-------- Original Message --------
I assume this query is based on a recent internet posting on truthout asserting that "The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery"
I responded to another list serve with the following:
The history in this essay is pretty thin, and mostly wrong. I was asked about this earlier today and sent the following response, which I am happy to share with the list.
Much of this essay is just wrong. This is not to say that slave patrols were not part of the South and slavery. But, let's remember, the 2nd Amendment was directed solely at the federal government, which was prohibited from disarming state militias and thus allowed the states to arm their militias if the feds did not do so. Even if the Amendment did not exist and the national government had abolished the state militias, the states would have been free to create their own slave patrols. The amendment had nothing to do with state police powers which were the basis of slave patrols and there is NO federal interference with state criminal justice or policing until the 20th century. No one in 1789 would have imagined the national government interfering with state policing powers.
As you both know, I find slavery almost everywhere in the Constitution. (See my book Slavery and the Founders (2001), but this essay does not add to that sort of argument.
The slave patrols were NOT the militia. The militias had just fought in the Revolution. That is in part what the 2nd Amendment is about. For more you can look at my article, “A Well Regulated Militia,” 76 Chi-Kent L. R. 195 (2000). Sometimes the militia acted as a slave patrol but they were different things.
Carl Bogus, my good friend and sometime collaborator, is NOT "Dr." Bogus, unless you can call someone a “Dr.” who has a J.D.! It is always problematic when an author cites authorities but does not really know who they are.
I would love to see evidence that “By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South." Such evidence would revolutionize our understanding of colonial and early national history. But, of course there is no evidence for such a clam. There were a few rebellions in the colonial period, most notably Stono, which took place about 40 years before the Constitution was ratified. There were not “hundreds” and only Stono was “substantial.” The author simply does not know what he is talking about.
The statement that Patrick Henry opposed slavery is almost amusing! Next thing we know this author will tell us that Jefferson also opposed slavery. In fact, in opposing ratification, Henry argued that the Constitution threatened slavery.
This paragraph is just nuts: "Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves." There is not a single shred of evidence that ANYONE thought this. Moreover, it is hard to imagine under Article I how that would work. If anything, northern antifederalists opposed the constitution because it would force Northerners to march south and suppress slave rebellions. Thus use of state militias (although not northern ones) to suppress Nat Turner and the use of the US military to suppress John Brown illustrates this issue.
Author does not even know that Lord Dunmore's proclamation was during the Revolution not in the "lead-up" to it. Just one more example of someone writing without knowledge or any serious research.
The quotations from Henry are mostly right but yanked out of context in strange ways. It is amusing to think Madison changed the 2nd amendment to please Mason and Henry -- both were his political enemies and neither was in Congress. In fact the wording changes took place in the House and Senate. Nor did Mason and Henry have much to do with writing the 2nd Amendment since they were not in Congress. When the Amendment was proposed Henry opposed it (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights).
I could go on but will not. The Constitution (as opposed to the Bill of Rights) protected slavery in many ways; the 5th Amend. may have protected slavery (as Taney says in Dred Scott) but most of the rest of the B of R is not about slavery in any important ways that I see.
These is one point in all this that is entirely true. Race plays a big factor in why the 2nd A was NOT designed to give an individual right to own guns; as no one would have imagined that the Amendment prohibited the national government from disarming free blacks in the territories or the District of Columbia. Since the amendment did not apply to the states, they were all free to regulate firearms ownership, as they did.
========================================
*************************************************
Paul Finkelman, Ph.D.
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, NY 12208
518-445-3386 (p)
518-445-3363 (f)
[email protected]
www.paulfinkelman.com
*************************************************
________________________________________
From: Robert Bradley [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 10:10 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Second Amendment Inquiry
Hello:
Wondering what the thoughts of list-goers were about the argument that
the Second Amendment was adopted basically as a concession to some
Southern States that would allow them to maintain their state
militias, which were being used to suppress possible slave uprisings,
in order to get their ratification votes?
Bob
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Illinois State University RedbirdMail
