This is absolute nonsense. Slavery is explicitly supported in Article IV§2 and implicitly mentioned in the famous three-fifths clause in Article I. The slave-holding states were vital to the existence of the US as a whole entity – in fact, there is a substantive argument that the Revolutionary War was prosecuted in large part on behalf of the slave-holding states, as England was on an abolitionary trajectory.
Slavery was essentially a state’s rights issue. To sever the two concerns as Civil War causes is the height of speciousness. If the Second Amendment is written in a way that is advocating the right of individual states, that strongly suggests that arming the citizens was partly a means to help keep the slaves under control. To play down the importance of slavery in the early development of the US as a nation is foolishness.
These claims exist but, as noted above, they are untrue. Claiming that the Revolution was fought over slavery is nearly as clear a case of revisionist history as claiming that the Civil War was not fought over slavery.
In the 1700s, England was hardly on an abolitionist trajectory, except insofar as the whole world was (including the southern United States) purely due to the decreasing economic viability of slavery as a whole. The world’s economy was becoming less and less dependent on the sort of unskilled manual labor that you can effectively force a slave to perform; while you can put a slave in a factory to perform more specialized labor, they’ll never perform as effectively as a free person.
At the time of the Revolution, @DrDeth is in fact correct. Most of the Founding Fathers assumed that slavery was on its way out, so rather than tackle the issue which stands in opposition to the foundational principles of the new Republic, they just ignored it, and agreed to bind the federal government in ways that would prevent it from abolishing slavery.
Two developments which they didn’t see coming occurred and entranched slavery in the Southern states:
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The invention of the Cotton Gin gave slavery a few more decades of economic viability
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The South developed antebellum culture which made slavery an integral part of the southern identify
Neither of those things had happened yet at the time of the Revolution.
Correct, but so is trying to tie the cause of the Revolution (what we are discussing in this thread) to slavery.
More accurately, states’ rights was essentially a slavery issue. The North believed that states should have the power to abolish slavery, and the South objected to that. Every time that anyone talked about “State’s Rights”, that’s what they were talking about.
Slavery, at least as practiced in the American south, was never economically viable. It existed for the same reason racism is still widespread today: To give white losers someone even lower than them on the social hierarchy that they could look down on.
It clearly was economically viable at some point, since people made a bunch of money off of their slave plantations.
Owning a lot of property always means making a bunch of money. But they could have made more, with free workers.
The big thing with Washington DC was that it isn’t a state, it’s a federal district; and so the court couldn’t duck it as a states’ rights issue, it had to address what the federal constitution said about the “rtkaba”. And at that point there was no way left to waffle on the subject; the court’s choices were to declare the Second Amendment an archaism that was a dead letter in the 21st century, or to uphold that it really said and meant that owning firearms was a liberty and an indelible part of the Bill of Rights.
I don’t dispute that. But despite operating less efficiently they were able to build up wealth.
Around the time of the Revolution that was becoming less and less true. The inefficiency of slavery was becoming more and more pronounced, the gap between free and slave labor was growing, and slavery was becoming less and less viable to maintain.
The Constitution called for forbidding the states from having their own individual state armies, AND gave the federal government co-authority over the one type of armed force the states were allowed to retain: calling up a posse of armed citizens. If the Second Amendment hadn’t explicitly forbidden the federal government from interpreting that authority as giving it the power to order the citizenry to disarm, the Constitution would never have been ratified. The states would have said F-U, and we would have dragged along under the Articles of Confederation until the whole thing fell apart and what’s now the USA would be 6-12 sovereign or semi-sovereign nations. Like equal representation in the Senate or the 3/5ths Compromise, it was the price of doing business.
And that’s why we would’ve been better off if the Revolution had failed.
