The Founding Fathers and Armed Rebellion: Pre-Constitution

David Frum recently ran quite an interesting pair of articles on the history of the Second Amendment and how the interpretation arose that its purpose was armed rebellion against the government.  He begins by commenting on the book Gun Fight, which is a history of American attitudes towards guns and gun control.  Frum does not give an overall review of the book, but mostly addresses how the view of the Second Amendment as protecting armed rebellion against government began. There is ample evidence that the Founding Fathers did not intend to authorize armed rebellion against the government they were establishing, insurrectionist arguments to the contrary.  There is also ample evidence that they regarded private armies and political violence, not as safeguards of liberty, but as evils to be avoided.

Frum actually begins with examples long antedating the United States.  Many ancient Romans raised private armies to wage war against the state.  Invariably, these led, not to glorious revolution and liberty, but to civil war, mass slaughter of the losers, and military dictatorship.  Frum particularly offers the example of Catiline, a Roman general who sought to use his army to overthrow the Roman government, widely seen as a villain by the founding generation.  He overlooks the more obvious example of Julius Caesar, also seen by the Founders as a villain.*  The phrase "to cross the Rubicon" is so often used to refer to the point of no return that its origins are often forgotten.  So long as Caesar and his army remained north of the Rubicon, they were on a foreign campaign.  If they crossed, Caesar was taking a private army into Rome proper and was in rebellion against the state.  Frum also offers the example of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army as another private army that overthrew constitutional government and established a military dictatorship.

The Revolutionary War, it should be noted, was not fought as a spontaneous uprising by every man and his gun, nor by private armies.  It was fought by colonial/state militias, under the control of the colonial/state governments.  A Continental Congress had been formed even before the war began, and soon formed a Continental Army to fight alongside the militias.  The French also sent in troops to help.  And then there was the little matter of Shays' Rebellion.  My high school history books have always portrayed Shays Rebellion in a favorable light, as a desperate act of debt-strapped farmers denied any recourse at law.  The judgment of contemporaries, with the exception of Jefferson is much harsher.

It was in the context of Shays Rebellion that Thomas Jefferson made his famous comments about rebellion being a good way to keep government in line.  To Madison he wrote:

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

 His letter to William Smith was even clearer:

[C]an history produce an instance of rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

This is a remarkable comment.  Jefferson is saying that he thinks Shays Rebellion was good, even though he did not believe it was justified.  He believes that if people believe, however mistakenly, that they are mistreated by their government, the proper response is violence, and that some sort of violent rebellion is needed every 20 years or so.  If he truly believed that the proper response the mistaken belief that one is wronged by government was to start shooting, he probably seriously misjudged how common such mistaken beliefs were.  He also seriously misjudged how governments tend to respond to armed rebellion -- usually by brutal crackdown.  Shays Rebellion was no exception.  Aside from Jefferson, the general view was one ocondemnation.

Contrast Jefferson's view to George Washington:

Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them. I am mortified beyond expression that in the moment of our acknowledged independence we should by our conduct verify the predictions of our transatlantic foe, and render ourselves ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of all Europe.

To say nothing of Samuel Adams, "[I]n monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death."

Even in Massachusetts, where people had good insight into the Shaysites' real grievances, their actions were widely seen as simple lawlessness to be suppressed, and no more.  Perhaps the most eloquent denunciation of Shays Rebellion came from Jonathan Smith, a Massachusetts farmer and minor politician who lived in the middle of the disturbances:

There was a black cloud [Shays’ Rebellion] that rose in the east last winter, and spread over the west….It brought on a state of anarchy and that led to tyranny. I say, it brought anarchy. People that used to live peaceably, and were before good neighbors, got distracted, and took up arms against government…. People, I say, took up arms, and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death presented to your breast. They would rob you of your property, threaten to burn your houses; oblige you to be on your guard night and day. Alarms spread from town to town; families were broken up; the tender mother would cry, O my son is among them!...

Our distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at anything that looked like a government. Had any person that was able to protect us come and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had been a monarch, and that monarch might have proved a tyrant. So that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny; and better have one tyrant than so many at once.

 The classical history of private armies, well known at the time the Constitution was founded, gave every indication that they were dangers to liberty, rather than its defenders.  The real world behavior of private armies since only reinforces that impression.

Next up:  The militia and armed rebellion at the Constitutional Convention.
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*One can certainly argue that the Founding Fathers were unjust to both Caesar and Catiline.  Rome's aristocratic republic had largely degenerated into a narrow oligarchy that did a very poor job of protecting the ordinary Roman citizen.  Figures like Caesar and Catiline, though despised by aristocratic republicans, were often champions of the common people.  However, champions of insurrectionism invariably base their arguments on the views of the Founders, and the Founders clearly saw Caesar and Catiline as evil military dictators and examples to be avoided.