Constitutional law and standing armies

One of the facts that lies in the background of constitutional history, and usually stays there, without being highlighted, is this: most of the founders of the United States shared a disdain for the institution of a "standing army" --that is, of a permanent professional military force maintained through peacetime and composed of full-time soldiers. 

Their idealization of the "militia," and the reference thereto in the second amendment, arguably the second amendment itself, constitute the flipside of their anti-standing-army persuasion. 

If you ask about the background and history of this conviction, you are generally referred to the build-up to the revolution, as the mother country built up its military presence (the "regulars") in the troublesome colonies. But a newly published paper makes the point that the vocabulary in which our founders expressed their conviction on point has a specific history within that Mother Country. 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5158438

Noah Shusterman of the Chinese University of Hong Kong harkens back to the historic moment just after William and Mary came to power -- the Stuarts had been ousted a second time -- and it was clear immediately the new regime would have to fight the French.  This is when pamphleteers led by John Trenchant and Walter Moyle made their appearance and made the anti-standing-army case that would echo eighty years later. Trenchant and Moyle hearkened back to what they called the "glorious commonwealth" of the Roman Republic that had "kept swords in the hands of its citizens" and been able to build an empire without a standing army.   

https://catalog.folger.edu/record/67498

They could not go too far with that line of thought, or they'd be calling for a return to the Cromwellian commonwealth.  They didn't want to do that. After a contentious century, Britain had reached a constitutional settlement -- parliamentary government and a monarchy, too. 

But the argument over a standing army was the echo of the older debates within the context of that settlement, it was the more-or-less safe return of Cromwellian sentiment.  

Of course what Britain most needed given its geography was a standing (or rather a permanently floating) navy. The idea of raising armies only for emergencies and the related idea of leaving swords in the hands of the citizens made a certain degree of sense -- more sense than they would have made in France, where neither German nor Spanish-speaking foes ever needed a navy to attack.

Good to have this context.