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FORUM: RESPONSE
Influence and Emulation in the Constitutional Republic of Letters
David Thomas Konig
| I am glad that the Review has provided a Forum for advancing discussion of the "rapidly evolving field of Second Amendment scholarship," as Richard Uviller and William Merkel so aptly describe it. The field is evolving so rapidly, in fact, that I had no chance to consult their excellent book on the subject when writing this article. Having now had the luxury—and great benefit—of reading it in preparing my reply to their comments, I can only cheer them on for the way that book and their remarks in the Forum advance the common goals we seek: to replace an a historical quotation-hunting with a meticulous examination of "the collateral expressions of the founders and their contemporaries to find the most likely purposes and assumptions underlying the text" of the Second Amendment.1 |
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In their comment, Uviller and Merkel note that the "new paradigm" described in my article is somewhat less than entirely new, having been put forward by Saul Cornell and others. I agree entirely. My further contribution, I hope, is—as I discover theirs to be—factual historical support for such a paradigm, showing demonstrable connections to an informing context of articulated ideas and well-known experience. The Scottish "influence" provides that context in my article. "This awareness of Scotland as an alternative English-speaking culture was the most significant aspect of the Scottish influence upon America," writes William Brock; "it is also the hardest to document" because of the way Scots assimilated their lives and ideas into American culture.2 Messrs. Uviller and Merkel thus understandably raise valid issues concerning the impact of the Scottish model. I should like to use the opportunity of the Forum to examine several factors (in both senses of that term) that, I hope, will answer their concerns. |
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Despite our common efforts to move beyond "either/or" formulations in understanding the context of the Second Amendment, Uviller and Merkel seem to present another dichotomy—a binary opposition of competing English and Scottish cultures, whether between English and Scottish political legacies or between English and Scottish ethnicity. By emphasizing the British nature of the question, however, I wish to illuminate the importance of American membership in the transatlantic "republic of letters"—an explicitly articulated identity that linked opposition politicians across the Tweed, the Irish Sea, and the Atlantic. For Americans it served, according to David D. Hall, as "an expansive vision of learnedness, articulated especially during the Revolutionary period, as a means of advancing 'liberty' and thereby fulfilling the promise of a republican America."3 It drew together political radicals and religious dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic, who drew from their shared struggles against a corrupted Parliament and the Church of England a common agenda of constitutional reform.4 It also affords us a way to understand the finer points of the category of "ethnicity," a concept both too narrow and too broad to be useful here. It is too narrow because the transatlantic "republic of letters" embraced ideas and projects that blurred or obliterated "confessional, political, and national boundaries."5 It is too broad because it lumps Jacobite Catholic Highlanders and Whig Protestant Lowlanders into a common "Scottish" identity that contemporaries would have rejected. As Linda Colley instructs us, Scots may have retained their religious and social institutions, but most Lowlanders were not even Celtic and "had far more in common with the inhabitants of northern England than they did with their own Highland countrymen."6 |
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Eric Richards, however, provides the best way to understand the "influence" question by introducing us to the idea of "emulation," which explains how Lowland Protestant Scots, like Americans, could embrace the Whig legacies of the Glorious Revolution and the writings of Trenchard and Gordon. To seize on such attributes brought them into what these provincials regarded as their common British tradition, elevated them above their embarrassing barbaric Highland cousins, and testified to their entitlement to traditions of cultivated civility and historic liberties.7 Americans, too, sought such an identity—a process once described by historians as "Anglicization," but perhaps more usefully understood as an attempt to emulate those cultural and political attributes of the common British heritage of civility, religious freedom, and political liberty. More Americans, in fact, matriculated at Edinburgh than at Cambridge or Oxford for their university education.8 Both Lowland Scots and the American provincials did their best to select and replicate what they envied in the metropolis—especially its political legacies, including the right to bear arms in a citizen militia. News of the Jacobite risings spurred interest in news from Scotland, brought to the Chesapeake by the hundreds of Scottish tobacco factors who traveled there regularly, carrying with them newspapers from the outports.9 Scottish booksellers, unconstrained by copyright laws, pirated English as well as Scottish works to satisfy this demand, and in Philadelphia the Scot Robert Bell unashamedly reprinted and aggressively advertised works he knew Americans would respond to. Among his most notable marketing successes were heavy sales of Blackstone's Commentaries, Burgh's Political Disquisitions, Robertson's Charles V, and, of course, Paine's Common Sense. During the Revolutionary War, Bell carted literally "tons of books" from Philadelphia to Boston and New York.10 |
