The Founders did not say a State may pick a manner of carry and extinguish the other. Concealment-as-such is not a 1791 category. When the early republic later regulated manner — starting in 1813 — it regulated secrecy and left open carry standing. Chandler and Nunn are that analogue, not a State menu.
Madison’s text is “keep and bear.” St. George Tucker, writing the first major American Blackstone in 1803, treats the Amendment as the “true palladium of liberty,” self-defense as “the first law of nature,” and stresses that unlike England the American right has no “condition or degree” qualifier. (Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries, 1803, app. 300.) He is attacking disarmament-by-pretext (game laws), not drafting a concealed-vs-open codebook. He never says the legislature may elect one mode and abolish the other.
If you want a Founding-era practice rule, it is this: peaceable public carry was not a crime in the early republic, and concealed-weapons statutes almost do not exist until 1813 onward. Kopel’s count is eight states before 1846, mostly Southern plus Indiana. That inventory is Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic (1999). That timing matters. A wave of dirk / Bowie / “secret assassination” statutes a generation after ratification is not the 1791 settlement.
What the 1840s–50s Courts Actually Held — and What They Did Not
This is the layer the cases actually use.
- Bliss v. Commonwealth (Ky. 1822) goes the other way: a conceal ban was void because it forbade a manner that was lawful when the state constitution was adopted. Kentucky later amended its constitution to authorize conceal bans. Bliss is the high-water mark that the right includes even the secret mode.
- State v. Reid (Ala. 1840): a conceal ban can stand if the arm can still be borne openly; a “regulation” that makes the arm “wholly useless for the purpose of defence” would be void.
- Nunn v. State (Ga. 1846): the conceal half of the statute stands; the open-carry prohibition is “in conflict with the Constitution, and void.” Heller later cites Nunn with approval.
- State v. Chandler, 5 La. Ann. 489 (1850): the 1813 act is valid because it “interfered with no man’s right to carry arms … ‘in full open view.’” That open mode “is the right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.” Concealment was the vice (secret advantage / assassination). Openness was the equality condition.
Read those holdings in order and the modern slogan falls apart. They are not “the State may choose open or concealed.” They are “the State may burden the secret mode because the constitutional mode remains.”
Where the “Choose One” Sentence Comes From
It is a 20th- and 21st-century synthesis: if some lawful carry remains, manner is a regulation, not a destruction. That is intermediate-scrutiny talk dressed in historical clothing. It treats open and concealed as fungible products on a shelf. Chandler does the opposite. It treats them as morally and constitutionally different acts. Nunn does the opposite. It voids the ban on the historical default.
That is the inversion O’Neil v. Neronha is asking the First Circuit to look at: history restricted concealment and left open carry as the ordinary public bearing of arms; the modern statute keeps a permit / need-showing concealed channel and withholds the default. That is not applying Chandler. That is standing Chandler on its head.
The Fair Contrary
There is a serious literature (Frassetto, Cornell, some public-carry historians) that open carry in populated places was socially rare, sometimes stigmatized, and that the Southern open-carry cases are tangled with honor culture and slavery. Worth reading. It does not supply a Founding-era analogue for “ban the historical default, leave a discretionary other mode.” Absence of street-level open pistols in Philadelphia is not a tradition of forbidding them.
How to Argue It
Cite Chandler and Nunn for this proposition only: when the Founding-to-antebellum tradition regulated manner, it regulated concealment and left the open mode standing. Cite them as the manner analogue, not as 1791 statutes. The Founding left peaceable bearing unregulated as to hide-versus-show. Do not cite them for “the State may pick a manner.” Do not cite Tucker for a conceal/open codebook he did not write. And do not let the other side treat Rahimi’s “not trapped in amber” line as a license to reverse the default. Rahimi is about who may be disarmed after a finding of dangerousness. It is not a manner-swap statute.
That is the honest originalist cut. The Founders said bear. The early courts that spoke to manner said the protected bearing was in view. The State’s power, on that record, was to police the hidden blade — not to retire the constitutional mode and call the remainder a tradition.
Notes
St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries: with Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Philadelphia: William Young Birch and Abraham Small, 1803), vol. 1, Appendix, Note D, p. 300.
Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). That is the eight-state inventory Kopel uses (Kentucky and Louisiana 1813, then Indiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama).