The Black Experience and the Second Amendment

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, January 06, 2022

 

As with so much that has fallen under the 1619 Project’s increasingly expansive gaze, the problem with its meditation on the history of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it is uniformly false, but that it is overzealous.

 

That Americans have often ignored the black experience when evaluating the country’s past is, tragically, true. That this deficiency has applied as much to the promises made by the Constitution as to anything else is true as well. And yet, pace Nikole Hannah-Jones and co., it is not possible for the United States to remedy these inadequacies with overcorrection.

 

Alas, having been handed a golden opportunity to document in detail the many ways in which the protections of that Constitution have been denied to black Americans throughout their history, Carol Anderson, the author of the “self-defense” chapter in the book based on the 1619 Project, reverted to editorial type. Her account is simplistic. It is myopic. And it is false.

 

Which is to say that Anderson’s contribution suffers from the same flaw as does the rest of the book to which it belongs, in that it exhibits a singular inability to conceive of the United States as anything other than a vehicle for the suppression of non-whites. At various points, the Second Amendment is described as having accorded to “white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves”; as having been designed to make it “easier for white people to defend themselves against the Black people they enslaved”; and, in a nod to the “collective right” conspiracy theory that is so popular in the press, as having codified the “right to ‘a well regulated militia.’”

 

Thus are the millions of American — and British — figures who held profoundly different views from these simply “erased” from the historical record. Thus is the right to keep and bear arms — which was codified in law as early as the emperor Justinian, and which was common in 17th- and 18th-century Britain — transmuted into a Founding-era plot. Thus are the Northern states — in which an individual right to bear arms was not only protected both before and after the Revolution, but often protected in the very same constitutional instruments that were used to abolish slavery — ignored almost completely. Thus are pro–Second Amendment abolitionists such as Noah Webster, Tench Coxe, and Sam Adams stricken quietly from the record.

 

The lead essay within the original version of the 1619 Project canon held preposterously that the American Revolution itself was fought to preserve slavery — that is, that all that talk of “liberty” was a cover — and this erroneous assumption has been carried across to the book. The result is a peculiar revisionist history in which all political thought except that issued in defense of human bondage is treated as façade, and in which the Founding generation’s sincere opposition to the prospect of a strong central government with a powerful standing army has been vaporized.

 

In Anderson’s telling, the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution was driven primarily by a desire to include the Second Amendment, and the desire to include the Second Amendment was driven primarily by the South’s desire to efficiently put down slave rebellions. “Though it did not explicitly say so,” she writes, “the Second Amendment was motivated in large part by a need for the new federal government to assure white people in the South that they would be able to defend themselves against Black people.”

 

This is a strange claim. For a start, it is simply untrue that the inclusion of the Bill of Rights — and, specifically, of what became the Second Amendment — was driven by factional or regional concerns. Citing the tendentious work of the (aptly named) Carl T. Bogus, Anderson insists that, far from conceiving of the Second Amendment as the protector of an ancient individual right, the Southerners who pushed for it regarded it as a guarantee of the state’s capacity to deny freedom to rebellious slaves. This is false. Describing his proposed amendments to Congress, James Madison was keen to record that “nothing of a controvertible nature ought to be hazarded” in the process, as well as to assure his audience that he intended to submit only “provisions for the security of rights, against which I believe no serious objection has been made by any class of our constituents.” Reporting back from Congress in June 1789, Virginia’s first senator, William Grayson, echoed this sentiment, informing his fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, that “last Monday a string of amendments were presented to the lower House; these altogether respected personal liberty.” Or, as J. Gordon Hylton put it in “Virginia and the Ratification of the Bill of Rights, 1789–1791,” the amendments that James Madison ended up including “spoke to [George] Mason’s primary concern, the protection of individual liberties against government infringement, but they did not address what many antifederalists considered to be a more fundamental defect of the proposed constitution.” Nothing in the record contradicts these facts, which may go some way to explaining why the essay that Anderson cites to advance her smear is titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” (So well hidden, apparently, that it fooled every contemporary American observer, politician, historian, and jurist for two centuries, and wasn’t proposed anywhere until 1998.)

 

Anderson’s attendant claim that Southern interests “specifically wanted the language about the militia to limit how long state forces would be under national control and to place strict rules on how Congress would use the state militia” is also unsupported by the evidence. In a passage full of handwaving, insinuations, alleged “hidden” meanings, and cobbled-together quotations, Anderson concludes that “Virginia narrowly ratified the Constitution but only with amendments, including the right to ‘a well regulated militia.’” But the Second Amendment didn’t guarantee “the right to a ‘well regulated militia’”; it guaranteed “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Had the provision really pertained to “a well regulated militia” it wouldn’t have been placed into Madison’s non-“controvertible” Bill of Rights; it wouldn’t have been described as a “right” or reserved to “the people” — terms that have clear and consistent meanings throughout the rest of the document; and Madison would have proposed placing it not into Article I, Section 9, which deals with individual rights, but into the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16.

 

Besides, the Southern states had had no problem putting down slave rebellions prior to the ratification of the federal Constitution, and they needed no permission to keep doing so after it had passed. It is true, of course, that many Southerners used their preexisting right to keep and bear arms in ugly ways. But this tells us nothing more useful about the purpose or value or meaning of that right than the marchers at Skokie taught us about the purpose or value or meaning of the rights to assembly, petition, or free speech.

 

Perhaps most damning of all is Anderson’s decision to glide over the sincere motivations of the men who drafted the 14th Amendment. “When they won their freedom,” she writes, “Black people did not also win the right to defend themselves.” This is incorrect, because it is incomplete. Blacks in America did win that right after the Civil War — even if they were often denied it in practice. The author of the 14th Amendment’s privileges-or-immunities clause, John Bingham, explained to the House after ratification that its purpose had been to apply to the states the rights that were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” while Jacob Howard, who introduced it into the Senate, confirmed that it was designed to apply “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as the freedom of speech and of the press; the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances, a right appertaining to each and all the people; the right to keep and bear arms”; and so on. As Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar has pithily noted, “between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.” That for many years the architects of Jim Crow were successful in repressing those freedmen proves that the 14th Amendment was not enforced as intended; it does not suggest that it was never intended to be enforced.

 

The New York Times’ decision to use the word “project” to describe its sweeping program of historical revisionism has always been instructive — suggesting as it does that its core aim is not inquiry, or even rebalancing, but conquest. Given the metastasizing nature of the incursion, it was only a matter of time before it took aim at the Second Amendment. What a shame that it skipped the damning story on offer in favor of yet another round of inchoate, half-baked, self-conscious propaganda.