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Saul Cornell's examination of the Beccarian position taken by Thomas Jefferson affords us another opportunity to examine the context and meaning of the right to keep and bear arms. Cornell rightly notes that Jefferson copied (in Italian) Beccaria's defense of personal arms-bearing into his legal commonplace book, a collection of excerpts of legal materials that Jefferson thought worthy of pondering and application. Beccaria's position might be paraphrased as the current argument that "when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." Like many of Jefferson's political interests, however, Beccaria was not a notably cited authority in the founding era, as Cornell reminds us. But I would go a step farther to note that if we examine Jefferson's commonplacing of Beccaria, we will find that he was not citing the Milanese reformer on rights. Rather, as the manuscript of the Legal Commonplace Book makes clear, Jefferson assembled his extracts from Beccaria (of which this was but one) to formulate a position about policy, not rights. In fact, Jefferson's manuscript marginalia show us that he was citing Beccaria's point as an example, Jefferson wrote, of "falso idea di utilitá" in law reform—that is, that disarming law-abiding citizens of arms for personal self-defense was flawed utilitarian policy.11 |
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Jefferson was always quick to identify rights, but it is significant that in copying from Dei Delitti e delle Pene he chose to omit Beccaria's reference to bearing arms as a "libertà personale" (a personal liberty) from his commonplaced entry. Instead, he continued with Beccaria's argument about the diminished ability of disarmed victims to defend themselves and his call for "[una] ragionata meditazione degli' inconvenienti, ed advantaggi di una decreto universale" ("a rational contemplation of the disadvantages and advantages of a universal law").12 Jefferson viewed bearing arms as part of the universal law of self-defense, limited to one's own "lands or tenements," as he proposed for Virginia's constitution. As president he condemned popular recourse to arms in opposition to government. When New Yorkers resisted the Embargo in 1808, he condemned the "combination of a number of individuals to oppose by force and arms, the execution of those laws" as an act "fully within the legal definition of an insurrection" that should be suppressed by the state militia.13 Prompted by Cornell's comments, we must re-examine more closely Jefferson's position on bearing arms. |
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Notes
1. H. Richard Uviller and William G. Merkel, The Militia and the Right to Bear Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 2.
2. William R. Brock, Scotus Americanus: A Survey of the Sources for Links Between Scot-land and America in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 171.
3. David D. Hall, "Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century," in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. David D. Hall, vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 433.
4. In addition to the work of Caroline Robbins cited in my article, see John Sainsbury, The Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (London and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987); Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
5. Hall, "Learned Culture," 416.
6. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 12.
7. Eric Richards, "Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire," in Strangers in the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 84.
8. Ronald Syme estimates one hundred at Edinburgh as against seventy at each of the other two (Colonial Elites: Rome, Spain, and the Americas [London: Oxford University Press, 1958], 56).
9. Steele, English Atlantic, 118, 141.
10. James N. Green, "English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin," in Hall, History of the Book, 285–88.
11. Manuscript of Legal Commonplace Book, Library of Congress, item #828, citing Dei Delitti e delle Pene [Of Crimes and Punishments] (1766), chap. 40.
12. Ibid. (My translation.) Nevertheless, the omitted words (and the rest of an omitted thirty-nine word passage) have been inexplicably attributed to Jefferson. See Randy E. Barnett and Don B. Kates, "Under Fire: The New Consensus on the Second Amendment," Emory Law Journal 45 (1996): 1215.
13. Jefferson's "Second Draft" of Virginia Constitution, 1776, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., 28 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950– ), 1: 353. Jefferson to Daniel D. Tompkins, 15 August 1808, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1905), 12: 132.
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