While the fires destroyed plantation after plantation in Haiti, freeing blacks in the process to join in the revolt, whites in the US came to believe they "'lived in an enemy camp.'" The "threat" of an uprising by blacks in the US "was always there."
In the Second, Anderson discusses many attempts on the part of free and enslaved black rebels in the US to gain their freedom, but one in particular was telling of how deceptive and determined were white Americans to maintain white supremacy. In Louisiana, on January 8, 1811, Charles Deslondes led enslaved blacks on a "thirty-six mile liberation trek to New Orleans." The militia attacked plantation after plantation, but soon word reached Governor Claiborne who called for organized militias to come to the aid of the free! In danger, no less, from pro-freedom blacks!
While the region and the nation as a whole were legislating in between conducting violent home raids to disarm black people, Claiborne calls on the black militia. Consisting of free armed black men, the militia agrees to help squash the enslaved uprising.
What ensues is a "rout." The rebels under Deslondes fought and fought. But of the enslaved militia, they were captured, including Deslondes. Many were killed, "executed on the spot." The Louisiana's state legislation went to work on a constitution that would grand rights to white males to own and to carry arms. The forming of militias "disciplined" to protect the state, would be the right of white men. Only! As Anderson writes, "despite a black militia being instrumental in crushing a rebellion of enslaved black people, no amount of zeal, patriotism, effectiveness, or courage could fully overcome white fears of black men with guns."
The "black laws," written during the 1830s, further deprived blacks of their right to bear arms. In Virginia by 1832, free blacks were not permitted to "carry firelocks of any kind, under penalty of thirty-nine lashes." In Florida, blacks could be "'summarily punished,'" receiving "up to 'thirty-nine strokes on the bare back' all 'without benefit of a judicial tribunal.'" It followed that in Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas no black person was permitted the right to bear arms.
Add to states implementing laws prohibiting blacks from owning guns, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 codified a state of tyranny for blacks forced to endure on-the-spot inspections and home invasions. The Act put "a bounty on virtually every black head" and certainly contradicted the American idea of freedom. The enslaved were condemned remain exploited laborers while the "free" blacks were never to see themselves as American citizens, with rights that can't be revoked at the whim of white America.
Blacks, writes Anderson, "were ushered into the killing fields." And here we are decades later with "that pervasive anti-blackness," Anderson continues, "even after the Civil Rights Movement," turns "the Second Amendment's laws for protection the castle doctrine, stand your ground, and open carry against African Americans."
"Why did you shoot him, sir?"
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