ABC-CLIO - Product - Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform

Topic: American History / 1350-1800 - Origins

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Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic

Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform

Clayton E. Cramer

978-0-31338-845-3

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Clayton E. Cramer

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Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic

Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform

Clayton E. Cramer

August 1999

Praeger

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Pages

Volumes

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Hardcover

192

6 1/8x9 1/4

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eISBN

978-0-275-96615-7

978-0-313-38845-3

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	$106.95

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Examines the history behind the nation's first laws regulating the carrying of concealed deadly weapons, demonstrating the surprising connection between these laws and efforts to suppress dueling in the southern back country.

Cramer's work examines the motivations and legislative history behind the nation's first laws regulating the carrying of concealed deadly weapons and establishes a previously unexplored link between these laws and efforts to suppress dueling in the southern back country. Earlier attempts to analyze these laws focused upon efforts to maintain slavery by severely restricting the rights of free blacks: if free blacks could not possess arms and lacked other basic rights, slaves would be less inclined to seek their freedom. Cramer rejects such thinking by demonstrating that the concealed weapon laws of the early republic were not racially-motivated. He further supports the work of other scholars who have lately examined the role of Scots-Irish immigrants in creating a distinctive southern back-country culture of honor violence including dueling and brawling. It was the attempt to control such violence, Cramer argues, that led to the concealed weapons laws. Thus, rather than considering gun control laws primarily as legal or constitutional history, this study starts from a cultural and historical viewpoint.

Southern state legislatures sought to improve the morals of their back-country population through increasingly severe punishments for dueling. When judges and juries regularly refused to convict duelists, these legislatures created extrajudicial punishments by requiring elected and appointed officials, as well as lawyers, to swear oaths of non-participation in dueling. Young men, obsessed with honor and reluctant to perjure themselves for fear of damaging their public reputation, soon took to carrying Bowie knives and handguns with which to kill those who insulted them—a perfectly honorable action to much of the population. The state legislatures then severely regulated carrying of concealed deadly weapons in the hope of suppressing the bloody results of what had been, until then, an accepted practice.

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Topic: American History / 1350-1800 - Origins

Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic

Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform

James Glen

From Scottish Provost to Royal Governor of South Carolina

Ghost Empire

How the French Almost Conquered North America

George Washington

A Biographical Companion

General William Maxwell and the New Jersey Continentals

Frontier Profit and Loss

The British Army and the Fur Traders, 1760-1764

Free Trade and Sailors' Rights

A Bibliography of the War of 1812

Federalism

A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution

Family Life in 17th- and 18th-Century America

Events That Changed America in the Eighteenth Century

Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers

Primary Documents on Events of the Period

Daily Life on the Old Colonial Frontier

Daily Life in the Colonial South

Clothing through American History

The British Colonial Era

Cadwallader Colden

A Figure of the American Enlightenment

British Colonial America

People and Perspectives

Brides from Bridewell

Female Felons Sent to Colonial America

Birth of the Bill of Rights

Encyclopedia of the Antifederalists

Benjamin Rush, M.D.

A Bibliographic Guide

America's Founding Charters [Three Volumes]

Primary Documents of Colonial and Revolutionary Era Governance

American Revolution

People and Perspectives

American Indians in the Early West

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