The Slave Patrolers Wrote the Second Amendment
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” — Second Amendment, ratified on December 15, 1791.
Every argument about gun control and safety in America eventually runs into the thirteen words that open the Second Amendment:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...”
The gun lobby would like you to ignore those words, but they’re the key to understanding where this amendment came from and how it’s been twisted by Republicans on the take from the weapons industry for over 50 years, including those on the Supreme Court.
In reality, they’re essential and the men who wrote them knew exactly which militia they meant.
This week’s excerpt pulls together three short chapters from the heart of the book.
The first chapter explains what the southern “militias” identified in the Second Amendment were actually doing when the Constitution was written. Instead of fighting the British or the Indians, they were called “slave patrols.” Laws in Georgia and the Carolinas required the slave patrollers to ride through the region and inspect slave quarters every month searching for weapons and brutally whipping any enslaved person found off the plantation.
The second chapter explains how Thomas Jefferson’s lifelong fear of standing armies — a fear he’d acquired from studying Europe’s long history of military coups — was why his protégé James Madison was drafting an amendment about militias in the first place — one that originally had nothing to do with slavery.
And the third chapter follows that draft of the Amendment into the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788, where two famous “founding fathers,” Patrick Henry and George Mason, laid out on the record what was really going on. They were afraid that a future anti-slavery president (like Abraham Lincoln; they were prescient) might use the Constitution’s military impressment powers to strip their states of their slave patrolers, leaving them vulnerable to Black revolts.
Madison, a slaveholder himself, called Henry paranoid, then went back to his draft and changed one word that shifted everything from avoiding standing armies and toward protecting the slave patrols. I’ll let the chapters tell the rest.
From The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, Chapters 8, 9, and 12.
How Slavery Laid the Foundation of the Second Amendment
I think slavery is the next thing to hell.
—Harriet Tubman to Benjamin Drew, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 1855
Europeans used guns and formed loose militias to wage a genocidal war against the once-thriving Native American population in North America. Militias in the South at first served the same role, but as the American frontier pushed westward, the role of local militias shifted.
By the mid-18th century, rich plantation owners located east of the Appalachian frontier were generally protected by the British military, which enforced the treaties between Native American tribes and the British empire.