--even prized hunting dogs--and children's toys (unless the children were deceased) and the widow's paraphernalia, a vague and contested term. Worse, appraisers often lumped things together under a generic category such as "tools" or "household linens." How they went about compiling an inventory was up to them, and their methods varied from one probate district to another. Court-directed procedures also differed by jurisdiction. Debts owing to, or by, the deceased might not appear until the account of administration, due a year later, or in the final settlement of the estate, and that account or settlement might or might not have been copied into the running record of the court's business. For Bellesiles to pretend that these lists ever formed an internally consistent body of "scrupulously" recorded data is, to use one of his favorite words, "incredible."	2
As for the absence of guns from bequests in wills noted by Bellesiles, this is a true but meaningless observation. Most men's wills that I have read from early New England and Maryland forbear itemizing any bequests beyond describing specific parcels of land, probably because they had to pay someone by the page to prepare the will for them. Very few wills mention horses or cows, for instance, yet these animals could be quite as valuable as a good gun. No one would claim that the absence of horses and cows from bequests meant the testator did not own them. Why then should the failure to stipulate a gun mean there was no gun to give? Nor was there anything in the law that required inventories to list personal possessions that had been given away by the deceased prior to his last illness so long as his estate covered his debts.	3
So, all right, he just went ahead and used what he could find, right? Yet that seems not to have been the case, either, for he says "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" (p. 109). Here the author is excusing himself from doing anything like a balanced geographical sampling of earlier probate records on the grounds that he could not find sufficient numbers of "complete runs" before the 1760s. Readers are left to infer that he must have found them thereafter (pp. 109–10, 148, 266–67, 386, 445). I am uncertain what he means by "complete runs" but wonder at the idea that the rate of probate coverage improved with time since the rates actually declined in New England and Maryland. If by "complete" he means only those inventories accompanied by a will, he was by-passing something like two-thirds to three-quarters of all probated estates, and they are not "incomplete"--they simply pertain to the majority who chose not to make a will or didn't get around to making one.	. . .