And yet the other provisions of the Bill of Rights were eventually held to be not merely matters of federal versus state jurisdiction but statements of political philosophy, the closest thing our constitution has to expounding a thesis or manifesto on natural rights and the proper relationship of the citizen to the government. The degree to which the federal government can stick its nose into the business of state laws has been and remains controversial. But I’ll note that we wouldn’t even be having this discussion about state bills of attainder, or summary state incarceration without habeas corpus, or crowd-control ordinances that essentially pre-defined all unauthorized gatherings as conspiracy to riot. Only the embarrassing and unloved Second Amendment is regarded with any doubts at all.
By the values that we seem to hold in the 21st century, yes.
And its more complicated than even that. The original founders didn’t want a standing army - not at a state or federal level. One of the huge issues with the Revolution was that our militias weren’t “well regulated” - they weren’t trained. So they wanted a trained citizenry but not a standing army.
And what did they want that trained citizenry for? Well, possibly invasion by Canada, and we did end up in the War of 1812, but really, they were afraid of two populations - slaves and slave uprisings and Native Americans. And that’s REALLY what the second amendment is about…upholding the slave state and continuing to colonize at the expense of the indigenous population.
And yet what was the Second Amendment forestalling– the possibility that the states wouldn’t be allowed to maintain state armories? The letter of the 2nd at least seems to be guaranteeing that there wouldn’t a federally-ordered disarmament, which only seems relevant under the presumption that the states were to call up citizens armed with their own privately-held weapons.
To the extent that the Bill of Rights originally only limited the federal government, they’re all about state vs. federal power.
At least circa 1787-1812 the idea that Britain, or France or even Spain might launch an attack or invasion of the nascent USA was not unrealistic. I won’t dispute that slave uprisings or indian wars were a concern, I just don’t think the entire 2nd Amendment is a dog whistle for “slave patrols”.
At least in the north, it was more about native American patrols than about slave patrols. And not really about invasion from Europe.
We also wouldn’t be having this discussion if the 2nd amendment had solely said “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. But it doesn’t.
Only the Second Amendment includes language which its proponents would like to simply ignore.
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” has meaning. It is best understood in the context of the time. It preserves a state right.
Amendments have been incorporated to the states, but on a case by case basis, based on the understanding that the right being preserved was an individual right, and pursuant to the authority of the 14th amendment.
But that first requires a determination that the right being encapsulated is an individual right. I do understand why some may decide the 2nd does that - it uses the term “the People”, after all.
But, in the context of the time, I think that term is best read as a comparison to a standing “professional” army, of which the founders were wary. Under classic “originalist” philosophy, it was a federal restriction on state sovereignty, and should have remained so.
(Personally, I’m okay with the Supreme Court saying that, as our country has evolved, it has come to be understood as a personal right to own a weapon, and therefore should be protected generally, although it is the proper subject of regulations and restrictions. But that requires an acknowledgment that the constitution can be interpreted in a way not originally contemplated by its authors, something that most 2nd amendment proponents- who tend also to be right wing - disparage).
No mention of the word 'slave" at all, in either. No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
Yes, they knew it existed, they never wanted to name it, and they hoped it would go away. They made compromises , but only to get the Declaration and Constitution passed.
Our Founders’ own statements at the Constitutional Convention, speeches, and private correspondence thereafter paint a very different picture of their views on slavery and how it shaped the Constitution.
It wasn’t for the sake of the rest of the world that the Founders did not mention slavery therein, as Hannah-Jones claims. It was not a mere fig leaf.
The words were purposefully omitted in the hope that our Constitution would long outlive the horrors of slavery and the conviction that our founding document would not bear its scars.
The Founders were under no illusions that slavery was in any way consonant with the principles at the very foundation of our regime.
Moreover, they hoped that the harsh dissonance between principle and practice would be resolved quickly. Indeed, in laying down principles that could not be squared with slavery—and drafting a Constitution that did not guarantee its continuance, nor even countenance slavery’s existence—our most celebrated Founders hoped they had hastened its demise.
Indeed, decades later as Southern politicians, such as Sen. John Calhoun of South Carolina, attempted to defend slavery against mounting challenges, they found no support in our founding documents.
