From the 1890s to the 1930s, a series of tropic-zone small wars molded the evolving doctrine of the U.S. Marine Corps.
The United States’ early 20th-century military interventions in Asia and the Caribbean are important because they have us reckon with questions about the use of military/naval power abroad. These questions pertain to U.S. motivations to intervene as well as the effectiveness, cost, and consequences of intervention on the peoples and military institutions involved.
This historical drama played out in the Philippines, China, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Central America between 1898 and 1934. Although the U.S. Army played the leading role throughout much of the early interventions, it was the U.S. Marines who effectively took over these tasks in the early 1910s through the early 1930s. Doing so led them to develop their own “small wars” doctrine that ultimately enhanced the service’s flexibility. These interventions also imbued the Corps with a robust history of counterinsurgency operations that informs much of its institutional identity.
New Wars for an Expansionist Century
After the Spanish-American War, the United States became an empire in all but name. Americans’ history of westward expansion across North America culminated with the closing of the frontier in 1890. That expansionist impulse then spilled overseas to places such as Hawaii and the Philippines. Missionaries and politicians wanted to spread civilization, build roads and schools, and uplift the lives of natives in these exotic locales. U.S. produce and energy companies, however, wanted access to the natural resources of these places and native labor to extract and process them. American banks funded these ventures, even going so far as to become creditors to foreign treasuries.1
Security was a major concern, too. During the 1890s and 1910s, the empires of Great Britain, Germany, France, and Russia seized lands in Africa and Asia without much consideration to the sovereignty or wishes of native peoples. The U.S. defeat of Spain created a political vacuum in its former possessions that many Americans believed would be filled by some other power if those territories were granted full autonomy. Therefore, the McKinley administration chose to stay on in such places as the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico after the war.2
Once the United States became a power with global interests, the Navy and Marine Corps expanded. Newly acquired Pacific islands such as Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, and Wake could serve as advanced bases for coaling stations and ports that allowed the U.S. Navy to project power globally and protect maritime communications and commerce.
The Marine Corps began down a path with two lanes. One was advanced base seizure and defense, the operational and conceptual antecedent for the 1934 Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. Small wars, contingency operations, and counterinsurgencies comprised the other. Although early 20th-century Marines’ intellectual predilections shifted toward the former lane, they mostly operated in the latter.
Manifest Pacific Destiny?
Soon after the McKinley administration annexed the Philippines, the U.S. Army found itself embroiled in a deadly counterinsurgency. Filipino revolutionaries fought too long against Spain to trade one colonial overlord for another. Led by Emilio Aguinaldo, the resistance first waged a conventional war in early 1899 against the Army VIII Corps operating out of Manila.3
A regiment of Marines soon arrived on Luzon to aid the Army in putting down the revolt. The most notable action for the Marines involved a battalion assault of the fortified garrison at Novaleta, southwest of Cavite, in October. Soldiers and Marines soon defeated Aguinaldo’s forces in conventional operations, and the conflict morphed into a guerrilla war.
The Marines learned from the Army’s senior leaders, who had counterinsurgency experience dating back to the Civil War and Indian wars of the frontier. By 1900, the Army had developed de facto counter-guerrilla methods that balanced violent coercion with peaceful encouragement, a “carrot and stick” approach.
By 1902, it had become evident that although waging counterinsurgencies proved a great learning experience for Marines, it certainly was not a rewarding one. Marines had learned from the Army that attraction and chastisement measures needed to be wielded in proportions dictated by the situation; the situation in the Philippines was terrible.
Harsh U.S. treatment of Filipinos drew condemnation from the American press. “Forgery, deception, the violation of the laws of hospitality . . . the wanton slaughter of troops drawn up under false representations of peaceful intention, all these things, we are assured, are manly in the eyes of a soldier,” wrote one critic.4 This would not be the last time U.S. troops, Marines included, would get lambasted in the press while waging small wars overseas.
TR’s Beefed-Up Monroe Doctrine
President Theodore Roosevelt considered the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea vital to U.S. security for several reasons. Many Caribbean countries held substantial debts to European creditors. The Roosevelt administration believed that civil unrest, often fueled by political and economic strain caused by those debts, invited European intervention. This was unacceptable to TR because it violated the Monroe Doctrine that proclaimed unilaterally an end to European colonization of the Western Hemisphere.
