From: Michael Pugliese 
Subject: SNET: 1st Chapter - A Necessary Evil
Date: 30 Apr 2000 06:24:44 -0400
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1st Chapter - A Necessary Evil

A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government
By Garry Wills
Chapter One


Minutemen


One of the dramatic developments of the 1990s was the emergence of
self-styled militias training for guerrilla war against the federal
government. Proudly patriotic, these organizations presented themselves as
the true guardians of Jeffersonian values, as heirs to the Revolution's
minutemen. It was hard to judge the extent or depth of the movement, but
some of the literature it relied on was an apparent inspiration to Timothy
McVeigh when he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168
people. His action echoed, in fact, an event in William Pierce's 1978 book,
The Turner Diaries, which imagines a war on government beginning with a
fertilizer bomb that destroys a federal building.
It may seem absurd for small bands of men to think they can defy a federal
government they describe as vast in its power and ruthless in the use of it.
But the militias drew on a claim that was routinely accepted in circles less
extreme than their own. The Vietcong, they argue, defied the same United
States government and bested it by guerrilla "insurgency." This is an
analogy that Wayne LaPierre, at the time the executive vice president of the
National Rifle Association, used in order to argue that gun owners in
general could successfully defeat tyrannical measures taken by the
government.
The view that the Vietcong prevailed by guerrilla tactics is a belief
widespread but fallacious. The conclusions drawn from a panel of military
and academic experts have been amply confirmed in later studies: "The North
Vietnamese finally won by purely conventional means....In their lengthy
battle accounts that followed Hanoi's great military victory, Generals [Vo
Nguyen] Giap and [Van Tien] Dung barely mentioned the contribution of local
forces." But surprisingly large numbers of people have been tempted, in
recent decades, to believe in an almost magic power of "people's war" to
prevail against the odds. Colonial populations hoped they could launch
revolutions "on the cheap." And their opponents hoped that
"counterinsurgency" could also be scaled to smaller challenges. John
Kennedy, recoiling from the Eisenhower era's doctrine of "massive
retaliation," turned to "flexible response," relying on covert action,
"psywar," and Green Beret derring-do. It was the era of small-time operators
promising big results, of spooks like John Paul Vann and Edward Lansdale.
(Lansdale tried to psych out the enemies in Vietnam by tampering with their
astrological predictions.) The militias of the 1990s were inheritors of such
illusion.
Renewed interest in the tactics of limited war led some people to recast our
history in terms of the fad. Even some professional historians yielded to
the rhetorical elation of the period. The military historian Don
Higginbotham confessed that he had exaggerated the importance of militias to
the Revolution when he succumbed to the excitement of the 1960s, responding
to a timely "preoccupation with irregular war." During the bicentennial
celebrations of the seventies, William Casey, the future head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, toured Revolutionary battlefields and wrote a book that
said our forebears won the Revolution, just as the Vietnamese won their
struggle, "by irregular, partisan, guerrilla warfare." The misreading of the
one war prompted a misreading of the other, and indicates why Casey, when he
became the head of the CIA, thought that Oliver North was an appropriate
sponsor of guerrilla Contras in Nicaragua. In the early 1960s, John Galvin,
who would serve in Vietnam before becoming the commanding general of NATO,
wrote The Minute Men, describing the Revolutionary minutemen as an elite
rapid response team, just what the Pentagon was dreaming of.
Vietnam-era romanticizing of militias served the 1990s extremists well. No
matter how nutty the latter might seem, they had legitimate forebears in our
history. Some of the groups even called themselves minutemen. NRA publicist
Tanya Metaksa met with militiamen. Congressional officeholders and
candidates defended them. Respected law professors argued that the Second
Amendment had authorized a "genuine" militia, not the tame National Guard
that swears allegiance to the federal government. But Gary Hart, the former
senator, argues in his 1998 book, The Minuteman, that the National Guard
could be trained to become "citizen guerillas" for our time. The
glorification of militias reached such a pitch that Akhil Reed Amar,
Southmayd Professor at the Yale Law School, collaborated with a journalist
on a book proclaiming that the right to serve in a militia was one of the
three most fundamental guarantors of constitutional freedoms. This is not
far from Charlton Heston's statement, on behalf of the NRA, that the Second
Amendment is the most important part of the Constitution, since it equips
people to defend all their other rights with guns.
Even some who do not agree with Heston's assessment of the Second Amendment
are willing to accept a rosy depiction of the colonial and Revolutionary
militias. They represent, for most of us, a high ideal of citizen response
to threats against our liberty. We honor Daniel Chester French's statue The
Minute Man at Concord's battlefield in Massachusetts. The rallying of other
towns to the defense of Lexington was a great moment in American history.
But before we get too carried away by the cult of the militias, we should
reflect on claims for them that cannot stand a close inquiry.
One of the principal boasts of the militias' admirers is that they exhibited
a democratic inclusiveness. Every free white male of military age had to
serve, regardless of class or social standing. That was rarely the case in
colonial times. There were many exemptions - for conscientious objectors
