To keep slaves in slavery, you needed militias and they needed to be armed. "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." The Second Amendment, adopted a couple of years later as part of the Bill of Rights (of free white people), was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners in the states that formed militias-often known as “slave patrols”-to crush any attempt at what was called, in those days, a “servile insurrection.” That’s why the full text of the Second Amendment reads: Constitution was built on an explicit compromise (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3) that allowed slave-holding states to count human chattel, described as “other persons,” as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of taxation and state representation in the House, but allowed them no rights as human persons whatsoever. When Dickens was writing in the 1840s, remember, keeping Negro slaves was defended as a Constitutional right with the same vehemence that we hear today when it comes to keeping and bearing arms, and perhaps with more foundation. “With sharp points and edges such as these, Liberty in America hews and hacks her slaves or, failing that pursuit, her sons devote themselves to a better use, and turn them on each other.” “These are the weapons of Freedom,” Dickens wrote with brutal irony. What could one expect, he asked, of those who “learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face” but that they carry guns and daggers to use on each other. Louis the murder of Missouri’s governor two 13-year-old boys defending their “honor” by dueling with long rifles, and other examples. I tried to make the letter M.”ĭickens also compiled a list of several shooting incidents, not all of them in the South: a county councilman blown away in the council chamber of Brown County, Wisconsin a fatal shootout in the street in St. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. “Ran away, a negro woman and two children. Often these public notices described the wanted men and women by their scars. The author of Oliver Twist listened with a mixture of horror and contempt as Americans defended their utterly indefensible “rights” to tote guns and carry Bowie knives, right along with their “right” to own other human beings who could be shackled, whipped, raped, and mutilated at will.Īs damning evidence of the way slaves were treated, in his American NotesDickens published texts from scores of advertisements for the capture of runaways. In 1842, the novelist Charles Dickens, on a book tour of the United States, saw a link between the sheer savagery of slave ownership and what he called the cowardly practice of carrying pistols or daggers or both. And back in the decades before the American Civil War, several British visitors to American shores thought they’d discerned an important connection: People who owned slaves or lived among them wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile, but often shot each other, too. PARIS - For most of the last two centuries, Europeans have been puzzling over their American cousins’ totemic obsession with guns and their passion for concealed weapons.
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