European naval and military presence in the Caribbean threatened the isthmian canal under construction in Panama. Once completed, the canal would give maritime and naval vessels the ability to bypass the Magellan Strait. Any threat to the canal equated to a threat to trade and the U.S. Navy’s ability to concentrate its fleets in either hemisphere. Therefore, TR promulgated a “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that asserted the right of the United States to intervene in Latin American countries to preclude powers such as Germany from establishing bases in the region.
Under these auspices, the Navy landed Marines all over the region to protect American business and quell civil/political strife. Before U.S. entry into World War I, Marines deployed to Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917; the Dominican Republic in 1903, 1904, and 1916; Panama in 1903 and 1904; Nicaragua in 1912; Mexico in 1914; and Haiti in 1914 and 1915.
By 1910, the Army wanted nothing more to do with chasing insurgents in insalubrious climes. Guerrilla wars and nation-building in places such as Cuba and the Philippines had been lackluster affairs despite some successes. The Army tried to get out of intervening in Cuba in 1906 and argued against sending soldiers to China in 1911 and later to Nicaragua in 1912. Generals and chiefs of staff such as General Leonard Wood argued that sending smaller units of Marines was a more appropriate response to troubled areas in the Caribbean than sending large Army formations.5
The success the Army had in getting away from small wars stemmed from an institutional strength the Marines lacked. The Corps’ place in the defense establishment was tenuous in the early 1900s. Despite being assigned the advanced base mission in 1900 and growing from 3,000 to nearly 10,000 men between 1899 and 1912, the Marines experienced several attempts to legislate them out of existence.
The Navy attempted to remove them from its ships in 1906, and General Wood suggested the Corps be handed over to the Army. Marines regained their places on board naval vessels by 1909, but institutional vigilance remained high. Eager to prove their worth in the face of seemingly continuous threats to their existence, Marines took over the constabulary mission without any objections from the Army.
In a way, this made sense, because the Marine Corps’ size and fluid force structure made it ideal for small-scale interventions on short notice. Its organization stemmed from the Navy and U.S. government tasking Marines to guard naval yards, serve as ships’ detachments, and form a mobile force for advanced base operation and expeditionary duty while only allotting funding for 341 officers and 9,988 enlisted personnel.6
Up to 1912, Marine regiments and battalions were provisional, organized hastily when necessary and disbanded quickly afterward. Marine Corps headquarters did this by pulling Marines from various barracks and ship detachments, appointing a command staff, and designating them a temporary unit number.7
This amorphous structure confused many outsiders, but it created a fluidity that allowed the Marines to respond to their varied missions quickly. It came in handy when Marines deployed hastily to Nicaragua in 1912 and Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914. These were high-profile interventions, especially Vera Cruz, for which Congress awarded nine Medals of Honor to Marines, including Smedley Butler, and 47 to the Army and Navy. Except for a small force of Marines that remained in Managua, Nicaragua, to guard the legation, neither intervention necessitated long occupations.
Guns to Hispaniola
Marines landed at Port-au-Prince in July 1915 after armed rebels assassinated the Haitian president and took over the government. By August, the First Provisional Brigade arrived, commanded by Colonel L. W. T. Waller along with Major Smedley Butler. Marines then went about pursuing insurgents (known colloquially as Cacos) and pacifying as much of the country as they could. Butler’s assault on Fort Rivière in November was the most dramatic combat action, ending with more than 50 insurgents killed. Marine companies soon occupied 16 Haitian towns and settled in for a long occupation.8
Marines then landed in the Dominican Republic in May 1916 after rival political factions wrested government control from President Juan Isidro Jimenes. Colonel Joseph Pendleton organized Marine units from Haiti, Cuba, and Admiral William Caperton’s warships into an expeditionary force that defeated armed Dominicans at Las Trencheras and Guayacanas and eventually took the city of Santiago. Rear Admiral Harry S. Knapp became the military governor of the country, while Pendleton and his Marines set about pacifying the countryside.