(Pennsylvania had no pre-Revolution militia because of its Quaker
population), attendance at college, engagement in important business. The
socially prominent could usually avoid service if they wanted to, often by
paying others to go in their place. (If the militias were truly universal,
there would be no "spare" men to be paid for joining.) The military
historian John Shy notes that John Adams, just the right age to take up a
musket in the French and Indian War of 1756-63 (when all men were supposed
to be in the militias), never even considered doing so.
But there is an even more sweeping fact that made universal service
impossible throughout the colonies. There was a drastic shortage of guns.
This goes against everything we have assumed about our pioneer forebears -
that they vindicated their own liberties with their own arms. But there is
overwhelming evidence that a majority of males did not own usable guns. The
colonies repeatedly legislated that all men should get or be given guns, and
just as repeatedly complained that this had not been accomplished. In the
French and Indian War, a contingent of two hundred Virginia militiamen went
to the front bearing only eighty muskets, and British officers in
Massachusetts, amazed that so few colonials possessed muskets, were even
more surprised to find that many had not even fired one. At Lexington and
Concord, the opening battles of the Revolution, despite the fact that the
Massachusetts militia had spent months desperately trying to arm itself,
some contingents showed up at the front unarmed. A captain of the New
Hampshire militia reported in 1775 that "not one-half our men have arms,"
and a militia officer in Virginia said that he had a stand of a thousand
guns, but that none of them worked. The New York Committee of Safety refused
to send troops to the field because "they have no arms." Thomas Jefferson,
Virginia's governor, had to defend his state's militia when, lacking guns,
it stole a consignment purchased by the Continental Army; and he consoled
one of his commanders with the philosophical reflection that "the subsequent
desertions of your militia have taken away the necessity of answering the
question how they shall be armed" (J 3.224-27, 640).
If every man had his gun for militia drill, why did so many go off to battle
without a musket, not only militiamen, but Continental Army soldiers too?
Patrick Henry would later use the dearth of guns as a reason for refusing to
ratify the Constitution. The new government promised to arm the militias,
but the state of Virginia had been promising to do that for years, and had
never done it. How could Virginians expect the federal government to do what
they could not do for themselves? Henry told the Virginia ratifying
convention in 1788 that "we have learned, by experience, that, necessary as
it is to have arms, and though our Assembly has, by a succession of laws for
many years, endeavored to have the militia completely armed, it is still far
from being the case." In an earlier session of the convention he had asked:
"Of what service would militia be to you when, most probably, you will not
have a single musket in the state? For as arms are to be provided by
Congress, they may or may not furnish them" (R 9.957, 10.1273).
If Congress would not supply arms, what prevented each man from taking down
his musket from over the mantel? We have all been taught that the guns were
there. But they weren't. In one of the most important (but neglected)
studies of the colonial frontier, Michael Bellesiles went through over a
thousand probate records covering the years 1763 to 1790 from western
sectors of New England and Pennsylvania. Though these were inheritance lists
for white males (those most likely to own guns), and though belongings were
listed in great detail (down to broken mugs), only 14 percent of the men
owned guns, and 53 percent of those guns were broken or unusable.
How can this be? We have always known or assumed that men in the colonial
period had to hunt for food. Bellesiles shows that this, too, is a myth.
Hunting for food - with a musket, inaccurate enough when aimed at a man and
generally hopeless against a rabbit; or with a rifle whose loading (after
each shot) was slow and difficult - could not be an efficient use of the
ordinary person's time. Though most meat consumed was from domestic animals
(pigs or cows), the supplementary provisions were best caught with the
trapper's or the fisherman's net. People's defense came from their living in
communities, with select militias to guard them, using what guns were
available. These guns came mainly from Europe, and the typical village's
blacksmith was not very good at repairing them. (Much of the smith's time
went into forging farm and transportation gear.) Though some guns were made
in America, M. L. Brown established that this was "an infant, homespun,
widely dispersed, and distinctly disorganized American industry" when the
Revolution began. The European source for arms was cut off by British
embargo during the Revolution, and was only partially restored when the
French entered the fray on the Americans' side.
Guns for both militias and the Continental Army were so scarce that George
Washington fills page after page with laments for his inability to get
them - and he meant muskets as well as the even scarcer cannon and
artillery. If guns were not omnipresent, then obviously the skill in their
use was not widespread either. Why were so many guns broken or unusable in
the probate records? It was not only that the blacksmiths in small
communities were not gunsmiths. Guns were mainly made of iron at the time,
and interior rusting of barrel and parts would take place unless guns were
cleaned and maintained. Obviously, not enough people kept them in regular
use to prevent this from occurring. Though some mastered the difficult
handling of the long rifle, few became truly expert. Brown quotes Benjamin
Thompson, a Continental soldier expressing the "common sentiment" about
riflemen attached to the army as skirmishers:


Instead of being the best marksmen in the world and picking off every
Regular that was to be seen, there is scarcely a regiment in camp but can
produce men that can beat them at shooting, and the army is now universally
convinced that the continual firing which they kept up by the week and month
together has had no other effect than to waste their ammunition and convince
the King's troops that they are not really so formidable.


The famed American rifle was not of much use in war, and its wielders,
according to historians George Scheer and Hugh Rankin, were "more noisy than
useful." They were wielding an instrument never intended for battle:


The rifle used by these "irregulars" was practically unknown to the New
Englanders, accustomed to the smooth-bore musket and fowling piece. Long in
barrel, small in bore, light in weight, and perfectly balanced, it was the
weapon of the professional hunter and woodsman, the man who eschewed every
ounce of unnecessary burden and could not afford to waste a single charge.
Its barrel was spiral-grooved to give spin to its bullet, and its effective
range more than doubled the musket's sixty yards. Its greatest disadvantage
was that in order to benefit from its rifling, its bullet had to be fitted
so tightly that it had to be forced home with an iron ramrod and a wooden
mallet, a slow process. It had other disadvantages for line firing: the
weather more easily rendered it useless; it had no bayonet, so that its
users could not deliver or stand a charge; and surrounded by the smoke of a
battle line, the riflemen could not aim carefully enough to take advantage
of their weapon's unbelievable accuracy.


