Verisoph story dossier
America's citizen-soldiers from the colonial militia to today: the minutemen, the Second Amendment and the Militia Acts, the Dick Act and the National Defense Act that federalized the Guard, and its long record on American streets...
America's citizen-soldiers from the colonial militia to today: the minutemen, the Second Amendment and the Militia Acts, the Dick Act and the National Defense Act that federalized the Guard, and its long record on American streets, from Ludlow and Little Rock to Kent State, the 1992 LA riots, and January 6.
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The Massachusetts General Court ordered the colony's existing train bands grouped into the North, South, and East Regiments, the first organized militia in the English colonies. The Army National Guard traces its lineage to this date, observing it as its official founding. The units were built on the English tradition of the citizen-soldier, obligated to muster for local defense.
Colonial militia and Minutemen exchanged fire with British regulars at Lexington and Concord, opening the Revolutionary War. The engagement became the founding legend of the American citizen-soldier ideal, a part-time militia able to muster quickly for defense of home and colony. Militia units, not a standing army, carried the bulk of early Revolutionary fighting.
The Second Amendment, part of the ratified Bill of Rights, declared that a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, meant the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Its drafters were working from the experience of state militias in the Revolutionary War and suspicion of standing federal armies. The amendment's exact scope has been debated by courts and historians ever since.
Congress passed the Calling Forth Act and the Uniform Militia Act, which required able-bodied white male citizens aged 18 to 45 to enroll in their state militia and provide their own arms, and authorized the president to call militia into federal service to suppress insurrections or repel invasions. The acts left training, organization, and equipment mostly to the states, producing uneven readiness across the country. They remained the basic legal framework for the militia system for over a century, until the Militia Act of 1903.
President Washington invoked the Militia Act of 1792 to call roughly 13,000 militiamen from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey to suppress armed resistance to the federal whiskey excise tax. Washington personally reviewed the assembled militia before it marched into western Pennsylvania, the only time a sitting president has commanded troops in the field. The show of force ended the rebellion with almost no fighting and demonstrated the new federal government's power to call up state militia.
Hastily assembled American militia broke and fled before British regulars at the Battle of Bladensburg, opening the road to Washington, D.C., which the British burned days later. The defeat, mocked afterward as the Bladensburg Races, became a byword for the limits of poorly trained, poorly equipped militia against professional troops. It fed a long argument in American military policy over whether the militia system could be relied on for national defense.
State militia officers organized the National Guard Association to lobby Congress for federal funding, standardized training, and equipment for the state militias, which by then were widely calling themselves the National Guard. The association became the chief political voice pushing for the reforms that led to the Militia Act of 1903. Its founding marked the shift from scattered state militias toward a more unified national institution.
After a deadly gun battle between striking steelworkers and Pinkerton guards at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead mill, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison sent roughly 8,500 state militia to occupy the town and protect strikebreakers. The militia presence broke the strike and the Amalgamated Association union at the plant. It was an early instance of state militia being used against organized labor rather than for external defense.
During the national Pullman railroad boycott, Illinois Governor John Altgeld deployed state militia in Chicago, while President Cleveland separately sent federal troops over Altgeld's objection to keep the mails and interstate commerce moving. The strike collapsed after federal courts issued an injunction and troops broke the picket lines. The episode became a landmark dispute over state versus federal authority to use armed force against a labor strike.
When war with Spain began, President McKinley's call for volunteers drew heavily on state militia units, which supplied a large share of the roughly 200,000 men mustered into federal volunteer service. Poor equipment, sanitation, and training in militia-derived units caused far more deaths from disease than combat, exposing the weakness of the old militia system. The war's logistical failures gave reformers, including Secretary of War Elihu Root, the argument they needed for an overhaul of the militia laws.
Congress passed the Militia Act of 1903, known as the Dick Act after its sponsor Senator Charles Dick, replacing the outdated 1792 militia laws. It formally organized the state militias as the National Guard, required them to follow Regular Army organization and standards, and provided federal funding, arms, and training in exchange. The law set the legal foundation for the modern National Guard and its federal-state relationship.
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On 20 April 1914 Colorado National Guard troops and camp guards attacked a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, killing about two dozen people including children. The mine was controlled by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and the deaths drew national outrage.
Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1916, which expanded the Regular Army and National Guard, required Guard members to take a dual oath to their state and to the United States, and gave the president clearer authority to draft the Guard into federal service. The law strengthened federal control and standardization of the Guard while preserving its state militia character. It set the basic dual state-federal structure that still defines the National Guard.
After Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico, President Wilson mobilized roughly 110,000 National Guard troops from every state to patrol the border alongside General John Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico. The call-up was the largest mobilization of the Guard since the Civil War and served as a dress rehearsal for the much larger mobilization that followed a year later for World War I. It exposed continuing gaps in Guard training, equipment, and readiness for sustained federal service.
President Wilson drafted the entire National Guard into federal service, folding its roughly 380,000 members into the American Expeditionary Forces. National Guard divisions, including the 26th 'Yankee' Division and the 42nd 'Rainbow' Division, saw extensive combat on the Western Front in 1918. The mobilization confirmed the Guard's status as a primary federal reserve force rather than a purely local defense body.
When most of the Boston police force walked off the job, looting broke out and Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the Massachusetts State Guard to restore order, resulting in several deaths in clashes with crowds. Coolidge's declaration that there is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time made him a national figure. The episode became a touchstone case for using militia forces to end a public-sector strike.
Thousands of armed coal miners marching to unionize southern West Virginia clashed with a private army of sheriff's deputies and mine guards, in the largest armed labor uprising in American history. West Virginia's governor mobilized state militia and appealed for federal help, and President Harding sent Army troops and bombers to end the fighting after roughly a week. The confrontation, and the state and federal force used against it, marked the violent peak of the mine wars era.
