Much of the story of gun control in America has played out from the New Deal to the present, with Congress enacting major legislation after the advent of the “Tommy gun” in the 1930s, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s and the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
But a long-lost episode from America’s earliest days illustrates that even in the nation’s infancy, politicians wrestled with the problem of firearms, both in terms of the scope of federal authority and of a mythic American exceptionalism that purportedly marked the outer limits of the power of law when it comes to guns.
Like so much of American politics in these years, the story began with the Haitian Revolution. In 1791, black revolutionaries rose up against French colonizers in a conflict that lasted for more than a decade.
Many white Americans watching from afar feared that the Haitian Revolution would spread north and lead to a massive slave rebellion. But while the fear of racial apocalypse infected some, an equally well-established desire for profit captured others. American merchants understood that war-torn markets, starved for basic supplies and luxury goods alike, could mean big bucks for them.
Alas, France did not want American merchants to trade with the Haitian rebels. So in 1804, the French navy blockaded Haitian ports. American merchants responded by arming their vessels and shooting their way through the blockade. As the New York Chamber of Commerce put it, “whether at home” or “upon the ocean,” the American man “has believed that he may lawfully carry arms, in self-defense.”
Though it took a bit of money and some serious carpentry to mount cannons on a merchant vessel, colonial Americans had done so for much of the 18th century. But in the new United States, private armed vessels seemed both unnecessary and unwarranted. After all, private citizens attacking foreign nationals could spell big trouble for the young, somewhat fragile nation.
In 1794, Congress passed a law that prohibited Americans from arming vessels if they had an “intent” to attack citizens of countries at peace with the United States, especially France and Great Britain. In 1795 and 1797, Presidents George Washington and John Adams used administrative measures to order federal customs officers to detain private armed vessels because the ships failed Congress’s intent test: The very fact of being armed during a time of peace suggested hostile “intentions.”
Fast forward to 1804, when American merchants were arming their vessels to trade with Haitian revolutionaries. Thomas Jefferson, a committed francophile, was now president. After the French diplomatic corps protested loudly about armed Americans roaming the seas, Jefferson used his 1804 State of the Union address to call for congressional action.