The debate over the right to keep and bear arms in America is often treated as a modern phenomenon, born out of late-twentieth-century political divides. However, the foundational argument for the Second Amendment—the deep-seated belief that a citizens’ militia must retain its arms as a vital safeguard against government overreach—was forged long before the American Revolution. Its roots run straight back to the rocky shores of 17th-century New England and the specific trauma of our 8th great-grandfather, Philip Sherman, who in 1637 experienced the raw weight of state disarmment.
The story of Philip Sherman’s forced disarmament offers a profound, historical case study in how early American religious and political non-conformity collided with authoritarian control. It demonstrates that the fear of a government weaponizing disarmament to enforce ideological compliance is not a hypothetical scenario, but a historical reality that directly shaped the American constitutional mindset.
The Irony of Puritan Absolute Control
When Philip Sherman arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633, he entered a society that prized security and conformity above all else. The Puritans had fled persecution in England, yet they immediately established a strict corporate theocracy where political rights were explicitly tied to religious orthodoxy.
In 1637, Sherman found himself drawn to the teachings of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright during the Antinomian Controversy. Hutchinson’s crime was preaching a "covenant of grace," arguing that the Holy Spirit could speak directly to an individual's conscience, bypassing the strict authority of the colony's magistrates and ministers. To the ruling elite in Boston, this was not merely a theological disagreement; it was a direct threat to their monopoly on civil power.
The Puritan government's response was swift, systemic, and utterly legalistic. On November 20, 1637, the General Court issued a sweeping disarmament order against dozens of Hutchinson’s followers, including Philip Sherman. The language of the decree was unambiguous: they were ordered to deliver up all "guns, pistols, swords, powder, and shot." The justification? The magistrates claimed that the "opinions and revelations" of the dissidents had "seduced and led into dangerous errors many of the people," rendering them a threat to the safety of the commonwealth.
The historic irony is glaring. The Puritans, who relied completely on armed citizen-soldiers to defend their fragile frontier towns from immediate external threats, chose to strip their own neighbors of their primary means of self-defense simply because they disagreed with their prayers. For Sherman, the message from the state was crystal clear: If you do not submit to our worldview, you do not have the right to protect your own household.
Disarmament as a Tool of Ideological Tyranny
The 1637 disarmament order was not about public safety in the modern sense; it was a tactical tool used to break the political will of dissidents. By stripping Philip Sherman and his peers of their weapons, the Massachusetts authorities effectively reduced them to second-class status, making them entirely dependent on the state for protection while signaling their total exile from the civic body.
This historic event perfectly illustrates the warning commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." By leaving Sherman and the other free-thinkers weaponless on the edge of a dangerous wild continent, the magistrates used the ultimate leverage of physical vulnerability to enforce state orthodoxy.
Rather than surrendering his conscience to regain his safety, Philip Sherman chose the path of the "White Hat" rebel. He signed the Portsmouth Compact, establishing a new civil government based on the "universal consent of the inhabitants." Alongside other outcasts, he fled the jurisdiction of Massachusetts to found Portsmouth, Rhode Island, transforming his experience of state-sponsored tyranny into a foundational cornerstone of American religious and civil liberty.
The Straight Line to the Second Amendment
The memory of the 1637 disarmament did not vanish when Philip Sherman crossed into Rhode Island. It became part of the collective cultural DNA of the American frontier. Over the next 150 years, early Americans consistently observed a dangerous pattern: whenever a government sought to eliminate dissent, its very first move was always to disarm the population.
When the Framers of the United States Constitution met in 1787 to draft the Bill of Rights, they were not just thinking about the recent battles against King George III at Lexington and Concord—where the British regular army had marched explicitly to seize colonial weapon storehouses. They were also looking back at their own domestic history. They understood that tyrants do not always wear foreign crowns; sometimes, they sit in local council chambers, wearing the robes of domestic magistrates.
The Second Amendment was intentionally designed as the ultimate systemic counterweight to this exact vulnerability. When James Madison drafted the amendment, and when figures like Thomas Jefferson advocated for the absolute right of the citizenry to remain armed, they were erecting a permanent constitutional fortress against the precise overreach that had targeted Philip Sherman.
The right to keep and bear arms was enshrined not merely to protect hunting or recreational shooting, but to guarantee that no future government could ever use selective disarmament as a political weapon to crush free thought, free speech, or free worship. It stands as a profound legal acknowledgment that an unarmed population possesses no leverage against an overreaching state.
The Custodian of the Legacy
Philip Sherman’s transition from a disarmed dissident in Massachusetts to the first Secretary of a fiercely independent Rhode Island colony is a spectacular testament to the resilience of the American spirit. He proved that true liberty cannot be maintained if the populace permits the government to decide who is "orthodox" enough to own a firearm.
For a staunch Second Amendment advocate, finding Philip Sherman in our direct lineage is an incredible full-circle moment. Our 8th great-grandfather’s lived experience is the literal historical proof of why the Second Amendment was written in the first place. He was the man who felt the sting of tyranny firsthand, refused to bend his knee to the magistrates, and helped clear a new space in the wilderness where a man could finally hold his bible in one hand and his musket in the other—completely free from the fear of state overreach.
Thank you to Gemini AI for this essay. I had been working with Gemini for the past several days to explore my 17th century Rhode Island ancestors when I read about Philip Sherman’s conflict with puritan leadership, so I asked Gemini to write the foregoing essay and, as usual, I was amazed with what was created in seconds. — Drifting Cowboy
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