A Method of War

Smith threatens Opechancanough

The first Anglo-Powhatan war (1609-1614) was a brutal affair. Most British immigrants to the Jamestown Colony perished through the course of the first seven years, a great many in battle or due to conditions create by a siege of the fort (see "Death in Jamestown"). On the other side, entire Powhatan villages were destroyed.

Bad History

Bad history is common, especially in a world that favors crowd sourcing over the views of experts. Even experts, however, are not infallible. Bad history grows from ignorance, laziness, lies, ideology. It has been a theme of Patriots and Peoples that ideology often cultivates error.

I wrote the comment below on a YouTube video three months ago. The video was put up by Political Juice, a popular channel with over 125 thousand subscribers. I have not watched other videos on this channel, but it is clear to me from this one that the creator is not a historian.

The video purports to present the history of the Second Amendment. It gets a few things correct, especially a small portion of Justice Scalia's argument in D.C. v. Heller (2008). It gets a whole lot wrong. I need to finish my review of Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011). That book presents a clear and accurate history of the Second Amendment that shows how extremists who are both pro- and anti-gun have been misguided in their understanding.

Patent Application for Puckle Gun (1718)

My comment (there are typos in the original that remain here):

The issues in this video start at the beginning. In the first eight minutes or so, PolJuice offers a short history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its changing relationship with England over half a century. About 80% of the facts are accurate (a couple of websites offer thin research), but the narrative itself is far from accurate in its interpretation. For instance, you mentions how the Puritans in the early years admitted people to church membership and full citizenship. However, this dramatically changed in 1662 with the Halfway Covenant (not mentioned in the video), due to internal pressures from growing secularization of the colony. Instead of seeking to understand the complexities of 1660s Massachusetts, the video blames all the conflicts on Charles II and James II. That's simply wrong. 

Then, the next eight to ten minutes race through a host of actions of Parliament from the 1660s to the 1770s with minimal context. Such facile generalizations are always grounded in shortcuts that distort. 

This video only becomes tolerable when PJ summarizes Justice Scalia's grammatical analysis of the Second Amendment in the Heller decision. This portion is well-done and accurate until he addresses the counter arguments in the dissenting opinions. There mockery reigns, even using a comic voice to undermine the credibility of the arguments. 

The final ten minutes or so is a mixed bag. The Puckle gun gets too much credit, as it does so often by people who don't delve into the history with any real effort. The Puckle gun was almost completely forgotten by the time Jefferson was born. Its deployment in any argument about the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It is also unnecessary. As the video points out, the First Amendment protects the sort of speech one finds on YouTube. Likewise, the Second Amendment has the flexibility to cover modern firearms. Using bad arguments to counter bad arguments does not strengthen your argument; it weakens it.

Gun Obsession

Recently, I became cognizant that every post on Patriots and Peoples the past three years has been about guns in one way or another. There also have been very few posts. Despite appearances, I have interests other than guns (read my more active Chess Skills for evidence). Nonetheless, my interest in guns has grown over the past few years. This interest is both personal and historical. Guns have long interested me, although for the better part of forty years that interest was mostly historical. My personal interest revived slowly over the past few years. Last fall, I returned to the woods as a hunter for the first time since the late 1970s.

Three or four years ago, a friend shared a series of quotes on Facebook that he alleged made clear the views on the Founding Fathers on the matter of guns. My initial impression was that the list was not characterized by the usual array of fake quotes that seem the norm in highly partisan collections.

Study Regimen

Over the next few weeks, I spent several hours tracking down the original sources of each quote, studying the context, and jotting down some notes in the computer file where I had pasted the collection. My intention was to create a series of blog posts assessing which quotes were credible and which were deceptive. When I saw my friend, I asked about his source. He had received the collection in an email, he recalled, but was vague on the specifics. I found the whole collection online at Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio gun rights organization. Their website offers:

Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA) is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that serves as the flagship of our grassroots efforts to defend and advance the right of more than 4 million Ohio citizens to own and use firearms for all legal activities, including self-defense, hunting, competition, and recreation.
www.buckeyefirearms.org

My friend could have subscribed to their email, but he denied any knowledge of the organization. I am sure that the collection of quotes circulates several ways. It is possible that it originates with the BFA, but there may be another source.

My main concern is the authenticity and relevance of each quote. I appreciate the sourcing in the collection. That is, the collection not only credits George Washington with, "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined...", but also references the president's First Annual Message to Congress. There are many fake gun quotes attributed President Washington that begin with this one.

One of my relatives shared on Facebook last week an image with a version that adds words not only that Washington did not utter, but that were contrary to his known views.

Fake Quote

His source was Mary J. Ruwart, a biochemist turned libertarian political activist. She posted this image 1 February 2017 and it continues to circulate. The measures Facebook has taken against fake news stories does not apply to images and does not apply to errors of historical fact.

I pointed out to my relative that the quote is fake and offered a link to the whole of Washington's address to Congress. I pasted my reply to Ruwart's original post.

My Response

This response and my post on Wayne LaPierre's errors with respect to a John Adams quote both were aided by the work I started three years ago or so on the BFA quotes. My series of blog posts have not materialized the way I intended, but the work has been useful. Like many projects, it has taken longer than anticipated and other interests began to crown upon the project. When I started working through these quotes, I did not have a shelf of books on guns and gun history. Now I have several such shelves and another book is scheduled to arrive today.

