"So why were these guys commonly armed to the teeth? I'm gonna quote one John D. McAdoo, in 1864 appointed Brigadier General in charge of keeping the peace and preserving order in the Sixth Military Distict. Here he is commenting on conditions around Fredericksburg at that time (as given in Smith "Frontier Defense in the Civil War"..."
Yet in the Fremantle diary which recounts Lt. Col Arthur Freemantle's journey to the "seat of the war" in 1863 in his recounting of the portion of his trip from Mexico to San Antonio he mentions that one settlemnet (Oakville?) there were no functioning guns in the community. Guess it depended on who and where you were.
Carry on.