The American army found even less use for pistols than for rifles. British
cavalrymen and naval officers carried them as signal guns and for defense
against a rebel in their ranks, but they were an ornament that Americans
forbore: "Few pistols were domestically produced, for cavalry generally
performed a minor role in the Continental Army, operating primarily in the
southern campaigns, and preferred the carbine and blunderbuss to the saber
and the pistol." Pistols, which gentlemen used for duels, were not handy in
combat, since one had to get out one's powder and ball and load the things
for each shot. In private life, knives were a quicker and more wieldy
weapon, and they accounted for most individual killings in the eighteenth
century. Bellesiles shows statistically that not until the industrial
revolution of the nineteenth century, not until the Colt company's great
output and advertising, did gun ownership spread dramatically in America -
and then it never stopped spreading. There was one gun for every ten people
in the colonies. Now there is more than one for every man, woman, and child
in America, with three for every adult male of the population. Yet this
latter situation is justified by appeal to the former.
We must give up, then, the idea that every man in the colonies turned out
for militia service bearing his own gun or one supplied him. But other
factors prevented the militias from being universal. John Shy, the special
master of this subject, says that militia composition differed from state to
state and from period to period for a variety of social and economic
reasons. It is best to consider the militias in four stages - before the
Revolution, at its beginning, during its course, and at its end.
1. In the first settlements, short on manpower, everyone did everything
possible for the common defense - women, children, slaves, friendly Indians.
That condition could recur later, at times of maximum emergency. In response
to the British march on Concord, the women of Pepperell township set up
militia patrols after their men left town. Blacks warned households that
"the Regulars are out." An old woman, "Mother" Batherick, took six
unresisting prisoners in the British retreat from Lexington.
But when the pressure of crisis eased, in the colonies before the war,
training sessions for the militias were cut back, and attendance was low at
them. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Virginia's "militia
virtually ceased to exist," since "a handful of semi-professional rangers
could watch the frontier." Later, as the slave population grew, and grew
restive, the militias were drilled as a police power to intimidate and
control the slaves. The militias were becoming "more social than military
organizations." Officers held military rank as part of their general
influence. Here was the birth of all those "colonels" who have dotted the
southern landscape. When a time for actual fighting arose, the poor and
vagrants were bribed or dragooned into service. "Tidy colonial laws,
imposing a military obligation on almost every free adult white male, became
less and less an accurate mirror of military reality, particularly in times
of danger." That is, times of crisis - for which the militias were supposed
to be trained - were precisely the times when they were least in evidence.
This explains the poor performance of the militias in the French and Indian
War, when the British acquired a contempt for the American fighting man.
Historians James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender respond to that
contempt by pointing out that "these provincial soldiers were not militia,
but rather outcasts from middle-class society, unfortunates who had been
lured or legally pressed into service through promises of bounty payments
and decent food and clothing."
Even when vagrants were not being lured to replace militiamen, genuine
members of the militias usually volunteered for actual fighting, under the
encouragement of special rewards, as if they were not already obliged to
service. The militias had become a kind of manpower pool from which
volunteers could be sought, rather than a force already formed. The men
dispatched to do real fighting were not normally the militia units that were
supposed to have trained together, but a collection of those who could leave
home with least disruption to the community. They were selected out,
becoming the very thing modern celebrants of the militias say that universal
citizen service was meant to prevent. They were a "select militia." And the
very principle of their selection guaranteed that they would largely be
untrained, undisciplined, unskilled in the use of arms, and ready at any
minute to desert. That was the type of soldier who served with British
Regulars in the French and Indian War, the colonial war waged just before
the Revolution.
George Washington, trying to lead those militia forces, said they made him
ashamed for his countrymen. His biographer describes the situation he faced
as that earlier war began:


Virginia had trained no officers, had kept no troops, had organized no wagon
train, and possessed few arms. The militia, as the Governor had phrased it,
were in "very bad order." In Frederick, a more nearly accurate word would
have been "non-existent." Lord Fairfax apparently had no roll of the men
liable to military duty; he possessed no facilities other than those of the
tax-lists for preparing a roster; he had raised none of the fifty men George
was supposed to find ready for him.


