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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Danny Glover’s Revisionist History: 2nd Amendment Was for Protecting
Slavery
January 21, 2013 Warner Todd Huston
Actor and hardcore progressive Danny Glover should add revisionist historian
to his growing resume of left-wing activism after a recent visit to Texas A
&M University where he told students that the Second Amendment was mainly
meant to keep African Americans in slavery and to kill Native American
peoples.
During his January 17 appearance at the university, Glover thought to teach
the students attending about the real purpose of the Second Amendment.
I don’t know if people know the genesis of the right to bear arms. The
Second Amendment comes from the right to protect, for settlers to protect
themselves from slave revolts and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a
revolt from people who were stolen from their lands or revolts from people
whose land was stolen from. That was the genesis of the Second Amendment.
This is simple historical revisionism. Slave revolts had yet to become the
constant, nagging fear it was later to become for southern slaveholders.
There was no such preoccupation in the late 1780s during the debate over the
Constitution or in the decades previous to that and it certainly wasn’t a
cause for northerners to worry.
Glover is completely wrong in every respect.
Slave revolts were a factor in the later decades after the Constitution was
enacted, of course. Fears of slave revolts took hold in the south because of
several major revolts that frightened whites here and elsewhere. But
previous to the debate and ratification of the U.S. Constitution there had
been but few such revolts and none of them really served as the basis of any
pervasive fear.
One of the most famous slave revolts of the founder’s era was that in Haiti
made famous by the leadership of a former slave named Toussaint L’
Ouverture. The revolt shocked the world, for sure. But this revolt didn’t
start until 1791, four years after the U.S. Constitution was a done deal.
This revolt played no part in the creation of the Second Amendment.
There were slave revolts before 1787, though. One slave revolt in the
founder’s recent memory was called the Battle of the Lord Ligonier and
occurred back in 1767. But that occurred on a ship in the Atlantic not on
our own shores. Another revolt termed the New York Conspiracy happened in
1741. The next one back, called the Stono Rebellion, occurred in South
Carolina in 1739. (And, remember, the famous Amastad incident wasn’t until
1839.)
None of these revolts that occurred before the framing of the Constitution
had much impact on the founder’s thinking.
It should also be remembered that when the founders were debating the Second
Amendment in 1787, slavery had yet to become the economic powerhouse it was
later to become.
Previous to 1810 slavery was developing a bad reputation throughout the
country–even in the south–and by 1810 manumission had been bestowed upon
nearly 200,000 slaves. Then came the growth of the south’s plantation
economy and with it a growing refusal of southerners to consider the end of
their “Peculiar Institution.” But that came a few decades after the
invention of the cotton gin in 1793.
For an economic barometer of the times, cotton exports went from 500,000
pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds by 1810. This abrupt change made slavery
an economic necessity if the south were to continue growing as it had. But,
again, all of this was years after the Constitution was in place.
So, while it is true that southern plantation owners would eventually
develop a bone-shaking fear of slave rebellions and because of that would
begin a vicious routine of suppressing blacks, this fear didn’t manifest
itself until the 1820s and 30s when slavery had become an important and
growing institution for the southern economy.
The truth is the 2nd Amendment was a philosophical ideal based on humanity’
s long history of using government force on a disarmed public, force that
resulted in oppression and in the subsequent loss of religious freedom, and
as a result of the fact that the founders wanted a weaker, de-centralized
federal government that could not harm the rights of the people.
It had nothing at all to do with slavery and Indian attacks, Mr. Glover.
Nothing at all. |
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