Amendments to the National Defense Act created the National Guard of the United States as a distinct federal reserve component, so that Guard members simultaneously held membership in their state militia and in a reserve of the United States Army. The change let the president order Guard units into federal active duty without going through the older, more cumbersome militia-draft process. It fixed the modern dual state-federal legal status that still governs the Guard.
As war spread in Europe and Asia, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, and President Roosevelt ordered the entire National Guard, about 300,000 soldiers, into a year of federal active duty starting that month. Guard divisions such as the 34th 'Red Bull' Division later fought in North Africa and Italy, and other Guard units fought across the Pacific. The 1940 mobilization gave the Regular Army a badly needed trained cadre well before Pearl Harbor.
Governor Orval Faubus first called out the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School under a federal desegregation order. After weeks of confrontation, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas Guard, taking it out of Faubus's control, and sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school. It was the first time since Reconstruction a president had used federal troops to enforce Black civil rights against a state government.
A mob of segregationists attacked federal marshals protecting James Meredith, the first Black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, in rioting that killed two people. President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and sent Army troops to restore order and enforce the court-ordered enrollment. The riot was one of the most violent confrontations of the school desegregation era.
Governor George Wallace stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block the enrollment of two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, in a staged act of resistance to federal desegregation orders. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard that same day, and Guard General Henry Graham ordered Wallace to step aside, after which the students registered. The confrontation was broadcast nationally and pushed Kennedy toward proposing the Civil Rights Act.
A police raid on an unlicensed bar touched off five days of rioting, arson, and looting in Detroit, one of the deadliest urban uprisings of the 1960s, leaving 43 people dead. Michigan Governor George Romney deployed the National Guard, and President Johnson later sent Army airborne troops when the Guard could not restore order. The uprising, and the federal commission it prompted, focused national attention on the conditions and policing in Black urban neighborhoods.
After North Korea seized the USS Pueblo and North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet Offensive, President Johnson ordered a partial mobilization of roughly 12,000 National Guard and Reserve personnel, some of whom deployed to South Korea and South Vietnam. The call-up was far smaller and more selective than the mobilizations of the world wars, reflecting a political decision to avoid a broad Guard call-up for Vietnam. The limited use of the Guard during Vietnam, in contrast to its heavy state-side use against civil unrest in the same years, became a point of lasting controversy.
Ohio National Guard troops, sent to the Kent State University campus after protests against the invasion of Cambodia, fired into a crowd of demonstrators and bystanders, killing four students and wounding nine. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest found the shootings unjustified, and a subsequent Justice Department investigation and grand jury inquiries produced conflicting conclusions, with no Guardsmen ultimately convicted. The killings galvanized the national student anti-war movement and remain the most cited example of lethal Guard force used against American civilians.
President George H.W. Bush activated National Guard and Reserve units for Operation Desert Shield and the subsequent Operation Desert Storm, eventually mobilizing more than 60,000 Guard soldiers and airmen. Guard combat units, including some armored brigades, deployed to the Gulf, alongside large numbers of Guard support, medical, and logistics personnel. It was the largest call-up of the Guard for an overseas conflict since the Korean War.
Rioting, looting, and arson broke out across Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers filmed beating Rodney King, leaving more than 60 people dead over several days. California Governor Pete Wilson activated the National Guard, but a delayed and poorly coordinated deployment, later documented in official after-action reviews, let the violence spread for two days before Guard troops were widely visible on the streets, and federal troops and Marines were also sent in. The slow Guard response became a widely studied case of civil-disturbance planning failure.
Following the September 11 attacks, President Bush declared a national emergency and activated tens of thousands of National Guard troops for airport and infrastructure security, disaster response in New York City, and homeland defense duties. The call-up marked the start of a sustained, large-scale use of the Guard for homeland security missions that continued for years afterward. It also set the stage for the Guard's subsequent heavy overseas deployment in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and continuing through the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon relied on the National Guard at a scale not seen since World War II, deploying hundreds of thousands of Guard soldiers on repeated combat tours as an 'operational reserve' rather than a strategic reserve held back for emergencies. Guard combat brigades held ground in Iraq's Sunni Triangle and elsewhere, while Guard aviation, engineering, medical, and logistics units were deployed continuously through both wars. The reliance on the Guard strained relationships between deployed soldiers, their civilian employers, and their families, and prompted lasting policy debates over how the Guard should be used.
After days of protest and rioting following the police killing of Michael Brown, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon activated the National Guard to support police in Ferguson, drawing criticism over the heavily militarized response to the protests. The deployment became part of a wider national debate about police militarization and the use of military-style equipment and forces against domestic protest. Guard troops were withdrawn after about a week as unrest subsided.
After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests and unrest spread to cities across the country, and governors in more than 30 states activated the National Guard, eventually mobilizing over 40,000 Guard personnel, the largest simultaneous domestic Guard deployment since the 1968 unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Guard units guarded federal buildings, monuments, and city centers, including a much-criticized deployment near the White House and Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. The scale of the mobilization renewed debate over the proper role of the Guard in policing civil protest.
After a mob breached the US Capitol during the certification of the 2020 election, National Guard troops were mobilized to secure the building, following a delayed activation that later Pentagon and congressional inquiries attributed to unclear authorization and coordination failures. In the following weeks, roughly 25,000 National Guard troops from all 50 states were deployed to Washington to secure the January 20, 2021 presidential inauguration, an unprecedented peacetime security mobilization. Thousands of Guard troops remained on duty around the Capitol for months afterward.