Lock, Stock, and Barrel: The Origins of American Gun Culture

296 Pages·2018·9.67 MB·English

by  Clayton E Cramer

LOCK, STOCK,
AND BARREL

LOCK, STOCK,
AND BARREL
The Origins of American
Gun Culture
CLAYTON E. CRAMER
Copyright © 2018 by Clayton E. Cramer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in
a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cramer, Clayton E., author.
Title: Lock, stock, and barrel : the origins of American gun culture /
Clayton E. Cramer.
Description: Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, [2018] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047557 (print) | LCCN 2017052714 (ebook) | ISBN
9781440860386 (eBook) | ISBN 9781440860379 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Firearms ownership—United States—History. |
Firearms—United States—History.
Classification: LCC HV8059 (ebook) | LCC HV8059 .C733 2018 (print) | DDC
683.400973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047557
ISBN: 978-1-4408-6037-9 (print)
978-1-4408-6038-6 (ebook)
22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available as an eBook.
Praeger
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
www.abc-clio.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Terminology xiii
1 Gun Culture in Colonial America, 1607–1775 1
2 Counting Gunsmiths: Methodological Problems 29
3 Colonial Gunsmiths and Manufacturers, 1607–1775 39
4 Repairing Guns during the Revolutionary War, 1775–1783 51
5 Gunmaking during the Revolutionary Era, 1775–1783 57
6 Gun Culture in the Early Republic, 1783–1846 87
7 Gun Manufacturing in the Early Republic, 1783–1846 121
8 F ederal Government Gun Contractors
in the Early Republic, 1783–1846 125
9 S tate Militia Gun Contractors in the Early Republic,
1783–1846 137
10 H ow the American Gun Culture Changed the World,
1800–Present 143
11 The Myth of 19th-Century Gun Marketing 153
12 Postbellum Gun Culture, 1865–1930 165
13 Modern Gun Culture, 1930–Present 171
vi Contents
Epilogue: American Gun Culture: Transformative
and Still Kicking 185
Appendix A: Gunsmiths in Early America 187
Appendix B: Partial List of Government Arms Contracts 193
Appendix C: Glossary 197
Notes 201
Bibliography 255
Index 277
Preface
For me, the most important novel of the 20th century was George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its protagonist, Winston Smith,
works for the Ministry of Truth, where Winston changes history books,
and even old newspapers, so that the past is continually updated to
reflect the ever-changing needs of the Party. “Day by day, and almost
minute by minute, the past was brought up to date.”1
Revisionism, the revising of history, is not always bad. History does
change as historians reexamine the evidence. But essential facts seldom
change. Even history books published in 1918 agree with recent ones
that President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Minor facts,
and often theories for why events happened, get revised, often after the
evidence in support of the new position becomes well established.
This book is in part about some recent historical revisionism. While
less dramatic than claiming President Lincoln enjoyed a well-deserved
retirement in Springfield, Illinois, it is very close to the Ministry of Truth’s
slogan: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls
the present controls the past.” The question at the heart of this rapidly
changing past is this: how recently did America’s gun culture develop?
This book aims to demonstrate that the traditional, largely assumed
view of America as a gun culture from its beginning is generally correct.
The recent revisionist history is chiefly driven by the desires of political
activists concerning gun control today.
What is a “gun culture”? While lacking a universally accepted defini-
tion, widespread private ownership and use of firearms, a belief that they
have some significance beyond their immediate practical need, and the
idea that one has a right to possess them certainly seems an adequate
starting definition. By analogy, America in the 1960s was a “car culture.”
viii Preface
Traditionally, historians assumed that guns were always part of our
culture, a consequence of a nation formed from a “howling wilderness,”2
a necessity in a place where hunting for food and defense against danger-
ous animals, and sometimes hostile Indians, was needed. In the last two
decades, revisionist historians have argued otherwise. In 1996, an Emory
University professor of history, Michael A. Bellesiles, published an article
in the Journal of American History3 and a subsequent book, Arming
America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), that claimed
that many long-cherished ideas about violence, guns, and the effective-
ness of the militia in early America were incorrect. Bellesiles argued that
guns were very scarce and tightly controlled in America before 1840,
that there was essentially no civilian market for handguns before 1848,
and that few Americans hunted.4 Initially, many academics responded
with fawning reviews of this courageous attack on the “gun lobby” and
its “distortion” of American history.5
Bellesiles’s book was eventually discredited for engaging in fraud. His
summaries of probate inventories were clearly erroneous and often com-
pletely fabricated. He listed sources in archives that did not exist or that
he had never visited.6
At Emory University’s request, a blue-ribbon panel of historians
examined the controversy. The committee’s comments made it clear that
it did not believe Bellesiles’s responses. In many cases, the committee
members were unable to find Bellesiles’s cited documents. Their conclu-
sions included the following passage:
But in one respect, the failure to clearly identify his sources, does
move into the realm of “falsification,” which would constitute a
violation of the Emory “Policies.” The construction of this Table
implies a consistent, comprehensive, and intelligible method of
gathering data. The reality seems quite the opposite. In fact, Pro-
fessor Bellesiles told the Committee that because of criticism from
other scholars, he himself had begun to doubt the quality of his
probate research well before he published it in the Journal of Amer-
ican History.7
Yet, the graphs produced from Bellesiles’s “probate inventories” were a
large part of why that article, and the subsequent book, were initially
regarded as groundbreaking and persuasive. Who argues with statistics?
In response to the report Emory commissioned, Bellesiles resigned
from his recently received tenured position, and Columbia University
Preface ix
revoked the Bancroft Prize it had awarded to Bellesiles for Arming
America—an unprecedented event.8
My book Armed America (2006) did an adequate job of demon-
strating that Bellesiles was not simply wrong, but he had deliberately
misrepresented the facts: altering texts, making up texts, and massively
misrepresenting his sources. His fellow academics for the most part
never noticed because he told lies that led to a very limiting interpreta-
tion of the Second Amendment with which they emotionally, and there-
fore intellectually, agreed.
Almost a decade later, I was astonished to see Bellesiles’s false claims
rise from the grave, like a vampire not adequately staked. Pamela Haag’s
study The Gunning of America (2015)9 argues, as had Bellesiles, that the
American gun culture, and thus demand for guns, was created in the mid-
19th century and was the result of clever marketing by the newly formed
mass production gun industry (primarily Colt Firearms and Winchester
Repeating Arms). Haag asserts that the industry had created demand for
a product that Americans neither wanted nor needed. She also claims
that guns were so rare that they were not the primary murder weapon
before 1860, according to an 1850s survey based on “eighty-five mur-
ders . . . that were mentioned in popular books and pamphlets.”10 If guns
were rare, and guns cause murder, this would be a plausible claim. We
will later examine the evidence for this claim.
Haag directly acknowledges that she believes Bellesiles’s claims about
the scarcity of guns and gun culture were correct, and she appears to
have no awareness that Bellesiles had been discredited.
This book will explore the following questions:
1. Was gun ownership (and in consequence gun manufacturing and
gunsmithing) rare before 1840?
2. Was the civilian market for pistols small or nonexistent before
1848?
3. How did gunsmithing (including gun manufacturing) develop in
Colonial and Early Republic America?
4. What role did the gun manufacturing industry play in not only
transforming American industry but also creating the modern
industrial world across Western civilization?
5. Was American gun culture actually created by gunmakers through
clever marketing?
The answers to questions 1, 2, 3, and 5 are provided in the following
pages, which will refute the revisionist claims concerning the origins of