The Faces of “Comprehensive Government Security”

This guest post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.

After the Heller decision recognized “schools and government buildings” as sensitive places, the Supreme Court additionally endorsed in Bruen “legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses” as places where weapons were historically prohibited and could still be prohibited today. Some litigants have suggested that what unites these Bruen locations is that they are places where the government has always provided security. Only with such “comprehensive government security,” the argument goes, can the government prohibit the carrying of arms in any given location today. During the Fourth Circuit oral argument in Kipke v. Moore, an attorney for the plaintiffs went so far as to suggest that without armed guards, even polling places might not be considered sensitive.

Proponents of the comprehensive government security argument have claimed that men serving as doorkeepers and sergeants at arms in early American government buildings played the same role historically as metal detectors and armed guards play today. These claims generally rest on Founding Era statutes that provide for a doorkeeper or two or a sergeant at arms in those buildings. Several district and appellate courts have rejected this line of thinking, including the Ninth Circuit in Wolford v. Lopez and most recently the Seventh Circuit in Schoenthal v. Raoul. The Schoenthal decision was particularly strident in its rejection of the security principle—noting, for example, that the argument fails to account for schools as sensitive places and “cannot unify even legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses,” given the limited scope of officials’ responsibilities in those locations.

But even beyond the statutes that the Seventh Circuit and other courts have evaluated, the historical record has more to say about the comprehensive government security theory and the sergeants at arms and doorkeepers upon whom it relies. To further evaluate the argument, it may be worth it to study the actual men who historically took these jobs. Here, we get to know a few of them.

The Governor’s Council in colonial Virginia had a dual purpose—it was both the upper house of the General Assembly and the colony’s highest court. While it might seem that such an august body would demand the most comprehensive of comprehensive security, history indicates that doorkeepers were not always particularly well-equipped to defend the wealthy, influential men who comprised Council membership. Christopher Ayscough was the proprietor of one of Thomas Jefferson’s favored taverns in Williamsburg, and he evidently succeeded in parlaying this proximity to power into a position as Council doorkeeper. Hiring a bar owner with no other clear qualifications turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a mistake. Ayscough showed up drunk to work often enough that he was fired in 1771. He may also have been in poor health towards the end of his service. He was likely in his early seventies by the time of his termination, and he was dead roughly a year later. 

Ayscough was not the only man to hold such a position at such an advanced age. Colonel Anthony Crockett, born in 1758, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and represented both Virginia and Kentucky in their state legislatures. Despite being in his mid-fifties at the outbreak of the War of 1812, he insisted on serving again, ready to take on the British redcoats for the second time in his life. He paused his tenure as the Sergeant at Arms of Kentucky’s State Senate to fight in this war, then took up the job again afterwards, when he returned home to Franklin County. He acted as the Kentucky Senate Sergeant at Arms for 30 years, up until just before he passed away at 80. 

At the national level, the US House of Representatives employed Benjamin Burch as doorkeeper from 1821 until he retired in 1831, just months before his death at age 70. It appears that he was homebound by illness for quite some time during his tenure. President John Quincy Adams (who served in the House after his presidency) remarked in his diaryupon Burch’s retirement that the doorkeeper “ha[d] been for several years and yet is an invalid, confined to his house[.]”

Burch was not exceptional among his peers. Overton Carr was his successor as House doorkeeper, and he died while still employed as such. Adams, ever the observer, noted in his writings that, not unlike his predecessor, Carr had been “many months in decline” before succumbing to his maladies. The Congressional assistant doorkeepers were also not selected for their physical prowess. Veterans who had lost limbs in the nation’s first few wars were considered to be especially good candidates; and the assistant doorkeeper position itself was finally abolished as “unnecessary” in 1841 after John W. Hunter died on the job in his 70s.

This pattern persisted through the Reconstruction Era. Benton Miller lost four inches of his leg fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War. “For the rest of his life[,]” as his biographer has explained, “Miller walked only with the help of a crutch and cane.” Nevertheless, he served as doorkeeper to the Georgia House of Representatives for a decade, from 1873 to 1883. Miller was not elderly at the time of his service, by any means; indeed, he lived until 1907 or 1908. But, despite his relative youth, his injuries would have left him unable to provide legislators in Atlanta with the sort of “comprehensive security” that gun rights advocates have described.

While litigants have focused less on sergeants at arms in courthouses, their roles in those buildings may still be instructive for evaluating the merits of the comprehensive government security argument. George A. Robertson of Kentucky was too old when the Civil War broke out to have served in combat. Advanced though he was in age, he was still elected to the position of Sergeant at Arms of the state Court of Appeals during the postwar Reconstruction Era. His credentials were not those of an injured veteran but rather a longtime civil servant: Robertson had clerked in the state treasurer’s and state auditor’s offices and had later served as state librarian. He acted as the Kentucky Court of Appeals Sergeant at Arms until his death, at age 86, in 1893.

These men could not be credibly described as effecting “comprehensive government security.” Although titles like “doorkeeper” and “sergeant at arms” may suggest historical equivalents for security checkpoints, these were often more ceremonial positions than anything else. Indeed, war hero-turned-Representative Benjamin Butler reminded his House colleagues in 1878 that in selecting a new doorkeeper, “a maimed soldier shall be preferred.” Battlefield injuries and old age were (and still are) frequently physically disabling, but that presented no problem, because the positions discussed here were not intended for sprite and able-bodied youngsters who might serve as nineteenth century security guards. These jobs were, instead, sinecures for men—often older men—who had served their country on the battlefield or as civil servants (or as favored local barkeeps) and thus merited both appreciation and a paycheck from their government. Sergeants at arms and doorkeepers certainly deserve more historical attention—the positions and those who staffed them have much to teach us about how early Americans thought about aging, about wartime injury, about respect, and, in some cases, about how to reward the men who got them drunk—but it should be hoped that this attention will come from historians interested in an honest inquiry into these men’s lives and roles.