Even some strong nationalists, such as George Mason, had qualms. In 1776, when he drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Section 13, Mason wrote, “Standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
For a militia to be effective, of course, it needed to be armed. Lee was strong on that point as well. He would later write that a “militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms…to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.” Patrick Henry had similar views. “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.”
But both were talking of an armed population in lieu of a standing army. Neither Lee, Henry, nor any other white Virginian advocated a universal right to bear arms. Almost no one did. Free Blacks, of which there were almost sixty thousand, more than half of those in the South, were legally enjoined from owning weapons, as were those of mixed race. It was only in the context of the perceived future need of “citizen soldiers,” militia members, that armed civilians was discussed. Whether or not Americans—once again, white Americans—should have the inviolate right to keep weapons for self-defense, key to the current debate over gun ownership, was neither considered nor debated.
When the Constitutional Convention began, while virtually all the delegates favored private gun ownership, that is not to say they thought such a provision should be enshrined in the new Constitution, nor that the right was to be free of government control. In terms of national defense, although some, such as Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a former army general, recognized the need for a standing army, few others felt the same. Still, avoiding a national military in favor of militias promised to be no easy task when Washington and those who had experienced both were bitterly opposed.