Yesterday morning, I started reading Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011). I am halfway through. I might post a review of this book, which I think is vastly superior to Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography (2014), which I reviewed in 2017. I wanted to go to the shooting range yesterday morning, but the snow started falling at 6:00 am and my wife took our Explorer to work leaving me with the car that does less well on slick roads. Instead of shooting a gun or two at some targets, I spent my time reading about them.

Guns and Violence in America

The problem of guns and violence in American society is a problem of overblown rhetoric compounded by willed ignorance. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters take a stand that is both principled and wrong in opposition to all reasonable discussion of the limits of the right to bear arms. Those who seek to regulate firearms, on the other hand, seek band aids without addressing root causes. (See "Why Root Causes Matter" for the views of another group of gun owners.)

More than 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Without accessible guns, many or even most of these people would find other means, albeit often less effective ones that fail. More than 60% of the remaining gun deaths are gang related. When physically mature teenagers kill one other over drug deals or turf, the anti-gunners add the numbers to their discussions of children being gunned down in their classrooms. (See "Gun Deaths in America".)

In 2000, I was a delegate to my County Democratic Convention. Because I liked Bill Bradley, I became more involved in the political process that year than normal. At the convention, there was a platform proposal to ban handguns that could accommodate more than six rounds “in the chamber”. I joined a small group of others who spent half an hour explaining that passing this proposal, which would push it on to the state convention, would embarrass us. It seeks to ban a gun that not only does not exist, but that cannot exist. Of course, we could have helped improve the language.* We weren’t interested in improving the proposal. We believed, or at least some of us did, that anti-gun planks in Democratic platforms hurt Democrats.

I wasn’t a gun owner then. I am now. In 2000, I still thought that I agreed with the NRA. Since becoming a gun owner a couple of years ago, however, my views have evolved and this issue has risen in importance to me. I now realize how much I disagree with the NRA, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, also how much more I oppose some of the same things the NRA is fighting against. (See "That's Not What They Meant" for part of my argument with one of the NRA's leaders.)

As a reluctant Democrat, I vote health care, the environment, the economy, and foreign policy over guns. On all of those issues, the GOP is nearly 100% wrong in my humble opinion. That doesn’t mean the Democrats are always right, only that they are better than Republicans. Even so, I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the priorities of Democrats who are more willing to seek a Constitutional Amendment eliminating the Electoral College than to find a way to win back the rural voters who once were the backbone of the party.

We need to have a real conversation in this nation about the root causes of violence. The United States is one of the most violent nations in the history of the world. Blaming the tools employed by the violent is no more useful than refusing to consider any improvements in safety training, safe storage, and limiting access to certain individuals.


*The author of the proposed plank meant magazine, but did not understand the difference. It might be argued that revolvers do accommodate multiple rounds in the chamber because each slot in the cylinder is essentially the chamber when it is lined up with the barrel. If so, this plank sought to ban revolvers holding more than six rounds in the cylinder, a very small percentage of firearms, but they do exist.

Irony

American history runs over with irony and contradictions. The gap between common beliefs and the evidence is especially true of the American West. The West revels in individualism, but the region as a whole is vastly more dependent upon the Federal government than the East.

Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the making of American Gun Culture (2016) traces Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester's efforts to make a business of the manufacture of firearms. She offers a compelling sentence that crystallizes a central irony in Western America.

No objects are more indelibly associated with the American West that the Colt revolver and the Winchester rifle, and yet no objects relied more heavily for their survival--before, but especially after, the Civil War--on non-U.S., global markets.
Haag, 35.

Samuel Colt's Cabinet of Memorials, for example, containing gifts from customers, contained a gold snuff box from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire; a ring from Alexander Alexandrovioch, the Russian grand duke; a ring from the king of Sardinia; a tea -caddy and cigar case from Siam; and other gifts from England, Italy, and the Islamic world.

Gun Ownership in Colonial Virginia

While rereading A True Relation (1608) by John Smith, a statement about most guns being packed away caught my eye. I noticed the statement because it provides corroborating evidence for an assertion that I read on the Jamestown Rediscovery website.

On 22 April 1607, according to Smith,* He, Captain Christopher Newport, and twenty others set out upriver to explore and gather food for the nascent colony. While they were away, the fort at Jamestown on which construction had barely begun, was attacked by about 400 Indians. The English colonists were fortunate in their ability to repel the attacks because most of the guns were still packed away in shipping containers. The exceptions were those possessed by "gentlemen". Smith noted, "...their Armes beeing then in drievats and few ready but certain Gentlemen of their own" (35).

The Jamestown Rediscovery website mentions restrictions on ownership and access to firearms in the England of James I.

There had been no major military battles in England since the war against Spain that ended in 1603; so, at the time of Jamestown’s settlement there was a shortage of arms and armor in England for the Virginia Company to supply to its colony. The English government strictly controlled all the military equipment, which was stored in city armories or private households of the rural gentry.
"Arms and Armor," Jamestown Rediscovery (accessed 15 August 2017).

For centuries leading up to this time, men in England had a duty to be trained in the use of arms for service in the militia, as well as for service in the defense of themselves and their neighbors. But, ownership of weapons was not yet articulated as a right. Moreover, there were restrictions, especially on concealable weapons--crossbows and firearms less than a yard in length. Additional restrictions were put into place early in the reign of James I (1603-1625).

