Why the Founders wrote the Second Amendment after Lexington and Concord

The faculty lounge has a theory that the Second Amendment was eighteenth-century clutter, tossed in by founders who were short on ideas and long on muskets. Think about that for a second. These were men who had just fought a war that began over a march to seize gunpowder. They did not stumble into the right to keep and bear arms. They bled for it on a village green, and then they wrote it down.

This is the story in order, because the order is the argument. The amendment didn't drop out of the sky in 1791. It came out of a century of English constitutional fights, a decade of colonial grievance, one very bad morning in Massachusetts, and an argument over whether the new national government could be trusted. Follow the dates and the purpose of the text gets hard to miss.

1689: the English start the habit

Our founders were Englishmen who believed they had the rights of Englishmen. So begin in England. In the 1680s King James II was building up a standing army and enforcing laws that let the Crown disarm people it considered unreliable, which in practice meant his Protestant opponents. In 1688 Parliament invited William of Orange to take the throne, and in 1689 it passed a Bill of Rights as the price of the crown.

That document declares, among other things, that "the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law." Two things about that sentence. First, it is limited by religion, which is a defect nobody should defend, and by the phrase "as allowed by law," which Parliament could lean on. Second, notice what it rests on. It treats arms as a means of defense for subjects, and it answers a royal abuse. The English right was narrow, but the idea behind it was not: if the Crown can pick who is armed, the Crown picks who is free.

William Blackstone, whose Commentaries were the law school of the founding generation, described the right to have arms as one of the "auxiliary" rights that protect the primary rights of personal security and liberty. The Americans read Blackstone. They took the principle and dropped the restrictions.

1768 to 1774: the colonies learn what disarmament looks like

By the 1760s Britain had stationed troops in Boston. In the fall of 1768, a Boston town meeting urged residents to arm themselves and pointed to the English Bill of Rights as its authority. The arguments the colonists made were English arguments: subjects have a right to arms for their defense, and the Crown cannot lawfully take them.

Then the matter got concrete. In September of 1774 General Gage, the royal governor, sent troops to seize powder stored in a powder house outside Boston. Rumors flew that blood had been shed, thousands of militiamen turned out, and the episode came to be called the Powder Alarm. Nobody died, but the lesson stuck: the Crown would go after the colonists' stores of powder, and the colonists would answer with their own organized force. In late 1774, an order from London barred the export of arms and ammunition to the American colonies, a move that tells you exactly how the Crown viewed an armed population.

That is the ground the war grew on. The colonists weren't an army. They were a militia, men who owned their own guns, trained on the village green, and answered the muster when the bell rang. The government in London didn't need to be told what that meant. It decided to disarm them.

April 19, 1775: the march on Concord

General Thomas Gage, commanding British forces in Massachusetts, learned that the colonists had gathered military stores at Concord. On the night of April 18 he sent a column of British regulars to seize them. Riders, Paul Revere among them, spread the alarm. When the redcoats reached Lexington at dawn on April 19, about seventy militiamen were standing on the green. Someone fired. Nobody has ever settled who. When it was over, eight Americans were dead.

The troops moved on to Concord, searched for the stores, and found that much of what they were looking for had been hidden or carted away. Then, at the North Bridge, the militia met the regulars and fought. By the time the British column staggered back to Boston, harried by militiamen firing from fences and stone walls along the road, the war had begun. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing decades later, called the first shot at the bridge "the shot heard round the world."

Now ask the obvious question. What was the fight about? Not taxes in the abstract. The troops marched out to take the people's military stores. The government sent soldiers to disarm the countryside, and the countryside shot back. If you are looking for the reason a generation of Americans would later insist that the people keep their arms, you do not have to look far. It happened at dawn on a Wednesday in April.

The Declaration and the war

The Declaration of Independence in 1776 put the grievance in plain words. Among the charges against the king: "He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures." And another: he had affected "to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power." That is the voice of men who believed a professional army answering to a distant sovereign was the standing danger to a free people.

The war confirmed their suspicion in one direction and complicated it in another. It confirmed that armed citizens could resist a trained army when it came to it, and that the militia was an essential piece of the defense. It complicated things because the militia also had famous failures; George Washington spent much of the war complaining that short-term militia could not do the work of a trained force, and that is how the Continental Army came to be. The founders carried both lessons into the Constitutional Convention. They wanted a federal army, and they wanted it kept on a short leash.

1787 and 1788: the Constitution and the fear of a new master

The Constitution gave Congress the power to raise armies, with a two-year limit on appropriations for them, and to organize, arm and discipline the militia, with the states appointing the officers. For many Americans that wasn't enough. They had just fought a war against a central government that claimed the power to disarm them, and now they were being asked to create another one.

This was the Anti-Federalist case, and it's worth remembering that the people who made it were not cranks. They worried that Congress, with its power to "arm" the militia, could neglect to arm it or could organize it in ways that left ordinary citizens defenseless. George Mason of Virginia refused to sign the Constitution partly because it had no bill of rights. At Virginia's ratifying convention in June of 1788, Mason and Patrick Henry warned that Congress's power over the militia could be used to leave the people unarmed and unable to resist, and Henry made the case that a government holding the sword and the purse should not also control the people's means of resistance.

