Saturday, January 26, 2013

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery




Without this material I have always found the whole provision regarding the bearing of arms rather odd. It failed to ring true as something that actually needed to be there in the first instance. It certainly exists no where else.

Now we can fully understand this amendment for the original travesty it was and for the ongoing travesty that it has become. Of course the South needed to protect its natural condition as a de facto police state and that meant local militias.

The second amendment was an instrument to sustain and preserve slavery and absolutely nothing else. It is now used to protect an open market for private arms of all kinds the like of which is tolerated no where else.

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

Tuesday, 15 January 2013 09:35By Thom Hartmann



The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states. 

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state.  The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings. 

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?"  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work.  Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. 

By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South.  Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings.  As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse.  And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves). 

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. 

This was not an imagined threat.  Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces.  "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps.  During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779.  And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.

Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:

"Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . .  

"By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory."

George Mason expressed a similar fear:

"The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution] . . . "

Henry then bluntly laid it out:

"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?

"In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."

Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias.  He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "Manumission"). 

The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):

"[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry.  "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?

"This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it."

He added: "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress."

James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid.

"I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."

But the southern fears wouldn't go away. 

Patrick Henry even argued that southerner's "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil:

"In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone."

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias. 

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."

But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government.  So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State[emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have called dysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have got to be kidding. It was ratified because of the British army. It was ratified because of cougars and black bears. it was ratified because it was a way of getting game. And they did not want the govt. to take it away from them. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE. The Communist Chinese Army has access to 200 million men. And we owe them a lot of money. Get these over vaccinated, malnourished children off of these horrible drugs. beholdapalehorse.tv

Anonymous said...

I agree with Anonymous. This article only provides speculative ancillary reasons for the second amendment being a method for controlling slaves with little to no supporting information. It is clear to me that the reason for the second amendment was to allow the citizens to retaliate if and when the government becomes tyrannical. The founders said so in their writing as wall as the Indictment section of the Declaration of Independence.

To me the above article is little more than race baiting.

You might like to review this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F584p5kJL-U&feature=youtu.be

KP said...

America is extremely lucky this amendment was included. Look at the options- Hitler stripped the Germans of their arms and kills millions, Stalin takes over a disamred populace and murders millions, Mao does the same. An armed citizenry is the only defence against a Police state, as you will find out soon enough.

Anonymous said...

Excuse me Sir but, you are so full of "SH*T" you reek of it. Study real history then post your blog, otherwise we the American People do not need you're lying fictional history.

Tucci78 said...

The Second Amendment was "to preserve the slave patrol militias" in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and New Hampshire?

Yeah, right. While you're groping around down there, yank the other one. Its got bells on.

If anything, the militia imposition upon non-slaveholding Whites in the southern states was yet another economic burden which the majority of the population (the poorest, naturally) had to sustain in order to preserve that "peculiar institution," and one of the many reasons for abolitionist sentiments in those states up until Lincoln sent armies into those sovereign states to enforce the Morrill Tariff.

Stand on Little Round Top and look down across Bloody Run into Devil's Den and consider what had impelled those brigades in butternut and grey - the men in the ranks, not the officers - to join in the attack on that hill on that hideous July day in 1863.

I strongly suspect that it was because "those people" in the blue suits looked a helluva lot like tax collectors.

Anonymous said...

And today, I Choose not to be a Victim, nor a Slave, therefore I proudly carry!!

http://anationbeguiled.com said...

After eight years of 80 hour weeks of research, this is the first mention (Undocumented) of such horse crap I have encountered. Race bating is evident here, so go home, lick your wounds, and remember, gun confiscation is how governments prepare their citizen to be murdered with little loss of their own lives. If you are not afraid of our federal government, it's because you're STUPID!

stephenf said...

Well, obviously, you can't confuse 'em with the facts and make 'em happy at the same time, can you?

What amazes me so much in this debate is the continued insistence on the idea of arms at home to resist some kind of totalitarian takeover by the federal government. Aside from the sheer lunacy of the thing, let's just look at the practical aspect. The only way one can maintain that rationale is to maintain at the same time the notion that the Second Amendment's intent is to allow a private citizen to keep in and around his home whatever would be necessary to resist government troops and materiel. In other words, in this age, you'd need RPGs, bazookas, tanks, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons...what else? Anybody want to defend the idea that citizens should be able to do this, so they can resist the government?

Anonymous said...

Well this is interesting. Without research I am not sure how much truth vs partial truth vs error is in this article. So for now I will concede the point. A point, if true, is a shame as to motive. Now to use the article’s logic:

""Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains."

Change the word ‘militias’ to ‘governments’, leave the rest, and think it over as today’s slavery is not bound by color. Governments have done plenty of trampling upon their own people in the last century, regardless of color.