In To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994), Joyce Lee Malcolm traces how the duty to bear arms became a right as articulated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. She suggests that gun ownership among the common people, as well as by the gentry, was widespread in rural England, and most of England was rural. But, she also notes that James I restricted firearm, crossbows, and hunting dogs through a series game acts in 1604, 1605, and 1609.

These acts altered the property qualification needed to hunt far more materially than any act in the preceding two centuries; made it illegal for unqualified persons to keep coursing dogs, sell game, use guns, crossbows, or other devices to take game; and brought some poaching cases before the kingdom's highest courts.
Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms, 13.

The needs for self defense and for hunting certainly differed in colonial Virginia than in the home country. Although perhaps difficult, the colonists were supplied with firearms. But, it appears that when they first arrived, guns were not individual possessions for the majority. Smith was a soldier and had pistols. Others were armed as needed, such as when on guard duty. Gentlemen possessed their own arms and these were all that were readily available during the first Indian attack.

As the settlement at Jamestown grew and expanded along the James River, those with farms certainly had firearms. That was not inconsistent with the practice in England where land owners ordinarily possessed firearms and other weapons for hunting and for self-defense. Slowly, during the fifteen years from 1607-1622, the English also began to instruct their Indian neighbors in the use of these weapons.

This training was negotiated. The English wished to offer religious training to the Natives. Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatans, agreed to this religious training on the stipulation that firearms training came as part of the package. In 1622, Opechancanough led his people to slaughter one-quarter of the English colonists, most of them in their own homes with their own weapons.

Over the course of the rest of the century, ownership of firearms expanded. As ownership expanded, the duty of Englishmen to be prepared for service in the militia also developed into a right to own and use firearms. It was a long process, and one that is not well-documented.


*21 May 1607, according to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor of Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907) 33. My source for Smith's True Relation is this book, 27-71, digitized at American Journeys.

The Second Amendment: A Book Review

The Second Amendment by Michael Waldman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disappointing

On the one hand, The Second Amendment: A Biography offers a fair summary of the framing of the Second Amendment, the paucity of interpretations of its meaning by the Supreme Court, the cultural shifts and advocacy that affected political power, and the novelty of the Heller decision. On the other hand, the book seems more of a skewed legal brief than the sort of history it advocates--thorough and dispassionate. The ultimate purpose seems to be advocacy that those who wish to restrict guns need to learn the methodologies of their enemies in order to turn the tide.

Michael Waldman offers a critique of Justice Scalia's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), noting weaknesses that it reveals in Originalism when historical evidence is mixed or silent. He venerates Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent, and he suggests that lower courts are finding more of use there than in the majority opinion.

The book has merits. I learned from this book. It gave me things to think about and questions to pursue in further reading. The Second Amendment: A Biography offers historical analysis of the the era of the Framers, interpretations of the Second Amendment by the Court before Heller, the Revolt at Cincinnati (1977) that changed the direction of leadership for the National Rifle Association, the Heller and McDonald decisions, and how the these landmark Second Amendment decisions have played out in lower courts since 2010.

Dispite its seemingly comprehensive scope, it failed to meet my expectations. The author is smart and knowledgeable; he could have produced a better book. Perhaps he tried to do too much. Perhaps his political bias got in the way.


View all my reviews

That's Not What They Meant

There are books that I start over and over again, always returning them to the shelf before getting far. There are many reasons for this behavior pattern. Some books require a certain mood or frame of mind that I rediscover each time I start them at the wrong time. Some books are badly written, but of such value (maybe praised by others) that I am unwilling to rid myself of their presence in my home. Some prove vexing because the arguments they provoke in the reader contain some unintended layers. Guns, Crime, and Freedom (1994) by Wayne LaPierre is one such book in this last group. I cannot recall how often I have started it, read most or all of the first chapter, and then gave up, trying again a year or more later. LaPierre drives me to his sources as I ponder his argument.

The first chapter, "That's Not What They Meant", takes issue with the argument that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution applies only to militias, not to an individual right to bear arms. LaPierre asserts, "Even a casual reading of our Founding Father's works would prove" that the Second Amendment supports an individual right (emphasis added, 4). Reading the book today, of course, a reader must be aware that in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the U. S. Supreme Court affirmed the view advocated by the National Rifle Association during the tenure of LaPierre's leadership.

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.
Syllabus, District of Columbia v. Heller, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/

If my issues with LaPierre's argument were principally focused on his conclusion, my time would be better spent pursuing Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in Heller. But my concern is less with this conclusion than with the means LaPierre uses to get there. LaPierre focuses his argument on the speeches, writings, and events that expressed the views of and shaped the Revolutionary Generation and the documents of self-governance that they produced.

I read footnotes. When any author makes an argument that relies upon historical sources, I evaluate the way these sources are deployed. Are quotes accurate? Are arguments attributed to speeches and texts an accurate reflection of what was spoken or written? How well does a book's narrative accord with other accounts of the events? Such criticism--both affirming and refuting claims in various books--has been the guiding focus of Patriots and Peoples.

In Guns, Crime, and Freedom, LaPierre starts well enough. He states his thesis clearly in the first paragraph, then proceeds to note how the phrase, "rights of the people," appears in the Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, as well as the Second (4, emphasis added). Scalia makes a similar, but more accurate point in D.C. v. Heller. The phrase, "right of the people" (note the singular), appears in the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, while similar language appears in the Ninth. Scalia omits the Tenth in the opinion of the court.

