Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment

Abstract

Armed Citizens maps two roads to the Second Amendment. The first road is a history of ideas from Livy to Niccolò Machiavelli to English reformers such as Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and John Trenchard. They all drew the same lessons from the history of the Roman Republic and the rise of Caesar: citizens made for more committed and reliable soldiers than professional troops; militia service made citizens strong, disciplined, and virtuous; a powerful military leader and a standing army undermined civilian authority and doomed any free society. The second road is a history of militias in England and the American colonies from the seventeenth century to the American Revolution. Noah Shusterman highlights the stark contrast between idealized depictions of militias and their unimpressive military performance. The American colonies adopted militias purely out of financial necessity. Colonial militias served to establish and defend the dominance of white settlers over Native Americans and enslaved African Americans. At times, as during Bacon's Rebellion (1676), militias turned on their superiors, who had no other means to defend themselves. The two roads, the intellectual and the institutional histories, run parallel, until they converge during the American Revolution. Shusterman maintains that the confluence of the promilitia ideology and the long tradition of colonial militias made the Second Amendment inevitable.