Though today's Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice -- so they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the cause of anti-government "liberty" -- it was primarily a concession to the states and especially to the South's fears that were expressed at the Virginia convention.
Approved by the First Congress as part of the "Bill of Rights," the Second Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain "the security of a free State," an echo of Mason's concerns about "domestic safety," i.e. a Southern state's ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.
As the amendment emerged from various committee rewrites, it stated: "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." But that right, of course, did not extend to all people, not to people of color.
The Second Congress put substance to the structure of state militias by passing the Militia Acts, which specifically mandated that "white men" of military age obtain muskets and other supplies for participation in state militias. At the time, the concerns were not entirely over rebellious slaves, but also over rebellious poor whites.
Part of the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786-1787, an uprising of white farmers led by a former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays. After ratification of the Constitution, the first significant use of federalized militias was in 1794 to crush an anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania led by poor whites known as the Whiskey Rebellion.
That uprising was treated as an act of treason as defined by the U.S. Constitution, although President Washington used his pardon power to spare rebel leaders from execution by hanging. Similar mercy was not shown when Southern states confronted actual or suspected slave revolts. In 1800, Virginia Gov. James Monroe called out the militia to stop an incipient slave uprising known as Gabriel's Rebellion. Twenty-six alleged conspirators were hanged.
Jeffersonian Influences
Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the Right during the country's early years, as economic interests diverged and political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key protege of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the fight for the Constitution.
Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws. However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political opposition to the Federalists.
In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of federal power, particularly with Hamilton's idea of a national bank which was seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the more agrarian South.
The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed Hamilton's national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.
Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson's enthusiasm for a more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is left out of this praise for "Jeffersonian democracy" is that Jefferson's use of the word "farmers" was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.
At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another Southern hypocrite. He wrote that "all men are created equal" (in the Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of Virginia).
His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.
Jefferson's hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, where African slaves took seriously the Jacobins' cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity." After their demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture emerged as the revolution's leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.
The "Black Jacobins"
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