In my reading, I pass over this first small error without difficulty. In the third paragraph, I also pass over his labeling of those who disagree with the individual right view as "foes of the Second Amendment" (4). LaPierre states the structure of his argument: understanding what the Framers expressed and experienced affirms their belief in an individual right to bear arms. Of course, they often expressed this view in discussions favoring militias over a standing army, and consequently the words of George Mason loom large. Mason's speeches and letters, more so than any other Founders, express clearly that the "whole people" comprise the militia (Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 4 June 1788).*

Revolutionary Focus

The beginning of the fifth paragraph gives me pause.

LaPierre asserts, "The Boston Massacre was the fuse that lit the powder keg of debate over the right of the people to be armed" (4). This strong statement concerning cause and effect calls for evidence. Was the American Revolution a battle to protect citizens against disarmament? Most historians point to other issues--taxation was preeminent. The British troops who perpetrated the massacre on 5 March 1770 were there at the behest of the tax commissioners who had been sent to enforce new taxes. The British had been regulating the importation of molasses to New England since 1733, but enforcement was lax and molasses from French colonies was cheaper and often of better quality, and hence preferred by New England's rum makers. Following the Seven Years War (1754-1763), often called the French and Indian War in U.S. textbooks, Parliament sought to offset some of the costs of its North American empire with more effective taxes and stronger enforcement. These taxes were onerous to the colonists in North America.

LaPierre's argument moves from this assertion to a discussion of the right to arms as expressed by John Adams in the trial of the British soldiers who killed five individuals on that day in 1770. Adams had been retained as counsel by Captain Thomas Preston, whom some witnesses claimed had given the order to fire. In Adams' closing arguments, he summarized some of the leading opinions of British jurists on the matter of self-defense. One of these was William Hawkins, A Treatise of Pleas of the Crown. Adams quotes Hawkins several times in the course of his argument.

“And so perhaps the killing of dangerous rioters, may be justified by any private persons, who cannot otherwise suppress them, or defend themselves from them; in as much as every private person seems to be authorized by the law, to arm himself for the purposes aforesaid.” Hawkins p. 71. §1412—Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defence, not for offence, that distinction is material and must be attended to.
"Adams' Argument for the Defense," in Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 3 (1965), 247-248**

LaPierre quotes Adams' own words from the end of Hawkins' words to "not for offence", but employs the modern American spellings of defense and offense. In absence of context, the term "the inhabitants" could seem to refer to those rioting as a crowd formed outside the Customs House shortly before 9:00 pm on that late winter day. Shots were fired about 9:10, according to several witnesses. LaPierre seems to think "the inhabitants" refers to the citizens of Boston, although he does not fail to mention that Adams was serving as a defense attorney for a British soldier. On the other hand, the context of the remark makes clear that Adams was speaking of the right of the British soldiers to arm themselves in self-defense. Adams grounded his defense of the soldiers as men who were private citizens as well as employees of the British government.

Of course, the words of John Adams here could also apply to the residents of Boston who resented the presence of the troops, and who had been involved in numerous violent altercations with these troops over the previous two years. But, the right of citizens to be armed, aside from those eight soldiers on trial, was never at issue. In the depositions of 96 witnesses to the event that were taken by the Grand Jury prior to the trial, the right to arms was mentioned once.

George Robert Twelves Hewes, of lawful age, testifies and says, that on the last night, about one o'clock, as he was returning alone from his house to the Town-house, he met Sergeant Chambers of the 29th, with eight or nine soldiers, all with very large clubs and cutlasses, when Dobson, a soldier, spoke to him and asked him how he fared, he told him very badly, to see his townsmen shot in such a manner, and asked him if he did not think it was a dreadful thing; said Dobson swore by God it was a fine thing, and said you shall see more of it; and on perceiving I had a cane, he informed Sergeant Chambers of it, who seized and forced it from me, saying I had no right to carry it; I told him I had as good a right to carry a cane as they had to carry clubs, but they hurried off with it into the main guard.
Frederic Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre (1870)***

The British troops seized a cane! When the right to bear arms is discussed, the focus is rarely upon a walking stick that could be employed in self-defense. So far as I know, no politician has proposed regulating crutches and canes. This single seizure of an "arm" in the wee hours of the morning following the killing of five civilians in Boston certainly offers no support to the notion that the right to arms was at stake that night. Only when Adams sought to exculpate the shooters through an assessment of their right to self-defense did the matter arise.

Aside from modernizing the spelling of two words, LaPierre quotes John Adams accurately. The words quoted do support, and strongly so, an individual right to arms for self-defense. However, they are germane to the argument of the book only through a mangling of the context. Not only that, LaPierre asserts that Adams spoke these words in his opening argument. The trial of the soldiers ran 27 November - 5 December; Adams' speech was delivered 3-4 December. His footnote correctly names the book, Legal Papers of John Adams, vol 3, but he lists the editors as Lyman H. Butterfield, and Hilda B. Zobel. His citation is incorrect. The editors are L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel. One name is wrong; the other has changed gender. Lyman H. Butterfield was the editor of many volumes of the papers of John Adams, but not this one (see "Founders Online--Printed Volumes, The Adams Papers" https://founders.archives.gov/content/volumes).

