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THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS CREATED TO PUT DOWN SLAVE REVOLTS  
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Thom Hartmann
September 19, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ But to understand why the Second Amendment exists at all, we must
strip away the myths and confront a brutal truth: it was not written
to safeguard freedom, but to preserve slavery. _

Discovery of Nat Turner, c. 1884 wood engraving by William Henry
Shelton, illustrating Benjamin Phipps’s capture of Nat Turner,
Public Domain

 

One mass shooting after another, one accidental child death after
another tears through this country on an almost daily basis. Once
again, lawmakers hide behind “thoughts and prayers,” while
clinging to an amendment that has been twisted beyond recognition. But
to understand why the Second Amendment exists at all, we must strip
away the myths and confront a brutal truth: it was not written to
safeguard freedom, but to preserve slavery.

The militias it enshrined were never about defending homes from
tyrants abroad but about keeping human beings in chains at home. Until
America reckons with this history, we will remain shackled to its
bloody legacy.

So, let’s clear a few things up.

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says
“state” instead of “country” (the framers knew the
difference—see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave-patrol
militias in the Southern states, an action necessary to get
Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution.

It had nothing to do with making sure mass murderers could shoot up
public venues and schools. Founders, including Patrick Henry, George
Mason, and James Madison, were totally clear on that, and we all
should be too.

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

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution,
laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners
or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia,
and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the
quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties
had which armed militias and required armed militia members to keep a
keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in
1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of
commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month
and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive
Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to
any slave found outside plantation grounds.”

It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by
Leonardo DiCaprio in _Django Unchained_ when he asks, “Why don’t
they just rise up and kill the whites?” It was a largely rhetorical
question because every Southerner of the era knew the answer:
Well-regulated militias kept enslaved people in chains.

Sally E. Hadden, in her brilliant and essential book _Slave Patrols:
Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas_, notes that,
“Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not
every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave
patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical
professions,” like judges, legislators, and students, could stay at
their work. Generally, though, she documents how most Southern men
between ages 18 and 45—including physicians and ministers—had to
serve on the slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in
their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.

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 uprisings by enslaved men and women. As I
detail in my book _The Hidden History of Guns and the Second
Amendment_, slavery can only exist in a police state, which the South
had become by the early 1700s, and the enforcement of that police
state was the explicit job of the militias.

Southerners worried that if the antislavery folks in the North could
figure 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 enslaved men into military
service from the South, then they could be emancipated, which would
collapse the institution of slavery, along with the Southern economic
and social “ways of life.”

These two possibilities worried Southerners like slaveholder James
Monroe, George Mason (who owned more than 300 enslaved humans), and
the Southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (Virginia’s
largest slaveholder), who said, “Give me liberty or give me
death.”

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 an army, and could also allow that federal army to subsume
their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing
institutions into something that could even, one day, free their
enslaved men, women, and children.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during
the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to
slaves who could escape and join his forces. “Liberty to Slaves”
was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the war, British
General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous
freed slaves served in General Washington’s army.

Thus, Southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in
fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves
could be emancipated through the newly forming United States offering
them military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:

“Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8
of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to
provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for
governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the
United States. …”

“By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best
defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm
our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither—this
power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing
officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this
pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the
pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.”

George Mason expressed a similar fear:

“The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been
practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering
them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may
neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the
state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to
arm them [under this proposed Constitution].”

Henry then bluntly laid it out:

“If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot
suppress insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should
happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be
invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition
of Congress. … Congress, and Congress only [under this new
Constitution], can call forth the militia.”

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry? “In this
state,” he said, “there are 236,000 Blacks, and there are many in
several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern
States. … May Congress not say, that every Black man must fight? Did
we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to
make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every
slave who would go to the army should be free.”

Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state
militias given to the federal government in the new Constitution could
be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He
knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he
worried they’d use the new Constitution they were then debating to
ratify to free the South’s slaves (a process then called
“Manumission”).

The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and,
ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):

“hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have
power of manumission,” said Henry. “And have they not, sir? Have
they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May
they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they
not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that
power?”

“This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper
[the Constitution] speaks to the point: they have the power in clear,
unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

He added: “This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in
subjecting it to Congress.”

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and a slaveholder
himself, called Patrick Henry paranoid. “I was struck with
surprise,” Madison said, “when I heard him express himself alarmed
with respect to the emancipation of slaves. … There is no power to
warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it
not.”

But the Southern slave masters’ fears wouldn’t go away. Patrick
Henry even argued that Southerners’ “property” (enslaved humans)
would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave
uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil: “In this
situation,” Henry said to Madison, “I see a great deal of the
property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and
tranquility gone.”

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson’s insistence) already begun to
prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first
draft to one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was
unambiguous and the Southern states could maintain their slave-patrol
militias.

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: “The
right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a
well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a
free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of
bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in
person.”

But Henry, Mason, and others wanted Southern states to preserve their
slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So
Madison changed the word “country” to the word “state,” and
redrafted the Second Amendment into its present form:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.”

Little did Madison realize that one day in the future, weapons
manufacturing corporations would use his slave-patrol militia
amendment to protect their “right” to manufacture and sell assault
weapons used to murder people in schools, theaters, and stores, and
use the profits to own their own political party.

In today’s America, you have the “right” to a gun, but no
“right” to health care or education. In every other developed
country in the world, the reality is the exact opposite.

Pointing out how ludicrous this has become, David Sirota (and
colleagues) wrote in his Daily Poster newsletter (now called The
Lever) on March 22, 2021: “Last week, the National Rifle Association
publicly celebrated its success in striking down an assault weapons
ban in Boulder, Colorado. Five days later, Boulder was the scene of a
mass shooting, reportedly with the same kind of weapon that the city
tried to ban.”

The Second Amendment was never meant to make it easier for mass
shooters to get assault weapons, and America needs a rational gun
policy to join the other civilized nations of this planet that
aren’t the victims of daily mass killings.

It’s long past time to overturn _District of Columbia v. Heller_,
which Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly argued the court should do, and
abolish today’s bizarre interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment was never meant to sanctify weapons of war in the
hands of mass killers. It was crafted to protect the institution of
slavery and the men who profited from it. Today, its distortion fuels
daily carnage in schools, streets, and supermarkets. No other
developed nation accepts this as “normal,” and neither should we.
To honor the lives lost and to finally break free from a history
steeped in violence and oppression, America must confront the real
origins of its gun culture, overturn dangerous misinterpretations of
the law, and choose life over death, freedom over fear, and truth over
myth.

_This article was produced by __Economy for All_
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a project of the Independent Media Institute._

THOMAS CARL HARTMANN is an American radio personality, author,
businessman, and progressive political commentator  He also
publishes The Hartmann Report, a daily progressive newsletter.

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* Second Amendment
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* District of Columbia v. Heller
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* guns
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* mass shootings
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* political violence
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