Madison's Federalist 46 and the advantage of being armed that tyrants fear

The father of the Constitution once reassured a skeptical nation that its new federal government could never become a tyranny, and his best evidence was that the people had guns. Nobody writing the modern version of that essay would get past a cable-news booker. Yet there it sits in the Federalist Papers, in the plainest prose, waiting for anyone who cares to read it.

The essay is Federalist No. 46. It is one of the most useful documents for understanding what the founders thought an armed citizenry was for, and it is useful precisely because it comes from the men who wanted the Constitution ratified, not the men who feared it.

The setting: a fight over a standing army

Some context first. The Constitution was signed in September 1787 and sent to the states for ratification. Its opponents, who came to be called the Anti-Federalists, raised many objections, but one of the loudest was about military power. The new Congress would have the authority to raise and support armies, and to call forth the militia. Was that not a recipe for the oldest tyranny in the book, a government with a professional army that could be turned on its own citizens?

The Federalists, led in the newspapers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay writing as "Publius," needed an answer. The eighty-five essays of the Federalist were published mostly between October 1787 and the spring of 1788. Madison's No. 46 appeared on January 29, 1788, in the New York Packet, and it takes up the question of whether the federal government or the state governments would have the advantage in a contest over the people's loyalty, and what would happen if the federal government tried to use force.

The key point is that the argument works only if one assumption holds: that ordinary Americans were armed.

What Madison actually wrote

I will quote the passages exactly, because this is a document that gets paraphrased badly.

The central sentence is this:

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Look at the grammar. Madison lists two protections against federal ambition. The first is "the advantage of being armed," which Americans possess "over the people of almost every other nation." The second is the existence of state governments that the people are attached to and that appoint the militia officers. He says "besides," which means he regards the armed population as a separate, distinct protection. And he says the combination forms "a barrier... more insurmountable" than any a single, unified government could offer.

Then comes the comparison with Europe:

Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

The sentence is a contrast. European governments, with large standing armies, still feared their own people to the point of refusing to let them be armed. American government, which was not so afraid, could rely on a people who held arms. The difference in the trust between government and governed is the difference between a monarchy and a republic.

Finally, the arithmetic. Madison asks how large a federal army could realistically become, and answers that the best computation puts a standing army at no more than one hundredth of the whole number of souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms:

This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.

Check the sums. If an army of 25,000 to 30,000 is one twenty-fifth of those able to bear arms, then the arms-bearing population is 25 times 25,000, or 625,000, up to 25 times 30,000, or 750,000. Madison rounds the militia down to "near half a million." The figures are an eighteenth-century estimate and should be read as a rough size of the argument, not a census. The logic is what counts: a regular army that is a small fraction of the population cannot subdue a population that is armed, organized and fighting for its own freedom.

The reasoning in numbered steps

Madison's case can be set out as a short argument.

1. A federal standing army, if one were ever raised, would be limited by what the country could afford to maintain. There is a ceiling.
2. Against that ceiling stands the militia, which is the armed body of citizens, many times larger.
3. The militia is not a faceless institution. It is officered by men chosen from among the people, and appointed by the state governments that the people trust.
4. A federal attempt at tyranny would therefore face an armed and organized population and loyal state governments.
5. So the danger of a federal army, though real in theory, is checked in practice.

Step 2 is where the guns come in. The argument does not say the people could win a war against a modern army by themselves. It says that a government contemplating abuse has to count the cost, and that the number of armed citizens is a large part of the cost. That is a deterrence argument. A burglar does not need to be certain the homeowner is armed. He needs only to consider the possibility.

Hamilton's Federalist No. 29

Madison was not alone. Hamilton wrote No. 29, titled "Concerning the Militia," which appeared in January 1788, and it makes the complementary point from the side of organization. Hamilton's focus was on whether the federal government should have power over the militia, which Anti-Federalists feared as a way of controlling the states. He answered that the Constitution's militia clauses were reasonable, since a uniform discipline was needed for effective defence.

But the most famous line from No. 29 is about the people at large: "Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year."

Notice three things about that sentence. It speaks of "the people at large," not a select force. It uses the word "armed" as a goal of policy. And it recommends only light training, one or two assemblies a year, which fits the model of a citizen militia, not a standing professional one. In No. 29 he writes that if a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of the body that is the guardian of the national security.

Those two essays, together, are a statement from the main architects of the Constitution about how the new government should relate to an armed population: it should assume one, rely on it, and organize it, not disarm it.

The Anti-Federalists agreed on the key point

Here is where the history gets interesting. The Federalists and Anti-Federalists disagreed about nearly everything else, but they agreed on this. An armed people is a check on concentrated power.

The Anti-Federalist writer known as the Federal Farmer, in a letter of January 1788, wrote that 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. He worried about a select militia that could be a tool of government and wanted the militia to be the whole people. His fear was that Congress might neglect the militia, and then claim the army was necessary.

So the two sides were not disputing whether the people should be armed. They were disputing how well the Constitution protected that fact. The Anti-Federalists wanted explicit guarantees, and that demand produced the state conventions' proposed amendments, which in turn produced the Second Amendment. (That history is told in What the ratifying conventions demanded before Madison drafted an arms right.) The Federalists said the guarantee was already built into the structure. Madison, in a delicious bit of political jujitsu, then wrote the amendments himself in 1789.

This agreement matters because it undercuts a modern story: that the arms right was a minor provision, a concession to a rural fringe, with no weight in the founding debate. Both sides treated the armed citizenry as the foundation of American liberty. The only quarrel was whether the text did enough to protect it.

The strongest objection, stated fairly

The best argument against reading Federalist 46 as a defense of private arms goes like this. Madison speaks of the militia, not of individuals. "A militia amounting to near half a million of citizens" is an organized military force with officers appointed by the states. The advantage of being armed is the advantage of a militia system, a collective institution. And the essay is an argument for why a federal army would not be dangerous, not an argument for any right to own a weapon. Besides, the essay is a campaign document, written to calm voters, with no force of law. What the Court needs is the Constitution's text and not the optimism of one of its advocates.

I want to take the objection seriously, because it is a fair statement of the best reading on the other side. Here are the answers.

First, the militia was the people. In the founding understanding, a militia of half a million "citizens with arms in their hands" was an armed population. Madison counted every man able to bear arms, and made them the militia. A militia of that size could not exist without private arms in private hands.

Second, "being armed" is a property of the people. Madison wrote of "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess." The word is "Americans," not "the American militia system." The advantage belongs to the population.

Third, the contrast with Europe shows the point. European governments were "afraid to trust the people with arms." That sentence is about whether people, as individuals, are allowed to be armed. If the American advantage were only a militia, the European governments had militias too. The difference Madison cites is trust, and trust in the people means trust in the people.

Fourth, the document is evidence, not law, and that is all we ask of it. We use the Federalist as the Supreme Court does: as a contemporary explanation by a principal drafter of what the text was understood to mean. Courts have long cited it for that purpose. District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) cited Federalist No. 46 for the militia of "near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands" and Federalist No. 29, and it observed that when the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.

Fifth, there is a limit we must acknowledge. Madison was making a claim about deterrence, not announcing a legal entitlement to armed revolt, and a responsible reader should not turn it into a call for violence. The point of the essay is the opposite: the best result is that the check works by being there, and is never used. A government that knows its citizens are armed behaves more carefully. The goal is that tyranny never be attempted.

Why tyrants fear it

The title of this post claims that tyrants fear the advantage of being armed. Is it true? History offers a pattern, not a law, but the pattern is clear.

Rulers who intend to concentrate power have generally begun by taking the means of resistance from the people. James II's disarmament of his Protestant subjects in the 1680s, discussed in The 1689 English Bill of Rights and the arms clause Americans refused to copy, is one case. The British effort to seize colonial powder and arms in 1774 and 1775, which led to Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, is another, and it is told in The Powder Alarm and the British arms embargo that came before Lexington. Both times, the aim was control, and both times people noticed.

Madison's insight was that the other direction also holds. A people who are armed, who hold their own governments dear, and who choose their own officers present a barrier that no ambitious faction can easily cross. It is a structural check, like the separation of powers or the federal division of authority. It does not depend on the virtue of any particular office-holder.

There is a gentle comedy in the modern attempts to treat the essay as an embarrassing relic. The line in Federalist No. 51 about ambition counteracting ambition is quoted with reverence in civics classes. A line from No. 46 saying the same thing about arms is treated as a typographical error. You cannot revere the architecture and hide one of its load-bearing walls.

What it means for a family

The practical lesson is about citizenship. The founders did not think liberty was kept safe by a document alone. It was kept safe by a citizenry that was informed, organized and, yes, armed, and that held its own governments close. Read the essay for what it says about responsibility: a people who hold arms hold a trust, and the founders assumed that the armed citizen was also an educated one, trained and attached to his community.

If you want to see how the idea shaped the text itself, George Mason and the well regulated militia composed of the body of the people follows the Virginia language, and The right of the people means the same thing in the First, Second and Fourth explains why "the people" is the same people throughout the Bill of Rights. The full text of the Federalist and the Constitution can be read through the site's Constitution page and founders page.

The case in brief

1. In Federalist No. 46 (January 29, 1788), Madison named "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation" as a barrier against federal ambition.
2. His arithmetic compared a federal army of twenty-five or thirty thousand with a militia of near half a million citizens with arms in their hands.
3. Hamilton's No. 29 said the people at large should be properly armed and equipped, and trained once or twice a year.
4. Anti-Federalists such as the Federal Farmer agreed that the whole body of the people should have arms, so the dispute was about guarantees, not the principle.
5. The objection that this is only about a militia system fails because the militia was the armed people and Madison's contrast with Europe was about trusting individuals.

What you can do: read Federalist No. 46 in full and Federalist No. 29 alongside it, then pass the two essays to a friend who thinks the founders never discussed an armed citizenry.