If Wayne LaPierre's missteps concerning the Boston Massacre were the sole errors, I would have read the second chapter years ago. But these errors characterize the scholarship of his book. He similarly mangles the context of George Washington's popular quote in his First Annual Message to Congress, and also incorrectly lists the first initial of the compiler of his source. Similar problems could be elucidated with respect to Patrick Henry's famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech calling for an armed response, rather than further diplomatic efforts.

LaPierre advocates and offers a "casual reading". To make his case, however, he needs something more. He needs to read and write much more carefully. Near the end of the first chapter he challenges mangled histories:

Today, it is politically correct to ignore the Founding Fathers and their clear intent. For the sake of political expediency, the anti-gun lobby, the anti-gun media, and the anti-gun politicians, including the president, have twisted, tangled, and reinterpreted their words.
LaPierre, Guns, Crime, and Freedom, 9-10.

If the prefix "pro" replaced each instance of "anti" in this passage, it would serve as a fair assessment of the chapter that it concludes.


*Although this speech could serve well LaPierre's argument, he omits it from the first chapter.

**My source is the online edition: Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed.C. James Taylor. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2017.
http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde2/. I also read Adams' speech in Samuel Willard, John Adams: A Character Sketch (1903), which the Library of Congress makes accessible at John Adams and the Boston Massacre Trial of 1770, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/rare-books/john_adams.php.

***Frederic Kidder's book on the Boston Massacre, published one hundred years later, consists of transcriptions of John Adams' notes in the possession of Kidder with additional commentary. It is available in several reprint editions, as well as an ebook from Google Books and from the Library of Congress site cited in the note above.

Minutiae

Robert F. Williams, Labor Organizer?

Small things catch me. While reading a history book, I have a tendency to get pulled away on a tangent when the writer makes some small, perhaps even trivial, comment that strikes me as wrong. These journeys into minutiae can be rewarding, but sometimes they prove to be a waste of time. Sometimes these journeys make reading impossible. Hundreds of books sit on my shelves unfinished because some small thing sent me after the truth of some small matter. Sometimes this quest has led to purchase of more books that I start and never finish.

My reading process is like the glass bead game in Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943).

After watching a documentary* a few weeks ago, I set out to learn more about Robert F. Williams. The video mentioned Williams setting up a National Rifle Association (NRA) affiliate gun club for African Americans in Monroe, North Carolina in the late 1950s. Williams had been only vaguely familiar to me from a short essay of his in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (1991), which I had used a textbook in some classes I taught at Washington State University in the 1990s. The NRA affiliate caught me by surprise. Here was a piece of the Civil Rights Movement that has not been emphasized in most histories of the era. Maybe it had not been emphasized in any of them.

I ordered a copy of Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Radio Free Dixie and the Roots of Black Power (1999), the book that offered the best prospects of  illuminating this unknown (at least to me) story.

While waiting for the arrival of Radio Free Dixie, I spent some time searching the Spokane Public Library for books that might have a little bit about Williams. I found one. Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015) is concerned with several groups of violent extremists of which the Weather Underground is perhaps the best known. The second chapter, however, is titled "Negroes with Guns". That chapter title came up in my library search and caught my eye because it is the title of a book Williams published in 1962 after he fled to Cuba to avoid trumped up kidnapping charges after he protected a white couple from violence at the hands of an angry black mob. The mob was still seething after Ku Klux Klan members from three states had descended on Monroe to disrupt an African American and white ally celebration after some direct action seeking to integrate area churches. The KKK transformed the celebration into a violent riot.

In Days of Rage, Burrough asserts his thesis and the place of Robert F. Williams in his story.

If the story of the civil rights and antiwar movements is an inspiring tale of American empowerment and moral conviction, the underground years represent a final dark chapter that can seem easy to ignore. To begin to understand it, one needs to understand the voices of black anger, which began to be noticed during the 1950s.
Burrough, 28.

Williams, he asserts, stimulated not only the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and other Black Power groups, but these groups led to the mostly white groups, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Blacks led and whites followed, Burrough argues. His thesis is provocative and caught my interest, but then he seemed to erase more than two centuries of slavery when he asserted 1954 as a start date after African Americans in the South "had been subjected to almost a century of oppression, police brutality, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and lynching" (28). That timeline begins after the Civil War. Prior to emancipation, slaves did not vote and they suffered brutally. They were certainly oppressed. They may not have been lynched by the KKK, which came into existence after the Civil War, but they were routinely killed.

The next two paragraphs put me into a critical mindset as I grew more and more disappointed with Days of Rage. Then, finally, the existence of slavery was acknowledged with brief mention of the slave rebellions led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. Even then, however, the author's suggestion that these rebellions in 1822 and 1832 were the beginning overlooks the significance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791). The American South was never isolated from the Caribbean. Events there affected events in the United States.

Nonetheless, I read on.

On the next page, I read that Burrough perceived a passing of the torch of self-defense (his metaphor) between five black men from 1959 to 1972. These five were Robert F. Williams, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and the pair, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

The second sentence of this section stopped me again: "Williams spent his early years working in Detroit factories, where he became a labor organizer" (30). By the time I had picked up this book, I had read a dozen or more articles online about Williams. None mentioned that he had been a labor organizer, although work in Detroit's factories had come up.

This assertion gave me a reading question that had to await the arrival of Radio Free Dixie. The book arrived a week after I ordered it from some used bookstore in the Midwest. I read it through the course of several evenings.

