The Long Line of the Citizen-Soldier

When the founders wrote that "a well regulated Militia" was "necessary to the security of a free State," they were describing something every colonist knew firsthand. In towns from New England to Virginia, able-bodied men were expected to own a firearm, muster on training days and turn out when the community was threatened.

This was not a professional army. Militia members were farmers, craftsmen and merchants. They supplied much of their own equipment and elected many of their own officers. Their readiness depended on a population that was already familiar with firearms from hunting, protecting livestock and daily rural life.

Many of the founding generation were deeply wary of large standing armies in peacetime. They had watched British troops quartered in colonial towns and saw a permanent army answerable only to a distant government as a potential threat to liberty. A citizen militia, by contrast, was the people themselves.

Congress gave the militia a formal national structure in the Militia Acts of 1792, which described who was enrolled and what equipment members were expected to provide. Over the following century, the organized militia evolved, and in the early twentieth century much of it became what we know today as the National Guard.

The Supreme Court addressed the relationship between the militia clause and the rest of the amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). The Court held that the opening clause announces a purpose but does not limit the operative right, which belongs to individuals. Readers who want the details of that decision will find them throughout this magazine's law coverage.

The image of the citizen-soldier endures because it reflects something true about the American character: a belief that ordinary people can be trusted with responsibility, and that liberty is best protected when it is shared broadly. On Veterans Day, it is worth remembering how far back that idea reaches.