Presidents' Day should be a day of reflection on the virtues of the leaders who helped to preserve, protect, and defend our constitutional republic. So let's look at the record of George Washington and the armed citizenry.
In early 1775, tensions between Great Britain and the American colonies were reaching the breaking point. The previous October, King George III had forbidden the import of arms and ammunition into the colonies, a decision which the Americans interpreted as a plan to disarm and enslave them. Kopel, How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution, 38 Charleston Law Review 283 (2012).
Without formal legal authorization, even from the Continental Congress, Americans began to form independent militias, outside the traditional chain of command of the royal governors. In February 1775, George Washington and George Mason organized the Fairfax Independent Militia Company.
According to Mason's Fairfax County Militia Plan for Embodying the People, "a well regulated Militia, composed of the Gentlemen, Freeholders, and other Freemen" was needed to defend "our ancient Laws & Liberty" from the Redcoats. "And we do each of us, for ourselves respectively, promise and engage to keep a good Fire-lock in proper Order, & to furnish Ourselves as soon as possible with, & always keep by us, one Pound of Gunpowder, four Pounds of Lead, one Dozen Gun Flints, & a pair of Bullet-Moulds, with a Cartouch [cartridge] Box, or powder-horn, and Bag for Balls." 1 The Papers of George Mason 210-11, 215-16 (Robert A. Rutland ed., 1970). Similar militias were being formed all over the American colonies, with no formal authorization and no chain of command to the established government. The legal bases of the militias were the natural rights of self-defense and self-government.
Because Virginia's House of Burgesses had been suspended by the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, the defiant Virginians assembled in Richmond in March 1775 as a special convention. There, delegate Patrick Henry gave his famous speech, "The War Inevitable." William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817). As Henry accurately explained, all petitions for peaceful conciliation with the British had been "spurned with contempt." The British army in North America had only one purpose: "to force us to submission." Because war was inevitable, Henry argued, it was better to fight now, before the British could take Americans' guns:
...Indeed, a few weeks later, on the evening of April 18, the British army occupying Boston would march off to Lexington and Concord to conduct house-to-house searches to seize firearms and gunpowder. The American resistance to arms seizures would mark the beginning of the American Revolution.
Persuaded by Henry's eloquence, the Virginia Convention formed a committee—including Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson—"to prepare a plan for the embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men as may be sufficient" to defend the commonwealth. The Convention urged "that every Man be provided with a good Rifle" and "that every Horseman be provided . . . with Pistols and Holsters, a Carbine, or other Firelock." ("Firelock" was a synonym for "flintlock," the most common firearms of the time.) Journal of Proceedings of Convention Held at Richmond 10-11 (1775).When the Virginia militiamen assembled a few weeks later, many wore canvas hunting shirts adorned with the motto from the conclusion of Henry's speech: "Liberty or Death." Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Revolution 251 (1991).
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