Tyson's Radio Free Dixie offers no evidence that corroborates Burrough's claim. In Tyson's account, Williams joined Local 600 of the United Automobile Workers of America and read the Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party (39-40). In 1943, Williams was the youngest worker on the assembly line at River Rouge in Detroit. He did not remain at the job long, moving to California in search of better employment, joining the Army near the end of the war, and then returning to North Carolina. In 1948, he was back in Detroit working at the Cadillac plant. He rejoined Local 600 and read the Daily Worker in the washrooms. He submitted a "thinly fictionalized" story "of a black veteran's return to the small-town South" to the Detroit Daily Worker (62).

Where did Burrough get his information concerning Williams' alleged labor organizing? He does not offer the sort of citations that are expected of scholarly works. Burrough is a journalist and he aims his book at non-academic readers. Nonetheless, in the note on sources, he mentions Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2007). Joseph offers a single sentence concerning Williams' time in Detroit.

A tall, broad-shouldered veteran, Williams was a well-traveled former industrial laborer who dabbled in poetry, consorted with radicals, and remained defiant in the face of racial terror in Monroe, North Carolina.
Joseph, 20.

Williams "consorted with radicals". I can imagine how sloppy note taking could mutate consorting into organizing, but Joseph does not call Williams a "labor organizer". Tyson offers more. Williams published a poem in the Socialist Workers Party newspaper, the Militant, in 1953. He also found another industrial job at Curtiss Wrights Aeronautics in New Jersey, commuting from Harlem, where he lived with his Aunt Estelle Williams. In Harlem, he spent a lot of time with "a group of white radicals whom he met through friends" (70).

Burrough went to great lengths to interview former members of the radical underground groups of the 1970s and the FBI agents who tracked them. Days of Rage may be a good book on the subject. However, the author appears to rely on sloppy reading of secondary sources for what he says about Williams. This may not invalidate his thesis concerning Williams' influence, or the influence of the Black Power movement on white radicals, but it does render Days of Rage a poor choice for learning about the Black Power movements themselves. It is too thin and not well-researched.


*In Search of the Second Amendment (2006) is available in full on YouTube. It is written, directed, produced, and narrated by David T. Hardy, whose law journal articles concerned with the Second Amendment are well-worth reading. The documentary strikes me as reasonably strong on the English precedents to the Second Amendment, on the revolutionary era, and on the mostly not often told story of the role of guns and gun rights in the antebellum Dred Scott decision and the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights era. When it gets to the past few decades, however, it becomes much more a strongly ideological brief for the NRA that is willing to delve into some weak sociology applied to cherry-picked crime data. Even so, this is my provisional opinion. My assessment is more a set of questions than a verdict.

Richard Slotkin on Guns and Violence

Another school shooting today raises anew why these tragedies occur with growing frequency in the United States. Richard Slotkin spent his career researching violence in American culture. His discussion with Bill Moyers in December 2013 is worth viewing. Segment: Richard Slotkin on Guns and Violence | Moyers Company | BillMoyers.com

Firearms and Bows 1607: The Jamestown Test

The colonists at Jamestown set up a test to compare their weapons to those of the Indians. Less than a month after the colonists arrived in Virginia, and only a few days after they began constructing the defensive fortifications to give them security in a potentially hostile land, they became the recipients of food brought by forty men from the Native village headed by Paspiha. George Percy, who was there, mentions that the British thought the generosity was part of a ruse to disarm them. A weapons test was conducted during this visit of the Powhatans to the English village.

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus mentions this episode:

Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, “which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not piece it.” To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer “burst his arrow all to pieces.” The Indian was “in a great rage”: he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, [Joyce] Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”
Mann, 1491, 64.

I mentioned in “Superior European Technology” Mann’s suggestion that the terms superior and inferior do not readily apply to the differences in the technology of the immigrants and the indigenous inhabitants of the land that was coming to be called Virginia.


George Percy’s Account

Some of the primary sources that aid historians in reconstructing the founding of Virginia are found in an early anthology of travel narratives collected and published by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others , 4 vols (1625). This anthology contains an account of the first months of the Virginia colony, George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606,” in Purchas his Pilgrims, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Percy relates the episode that Mann draws upon for evidence supporting his generalizations regarding technology.

The twentieth day [20 May 1607] the Werowance of Paspiha sent fortie of his men with a Deere, to our quarter: but they came more in villanie than any love they bare us: they faine would have layne in our Fort all night, but wee would not suffer them for feare of their treachery. One of our Gentlemen having a Target which hee trusted in, thinking it would beare out a slight shot, he set it up against a tree, willing one of the Savages to shoot; who took from his backe an Arrow of an elle long, drew it strongly in his Bowe, shoots the Target a foote thorow, or better: which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it. Wee seeing the force of his Bowe, afterwards set him up a steel Target; he shot again, and burst his arrow all to pieces, he presently pulled out another Arrow, and bit it in his teeth, and seemed to be in great rage, so he went away in great anger. Their Bowes are made of tough Hasell, their strings of Leather, their Arrowes of Canes or Hasell, headed with very sharpe stones, and are made artificially like a broad Arrow: other some of their Arrowes are headed with the ends of Deeres hornes, and are feathered very artificially. Pasphia was as good as his word; for he sent Venison, but the Sawse came within a few dayes after.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1688-1689.

First Battle between Jamestown Colonists and Natives

In late April, before the colonists had selected the location for their fort, their first encounter with the Natives of Virginia was hostile.

