ABSTRACT
The subject of the militia has produced some passionate writing by American publicists, soldiers, and historians. Defenders of the militia—those who believe that a universal military obligation is the proper way to defend a society—are fond of stressing that only when free men must themselves fight to protect their liberty are they likely to remain free. The colonial militia, in particular, represents the happy uniqueness of America, where Englishmen in the seventeenth century revived this military relic of the middle ages just as in Europe it was sinking beneath the superiority of the politically dangerous mercenary army on the battlefield. Critics of the militia—many of them professional soldiers—point a different moral, one that rests on the apparent inefficiency of militia in combat, and on the way that the myth of defense by militia led again and again to tragic unpreparedness for war.
