The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery [View all]

[kpete]

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
Tuesday, 15 January 2013 09:35
By Thom Hartmann, Truthout | News Analysis

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

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.

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MORE:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery?fb_action_ids=527613423937112&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22527613423937112%22%3A390307407725537%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22527613423937112%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/15/1179307/-The-Second-Amendment-was-Ratified-to-Preserve-Slavery