Many Things Forgotten: The Use of Probate Records in "Arming America"

Abstract

people did not own guns before the middle of the nineteenth century because guns had been too expensive, unreliable, and not all that useful.1 The advent of mass production and aggressive advertizing by domestic arms manufacturers, Bellesiles argues, boosted the levels of ownership, contributed to rising rates of interpersonal violence among white men, and created a national gun culture centered on the possession and display of firearms. Much of the book discusses the manufacture and tactical use of guns wartime, the manifold shortcomings of state militia systems, and the perennial shortage of their equipment, but the heart of the matter is what proportion of the people possessed guns early America. Bellesiles replies, Not many. His estimates, only 15 percent before 1790 and just 21 percent 1830, run strongly counter to folk images of our pioneer past (Table I, p. 445). Although he cites censuses of various kinds, it is the alleged absence of guns from probate records that provides his clincher. If arms of any kind are not mentioned inventories or wills, he argues, the odds are high that they were not there at all. Probate inventories, he says, scrupulously recorded item an estate . . . including those that had already been passed on as bequests before death (p. Io9, restated at length on p. 266). This is nonsense. Anyone at all familiar with inventories from the colonial period knows that they are maddeningly inconsistent organization and detail. They almost always contain escape phrases such as in small things forgotten or lumber, which could mean anything that happened not to interest the appraisers. Nor do inventories include every item. Custom, not law, excluded pets-even prized hunting dogs-and children's toys (unless the children were deceased) and the widow's paraphernalia, a vague and contested term. Worse, appraisers often lumped things