Although Haiti and the Dominican Republic were separate campaigns, Marines in both occupations drew upon what they had learned in Cuba and Panama and from working with the Army in the Philippines.9 They established native constabularies, the Gendarmerie d’Haiti and the Guardia Nacional Dominicana, with enlisted Marines serving as temporary officers. Marines used civil programs such as improving sanitation, providing basic security and medical care, and building roads as methods of attraction. Chastisement measures often took the form of combat patrols, early morning raids, the confiscation of property, and the killing of livestock.
Soon after the United States entered the Great War, Marines began using more coercive measures on Hispaniola. By the summer of 1918, insurgent activity had intensified in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. To send as many experienced troops to France as possible, Commandant George Barnett pulled Marine companies out of Hispaniola and replaced only some of them with brand new volunteers who had joined to fight the Germans, not Haitians or Dominicans.
One commander in Haiti reported in April 1917 that the “reduction of the number of Marines in Haiti by two companies is, in my opinion, a serious mistake . . . it is necessary in my mind that we increase our influence in this Island and not weaken it.”10
In Haiti, Marines revived the old corvée labor system whereby Haitians who could not afford to pay taxes for road construction paid with their own labor. While overseeing road construction in northern Haiti in January 1919, Major Clarke H. Wells allegedly ordered illegal executions of 19 Haitian prisoners.11 This event fanned the flames of an insurgency led by Charlemagne Péralte, whom the Marines assassinated nine months later.
In the Dominican Republic, cuadillos in the eastern provinces led a grassroots resistance against foreign invasion and economic exploitation.12 Bending under the pressure, the Marines brought back the odious concentration tactics they learned from the Army by relocating Dominicans from the countryside into urban centers to separate them from insurgents.
One Dominican witness to the camps described them as people being “locked up like pigs in stockades.”13 In August and September 1918, Captain Charles F. Merkel tortured and killed Dominicans found outside the concentration areas in Seibo Province. After being arrested, Merkel, to protect the Corps’ reputation, committed suicide in his cell with a smuggled pistol.14
Marines then experienced several years of acrimony after American journalists got wind of “indiscriminate killings” in the fall of 1919. Accusations in the newspapers prompted several investigations conducted by the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the U.S. Senate, all of which found only a few substantiated instances of wrongdoing. But journals such as The Nation and papers such as the Cleveland Gazette painted the Corps as a racist institution motivated by white supremacy.15 Indeed, many Marines held overt racist attitudes against Haitians and Dominicans, which caused them to underestimate their enemy and misunderstand the causes of both insurgencies.16
Hunting the Sandinistas
Amid shifting U.S. opinions on interventions, Nicaragua would be the last of the Corps’ pre-World War II counterinsurgency operations. A Marine legation had stayed in Managua since 1912 but left in 1925. Soon after its departure, conservative-leaning General Emiliano Chamarro Vargas led a revolt against the government and precipitated a civil war. The United States supported an interim government led by Adolfo Diaz, but Mexico and Honduras supported the former liberal Vice President Juan Sacasa. An army led by liberal José Maria Moncado wreaked havoc down Nicaragua’s east coast, attacking and seizing U.S. commercial property as it went.
Marines reactivated the 2nd Marine Brigade and sent it to Nicaragua under the command of Logan Feland. While the U.S. State Department brokered a peace deal between the two factions, Marines went to work again providing security for new elections and building a Nicaraguan national guard (See “A U.S. Marine in the Guardia Nacional,” pp. 20–25.).17
Liberal political and military leader Augusto César Sandino fought the Marines for five years. Soon-to-be-famous Marines such as Majors Samuel M. Harrington and Harold H. Utley, Captain Merritt A. Edson, First Lieutenant Hermann Hanneken (the Marine who had killed Charlemagne Péralte in Haiti), and First Lieutenant Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller pursued “Sandinistas” through the countryside with Thompson submachine guns and close-air support.
They garrisoned numerous posts around the country to pacify the surrounding areas, guarded U.S. commercial property, and continued to train and develop the Guardia Nacional. Air support, first introduced on Hispaniola, played a crucial role in reconnaissance, resupply, and direct combat support, an important precursor to the eventual Marine air-ground task force. Marine pilots used dive-bombing tactics on the Sandinistas, a methodology that would come in handy in major U.S. wars to come.