At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the Savages creeping upon all foure, from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their mouthes, charged us very desperately in the faces, hurt Captaine Gabrill Archer in both his hands, and a sayler in two places of the body very dangerous. After they had spent their Arrows, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise, and so left us.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1686.

After this skirmish, the English resumed their exploration of the terrain. Percy presents lists of the flora and fauna observed; he describes the shores and rivers, the meadows and forests, and other brief experiences with the Natives. They found an area where the Natives of Virginia had been burning the grass, as well as gathering and roasting oysters. Helping themselves to the warm oysters in the recently abandoned camp, the English found the shellfish “large and delicate in taste” (1686). They also found “a Cannow, which was made out of the whole tree, which was five and fortie foot long by the Rule” (1686).


Peaceful Contact

The English set up a cross to claim Chesapeake Bay for the Crown and named a piece of land Cape Henry. On the last day of April they were drawn into a Native village, where they were welcomed with songs, given a meal and smoke, and then entertained with songs and dances. They learned something of the manners of their hosts. In the narrative of the experiences, George Percy (sometimes spelled Percie) reveals quite a bit about the ideological baggage that colored English perceptions of Native American Indians.

When we came over to the other side, there was a many of the Savages which directed us to their Towne, where we were entertained by them very kindly. When we came first a Land they made a dolefull noise, laying their faces to the ground, scatching the earth wth their nailes. We did thinke that they had beene at their Idolatry. When they had ended their Ceremonies, they went into their houses and brought out mats and laid upon the the ground, the chiefest of the sate all in a rank: the meanest sort brought us such dainties as they had, & of their bread which they make of their Maiz or Gennea wheat, they would not suffer us to eat unlesse we sate down, which we did on a Mat right against them. After we were well satisfied they gave us of their Tabacco, which they tooke in a pipe made artificially of earth as ours are, but far bigger, with the bowle fashioned together with a piece of fine copper. After they had feasted us, they shewed us in welcome, their manner of dancing, which was in this fashion: one of the Savages standing in the midst singing, beat one hand against another, all the rest dancing about him, shouting, howling, and stamping against the ground, with many Anticke tricks and faces, making noise like so many Wolves or Devils. One thing of them I observed; when they were in their dance they kept stroke with their feet just one with another, but with their hands, heads, faces, and bodies, every one of them had a severall gesture: so they continued for the space of halfe an houre. When they had ended their dance, the Captaine gave them Beades and other trifling Jewells. They hand through their eares Fowles legs: they shave the right side of their heads with a shell, the left side they weare of an ell long tied up with an artificiall knot, with a many of Foules feathers sticking in it. They goe altogether naked, but their privates are covered with Beasts skinnes beset commonly with little bones, or beasts teeth: some paint their bodies blacke, some red, with artificiall knots of sundry lively colours, very beautiful and pleasing to the eye, in a braver fashion then they in the West Indies.
Percy, “Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie,” 1687

The entire text of Purchas his Pilgrimes is available at the Library of Congress website, where it is part of the Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake. Each page of the four volumes has been photographed, including black pages, and is viewable as an image.

Jamestown Matchlock

Jamestown 1607-1610


The Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project sheds light on aspects of the lives of the Jamestown colonists. Part of the Dale House Exhibit of 1999 was digitized and placed online. This exhibit includes an informative drawing showing how a soldier might have been armed--weapons and armor. Portions of the image can be clicked to bring up an image of an excavated artifact.

The matchlock lockplate is a case in point. The text accompanying the image highlights some of the weaknesses of this aspect of European technology, offering additional support for points I made in the post "Superior European Technology"--an ironic title.

Superior European Technology

Colonial Firearms

Assertions of European technological superiority appeal to our common sense. We know that guns are better than bows and arrows, and when we read some of the primary sources from the colonial era we encounter numerous references to the enthusiasm of American indigenes for firearms. Indians wanted guns, Europeans needed gold or furs or food—exchanges were made.

As he became the first European to sail around the island on the west coast of North America that now bears his name, Captain George Vancouver found several groups of Native that had acquired firearms before they had seen a European. Certainly his observations support the notion that guns were valued by North American Indians.

In the afternoon [17 July 1792] we were visited by two canoes, having a musket, with all necessary appurtenances in each. … it would appear that the inhabitants of this particular part are amply provided with these formidable weapons.”
George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. 2 (1801), 264

The guns Vancouver saw, as well as those he had available for trade were far superior to those available in the sixteenth century, but not yet as good as those about which Ulysses S. Grant would complain more than seventy years later. Writing in his memoirs about the capture of Vicksburg, Grant wrote:

The small-arms of the enemy were far superior to the bulk of ours. Up to this time our troops at the West had been limited to the old United States flint-lock muskets changed into percussion, or the Belgian musket imported early in the war—almost as dangerous to the person firing it as to the one aimed at—and a few new and imported arms.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Library of America, 1990), 384

Virginia 1607

Our common sense understanding of the superiority of European firearms runs so deep that most of us experience no cognitive dissonance when we watch scenes such as my favorite from Disney’s Pocahontas (1995). John Smith is under a waterfall when he first encounters the voluptuous Indian maiden. As she sneaks up on him as a panther might, he slowly turns and points his matchlock. The tension is broken before he fires the weapon, and this resolution benefits him because the open flame required by his gun would have been extinguished as quickly as it was lit.