The Federalists replied. James Madison, in Federalist No. 46, argued that a federal government could never overcome the resistance of a people who were armed and organized in their state militias, contrasting the American situation with European kingdoms whose governments, he said, were afraid to trust their people with arms. Madison's point is the Anti-Federalist point seen from the other side: an armed population is a check on tyranny. Both sides took for granted that the population was armed. They argued only about how best to keep it that way.

Several state ratifying conventions asked for amendments, and some of the proposals dealt with arms. Ratification came only because supporters of the Constitution promised that a bill of rights would be taken up in the First Congress. That was a promise made to win a close vote, and Madison kept it.

1789: Madison drafts

On June 8, 1789, Madison stood in the House of Representatives and introduced amendments. His version of what became the Second read, as best the record shows: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."

The House and Senate revised, and the religious-scruple clause fell away. The final text, as Congress approved it on September 25, 1789 and sent to the states, was the twenty-seven-word sentence we have today. It was one of twelve proposed amendments. The first two, on congressional apportionment and on congressional pay, were not ratified at that time. The other ten became the Bill of Rights.

Notice what Madison did with his drafting pen. He moved the militia clause into a subordinate position and kept the right of the people as the main idea. In the version Congress approved, the militia is the reason, and the right of "the people" is the command. You'll find the clause-by-clause reading in What the Second Amendment says, read one clause at a time; the history just told is the reason that reading holds.

December 15, 1791: ratification

An amendment needs three-fourths of the states. Vermont had joined the Union in March of 1791, which made fourteen states, and three-fourths of fourteen is ten and a half, so eleven states were needed. Virginia was the eleventh to ratify, on December 15, 1791. That is the date the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, became part of the Constitution.

The founders had gone to the trouble of writing it into the nation's fundamental law because the fear of disarmament was not theoretical for them. They had watched a government try it.

The lesson the founders carried out of the war

Pause on how strange the founders' position looks to a modern ear. They had just won a war, they had a new government of their own design, and they still wrote a guarantee against that government. Most revolutionaries do the opposite: they seize the state and assume their own side will run it kindly. The Americans did not. They treated every government, theirs included, as a thing to be watched, and they wanted the watchers to have the means.

That instinct is the thread that runs from the English Bill of Rights to the American one, and it is why the amendment sits where it does, right beside the guarantee against quartering soldiers and two amendments before the one against unreasonable searches. All three are about the same fear. A government that can put soldiers in your house, search your papers and take your arms has nothing left to ask your permission for. The founders had read enough history to know that this is how liberty usually ends: not in one dramatic coup, but one reasonable-sounding confiscation at a time.

What this means for the argument today

Here's the strongest objection a skeptic can raise: the history shows a militia concern, not a self-defense concern. Fair enough, and the history does show the militia concern. But follow where the evidence points.

1. The militia was the armed citizenry. The founders did not picture a militia as a government agency. They pictured the people themselves, with their own guns, organized when needed. A right to keep arms was the precondition of having a militia at all.
2. The grievance was disarmament. The march to Concord, the Powder Alarm and the London order on arms exports were all about taking arms from colonists. The remedy the founders wrote is a bar on infringing the people's right.
3. Self-defense was in the air. Pennsylvania's constitution of 1776 spoke of the right to bear arms for the defense of "themselves and the state." The Second Amendment did not need to repeat the idea any more than the First needed to define "speech."
4. The text says "the people." The word the founders chose was not "militia" and not "state" but the same word they used for assembly and for freedom from unreasonable searches.

Does that settle every regulation? No. We take the modern case law up in Heller, McDonald and Bruen Explain How Judges Now Read the Second Amendment. What the history settles is the character of the right: it was understood as a guarantee against a government that might want to leave its people unable to resist it.

There's also a lesson for those of us who think about The Founding Ideas in Order, From Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights as a continuous story. The Bill of Rights was not written by philosophers at a desk. Each amendment answers something the founders had seen. The Third answers the quartering of troops. The Fourth answers general warrants. The Second answers the march on Concord. A document written in answer to real abuses is not a relic, because abuses did not go out of fashion in 1791.

The bottom line

• The Second Amendment came out of experience. A government sent soldiers to seize the people's powder and arms, and the people answered on Lexington Green and at the North Bridge.
• The idea is older than the country. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Blackstone gave the founders a tradition. They kept the principle and dropped the religious limit.
• The founders feared standing armies and trusted armed citizens. They wrote that into the Declaration, into Article I and into the amendment, and Madison defended it in Federalist No. 46.
• The date to remember is December 15, 1791. Virginia's ratification made the amendment law, one of ten that make up the Bill of Rights.
• Next time someone calls it an accident, ask what they think the war was about. Then hand them the account of April 19, 1775, and let them read it.