Like the Hispaniola occupations, the Nicaraguan campaign became unpopular in the United States. After the Great War, American public opinion shifted decidedly against military interventions. The Republican administrations of Warren G. Harding (1921–23), Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) and Herbert Hoover (1929–33) tended to favor restraint over further entanglements in Latin America.18 The Coolidge administration pulled Marines out of the Dominican Republic in 1924. They continued to pacify Haiti and Nicaragua until 1933 and were effectively pulled out by 1934. The Marines never caught Sandino.
‘A Perilous and Thankless Job’
The early to mid-1930s was an intellectual crossroads for the Corps. A fervent debate took place within the halls of Marine Corps schools as to the identity and future of the institution: Would it continue as a constabulary force or as an advanced base force? It became a mixture of the two—although the intellectual effort and force structuring that took place during this time reflected a clear predilection for the latter.
Many Marines wanted to get away from contingency operations. They learned all too well that waging small wars was a perilous and thankless job. In addition, with the occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti concluded, the Corps had manpower and brain power free to focus on what many wanted to be their future raison d’etre: advanced base seizure and defense. Even acting Commandant Lieutenant General John H. Russell, who commanded Marines in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, wanted to sideline the small wars mission in favor of the advanced base one.
The Navy accepted Russell’s proposal to restructure the Corps as an arm of the fleet by issuing General Order 241 in December 1933; the Fleet Marine Force was born. Russell then canceled the 1933–34 academic term at Marine Corps schools in Quantico so the faculty and students could write the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations.19
Enough proponents of small wars doctrine existed, however, to complete a draft of the Small Wars Manual in 1935. The text reflected the entire corpus of Marine knowledge on counterinsurgency and contingency operations. It long stood as the single most comprehensive text devoted solely to small wars in the U.S. military.
But courses on the subject never took up more than 15 percent of students’ instruction at Quantico.20 While the Fleet Marine Force conducted fleet landing exercises throughout the late 1930s, a small group of Marines, including Utley and Harrington, worked on and published a revised version in 1940—on the eve of U.S. entry into another world war.
Small Wars Then, Small Wars Again
The United States’ fortunes spent nation-building and fighting insurgencies in the early 20th century had mixed results.21 Soldiers and Marines oversaw the construction of thousands of miles of roads and telephone lines and many airfields, hospitals, clinics, and schools. They organized and trained indigenous security forces and provided security for elections. More than 4,000 U.S. troops died fighting in the Philippines, while 47 Marines died in Nicaragua and 26 were killed in Hispaniola.22 Many thousands more Filipinos, Haitians, Dominicans, and Nicaraguans died as a direct result of the occupations.
Although the Caribbean interventions succeeded in keeping European competitors out of the region (a major strategic goal), they also left a troubled legacy for the United States. Haiti would fall victim once again to internal political strife and suffer through a series of brutal dictatorships.
In the Dominican Republic, Marine-trained Rafael Trujillo used the Guardia Nacional in 1930 to seize and keep power until 1961. One historian has argued that the U.S. occupation of Cuba, in which Marines played a significant role, helped push Cubans toward communism and an alliance with the Soviet Union that precipitated the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.23
These wars’ immediate impact on the Corps was ambiguous as well. Most Marines embraced amphibious operations as the Corps’ future over counterinsurgencies and contingency missions. Promotion boards in the 1920s favored officers who fought in France over those who had not.24 Officers most associated with the “Banana Wars”—Waller, Butler, Pendleton—never became commandants. After retirement, Butler became a staunch antiwar advocate and authored War Is a Racket, a dark critique of U.S. foreign policy.25
On the other hand, the valuable experience in jungle fighting and close air support Marines gained would prove invaluable in many Pacific campaigns. Despite the Corps’ penchant for amphibious assault missions and training, once the transports left the beach the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations was of little use. Marines relied on small war veterans like Merritt Edson, “Chesty” Puller, and Hermann Hanneken, all of whom drew on their experiences in Nicaragua and Hispaniola to lead them successfully in vicious jungle fighting in the Pacific.26
For the past 70 years, counterinsurgency and contingency missions have dominated the Corps’ history.27 The Vietnam War, the numerous contingency operations of the 1980s and ’90s, and the two decades–long war on terrorism bear this out. Marines and soldiers have relearned over and over how difficult and unpopular these wars are. Once again, the services are moving away from counterinsurgency operations. But if the United States remains a world power, Marines will have to be ready for small wars missions in the future.
1. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 279; Lester D. Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc, 2002), xv.
2. Allan R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012, 3d ed., (New York: Free Press, 2012), 282–83.
3. Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860–1941 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2009), 108.
4. Edward H. Crosby, “The Military Idea of Manliness,” The Independent, April 1901, 833.
5. Birtle, Counterinsurgency Doctrine, 181–82.
6. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1914 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 462.
7. Gordon L. Rottman, U.S. Marine Corps World War II Order of Battle: Ground and Air Units in the Pacific War, 1939–1945 (West Port CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 15.
8. Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 64–65; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 29–31.
9. Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps (New York: Free Press, 1991), 192. Bruce J. Calder, The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic During the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924 (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 8–10; Keith B. Bickel, Mars Learning: The Marine Corps Development of Small Wars Doctrine, 1915–1940 (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2001), 58–59.
10. Quoted report from an unnamed brigade commander in Brigadier-General George Barnett to the Secretary of Navy, Report on Affair in the Republic of Haiti, June 1915 to June 30, 1920, U.S. Marine Corps History Division (USMC HD), Quantico, VA.
11. Major Thomas C. Turner, “Report of investigation of certain irregularities alleged to have been committed by officers and enlisted men in the Republic of Haiti,” 3 November 1919, Haitian Geographic Files, USMC HD.
12. Bruce Calder, “Caudillos and Gavilleros versus the United States Marines: Guerrilla Insurgency During the Dominican Intervention, 1916–1924,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 4 (November 1978): 656; see also Millett, Semper Fidelis, 196.
13. Calder, The Impact of Intervention, 149; Hearings before a Select Committee of Haiti and Santo Domingo, 2 vols., 67th Cong., 1st and 2d sess., 1922, 1119; Langley, The Banana Wars, 146.
14. Charles F. Merkel to Russell W. Duck, 2 October 1918, Charles Merkel Personnel File, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, MO; Mark R. Folse, “The Tiger of Seibo: Charles Merkel, George C. Thorpe, and the Dark Side of Marine Corps History,” Marine Corps History 1, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 4–18.
15. Breanne Robertson, “Rebellion, Repression, and Reform: U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic,” Marine Corps History 2, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 47–50.
16. Col L. W. T. Waller to Col S. D. Butler, 13 July 1916, Butler Papers, Marine Corps Archives (MCA), Quantico, VA; Millett, Semper Fidelis, 187.
17. BGen Edwin Howard Simmons, USMC (Ret.), The United States Marines: A History (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 112–14.
18. Jeffrey W. Meiser, Power and Restraint: The Rise of the United States 1898–1941 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 195.
19. Bickel, Mars Learning, 211–13; Millett, Semper Fidelis, 330–32.
20. Bickel, Mars Learning, 222.
21. Alan McPherson, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 262.
22. For Philippine numbers, see Timothy K. Deady, “Lessons from a Successful Counterinsurgency: The Philippines, 1899–1902,” Parameters 35, no. 1 (June 2005): 53–68. For Hispaniola and Nicaragua, see Simmons, The United States Marines, 117; Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 180.
23. Aaron O’Connell, “Defending Imperial Interests in Asia and the Caribbean, 1898–1941,” in America, Sea Power, and the World, James Bradford, ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell and Sons, 2016), 161.
24. Oral history transcript, Brigadier General Victor F. Bleasdale, interviewed by Benis M. Frank, 4 December 1979 (Washington, DC: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1984), 160; Millett, Semper Fidelis, 323.
25. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket, Adam Parfrey, ed. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), 24.
26. Bickel, Mars Learning, 250.
27. Jeannie L. Johnson, The Marines Counterinsurgency and Strategic Culture: Lessons Learned and Lost in America’s Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018) 6–7.
DGAF = Don’t Give A Fuck
The title of this article may seem curious, but there is a point to it. Consider the fact that “assault weapon” is an intentionally nebulous, malleable term created and promoted by anti-gun extremists with the stated intent of creating confusion. A “weapon” can actually be anything that is simply used to inflict damage or bodily harm. It can be specifically designed to be used as a weapon, but could it be the actual use of the item, not the design, that makes the ultimate determination as to whether it is, indeed, a “weapon”?
