Posted by David Kopel:
The Crime Against Kansas:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_20-2007_05_26.shtml#1179861522
On this day in history, May 22, 1856, United States Representative
Preston Brooks criminally attacked Senator Charles Sumner on the floor
of the Senate, beating Sumner on the head with a heavy cane until the
cane broke, and incapacitating Sumner for four years. South Carolina
Rep. Preston Brooks was the nephew of South Carolina Senator A.P.
Butler, who had been sharply criticized by Massachusetts' Sumner in a
May 19-20 [1]speech, "The Crime Agains Kansas."
Sumner had declared that while Brooks "believes himself a chivalrous
knight, with sentiments of honor and courage," he "has chosen a
mistress" who is "the harlot slavery."
Among the elements of the crime against Kansas was that guns belonging
to the free-soil settlers had been confiscated by the pro-slavery
territorial government. Senator A.P. Butler had allegedly remarked
that the people of Kansas should be disarmed of their Sharps rifles.
(The Sharps rifles were the main type which were being sent to the
free-soilers by anti-slavery groups in the North, such as the
Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, led by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.)
Sumner thundered:
Really, sir, has it come to this? The rifle has ever been the
companion of the pioneer and, under God, his tutelary protector
against the red man and the beast of the forest. Never was this
efficient weapon more needed in just self-defence, than now in
Kansas, and at least one article in our National Constitution must
be blotted out, before the complete right to it can in any way be
impeached. And yet such is the madness of the hour, that, in
defiance of the solemn guaranty, embodied in the Amendments to the
Constitution, that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed," the people of Kansas have been arraigned
for keeping and bearing them, and the Senator from South Carolina
has had the face to say openly, on this floor, that they should be
disarmed--of course, that the fanatics of Slavery, his allies and
constituents, may meet no impediment. Sir, the Senator is venerable
. . . but neither his years, nor his position, past or present, can
give respectability to the demand he has made, or save him from
indignant condemnation, when, to compass the wretched purposes of a
wretched cause, he thus proposes to trample on one of the plainest
provisions of constitutional liberty.
Senator Butler indignantly replied that he had never proposed
disarming the people of Kansas. He had simply proposed bringing before
appropriate judicial authority "an organized body" who possessed
Sharps rifles.
But even if Senator Butler could claim that his remarks were
misunderstood, antislavery Congressmen had no doubt about the
atrocities being perpetrated in Kansas. On June 30, 1856,
Representative G.A. Grow of Pennsylvania listed the constitutional
abuses of the proslavery government in Kansas, including: "With the
shout of law and order you disarm the citizen, while the Constitution
of his country declares that the right 'to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed.'".
The 1856 national Republican Convention resolved that "the dearest
constitutional rights of the people of Kansas have been fraudulently
and violently taken from them . . . the rights of the people to keep
and bear arms have been infringed."
The federal government, obviously, had done nothing to interfere with
the official militia of the proslavery government in Kansas. Yet the
Republicans still saw a violation of the Second Amendment: some of the
state's citizens were being disarmed because they considered the
current state government illegitimate. Indeed, the event that had
precipitated Republican Sumner's speech was the "Sack of Lawrence," in
which the Kansas territorial militia, bearing arms supplied by the
United States government and under the command of a deputy federal
marshal, confiscated the guns of a group of free-soilers.
There is no known evidence of any pro-slavery Democrats, or anyone
else, defending the Sack of Lawrence on the grounds that the Second
Amendment did not guarantee the right of individual citizens of Kansas
to possess personal firearms for non-militia purposes.
References
1. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT6369.0001.001
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