1. Quoted in Sugarmann, Josh, National Rifle Association: Money, Firepower, and Fear (Washington DC: National Press Books, 1992), 14 Google Scholar.

2. Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tilly, Charles, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Evans, Peter B., Bringing The State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Weber, Max, “The Types of Legitimate Domination,” in Economy and Society, ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

3. McNeill, William H., Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 140 Google Scholar; Metzner, Henry, A Brief History of the American Turnerbund, trans. Theodore Stempfel, Jr. (Pittsburgh, PA: National Executive Committee of the American Turnerbund, 1924)Google Scholar; Trefethen, James B. and Serven, James E., Americans and Their Guns: The National Rifle Association Story Through Nearly A Century of Service to the Nation. (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1967), 111 Google Scholar. All spellings of foreign words are given as found in their original context. Alternate spellings of German words using the umlaut were often changed to meet the limitations of American typesetting capabilities at the time, for example.

4. Abanes, Richard, American Militias (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Anderson, Jack, Inside the NRA: Armed and Dangerous (Beverly Hills, CA: Dove Books, 1996)Google Scholar; Davidson, Osha Gray, Under Fire: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control (New York: H. Holt, 1993)Google Scholar; Stern, Kenneth S., A Force Upon The Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar; Sugarmann, National Rifle Association.

5. Cress, Lawrence Telbert, Citizens in Arms: The Army & the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Pitcavage, Mark, “Ropes of Sand: Territorial Militias, 1801–1812,” Journal of the Early Republic 13 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Prior to the Dick Act, military matters were left to the states, and often went unfulfilled, given a persistent lack of enthusiasm, manpower, and money. With the exception of Massachusetts and Connecticut, most states rarely met the standards expected of them by Congress. This is ironic, however, because their many representatives in the early Congresses had lobbied vigorously to protect their right to muster and maintain state militias of their own, as opposed to a national militia system run by the federal government.

7. Cress, Citizens in Arms; Cooper, Jerry, The Rise of the National Guard: The Evolution of the American Militia, 1865–1920 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

8. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 4–6.

9. Cress, Citizens in Arms, 58—direct quotes from John Adams to Henry Knox, Aug. 25, 1776.

10. Cress, “An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms,” The Journal of American History 71 (1984): 22–42; Cress, Citizens in Arms; Pitcavage, “Ropes of Sand.”

11. Patrick Henry, “5 June 1788” in The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, ed. Ralph Ketcham (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 202.

12. Cress, “An Armed Community.”

13. Cress, Citizens in Arms, 62.

14. Ibid., 63.

15. Cress, “An Armed Community,” 34.

16. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 9.

17. Ibid.

18. As late as 1839, Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett would complain that a “majority of [the militia] are armed with walking canes, fowling pieces, or unserviceable muskets.”

19. Riker, Soldiers of the States, 28–29; Pitcavage, “Ropes of Sand,” 496–97; Michael Bellisîles, “The Origins of American Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865,” The Journal of American History 83: 434–38.

20. Riker, Soldiers of the States, 37; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (1966; New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 169.

21. Pitcavage, “Ropes of Sand,” 500, 493–94.

22. Riker, Soldiers of the States, 37, quoted from American State Papers: Military Affairs, 2:663–64. See also Emory Upton, The Military Policy of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904).

23. Riker, Soldiers of the States, 39–40.

24. Lena London, “The Militia Fine, 1830–1860,” Military Affairs 15 (1951): 133–44; Cooper, The Rise of The National Guard, 13– 14.

25. John Gorham Palfrey, “A plea for the militia system in a discourse delivered before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, on its CXCVIIth anniversary, June 1, 1835,” (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1835), 5–7, emphasis added.

26. Bellesîles, “Origins of American Gun Culture,” 435, 434– 38.

27. Fogelson, Robert M., America's Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4–5 Google Scholar.

28. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 16.

29. Ibid., 17.

30. Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975).

31. Fogelson, America's Armories, 4.

32. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 15–16.

33. Note that the verb turnen [to perform gymnastic exercises] is not originally of German origin but was adopted by Jahn, who is credited with coining the term.

34. Metzner, Brief History of the American Turnerbund, 40.

35. Some Turners in the Deep South did side with, and fight for, the Confederate cause during the War, however. Robert Knight Barney, “Knights of Cause and Exercise: German Forty-Eighters and Turnvereine in the United States During the Antebellum Period,” Canadian Journal of the History of Sport 2 (1982): 62–79; Faust, Albert Bernhardt, The German Element in the United States, vol. II (New York: Steuben Society of America, 1927), 387–90Google Scholar; Ueberhorst, Horst, “Die Nordamericanischen Turner und Ihr Jahnbild,” Stadion 4 (1978): 358–64Google Scholar; McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 137–39.

36. Barney, “German-American Turnvereins and Socio-Politico- Economic Realities in the Antebellum and Civil War Upper and Lower South,” Stadion 10 (1984): 135–81; Annette R. Hofmann, “The Turners’ Loyality for their New Home Country: Their Engagement in the American Civil War,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (1995): 153–68.

37. Cooper, Rise of the National Guard, 17.

38. The collection at the Houghton Library of Harvard University include, for example, programs from an 1891 New York National Guard performance of Shakespeare's “As You Like It,” an 1874 minstrel show put on by a local encampment of the New York Grand Army of the Republic, two 1877 comedies performed by the Boston Navy Yard Dramatic Club, and an 1874 play by the Boston Light Infantry.

39. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 79–80; Fogelson, America's Armories, 6.

40. See, for example, Schützenverein, Madison, Constitution, Neben-Gesetz und Regeln des Madison Schuetzenverein (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Staats-Zeitung, 1895)Google Scholar; also Trefethen and Serven, Americans and Their Guns, 111–12.

41. Though the concept of armories as warehouses, fortresses, and training grounds for militias was certainly nothing new, most civilian military groups had previously relied on small, rented quarters for such purposes. Prior to the late 1870s, “only Brooklyn [of the nation's big cities] came close to providing adequate quarters for the volunteer militia.” New York's Tweed Ring was infamous for its practice of obtaining unoccupied buildings and then renting them at exorbitant rates to state- and city-funded militia groups. Even Boston's prestigious First Corps of Cadets had had to make due in the MIT gymnasium. Fogelson, America's Armories, 17; see also Riker, Soldiers of the States, 60. Riker writes, What rivers and harbors were to Congress – that is, a device to distribute pork barrel to the district of every Congressman – armories became to many state legislatures. Whenever they could, National Guard officials of course took full advantage of the pork barrel. Thus, in the two decades, 1891–1910, New York built armories in forty legislative districts at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars.

42. Fogelson, America's Armories, 28.

43. Fogelson, America's Armories, 1–2, 28; also Bonnett, Clarence, Employers’ Associations in the United States (New York: Vantage, 1956)Google Scholar; Voss, Kim, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

44. 116 U.S. 2552 (1886), emphasis added.

45. “A Menace,” The Chicago Tribune, 21 April, 1879.

46. Ibid.

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48. “Military Despotism,” The Socialist, March 1, 1879.

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51. Trefethen and Serven, Americans and Their Guns, 36–41.

52. Ibid., 88.

53. Ibid., 67–78.

54. Independent Company of Cadets, Roll of the Independent Company of Cadets – 1814 (Boston: s.n., 1814); Massachusetts Militia, First Division, Independent Company of Cadets, The Constitution of the Independent Company of Cadets, attached to the First Division, Mass. Volunteer Militia (Boston: Franklin Printing House, 1857); Massachusetts, 1st Corps of Cadets, The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the First Corps Cadets, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, October 19, 1891 (Boston: N. Sawyer & Son, 1892); Antenucci, Joseph, Ripman, Christopher Hugh, and Zumwalt, Kurt, Armory, First Corps of Cadets, 1887–1973, at the corner of Arlington Street and Columbus Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts (Boston: Veteran Association of the First Corps of Cadets, 1973)Google Scholar. Many of the extant papers of the First Corps of Cadets are currently housed in the Special Collections Division, Mugar Library, Boston University (which houses all of the collections of the former Military Historical Society of Massachusetts).

55. Harwood, W. S., “Secret Societies in America,” North American Review 164 (1897): 617 Google Scholar, emphasis added.

56. The Volunteer, vol. 1, no. 2 (May 1889); this was the only edition of The Volunteer available in the holdings of the former Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, and I have not been able to ascertain how long The Volunteer remained in publication.

57. Ibid., 75–77.

58. Ibid., 77.

59. Ibid., 78. Another excerpt reads, “Chelsea is the only city in Massachusetts which fails to provide her local militia with a rifle range, while the armory which is provided for Co. H, 1st regiment, would be an utter disgrace to any country village.”

60. Bellesîles, “Origins of Gun Culture in the United States,” 425–55.

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63. Quoted in Sharpe, The Rifle in America, 197; see also Trefethen and Serven, Americans and Their Guns, 67–78.

64. Army and Navy Journal, October 27, 1877, quoted in Trefethen and Serven, Americans and Their Guns, 79.

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68. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 108–12; Derthick, The National Guard in Politics, 24–29; Riker, Soldiers of the States, 60–63.

69. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard, 83; see also Skowronek, Building A New American State, 94.

70. Col. Thomas F. Edmands, “Memorial or Protest.”

71. Trefethen and Serven, Americans and Their Guns, 132.

72. Ibid., 128–30.

73. Ibid., 134.

74. Ibid., 134.

75. Ibid., 158.

76. Ibid., 162.