This may be a philosophical debate, but is an antique rifle hung above a fireplace—one never intended to be taken down, loaded, and fired—still a “weapon” because of its design, or has it now become a decoration because of its actual ornamental use?
To take an even deeper philosophical dive, is a chair’s existence in the universe somehow magically altered from furniture to “weapon” the moment someone picks it up to strike someone else? Perhaps this is a loose variation on the quantum mechanics thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.
The chair is both furniture and weapon, and the rifle is both weapon and decoration, until someone “opens the box” to decide the application, thus determining how the items will actually exist in the world.
The ultimate truth is that something is only a weapon if it is used, or intended to be used, as one. So an “assault weapon” can, technically, be any item used to “assault” someone.
But proponents of banning the possession of firearms by law-abiding US citizens have strived for decades to inculcate in the American psyche the notion that an “assault weapon” is a specific type of firearm; usually a semi-automatic rifle that incorporates a detachable magazine.
Today, the anti-gun industrial complex wants the image of an AR-15 to pop into your mind when it screams about banning “assault weapons,” but that wasn’t always the case. In the early days of the use of the term—in the mid-1980s—it was often semi-automatic versions of the AK-47, MAC-10, or Uzi that were depicted with the sobriquet “assault weapon.”
The term is so malleable and undefinable by design, however, that extremists have also used it to describe countless handguns and shotguns, and the ability to utilize a detachable magazine is not always considered a prerequisite for inclusion as an “assault weapon.” Indeed, even those who promote banning “assault weapons” are often so confused by their own term that they frequently either misidentify firearms, or simply cannot, or refuse to, offer a definition of the term.
In other words, those who wish to ban “assault weapons” will ultimately determine what is an “assault weapon,” the list of items banned will likely be far more inclusive than exclusive, and said list will also likely be subject to never-ending expansion.
In fact, the most recent version of a proposed federal ban on “assault weapons” would appear to ban ALL semi-automatic firearms, then “exempts” some semi-autos from the ban, and would require the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to maintain a list of guns that would be legal under the new paradigm.
So, what does any of this have to do with the “Bowie knife”? More than you might think.
Much like an “assault weapon,” a “Bowie knife” is fairly hard to define—at least, originally, when the term was created ~1830s. The original “Bowie knife”—the one supposedly carried by frontiersman Jim Bowie that was initially “popularized” through accounts of his use of it at the Sandbar Fight in 1827—likely did not resemble what most today consider a Bowie knife. And while today’s versions often vary in appearance, most are relatively large knives, carried in a sheath, and frequently include a crossguard and a clip-point.
Also much like an “assault weapon,” there’s nothing innovative or unique to a “Bowie knife”—either originally or currently—that makes it remarkably different from other knives. It has a blade and a handle, just like most other knives, and is a design that is millennia old. It is on the larger end of the spectrum of knives, but the same can be said for countless other knife designs that predate the “Bowie knife” by centuries, if not also millennia.
Similarly, “assault weapons” utilize the same technology for operating—including as related to storing, loading, discharging, and cycling ammunition—as has existed for well over a century. In fact, the semi-automatic operation utilized by “assault weapons” was invented in the 19th century, mere decades after the “Bowie knife” came to be. These firearms generally fire ammunition that is not only no more powerful than what most hunters use for harvesting deer, but is often much less powerful, ballistically speaking.
And just like with “assault weapons,” around the time the term “Bowie knife” was being more frequently used to describe certain styles of blades, laws that sought to regulate them began popping up around the country. Again, the knife was not innovative or truly unique in any way, but because people attached a certain mystique to the name (just like with “assault weapons”), and the knife itself began growing in popularity (again, just like with “assault weapons”), it drew the attention of lawmakers determined to impose regulations on arms.
Second Amendment scholar and attorney David Kopel wrote two articles last year that expose the eerie similarities between how these knives were treated in the mid-to-late 19th century and semi-automatic firearms today, although that does not appear to have been the goal of his work. One discusses some of the ways firearms and “Bowie knives” were regulated in America prior to 1900, and another looks at statutes between 1837 and 1899 that were specific to regulating “Bowie knives.”
