Right to Bear Arms

 
Dohrman Byers
 
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Dohrman Byers
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21 June 2011 10:35
 

It strikes me that, in American heraldry, the use of arms is generally seen as indicating or claiming some sort of social status, but there is no understanding as to what that status is.

This problem arises, in part, from the friability of the relation between social status and bearing arms. As James pointed out, a socially prominent ancestor can have socially obscure descendants. The latter inherit his arms, but not his social status. This is not true where there is a class of hereditary nobility. The penniless heir of a count is still a count, and outranks the wealthiest commoner. For citizens of the United States, however, “titles of nobility” are prohibited. The Constitution recognized only two kinds of heritable status: citizenship and slavery, the latter eliminated by the 13th Amendment.

 

The Founders clearly intended that the use of heraldry continue in the new republic. Not only did they continue to use arms personally, but they also adopted a coat of arms for the nation. They probably had opinions as to who should bear arms, but they did nothing to impose their opinions on anyone, making no provision for the regulation of arms.

 

America has never been a classless society, but no social class or category has ever made the use of arms a distinguishing characteristic or indicator of membership. While the use of arms has been more widespread among the “upper” classes, in no class is it universal or socially de rigueur. The only group I can think of which expects all of its members to use arms and which uses arms extensively to identify its members is the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church; and that usage belongs more to the supra-national tradition of the church than to the American heraldic tradition.

 

American society simply does not recognize any definable social status, other than citizenship, that may imply the right to bear of arms.

 

It is unusual for heraldry to be used without any discernable social basis, but such is the American way. Arms have been used in this country since its inception, and they stand in historic continuity with the traditions of European heraldry. American heraldry, however, has taken its own course with regard to the right to bear arms. Any general account of heraldry simply has to take that fact into account.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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21 June 2011 12:25
 

As insightful as always, Fr. Dohrman.  Worthy of Crevecoeur and Toqueville,  I believe.

"The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions."  (Hector St. J. de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Letter II, 1781)

 

"Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.  I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed."  (Alexis de Toqueville, first paragraph of the introduction to Democracy in America, 1835)

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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19 July 2011 01:59
 

Still trying to weigh the anglocentric view vs. something more pluralistic as a point of departure for contemporary heraldic usage in the U.S., it strikes me that Washington’s own appeal to the College of Arms (AFTER the Revolution, no less) for confirmation of his entitlement to use the arms of Wessyngton of Sulgrave Manor is potentially significant. It raises interesting questions, at least.

For one thing, what exactly did the College of Arms represent for Washington? Did he view it as no more than a repository of genealogical data, or did he think that, despite everything, the approbation of that body really was essential for arms to be legitimate? I guess the charitable construction of it is to say that Washington simply wanted to make sure he wasn’t infringing on someone else’s armorial identity and was doing his due diligence. If it had turned out that the Wessyngton arms were not his, would he have assumed a different coat of arms, would he have applied for a grant, or would he have just said, "Sour grapes"? We’ll never know, but can reasonable conjectures be made?

 
steven harris
 
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steven harris
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19 July 2011 08:53
 

I think that the Anglocentricity of heraldry in the United States can most easily be explained by the simple fact that our nation and the British heraldic authorities (College of Arms, Lord Lyon, even Canada) all literally speak the same language – English.

I am very interested to learn about the heraldic practices in other realms – Spain, Poland, Germany, France, Finland, etc. – but since I’m not literate in Spanish, Polish, German, French, Finnish, or anything else, I find their respective resources to be rather unattainable.

 

As far as our “Right to Arms” is concerned, I think that the British customs which we inherited along with their language is a very logical place to start.  But, as Americans, we should not be afraid to adapt and modify those conventions to meet our own needs, but we should do so with a very careful and deliberate farsightedness.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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19 July 2011 09:11
 

Fred White;86175 wrote:

Still trying to weigh the anglocentric view vs. something more pluralistic as a point of departure for contemporary heraldic usage in the U.S., it strikes me that Washington’s own appeal to the College of Arms (AFTER the Revolution, no less) for confirmation of his entitlement to use the arms of Wessyngton of Sulgrave Manor is potentially significant. It raises interesting questions, at least.

