Bartholomew Roberts
Moderator
Clayton Cramer discusses Bellesiles books with a website devoted to civil liberties and catches the following "misrepresentation" in Bellesiles' book (one of many apparently).
From the article:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>He quotes a Governor W.C.C. Claiborne of the Mississippi Territory as writing to the Secretary of State in 1802, shortly after he took office, complaining about the disarray of the militia and its lack of weapons. Bellesiles' point is that even on the frontier, Americans owned few guns and had little interest in them.
But Cramer provided me with the text of a letter written by Claiborne just a few months after the one that Bellesiles cites (and collected in the same book of Claiborne’s correspondence) in which the governor praises the militia and suggests that Mississippians' disinterest in firearms was pretty specific. Required to purchase their own militia weapons at the equivalent of perhaps two-months income, frontier-folks apparently had little use for inaccurate smoothbore muskets — but liked other guns just fine. Wrote Claiborne, "I find the people here are much prejudiced against muskets, and are unwilling to depend on any other arms but rifles." [/quote]
It seems odd that Bellesiles would miss that contradictory quote in a book discussing the scarcity of firearms in pre-Civil War America.
http://civilliberty.about.com/newsissues/civilliberty/library/weekly/aa091700a.htm
From the article:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>He quotes a Governor W.C.C. Claiborne of the Mississippi Territory as writing to the Secretary of State in 1802, shortly after he took office, complaining about the disarray of the militia and its lack of weapons. Bellesiles' point is that even on the frontier, Americans owned few guns and had little interest in them.
But Cramer provided me with the text of a letter written by Claiborne just a few months after the one that Bellesiles cites (and collected in the same book of Claiborne’s correspondence) in which the governor praises the militia and suggests that Mississippians' disinterest in firearms was pretty specific. Required to purchase their own militia weapons at the equivalent of perhaps two-months income, frontier-folks apparently had little use for inaccurate smoothbore muskets — but liked other guns just fine. Wrote Claiborne, "I find the people here are much prejudiced against muskets, and are unwilling to depend on any other arms but rifles." [/quote]
It seems odd that Bellesiles would miss that contradictory quote in a book discussing the scarcity of firearms in pre-Civil War America.
http://civilliberty.about.com/newsissues/civilliberty/library/weekly/aa091700a.htm