One of the points raised by Kopel makes yet another argument for how “Bowie knives” were America’s first “assault weapon.” It wasn’t until a single, high-profile incident took place that laws restricting “Bowie knives” really started being enacted.
In 1837, a debate between two Arkansas State Representatives escalated to the point of both drawing “Bowie knives,” with the end result being one dead, and one seriously wounded. Of course, this was long before the Internet, television, or radio, and even the telegraph was still in the process of being developed for widespread use at the time, so news spread slowly in those days. Nonetheless, a fatal stabbing in the Arkansas State House likely garnered a bit of national attention, and undoubtedly helped spur on some of the “Bowie knife” laws that were passed following the event.
In the same year the Arkansas fight took place, but before the actual altercation, two states—Mississippi and Alabama—enacted the first “Bowie knife” restrictions. After the fight, Georgia passed its own restrictions, some of which were eventually declared unconstitutional. The next year saw four states enact their own restrictions, and by 1859, a total of 16 states and territories had enacted some form of a restriction on “Bowie knives.”
By 1899, with 46 states included in the Union, 32 had laws on their books that referenced “Bowie knives” or a variant of the term, according to Kopel.
So, if you thought emotionalism driving legislation was a problem unique to modern times—due largely to the explosion of social media and the 24/7 instant news reporting of any tragedy—that’s probably not the case. In fact, now that we do have the Internet, social media, and seemingly unlimited news outlets (even if most of the media tend to support rabidly anti-gun views), there are probably more opportunities today to fend off legislation that is emotionally driven, as there are more opportunities for the public to hear logic-based views countering emotional arguments.
Looking back at the spread of anti-“Bowie knife” legislation in the 19th century, two things should be noted. First, at least one law that banned the sale of them was deemed unconstitutional, and in violation of the Second Amendment, when challenged in court. Another court found the carrying of “Bowie knives” to be a right protected under the Second Amendment.
These court decisions from the mid-19th century are just two of many that eviscerate the anti-gun myth that the more recent rulings out of the US Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) somehow invented the idea that the Second Amendment protects an individual right both to arms, and to carrying those arms.
Another interesting aspect of the comparison between “Bowie knives” and “assault weapons” is the fact that most of the legislative animus towards each has been geographically flipped. In the 19th century, it was Southern states that predominantly looked to restrict the vilified knives, while the northeast largely ignored such restrictions.
Kopel even noted an interesting contrast to how the South was treating “Bowie knives” out of New Hampshire:
“Like all of the Northeast, New Hampshire in mid-century had no interest in Bowie knife laws. But Bowie knives did appear in a legislative resolution that considered Bowie knives and revolvers to be effective for legitimate defense.”
Today, of course, Southern states tend to reject restrictions on “assault weapons,” while many states in the Northeast have adopted bans and other unconstitutional restrictions on them.
Eventually, the hyper-emotional reaction to “Bowie knives” from the 19th century waned, and today, most states consider them little different than any other knife. No state currently bans their sale, as some tried to do way back when, and no state currently tries to dissuade their possession with prohibitive taxes for purchase or possession, as was imposed in the past. And no state bans their mere possession. Bans on sales, exorbitant taxes, and bans on possession are all, of course, methods today’s anti-arms extremists use to try to restrict our right to own “assault weapons.”
So, whether or not you agree with the hypothesis that “Bowie knives” were America’s first “assault weapon,” there is at least one conclusion to this discussion with which anyone who supports the Second Amendment can likely agree.
Rather than capitulate to the anti-“assault weapon” hysteria of today, as so many apparently did during the anti-“Bowi knife” hysteria of the 19th century, NRA and our supporters must continue to fight against the irrational, emotional arguments of those who promote disarming law-abiding Americans. We are not willing to be “those” who are described in the aphorism widely attributed to philosopher George Santayana:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We must remember what happened to America’s first “assault weapon,” and reject the emotional, illogical call to impose restrictions on our right to arms, as those in the 19th century should have done with the imposed restrictions on “Bowie knives.” The similarities between the two campaigns separated by roughly a century-and-a-half should be recognized, and rather than wait for states that act irrationally to eventually come to their senses, as was the case with “Bowie knives,” we need to defeat these emotionally-driven, anti-freedom agendas, and make sure these particular errors of the mid-to-late 19th century are not repeated.