Baptists and the Second Amendment
In the article on Separate
Baptists we spoke of the First Amendment. But the Second Amendment
requires some discussion as well. It is just as important as the
First. There is a great deal of argument about the Second Amendment
in general and about the phrase “well regulated militia” in
particular. Does this phrase mean drill and training of the men of
the militia, or might it mean a militia which is under strict
constitutional control by law? I have long believed the word
regulated is derived from the War of the Regulation which took place
in North Carolina in 1771. It has almost been forgotten. It had only
one battle, the battle of Alamance, which took place in Alamance
County just south of Burlington and Greensboro on May 16, 1771.
There 2000 unprepared Regulators fought a pitched battle with 1300
militiamen of Governor William Tryon and lost. Nine men were killed
on each side. One captured Regulator was executed on the spot. The
writing of William Edwards Fitch, Elder Henry Sheets, and William S.
Powell describe the Regulators and Tryon’s barbarous treatment of
them in detail. Tryon’s Chief Justice ordered that six of the
captured Regulators, including Captain Benjamin Merrell, should be
hung, cut down while still alive, disemboweled, bowels burned before
their faces, beheaded, and drawn and quartered.[1] I believe, as
Fitch has said, that this battle was in fact the first battle of the
Revolution.
The Regulators of North Carolina were poor back
country frontiersmen, mostly Baptists and some Quakers, who had many
legitimate grievances against the royal government of William Tryon,
for whom Tryon, NC is named. He ruled from “Tryon’s Palace” in New
Bern, which was then the capitol, and was responsible for
administration of the State Church of the Colony, the Episcopal
Church. That many Regulators were Baptist is seen in Elder Henry
Sheets’ book.[2] There was about a 10 to 1 proportionate advantage
in legislative representation for the Coastal counties, mostly
Episcopal and much wealthier, as compared to the Piedmont frontier
counties. In addition the frontiersmen were excessively taxed and
were charged exorbitant fees by public officials. About half of the
taxes collected were embezzled by the sheriffs.[3] Furthermore, the
Proclamation of 1763 prohibited hunting and trapping west of the
continental divide in Virginia and west of Tryon in North
Carolina.[4] It was William Tryon himself who set the so called
Indian Boundary so far east of the continental divide in North
Carolina. This limit on hunting and trapping made money scarce among
the back country folk and interfered with their payment of the
excessive taxes and quit rents. These quit rents were equivalent to
modern property taxes and were paid to the King. Many times the
sheriffs sold the land and even personal possessions, down to
clothing, of the Regulators at auction to satisfy tax bills.[5] The
coastal planters were able to use paper certificates for stored
lumber and tobacco as a medium of exchange and had a much easier
time of it.
In the Declaration of Independence there is a
bill of particulars, 18 items, against the King. Many of these
particulars are related directly to the maladministration of
governance in North Carolina and South Carolina and Virginia. The
7th item comes from the Proclamation of 1763. And we recall the
statement: “He has sent hither swarms of officers to harass our
people and eat out their substance,” and “He has kept among us, in
times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our
legislatures,” and “He has affected to render the military
independent of, and superior to, the civil power.” So the authors of
the Declaration and of the Constitution and Bill of Rights were
acutely aware of the problems in the South, as well as in Boston.
They were aware because the Baptist Regulators, who were poorly
armed and had no officers, lost the battle of Alamance and were
hounded and scattered from North Carolina. They went to Virginia and
South Carolina and especially to what is now Tennessee. Many of
those Baptists who went to Virginia became neighbors and friends of
Jefferson and Madison and Patrick Henry.[6] Jefferson had relatives
who were Baptists and visited their churches. He said that their
churches exercised the purest form of democracy he had ever seen.
So the Regulators were simply attempting to
regulate the behavior of the colonial government of North Carolina
and to regulate the unregulated, select militia of Governor Tryon.
The principle is control of the military by the entire civilian
population, to put it in today’s terms. Tryon’s militia was drawn
from middle to upper class households and were predominately
Presbyterian and Episcopalian. Of his troops 199 of 1300 were
officers. All these had been appointed by Tryon; 8 were Generals, 7
Colonels. One officer, Edmund Fanning, was a graduate of Yale. Six
were members of the council, the upper house of the legislature, and
18 were members of the assembly, or lower house. Many others held
government posts. Elections to the assembly were controlled by the
sheriffs appointed by Tryon, and only influential men were likely to
be elected.[7] Thus a militia force which was indeed select and
under control of the Governor and legislature made unjust war on the
frontier constituents of the colonial government, decreeing in the
absence of a First Amendment that assembly for demanding redress of
grievances was treason.
