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New doubts about gun historian

Research to receive hard critique today

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 9/11/2001

When Emory University historian Michael A. Bellesiles
published his sweeping historical study of guns in Colonial
America last fall, the reaction was electric.

His thesis that guns were relatively rare in Colonial
households, and that the American ”gun culture” didn’t
take hold until long after the Founding Fathers drafted the
Second Amendment’s ”right to bear arms,” was immediately
hailed by gun control advocates and by a host of historians
impressed by his bold rewriting of conventional wisdom.

But even as publication of ”Arming America: The Origins of
a National Gun Culture” won Bellesiles plaudits – and, in
April, Columbia University’s prestigious Bancroft Prize for
historical excellence – some of his academic doubters were
poring over evidence Bellesiles cited and finding multiple
instances in which he seems to have misused historical
records.

Today, at Harvard Law School, Bellesiles’s most adamant
critic, Northwestern University law professor James
Lindgren, plans to detail evidence that Bellesiles may have
stretched or distorted the historical record in trying to
prove his claim.

The Boston Globe has reviewed substantial portions of
records Lindgren will cite: 18th-century probate records in
Vermont and Rhode Island. The Globe has also checked into
Bellesiles’s claim to have studied certain records in San
Francisco, records county officials say were destroyed by
fire in 1906. In each case, the records appear to support
Lindgren’s accusation and suggest a disturbing pattern of
misuse of data by Bellesiles in his book and in an article
defending his thesis which he published on his Web site.

In telephone and e-mail interviews, Bellesiles stands by his
research. ”I spent 10 years of my life traveling around to
archives myself, without research assistance. I know how
much work I put into it, and I stand by it.”

He does, however, concede that he apparently made an
”egregious error” in his interpretation of some Vermont
probate records cited in the Web-site essay. His
transcriptions of those records repeatedly characterize
weapons as ”old” or ”rusty” or ”broken.” But the
records themselves show no such notations.

Published by Alfred A. Knopf last September, ”Arming
America” drew immediate notice for its startling, and
apparently copiously documented, finding that, contrary to
common belief, ”gun ownership was exceptional in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century, even
on the frontier … The gun culture grew with the gun
industry.”

Bellesiles claimed to have examined more than 11,000 probate
records of more than 1,200 counties, counting the number of
guns listed in estate inventories. He found that between
1765 and 1821, not more than 17 percent of estate
inventories listed guns. The gun ownership rate was even
lower in the 1760-1795 period – about 14 percent, he said.
And ”over half of these guns were listed as broken or
otherwise defective,” Bellesiles wrote.

Indeed, he wrote, one reason the Revolutionary War went on
as long as it did may have been that the weapons available
to the colonists were so scarce and in such poor repair.
”Probably the major reason,” he argues in the book, ”why
the American Revolution lasted eight years, longer than any
war in American history before Vietnam, was that when that
brave patriot reached above the mantel, he pulled down a
rusty, decaying, unusable musket (not a rifle), or found no
gun there at all.”

”Bellesiles has dispersed the darkness that covered the
gun’s early history in America,” wrote historian Garry
Wills in the New York Times Book Review. ”He provides
overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a
superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the
17th Century.”

Firing back in a letter to the editor, National Rifle
Association president Charlton Heston chided Wills for
accepting ”Bellesiles’s ludicrous argument,” and the book
has been denounced on gun-owner Web sites and by
conservative reviewers in the Wall Street Journal and
elsewhere.

After the book came out, Bellesiles reported a campaign of
harassment, including abusive phone calls and what he said
was a pattern of viruses sent to his computer. His Emory
phone now refers callers to a mailing address, and his
e-mail address, which he does not give out, is coded. (He
is currently on a fellowship at the Newberry Library in
Chicago, a historical research library.)

Some of the reaction has been so vociferous that the
American Historial Association adopted a statement in June
deploring personal attacks on Bellesiles.

Besides its fiery assault on America’s present-day gun
culture, the book was a lightning rod because of its
potential to force a rethinking of the intent of the Second
Amendment: ”A well-regulated militia, being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the people to
keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

If, contrary to the familiar image of the sturdy yeoman with
his trusty flintlock, few Americans had actually owned guns,
it could be, as some gun-control advocates argue, that the
amendment was never meant to apply to individuals.

The Bellesiles controversy also divides academic historians,
for whom the Bancroft Prize is a singular honor. Past
winners include such luminaries as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
and Allan Nevins.

”I have been a defender of the book,” says Stanford
historian Jack Rakove, who has written extensively on the
Colonial period. ”It makes a number of arguments which one
would have to challenge comprehensively in order to
undermine its thesis.”

But Bentley College historian Joyce Malcolm, a Second
Amendment specialist, says, ”The more I looked at it, the
more disturbed I became. All historians can make mistakes
and differ on interpretation, but in his case it’s not just
interpretation, or one or two points, but matters of fact
and repeatedly.”

Lindgren, a specialist in probate law and statistical
analysis (and a believer, he says, in gun control), became
suspicious of Bellesiles’s findings early on and began
posting his objections on history discussion sites. He
looked over some of Bellesiles’s sources, and eventually
wrote the academic paper, ”Counting Guns in Early
America,” which he will present today at Harvard and later
at other institutions. The paper argues, among other
things, that Bellesiles’s data are grossly in error and that
some of his conclusions are mathematically impossible.
Lindgren also says that when he contacted Bellesiles, trying
to get him to produce the details of his research,
Bellesiles was unable to do so.