For one thing, what exactly did the College of Arms represent for Washington? Did he view it as no more than a repository of genealogical data, or did he think that, despite everything, the approbation of that body really was essential for arms to be legitimate? I guess the charitable construction of it is to say that Washington simply wanted to make sure he wasn’t infringing on someone else’s armorial identity and was doing his due diligence. If it had turned out that the Wessyngton arms were not his, would he have assumed a different coat of arms, would he have applied for a grant, or would he have just said, "Sour grapes"? We’ll never know, but can reasonable conjectures be made?


I feel like this is deja vu all over again. How many times do we have to smack down this egregious misreading of history? Garter Heard approached Washington for information, not the other way around. No one has ever come up with one single solitary scintlla of evidence otherwise. I quote the correspondence at some length in my article on the Washington arms and it’s all available in searchable transcription and digital images of the original documents - Heard’s actual letters and the file copies of GW’s replies and of the letters to his relatives seeking answers to Heard’s questions, at the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection, linked from www.loc.gov

 
Donnchadh
 
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Donnchadh
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19 July 2011 10:15
 

steven harris;86183 wrote:

I think that the Anglocentricity of heraldry in the United States can most easily be explained by the simple fact that our nation and the British heraldic authorities (College of Arms, Lord Lyon, even Canada) all literally speak the same language – English.

i agree.


Quote:

I am very interested to learn about the heraldic practices in other realms – Spain, Poland, Germany, France, Finland, etc. – but since I’m not literate in Spanish, Polish, German, French, Finnish, or anything else, I find their respective resources to be rather unattainable.

me too, but i’ve gained a lot by "friending" people from those nations who can speak English who expose me to their national style(s) of heraldry.


Quote:

As far as our “Right to Arms” is concerned, I think that the British customs which we inherited along with their language is a very logical place to start.  But, as Americans, we should not be afraid to adapt and modify those conventions to meet our own needs, but we should do so with a very careful and deliberate farsightedness.

again i agree.

 
steven harris
 
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steven harris
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19 July 2011 10:47
 

Joseph McMillan;86185 wrote:

...one single solitary scintlla of evidence


extra points for the nice alliteration!!

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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19 July 2011 20:59
 

Joseph McMillan;86185 wrote:

I feel like this is deja vu all over again?  How many times do we have to smack down this egregious misreading of history?  Garter Heard approached Washington for information, not the other way around.  No one has ever come up with one single solitary scintlla of evidence otherwise.  I quote the correspondence at some length in my article on the Washington arms and it’s all available in searchable transcription and digital images of the original documents - Heard’s actual letters and the file copies of GW’s replies and of the letters to his relatives seeking answers to Heard’s questions, at the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection, linked from www.loc.gov


My bad.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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20 July 2011 04:06
 

In any case, I’m glad for the clarification on the sequence of events in Washington’s correspondence with Isaac Heard, but I think what I was driving at might have been misunderstood. I wasn’t attempting to enlist Washington as a partisan of the specific idea that only a grant of arms from the UK (or a record of one’s arms in the Visitations) would suffice to legitimize one’s status as an armiger. Rather, I was suggesting that Washington seemed to take seriously the 18th c. English way of thinking about who is and isn’t entitled to use a coat of arms and that this might have some bearing on what the organizing principle of subsequent American heraldry should be. Whether he initiated the correspondence (a single exchange of letters, right?) with Heard is actually beside the point, because it appears that he did assiduously follow up with his relatives for several years afterward—as late as 1798, apparently, cf. http://www.revolutionarywararchives.org/washandgen.html—in trying to gather genealogical and heraldic information. The wording of Heard’s query seems to have been very affectionate, and it may be that Washington was simply being gracious in trying to track down material that would round out the COA’s files, but at the same time, it looks like something in that query from Heard really riveted Washington’s attention and got him thinking. Bottom line: If Washington took seriously the English way of thinking about coats of arms (and the allied subject of pedigree), then perhaps we should, too. Or perhaps not, but that’s what I’m thinking about, anyway.

BTW, I put post #33 in this thread because this is where we left off with the supporters discussion, which morphed, IIRC, into a brief consideration of whether there should be any restrictions, albeit informal ones, on who bears arms in the U.S., but what I’m trying to get back to is that issue of supporters and whether there’s room for a more inclusive approach to them than the Guidelines express.

 
Luis Cid
 
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Luis Cid
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20 July 2011 15:29
 

Fred, thank you for posting the very fascinating article on General Washington and the life of the famous Garter King of Arms of that time!