The Regulators were mostly Baptist with a few
Quakers (Madison married a Quaker) and some of no religious
affiliation and were low in wealth and social standing. Tryon’s
select militia had a vested interest in putting down impertinent and
troublesome backwoodsmen who would no longer meekly bow to their
tyranny. Unfortunately, the Regulators were not properly armed nor
led, having as yet no First or Second Amendment. It is clear that
the founding fathers were opposed to both standing armies and to
select, and unregulated, militia, and that they believed that the
right to keep and bear arms extended to all, of whatever religious
or political persuasion. They considered the militia to be the
entire able bodied population. They remembered the War of the
Regulation. Indeed, the news of Alamance had reached all the
colonies.
George Mason of Virginia is a good example of
the thinking of the founding fathers. Born in Fairfax County into
the planter aristocracy and privately educated, he knew well the law
and the classics. In 1758 he built Gunston Hall on the Potomac, one
of the grandest mansions in a state of great houses. In 1759 he was
elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and served at the
Virginia Convention which, in July 1775, armed the colony for the
struggle with Great Britain. At the state’s constitutional
convention of 1776, he drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights,
forerunner of the Bill of Rights. He was a delegate to the federal
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and helped to
write the Constitution. Like John Leland and James Madison, he did
not trust its centralization of power and its failure to include a
bill of rights, and he refused to sign it. He continued steadfast in
opposition to what he regarded as the document’s weaknesses and had
the satisfaction of seeing the first ten amendments, based on his
Virginia Declaration of Rights, added to the Constitution in 1791.
Mason’s Virginia Declaration read: “That the people have a right to
keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the
body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and
safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of
peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided
as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will
admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict
subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.” Notice the
presence of the phrase, well-regulated militia, which later found
its way into the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Mason said at
the Virginia Convention to ratify: “I ask, who are the militia? They
consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I
cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper
on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future may not
consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor.”[8] The
paper on the table was of course the Constitution before addition of
a Bill of Rights. That statement directly reflects the North
Carolina experience in the War of the Regulation.
Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington,
1796: “The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all
power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by
themselves…that it is their right and duty to be at all times
armed.” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers: “The
Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans
possess over the people of almost every other nation...where the
governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” At the
Virginia ratifying convention, in 1788, Patrick Henry said: “O sir,
we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were
only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you
could defend yourselves, are gone...Did you ever read of any
revolution in a nation...inflicted by those who had no power at
all?”
John Leland, the great Virginia Baptist
preacher, had 10 objections to the Federal Constitution. The first
was: “There is no Bill of Rights, whenever a number of men enter
into a state of Society, a number of individual rights must be given
up to Society, but there should be a memorial of those not
surrendered, otherwise every natural and domestic right becomes
alienable, which raises tyranny at once, and this is as necessary in
one form of government as in another.”[9] This list of objections
was sent to Joseph Spencer, who will be remembered from my article
on the Separate Baptists as the man who advised Madison to meet with
Leland about the Bill of Rights just before election of the
delegates to the Virginia Convention to ratify the Constitution.
The phrase well regulated militia seems to have
been peculiarly a Virginia and North Carolina phrase, not seen in
other states’ versions of the Second Amendment. I believe that
phrase in the amendment came about because of Baptist North
Carolinians who, after great suffering, fled to Virginia and in the
course of their lives there, dedicated to the service of Jesus
Christ and to the salvation of so many of their Virginia neighbors,
familiarized Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and Mason with the War of
the Regulation and the problems with a select militia.[10]
[1]
http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/mcksmerrframe.htm Fitch, William
Edwards, Neglected History of North Carolina (New York, NY, 1905)
pp.206-232.
[2] http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/mckstmerrframe.htm Sheets, Elder
Henry, A History of the Liberty Baptist Association (Raleigh,
Edwards and Broughton Co., 1907).
[3] Lumpkin, William L., Baptist Foundations in the South,
(Nashville, Broadman Press, 1961) pp. 72-86.
[4] De Vorsey, Louis, The Indian Boundary in the Southern Colonies,
1763-1775, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1966)
pp. 28-31, 96, 97, 108, 109.
[5] http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/mcksmerrframe.htm Fitch, William
Edwards, Neglected History of North Carolina (New York, NY, 1905).
[6] Lumpkin, op. cit., pp. 87-120.
[7] http://www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/mckstmerreg3.htm Powell, William
S., The War of the Regulation and The Battle of Alamance, May
16,1771 (Raleigh, Division of Archives and History, North Carolina
Department of Cultural Resources, 1975).
[8] http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndfqu.html.
[9] Journal of the American Antiquarian Society, “Elder John
Leland,” October, 1952, page 187.
[10] http://www.guncite.com/journals/dowdesp.html.
http://www.guncite.com/journals/senrpt/senrpt.html.
James H. Sightler
Sightler Publications
January 28, 2004