2. If that was the condition of the militias in the 1750s, why did the
colonies entertain such high expectations of their performance at the
beginning of the Revolution in the 1770s? The pressure of the mounting
crisis of the 1760s, when Parliament imposed new taxes like the Stamp Act,
made the colonies take their militias more seriously. As the break with the
mother country occurred, the units were forced to reorganize. Some of their
former officers were Tories, not to be trusted in a fight with British
troops. Most of them had been appointed by the royal governors of each
colony. Clearly, new arrangements had to be made. The units were formed on
ideological lines. Whig officers would now be elected by the troops
themselves, and Whig loyalties would be demanded of the troops. In New
England, the new bands were formed by covenant (a powerful concept the
Puritans had borrowed from the biblical covenant God made with his people).
In Pennsylvania, where Quakers had earlier prevented the formation of a
militia, newly formed bands were called The Association, and men in it were
Associators.
Even when the threat of war made some recall the ideal of universal service,
not everyone could be on constant call. In Massachusetts, select teams were
formed to be on ready alert - the minutemen, with their own organization,
the "minute companies." (They did not operate as individuals, as our myth
has it.) The minutemen constituted between a fifth and a fourth of the
covenanted force, and they were generally younger and more mobile than the
others. They had to serve for a specified period (ten months in the case of
Concord), keep arms by them at all times, and be part of a network for early
response to any threat. It was through this network that Paul Revere spread
the news that "the Regulars are coming out" when the British marched toward
the arsenal at Concord. These minutemen's preparedness made them able to
stream in from other townships to set ambushes for the British who had been
broken and sent into headlong retreat from Concord back to Boston. On the
other hand, it was not the minutemen who fought in the towns of Lexington
and Concord, but the whole force of each township. Little Lexington, with a
militia of forty men or so, had not even set up a minuteman corps and
Concord had been late in picking its own elite band.
The euphoria over the Massachusetts militia's early victory bred an illusion
that native "virtue" was bound to prevail over hireling coercion in the
British ranks. A Pennsylvania militia officer told his men, "The English
army derive all their strength from a close attention to discipline, with
them it supplies the want of virtue." When the conditions of Lexington and
Concord recurred during the war, militias often performed admirably - when,
for instance, the Americans were forewarned and prepared, when they were
fighting on their home ground, when they were facing small numbers of
British troops penetrating that ground, when those troops were acting on a
plan that did not foresee organized resistance. But those conditions were
not to be the normal ones, and in a long war fought over a vast territory,
spasms of local animation were of minor use.
3. The militias soon began to display all the marks of their earlier
(inglorious) service. Their lack of discipline made them careless of
sanitation (in war, disease competes with combat as a killer). Their
staggered and short enlistment times were interrupted even more by their
desertion rate (over 20 percent), which gave Washington grounds for some
scathing comments on the militias' performance. As his generals struggled to
create conditions of discipline in the Continental Army, the use of
auxiliary forces from the militias broke down what had painfully been built
up. Even people who began with high praise for the militias were disabused
of their admiration. Samuel Adams, who had been at Lexington on the day of
the glorious clash, would later write, "Would any man in his senses, who
wishes the war may be carried on with vigor, prefer the temporary and
expensive drafts of militia to a permanent and well-appointed army?" And
General Charles Lee, who had desired to lead militia forces, ended up
saying, "As to the minutemen, no account ought to be made of them" (and
minutemen were the elite corps). Jefferson, whose calls to the militia were
met with "detestation" and defiance, said that "no possible mode of carrying
it [the war] on can be so expensive to the public and so distressing and
disgusting to the individuals as by militia" (J 5.34). His fellow southern
governor Thomas Burke of North Carolina had begun the Revolution as an enemy
of central government, but his experience with the militia convinced him
"that every dodge was used to escape military service," and he tried to set
up a regular army at the state level (though that was forbidden by the
Articles of Confederation).
Despite some important exceptions, when the militias fought well, their
overall battle record is judiciously summed up by Don Higginbotham:


As an institution, however, the militia proved deficient. The law-making
bodies of the colony-states were never able to bring these military
organizations up to meeting their responsibilities....When required to stay
for extended lengths of time in the field far from home, when mixed closely
with sizable bodies of Continentals, and when performing against redcoats in
open combat, the militia were at their worst. Nothing in their modest
training, not to mention their normally deficient equipment and supplies,
prepared them for these duties.


The fervor of the early days in the reorganized militias wore off in the
long grind of an eight-year war. Now the right to elect their own officers
was used to demand that the men not serve away from their state. Men evaded
service, bought substitutes to go for them as in the old days, and had to be
bribed with higher and higher bounties to join the effort - which is why
Jefferson and Samuel Adams called them so expensive. As wartime inflation
devalued the currency, other pledges had to be offered, including land
grants and the promise of "a healthy slave" at the end of the war. Some men
would take a bounty and not show up. Or they would show up for a while,
desert, and then, when they felt the need for another bounty, sign up again
in a different place (so much for the claim that the militias were made up
of neighbors who all knew each other). This practice was common enough to
have its own technical term - "bounty jumping."
One of the more laughable contentions of those modern politicians who
romanticize the early American militias is that they prevented the
corruptions of a standing army by serving voluntarily, not by compulsion,
and freely, not for pay - unlike mercenaries on the other side. But the
draft often had to be resorted to by governors unable to get the militia to
serve without it, and the draft was often ineffective without the addition
of bounties. Even after bounties were raised, evasion or defiance of the
draft was common. A North Carolina militia officer told General Nathanael
Greene that fifty-six of fifty-eight men drafted in one place claimed they
had a disabling hernia, and Jefferson complained that when he tried to send
Virginia militiamen out of the state "I had as many sore legs, hipshots,
broken backs etc. produced as there were men ordered to go." Bidding to
drive bounties higher was engaged in by Continentals as well as militia, by
officers as well as their subordinates. Historian Charles Royster calls the
active bidding around recruitment the greatest source of corruption in the
Revolution.
Yet it would be entirely wrong to say that the militias made no contribution
to the Revolution. They played a vital part in it - but not the part their
current fans pretend they played. They did not prevent corruption or obviate
the need for a standing army. They did not defeat the foe by insurgent
tactics. They did not prove superior to trained armies by force of their
patriot virtue. What did they do, then? They were crucial to what was
called, in the eighteenth century, the internal police. At a time of great
turmoil, the stay-at-home militias kept order. The British tried to foment
slave rebellions. The militias kept a close watch on the slave population.
The British also used Indian allies to raid American communities. The
militias, which did have a tradition of active rangers on guard against
Indians, repelled them. Roving British marauders, hoping for plunder in
American villages, often found the militias there to repel them. Loyalists
could have become a fifth column in many communities. But attempts on their
part to agitate or denounce the war effort, or to communicate with the
enemy, were subject to close scrutiny by the militias - close enough to have
made them, at times, a kind of thought police. The lookout for men of
suspect allegiance even led Albany County in New York to establish a
Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies, a partial forerunner of
the Cold War's House Committee on Un-American Activities. There is a
delicious irony in this. Modern defenders of the militias value them as a
force that can defend the people from authority, but the Revolutionary
militias were put in the position of defending the war authority against
dissidents (the Loyalists).
What might be called this home-front importance of the militias had
paradoxical results. It was at once a moderating and a radicalizing
experience - moderating because it kept a measure of law and order through
the paroxysm of revolution, and radicalizing because it put "new men" in the
position of disciplining those who had been their social betters. Shy notes
both of these effects. By keeping order at the local level, the militias
helped maintain that legalism Pauline Maier finds in the Revolution, setting
it off from mere mob action. But by breaking down patterns of deference, the
militias gave citizens a new sense of control over their lives, especially,
as Steven Rosswurm notes, among the Pennsylvania Associators. In fact, one
of the most common complaints about the militias as a military force - that
the men and officers disobeyed commands not to their liking, and were ready
to go back to their own states - was an important social force for the
future.
4. The militias' contribution to this new political atmosphere at the local
level explains why so many people, at the end of the war, remembered the
militias' performance with a kind of fondness, despite their spotty or
disgraceful record on the battlefield. Besides, when the militias did act
well in war, it was often when the war came into the locale of the state
forces, where the troops were fighting on familiar terrain, under the eyes
of their neighbors. In those circumstances, the inhabitants of the region
tended to exaggerate the contribution of the militia, playing down the
achievement of the Continentals with whom the militia had fought the local
battle. The Continental Army was seen as a protector of the states, but also
as their dominator. It seemed always to be demanding provisions, paying for
them often with promises or with devaluing currency. It drew men off from
the home scene for service at a distance. Besides, in the course of the war,
it had to depend on the same bounty system that filled ranks with vagrants
and dragooned men. Joseph Reed, the president of Pennsylvania's executive
council, noticed that the "jealousy" between provincial forces and the
Continentals replicated the frictions between the militia and the British
Regulars during the French and Indian War.
Continues...



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