The indispensable man of the Revolution, George Washington owned hundreds of slaves, but during the Revolutionary War, he began to change his views. He wrote that he wished “more and more to get clear” of owning slaves. … Washington wrote in 1786 about slavery that “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it; but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, and that is by Legislative authority.” Washington, though, never took a public stand on the abolition of slavery. He described his ownership of slaves as “the only unavoidable subject of regret.” When Washington died, he made an important statement to the nation and freed the slaves he owned in his will, the only Founding Father to do so.…Despite this, he still wrote how he believed slavery to be a political and moral evil and how he wished to have the institution abolished. Jefferson felt powerless to change the situation and summed it up near the end of his life as “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Then note this- As the Founding generation passed on and as slavery continued to expand and grow in the Deep South, slaveowners began to speak of slavery less as a “necessary evil” and more as “positive good.”
So, the Founding fathers thought Slavery was a bad thing and would end on its own accord. This changed as life went on, especially with Cotton. Then the whole economy of the South was fixed on one big thing- King Cotton- and you needed slaves for that- or so they said.
[E]very measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States … . I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in abhorrence … .”—John Adams, Letter to Evans, 1819
“Slavery is … an atrocious debasement of human nature.”—Benjamin Franklin, an Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789
Correct, and thank you.
It was during the short era of King Cotton. Southern Fortunes were made.
From 1840 or so to 1863, money was made from cotton like never before.
Cotton gin - Wikipedia.
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.[34] While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[35] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.[36] The invention of the cotton gin led to increased demands for slave labor in the American South, reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century.[37] The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe’s first agricultural powerhouse”.[38]… The invention of the cotton gin led to an increase in the use of slaves on Southern plantations. Because of that inadvertent effect on American slavery, which ensured that the South’s economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.[39][6][40]
The number of slaves in the USA more than quadrupled due to the cotton industry.
Maybe, but not with Cotton- or at least that was the Convention wisdom of the time.
Then, maybe the French Revolution would not have occured. Democracy would have been a long slow time coming.
There werent that many slaves back then, maybe 400000 out of nearly 3 million. This is just another re-writing of history to make American history all slaves all the time . Until The South more than quadrupled the number of slaves, with only 5 million of so White people in the South and over 3 million black slaves.
Indians, the British, the french (the quasi-war_ etc were real threats. They had weapons and canny warriors.
No. It has two parts- every State can have a militia, and the people can keep and bear arms (so they can be in that Militia). The bit about States being allowed to have their own militia is now about as obsolete as “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”- but that was also important back then.
Well, it can- SCOTUS has said we have a Right to Privacy also- which is not enumerated.
The UK was already a democracy at the time, perhaps more so than the US at its inception because it didn’t have a large enslaved population. In the long run, slavery would have been abolished sooner, America would have gained its independence in the same way Canada and Australia did, and we wouldn’t be stuck with a constitution written to give disproportionate power to places where nobody lives.
In the Island, no slaves, yes- but in their colonies? Not until 1834. The UK beat us by only 30 years or so, their colonies had many slaves.
Rotten and Pocket boroughs were a major part of 'democracy" in the UK until about that same time.
The House of Lords was the more powerful House until again about that time.
In other words- before the late 1830s, the UK did not have a real functioning democracy.
Such as the House of Lords?
I think you are oversimplifying. Say the American Army had been fully defeated in two or three years and the colonies more or less brought to heel. The British would be rooting out the treasonous bastards who tried to break with the mother country, to bring them to trial in England.
The actions of the British government would create a lot of dissension in the colonies. Turmoil would be escalating. Meanwhile, some sort of armed conflict would develop against France, which was known to have aided the colonists in their insurrection.
Many of the “founding fathers” would be in prison or been executed at this point. But the colonies would be becoming increasingly troublesome for the British. American independence would have been effected by the twenties at the latest, under the guidance of a completely different leadership. What form that would have taken is difficult to imagine.
Has the definition of “arms” changed in the dictionary?