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Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell@compuserve.com> To: H-NET/OIEAHC Electronic Association in Early American Studies <H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU> Delivered-to: H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU Original-recipient: rfc822;john.saillant@vmh.cc.wmich.edu Clayton E. Cramer wrote: >I am working on refuting Michael Bellesiles's claims >about guns being scarce in colonial America and the early Republic. . . . >My digging into the Pennsylvania Council of Safety records has been >quite interesting: a June 30, 1775 resolution directs the various >counties to "provide a proper number of good, new Firelocks, with >Bayonets fitted to them..." Note that "new" is specified. The same >resolution indicates that "Patterns of the said Firelocks, Rammers >and Bayonets, be immediately made in the city of Philadelphia, and >sent to the different Counties." Apparently there was sufficient >firearms manufacturing capacity to simply send out patterns, and >have each county make their own. Mr. Cramer's inquiry is analogous to one focus of my research: artillery in Massachusetts just before the start of the Revolution. The provincial authorities had a surprisingly high number of cannon available to them, but those guns had been built and mounted for ships and shore batteries. To work as field-guns, they needed a different type of carriage. The records of the Provincial Congress and local towns include several orders to have cannons mounted on new carriages. Gen Gage's intelligence reports mention specific blacksmiths making such carriages; in Feb 1775 he sent troops to Salem to try to seize cannon at a carriage-making smithy there. Is that evidence of local capacity for manufacturing field-guns? Before we conclude that, we must examine the actual results of the work. Ensign De Berniere, one of Gage's scouts, reported the cannon at Concord in Mar 1775 were "mounted but in so bad a manner that they could not elevate them more than they were, that is, they were fixed in one elevation." A British spy near Concord writing in French said they were "montes sur des Roues assez mauvaises" (mounted on wheels rather badly). And the American army surgeon James Thacher later admitted that the provincial artillery was mostly "a few old honey-comb iron pieces, with their trunnions broken off; and these were ingeniously bedded in timbers in the same manner as that of stocking a musket. These machines were extremely unwieldy and inconvenient, requiring much skill and labor to elevate and depress them. Had the enemy been made acquainted with our situation, the consequences might have been exceedingly distressing." Those sources remind us that just because a government wants lots of good weapons to fight a war doesn't mean it can get them. In HENRY IV, PART 2, Owen Glendower claims, "I can call demons from the vasty deep," and Hotspur replies, "So can I. So can any man. But do they come when you do call them?" Or, for a more recent reminder, Sony is cutting US orders for its new videogame machine because it can't make enough. The Pennsylvania Council of Safety could order lots of muskets and gunpowder, but what could Pennsylvania smiths and mills actually turn out? Powder supplies were desperately low at the start of the war. And I recall that Bellesiles's book cites a long list of Americans making guns for the army that identifies most by other professions. In other words, even with a war on, men didn't see their primary craft as "gunsmith." >I am reading Richard Frothingham's _History of the Siege of >Boston_ 6th ed. (Boston: 1903), and there are a few interesting >points about this subject. The population of Boston was 17,000 >before the Port Acts were passed, but according to Frothingham >(pp. 54-55), many people left before the Battle of Lexington, >in anticipation of war, and even though General Gage made >efforts to prevent the removal of weapons and ammunition, >Frothingham (p. 15-17) indicates that muskets, ammunition, and >even cannon were successfully smuggled through the British >lines, and out of Boston. >I find in Frothingham on p. 208 that that the count of 2500 >firearms commonly cited is clearly an undercount of firearms >in Boston before the war, and perhaps a dramatic undercount of >even those arms left in Boston once hostilities had >commenced: >General Gage issued (June 19) an ill-natured proclamation. >He stated that the selectmen and others had repeatedly >assured him that all the inhabitants had delivered up >their fire-arms, though he had at the same advices to the >contrary; and that he had since full proof that many >had been perfidious in this respect, and had secreted >great numbers. I don't think we should take Gen Gage's statement at face value. He'd originally agreed to allow Bostonians to leave in May after the selectmen had collected all firearms in the town. Weeks of delay followed as Gage realized how many wanted to leave, and how their departure would leave his forces and loyalists vulnerable to attack. He probably sought a reason to abrogate the deal. Furthermore, the British authorities had unlimited control of Boston from late Apr 1775 to Mar 1776; I know of no source for them finding "great numbers" of guns hidden in the town, as Gage's statement implied they would. Frothingham's count of firearms collected by the selectmen comes from a list of those weapons and their owners in volume 29 of the town records of Boston, published in the late 1800s. I think that list deserves more study. It includes the names of people close to the revolutionary movement--meaning some prominent Whigs had neither left town nor sent out all their weapons. A scholar with more patience for numbers than I could compare that list with the 1771 tax valuations for Boston, published in 1978, to see if gun ownership was concentrated in one economic class (as Bellesiles contends for society as a whole). In using these numbers, we should also note that more recent estimates of Boston's civilian population before the war are 15-16,000. (I'll share my observation, based on reading both Prof. Bellesiles and Mr. Cramer, that a major point of disagreement between them is how to treat such surviving gun surveys. The latter argues consistently that those numbers are bare minimums, while the former treats them as close to comprehensive. I don't know if this can be resolved.) Another issue in using pre-Revolutionary Boston to assess overall American gun ownership is that it was atypical of society. The large majority of New England population were small farmers on land that had been settled for generations. Bellesiles argues that the colonial Americans most likely to own guns lived on the frontiers, on wealthy estates, and in large port towns like Boston. Pre-Revolutionary Boston was also atypical in its political situation. Bellesiles states that the overall number of firearms in colonial America went up during the French & Indian War. In the next twelve years, Boston saw political turmoil, two occupations by British troops, two French war scares, the formation of artillery and grenadier militia companies, and new provincial laws to strengthen other militia--hardly domestic tranquillity. Prof Bellesiles errs on page 177 of ARMING AMERICA when he writes, "The only incidence of gunfire in the long decade before the Revolution came in Boston in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on an angry crowd and killed five men." Boston alone provides several counterexamples. Less than two weeks before that Massacre, a Customs official had fired "swanshot" at an angry crowd outside his house, killing an eleven-year-old and wounding a teenager. The previous fall, a soldier's musket had gone off harmlessly during another riot, a Tory printer had fired a pistol to ward off a crowd of irate gentlemen, and one of that printer's servants was said to have fired a shot during the Pope Day procession. After the aforementioned Customs official was convicted of murder, James Otis Jr seems to have responded by firing pistols from his own windows. It's possible to view that record as supporting Bellesiles's thesis that America lacked a "gun culture" in these years. Every shooter but Otis was a supporter of the Crown, most of them from Britain. Despite a decade of turmoil and hostility in Massachusetts, and the loss of half a dozen lives to gunfire, the locals responded without firing guns. No Bostonian shot at a British official or supporter until Oct 1774, and the sailor who then fired pistols at two officers was, like Otis, judged mad and immediately confined. The townpeople's guns, whatever their number, are like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark. J. L. Bell JnoLBell@compuserve.com
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