Smith lacked Diamond matches that he could strike on his denim, and also lacked the denim. Nor was Smith in possession of a Zippo with its patented protection from the elements. Even if he managed to light the wick which the serpentine (the lock) delivers to the flash pan, it would not continue burning under such moist conditions. If Smith’s protection had depended upon his firearm, and Pocahontas had been hostile, he would have died a long time before he could write and repeatedly revise his Generall Historie of Virginia (1630) that spawned the misreadings and fabrications which in turn facilitated the myths propagated by the Disney cartoon.

Smith published The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1606-1612) in 1612 and The Generall History of Virginia, the Somer Iles, and New England in 1623. The former lacks his story of the rescue by Pocahontas, which first appears in the latter. Pocahontas died in 1617. There also is good reason to believe that Smith had read an almost identical story of the experience of Juan Ortiz who had come to Florida in 1528 in search of the missing Panfilo de Narváez. His story of rescue by an Indian maiden—Ulele was her name—whose father was prepared to roast him over a fire was published in accounts of the De Soto expedition. See chapter IX of the account of The Gentleman of Elvas.

Smith might have used a more expensive wheelock, which would not require an open flame but would still fail under a waterfall. Wheelocks had been available since the mid-sixteenth century, but never became as popular with soldiers as the matchlock. A good discussion of seventeenth century British weapons is available at the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project. The world’s library offers many other sources of reliable information regarding seventeenth century firearms, including the story of a project of replica manufacturing and a newspaper story (PDF) concerned with the film The New World (2005), another Smith-Pocahontas saga.

Correction (14 Dec 2007): My brother phoned to take issue with some inaccuracies in my initial description of the mechanism of Captain Smith's firearm. I have corrected these errors.


Florida 1528

In their failed attempt to conquer the land Juan Ponce de León had named Flowery Easter (Pascua Florida), the men under the command of Panfilo de Narváez were nearly helpless against the arrows of the Indians. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca was the highest ranking survivor of this failure. In his La Relación, first published in 1542, he recalled those traumatic days of 1528:

Good armor did no good against arrows in this skirmish. There were men who swore they had seen two red oaks, each the thickness of a man’s calf, pierced from side to side by arrows this day; which is no wonder when you consider the power and skill the Indians can deliver them with. I myself saw an arrow buried half a foot in a poplar trunk.
Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, trans. and ed. by Cyclone Covey (1998), 42

Despite its collapsed chronology, the 1991 film Cabeza de Vaca by Nicolás Echevarría captures this scene well. One moment the Spanish are cutting their way through the flora and the next they are being cut to pieces by a rain of arrows coming in fast and thick. They flee, although a great many are killed.


Mexico 1519-1521

Before his death in the failed effort to conquer Florida, Narváez had failed in another enterprise. With orders reminiscent of those given much later to Charles Marlow (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) and Captain Willard (Francis Ford Cuppola, Apocalypse Now) to go after the renegade Kurtz, Narváez was ordered to capture or kill Hernando Cortés, who had disobeyed orders. This part of the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlán is obscured in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History. They tell us that Spanish military technology—guns and tactics—“made any single Spanish soldier the equal of several poorly armed natives” (7). They tell us that Narváez’s “force of 600, including cooks, colonists, and women” was able to “overcome native Mexican armies outnumbering them two, three, and even ten times at any particular time” (7). They do not tell us that Cortés was able to overcome Narváez with a smaller army, nor do they tell us why he did so. In any case, the reinforcements from the captured army of Narváez and their Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán where they suffered astounding defeat on Noche Triste (melancholy night), returned a third time and laid seige , and finally overcame the great Aztec empire.

Mexico was born as Cortés put himself in place of Montezuma and his heirs in the now destroyed city.


Wars of the Iroquois 1648-1652

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois all but destroyed the Huron, their traditional enemies. Many historians that have narrated these events have attributed the Iroquois success to the so-called 400 guns of the Mohawks, which allegedly they had acquired through trade with the Dutch. Brian J. Given investigated these claims, and published his findings in “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis (1988).

Given notes, “[t]he premise that the European harquebuses of the seventeenth century were vastly superior to aboriginal projectile weapons is pervasive in the literature” (3). In his examination of these claims he set up field tests firing at a target measuring 2’ x 6,’ finding 50 to 75 yards the maximum range at which it could be hit when stationary “under ideal conditions” (10). In his summary of the bow vs. seventeenth century firearms, he points out the native bow had six times the rate of fire, could be reloaded while crouching (extremely difficult to do with a muzzle loaded firearm), and had an effective range of at least 100 yards. The bow could penetrate armour, and was accurate.

Bows never blow up and seldom misfire; the musket does both. A 20 to 50 percent misfire rate is usual in good weather under field conditions. In the lightest of rains the flint-lock becomes virtually useless, where the performance of the bow is little affected.
Brian J. Given, “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” 10

A New Thesis

In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann offers a cogent summary of what he had learned from reading various secondary accounts of colonization. Mann states:

It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Mann, 1491, 63.

The terms inferior and superior do not apply. Indeed, they cloud our judgment. The exchanges that began on Watling Island in 1492 and continued to be initiated again and again for more than three centuries were complex exchanges. Each side found itself attracted to or repulsed by cultural elements and technologies of the Other; each side was transformed through the encounter.