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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20 July 2011 17:53
 

Luis Cid;86225 wrote:

Fred, thank you for posting the very fascinating article on General Washington and the life of the famous Garter King of Arms of that time!


You’re most welcome, but we should probably direct our thanks to Joseph, whose friendly rejoinder motivated me to read the primary sources and the secondary one I posted.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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23 July 2011 23:39
 

I must say I find the spin put on the letters by the author of that article more than a little fanciful.  Isn’t it somewhat perverse to take everything Washington wrote in these exchanges to mean exactly the opposite—that when he said he considered the issue of his genealogy to be rather unimportant he really meant he cared deeply about it?

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.  Isaac Heard, who cared about genealogy and heraldry wrote a letter to a famous man, who dealt with the inquiry as courteously as he dealt with many other such requests from various people of note.  The letters say what the letters say and nothing more.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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24 July 2011 00:41
 

Joseph McMillan;86278 wrote:

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.


No doubt, and laying out the deceased on the couch is an enterprise fraught with intellectual danger. But such reading as I have done—Flexner, for example—permits the conclusion that Washington was preoccupied with social rank (not to say a sufferer of chronic status anxiety) and that his ubiquitous display of his coat of arms emanated from pride in meeting the peculiarly English criteria for being a gentleman. I do not think he was satisfied with being simply a citizen of this republic or regarded the absence of any other legal rank here as evidence that there was no meaningful rank otherwise. Especially given the chip left on his shoulder by his French and Indian War experience—being treated as a colonial, having a regular commission withheld from him, etc.—the nature of Virginia society, his relationship with the Fairfaxes in particular, his lack of any noteworthy formal education, and the fact that he had to do a lot of wheeling and dealing (and possibly careful marrying) to establish his fortune, Washington’s mindset is understandable. Anyway, I think his extensive follow-up to Heard’s query fortifies that conclusion that he was quite attuned to English notions of who did and didn’t cut the mustard as an armiger, regardless of any spin put on it by the author of the SAR article.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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24 July 2011 09:44
 

I agree completely with the assessment of Washington’s concern with status, although I wonder whether, if Flexner had written comparable biographies of a selection of other leading men of Washington’s time, place, and station, he wouldn’t have found this "preoccupation" with the outward display of social standing more the norm than otherwise.

I don’t find Washington’s follow-up to Heard’s inquiry particularly extensive. The total correspondence based on what’s in the Library of Congress collection seems to consist of seven letters spaced out over six-plus years:

 

1. Heard to Washington (asking for info), December 7, 1791

2. Washington to Hannah Washington (seeking info), March 24, 1792

3. Washington to Heard (relaying info), May 2, 1792

4. Heard to Washington (thanking him and asking for more info), August 9, 1793

 

[then nothing for almost three years]

 

5. Heard to Washington (giving results of research), July 10, 1796

[6. A possible letter to William A. Washington, referred to in letter 7]

7. Washington to William A. Washington (asking for info), February 27, 1798

 

I believe Hannah F. Washington was the widow of the president’s first cousin; William A. Washington was the president’s second cousin.

 

At most, I think we can conclude from the texts, especially of letter 7, that Washington had grown curious about his ancestry. If that’s a sign of status anxiety, I don’t know where that leaves me and many others on this forum.

 

Meanwhile, Washington had been acquiring items emblazoned with his arms or crest for more than 36 years before ever hearing from Sir Isaac Heard.  So whatever we can infer from this correspondence, the idea that an American needed the approval of the College of Arms to use his inherited armorial bearings isn’t among them.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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26 July 2011 09:48
 

Joseph McMillan;86185 wrote:

I feel like this is deja vu all over again. How many times do we have to smack down this egregious misreading of history? Garter Heard approached Washington for information, not the other way around. No one has ever come up with one single solitary scintlla of evidence otherwise. I quote the correspondence at some length in my article on the Washington arms and it’s all available in searchable transcription and digital images of the original documents - Heard’s actual letters and the file copies of GW’s replies and of the letters to his relatives seeking answers to Heard’s questions, at the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection, linked from www.loc.gov


So it wasn’t deja vu; we really did have this exact discussion before.

 

http://www.americanheraldry.org/forums/showpost.php?p=65533&postcount=25