”In virtually every part of the book examined in detail,”
Lindgren told the Globe, ”there are problems … An
enormous number of people have become cautious. It’s clear
that this book is impressive to legal and social historians
who do not check the background. Law professors and
quantitative historians have been suspicious about the book
since its release.”

Bellesiles says that he kept all his probate findings on
yellow legal pads and that they were destroyed when a water
pipe broke and flooded the history department offices at
Emory last April, while he was in England. (There was a
flood, an Emory spokeswoman says, and many history faculty
lost books and papers. The spokesman could not say whether
Bellesiles papers were among those lost.)

Lindgren also charges that Bellesiles could not have
reviewed probate records in San Francisco for the 1840s and
1850s, as he claims to have done in his book and on his Web
site, because all such records were destroyed in the 1906
earthquake and fire. Bellesiles’s Web-site article,
”Probate Records as an Historical Source,” lists the San
Francisco Superior Court as the site where he did his
research.

According to Ida Wong, deputy clerk of the San Francisco
Superior Court, contacted by the Globe yesterday, ”All that
we have here is 1907 and after. Everything before that was
destroyed.” Asked where surviving records might be, Wong
said, ”I would not know where to refer you.”

In an interview, Bellesiles said he can’t remember exactly
where he did the California research, that he remembers
going to the courthouse, but might have done it at the
Bancroft Library at the University of California. He said
he recalls finding 12 such probate files. Anthony Bliss,
curator of rare manuscripts at the Bancroft, says it is
possible there might be some lists in its collections, but
could not say for certain. Certainly, he said, the great
preponderance of such records were lost to the fire.

Serious questions have also been raised about an article
Bellesiles posted on his Web site called ”Men with Guns”
which seeks to buttress the findings of his book. In it,
Bellesiles discusses some Vermont probate files which list
gun ownership. Lindgren alleges that Bellesiles’s list
misrepresents the content of the originals. A Globe
examination last week of original records in the Rutland,
Vt., probate court for the 1770s and 80s shows that Lindgren
is apparently correct.

Six of many similar examples:

Bellesiles version: ”Cotton Fletcher, broken gun 6s [six
shillings]”

The original: ” a gun @ 6 shillings.”

Bellesiles: ”Isaac Cushman, old gun 12 s.”

The original: ”one gun barrel and stock, 12 s.”

Bellesiles: ”Samuel Crippin, old gun 10 s.”

The original: ”one gun @ 10 s.”

Bellesiles: ”Asher Culver, 2 old guns.”

The original: ”firearm.”

Bellesiles: ”Jonathan Mayo, broken gun 6 s.”

The original: ”1 lb. gunpowder 6 s., 3 lbs leads 3 s.”

Bellesiles: ”Abel Moulton, 5 muskets, some old, two
[pounds], 8 s.”

The original: ”Fire Arms, 2 [pounds] 8 s.”

When asked about the discrepancies, Bellesiles said he was
mystified, ”I don’t know. I am very upset about that.
It’s a mystery to me. I might have looked at a different
record book. It’s an egregious error on my part.”

Separately, in his review of Rhode Island records,
Bellesiles writes in his book that of 186 estates of
”property-owning adult males” in Colonial Providence, only
90 listed guns, and ”more than half of these guns are
evaluated as old and of poor quality.”

Lindgren found that 17 of the estates were not of men but
women. He also found that among 153 males whose estates
included inventories, 94 mentions guns. But only nine of
those are listed as old or in disrepair.

A Globe review of some of the Providence records, on file at
Boston Athenaeum, appears to confirm Lindgren’s findings.
There were many estates of women among those Bellesiles
cites, and few indicated guns in poor condition.

Asked why he characterized the guns that way, Bellesiles
said that the low prices paid for the guns at auction
indicate their poor quality.

Historian Alan Brinkley, chairman of the history department
of Columbia, says no such questions have ever been raised
about a Bancroft winner before, and since a new committee is
convened each year to choose the winners, and dissolved
afterward, there would be no clear way to reconsider a
winner. As chairman, Brinkley was the presenter at the
Bancroft ceremony, though he says he has not read
Bellesiles’s book. (The Bancroft carries a $4,000 cash
prize.)

Brinkley stressed that what Bellesiles put on his Web site
has no relevance to what is in the book. ”I don’t think
that a book prize would be rescinded on the basis of
information on a Web site. A book is a book and needs to be
judged on its own.” Brinkley added, ”There is a
difference between error and scholarly fraud. There are few
books in which there are no errors. Any book that people
set out to examine as this one has been would be found to
have errors in it. Whether in this case they go beyond
inadvertance and carelessness, I have no idea.”

Another leading historian said he finds the episode deeply
troubling.

”There are many questions raised about his use of probate
records and other materials,” says Brandeis historian David
Hackett Fischer, an authority on early America. ”They are
very serious criticisms. It cuts to the very foundation of
what he reports, and convincing answers are not coming from
him.”

Fair USE!