Public Arms and Private Armies: Militia weapons, gun clubs and the remaking of the United States

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Gage, Beverly

Abstract

The United States is heavily armed. It has the biggest military budget, the greatest police spending and the most civilian guns per capita of any country in the world. Public Arms, Private Armies: Militia weapons, gun clubs and the remaking of the United States interrogates the historical roots of this extraordinary militarization by considering arms supply and circulation between the Civil War and the First World War. In the nineteenth century the police, military, and civilians could all access federal weapons, and this influenced patterns of power and governance in American society. This dissertation traces these arms from the federal government to where they ended up, finding they fueled some of the most egregious events of political violence in the postbellum United States. Scholarship has either emphasized this period as the emergence of ‘modern’ security forces out of ‘premodern’ extra-state violence or has narrated the violence in this period as atomized by race and place. Instead, across regions, Public Arms, Private Armies explores the history of the various groups that stockpiled weapons, the arms trade that supplied them, and the federal militia policy that connected the two. In the wake of the Civil War, there was a glut of second-hand, decommissioned weapons left over from the recent conflict just as there was government investment in new, far more lethal, breechloading rifles. Each of my dissertation chapters follows these two forms of federal ordnance, released through militia appropriations, to gun clubs across the U.S. empire. In the first chapter, I set up the role of militia financing in the nineteenth century and follow these surplus Civil War weapons to Egypt. In the second chapter I follow them to Reconstruction Louisiana. While the federal government demonized the White League at the national level, they also facilitated arms transfers to the white supremacist organization. In the third chapter I follow the arms to the Midwest, which supplied the industrial geography of the Northwest company town in the Coeur d’Alenes in the 1890s, as well as a lynch mob in Southern Missouri at the turn of the century. Finally, I follow these arms to the first overseas branch of the U.S. National Guard: a recently banned haole separatist gun club on O‘ahu. Most importantly, in Hawai‘i, as in each of these sites, the arrival of firearms foreclosed possibilities of multiracial democracy, and political pluralism. In their wake, armed groups enforced a distinctively American deputized white supremacy. Rather than a fundamental break between pre-modern and modern militia in the Progressive Era, the conclusion considers how federal militia policy expanded the remit of the militia without narrowing its definition and reflects on Progressive Era militia policy within its colonial setting.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS