Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 00:52:05 -0700
From: "Clayton E. Cramer"
Subject: What a wonderful resource the Library of Congress has put online!
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html allows you to search the entire journals of the Continental Congress, the U.S. Congress (through 1873), as well as statutes adopted throughout this period. The great advantage of this resource is that you can check accuracy of quotations so painlessly that careless historians can't get away it anymore.Let me give an example. Michael Bellesiles's book Arming America quotes the Militia Act of 1792, and a bit differently than I remembered it. After explaining that the Militia Act defined every free white male 18-45 to be a member of the mililtia, Bellesiles makes the following remarks, quoting from the statute:
Further, "every citizen so enrolled, shall...be constantly provided with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints," and other accoutrements. Congress took upon itself the responsiblity of providing those guns, and specified that within five years all muskets "shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound."
[Bellesiles, Arming America, 230]
That wasn't quite how I remembered the Militia Act of 1792 (a law that I had read some years ago with great care), so I went and pulled up the statute in question from the Library of Congress site listed above. And what you do you know? The quote is not just out of context, it's actually been altered to say just the opposite of what it actually said! The actual text that Bellesiles quoted is:
That every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder....[2nd Cong., Sess. 1, Ch. 33 (1792), pp. 271-274]
Note: "provide himself." Congress did not "take upon itself the responsibility of providing those guns...." This is not a misreading by Bellesiles; he left out the critical words that would demonstrate that he has falsely characterized the statute, then inserted words into the quote that are not in the actual statute to cover over his "improvement" of the statute.
How much more egregious a case of fraud is required before Bellesiles has to answer to anyone for this? If Bellesiles is allowed to engage in this level of dishonesty without consequences, we might as well start congratulating the Holocaust deniers for their "fine scholarship."
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Clayton E. Cramer
http://www.claytoncramer.com/ to see excerpts from my five published books and full text of a number of scholarly and popular articles.