Arming America Twenty Years On

As my Sestercentennial postings from last fall recounted, the last part of the year 1769 in Boston was punctuated with gunfire:

• a shot from a British soldier’s musket during the Neck Riot.
• two pistol shots during the merchants’ assault on John Mein.
• at least one more musket shot that night while a mob carted around sailor George Gailer.

There were no serious injuries from those gunshots, much less deaths. Nonetheless, they showed that violence in Boston was becoming more lethal. And indeed, the first two months of 1770 would bring the shooting deaths of Christopher Seider and then five people in the Boston Massacre.

Back in 2000, Michael Bellesiles published a study titled Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. It received prominent pre-publication blurbs and lots of newspaper reviews, most of them (but not all) laudatory. At the time, I looked at the book for what it said about pre-Revolutionary Boston and was surprised to see this statement on page 177:

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.

I already knew that Boston alone provided several counterexamples to that blanket statement. Bellesiles had apparently missed not only the non-fatal shots of 1769 but Ebenezer Richardson shooting a child from his window—not to mention James Otis shooting out his own window two months later.

Back then, the main platform for discussion among historians was listservs and other forms of email groups. (A few years later, blogs took over, with Boston 1775 among them. A few years after that, and most of the discussion moved to Twitter, with podcasts gaining ground.) I noted that mistake in the book on H-Net’s OIEAHC listserv (now H-Early-America) in October 2000 and probably on the Revlist group on Yahoo! as well.

During those months, however, I wasn’t ready to write off Bellesiles’s entire book. Those examples of more gunfire in Boston didn’t necessarily negate Arming America’s larger argument because it claimed that there were more guns in port towns than in interior farming communities. The unwelcome stationing of the army regiments in Boston in 1768-1770 definitely made it an exceptional place.

I also wasn’t ready to conclude that such errors were evidence that Bellesiles had knowingly misrepresented the historical record—not without more solid evidence. As long as there was a way to reconcile the evidence he cited with what others were bringing to light, I felt we should consider that before deciding the only explanation was fraud.

At the same time, I found myself speaking up in the online discussions for Bellesiles’s harshest critics, reminding scholars not to dismiss them because they came from outside academia without considering the evidence.

As time went on, it became clear that Bellesiles’s evidence was full of holes. The book’s citations didn’t support its claims. A burst pipe in his Emory University office building had destroyed his notes on probate inventories, he said. (There was indeed such a disaster.) But then other researchers found that his counts of those inventories didn’t add up—mathematically couldn’t add up. Some of the archives he listed as having consulted didn’t exist.

In that context, what might have seemed like careless errors—overlooking the gunfire in pre-Revolutionary Boston, misreading accounts of life on the frontier, missing examples of gun crimes in the courts—came together in a more ominous pattern. On the H-Net listservs I posted messages about how I found Bellesiles’s explanations unconvincing, which prompted some pearl-clutching for a week and also produced one of the first academic citations of my work.

In 2002 Columbia University revoked the Bancroft Prize it had awarded Bellesiles for Arming America. Emory commissioned three respected historians to review particular accusations about his work—not all of them, just those raised by other academics and most easily tested. Random House stopped publishing the book, though Soft Skull Press issued a paperback edition with Bellesiles’s corrections and response to his critics (the edition shown above).

Last year, Daniel Gullotta of the Age of Jackson podcast tracked down Bellesiles and interviewed him at length following a discussion of the book with one of its early critics, Joyce Lee Malcolm. The transcript of the second half of the Bellesiles interview was published on the Contingent Magazine website. And I found myself wading back into those waters.

TOMORROW: Assessing claims in that interview.