EDMUND BURKEMore than a dozen years ago, I wrote an article titled The Hidden History of the Second AmendmentThe Hidden History of the Second Amendment. It got a fair amount of attention at the time. Some historians endorsed it – at least to the extent of saying they found its thesis plausible and deserving of attention – including Garry Wills and Don Higginbotham from the University of North Carolina, who specializes in military history of the colonial and Revolutionary eras.
But, frankly, the article did not get the kind of attention that I thought it deserved. After all, its thesis is intriguing and radical: that, in significant part, James Madison wrote the Second Amendment to assure his constituents in Virginia, and the South generally, that the federal government could not use its newly-acquired constitutional powers to subvert the slave system by depriving the states of armed militia, on which the South relied for slave control. My argument is based on circumstantial evidence; I do not claim that Madison said this was his motivation. However, during a dramatic debate in Richmond, Virginia in June of 1788, Patrick Henry and George Mason expressly accused Madison proposing a Constitution that empowered the federal government to undermine the slave system in exactly that way. Madison, therefore, had strong reasons to fix the problem when he entered the First Congress the following year.
To my surprise, the recent massacre in Newtown ignited a resurgence of interest in The Hidden History of the Second Amendment. During one week recently, it was the fourth most-downloaded article from the Social Science Research Network, which contains more than 300,000 articles. Even more surprising, as far as I can tell this resurgence in interest is taking place not primarily among scholars but among people from all walks of life, who – learning about it from social media or radio shows – are taking the initiative to find, download, and read a heavily-footnoted, 99-page law review article.
I have been getting a lot of questions from readers about the article. The most common question is whether I still endorse the thesis of the Hidden History. Some have suggested that I exaggerated the fear of slave insurrection in Virginia and the South. In the article, I noted that one researcher – the controversial, independent scholar Herbert Aptheker – cataloged roughly 250 rebellions or conspiracies involving at least ten slaves. Not so, some argue; there were not nearly as many actual rebellions and confirmed slave conspiracies. Sure Southerners were concerned and vigilant about slave revolts, but they weren’t “obsessed” about it, as someone put it to me.
I just read Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas by Sally E. Hadden, an historian at Florida State. Hadden’s book – published by Harvard University Press in 2001, after I wrote the Hidden History – may be the most comprehensive description of the South’s slave control system ever written. Hadden’s work supports the fundamental proposition that Southerners were terrified of slave revolts and very much obsessed about possible insurrections during the late eighteenth century. They invested enormous energy in maintaining a slave patrol system, in which white patrollers worked throughout the night to stop blacks from moving about without permission, to search black homes for weapons and other contraband, and to administer lashings to blacks who committed infractions.
Even if not many slave conspiracies ripened into actual revolts, the ever-present threat of insurrection had Southern teeth constantly on edge. Hadden writes: “Even though actual rebellions happened infrequently, their effects loomed large in the sanguinary imaginations of Southern whites.”
There were, of course, revolts. The largest took place in Stono, South Carolina in 1739. Slaves broke into a store, killed and decapitated the shopkeepers, seized rifles and powder, and openly marched under banners proclaiming “Liberty!” to attract other slaves to the rebellion. They grew to a force of between sixty and a hundred before being engaged by militia forces. Scores of slaves and militiamen were killed in two pitched battles. As a warning to other slaves, the militia decapitated dead rebels and displayed their heads on highway mile posts. This rebellion alone sent a chill throughout the South that lasted for decades.
Although Hadden does not catalogue insurrections, she mentions that slave revolts occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1775 and 1795. Moreover, it appears that for every revolt, several insurrection conspiracies were discovered and quashed before they ripened into violence. Conspiracies were quashed in Virginia in the 1720s, in North Carolina in 1753, and in South Carolina in 1766 and 1797. And it seems that for every confirmed conspiracy, there were even more rumors of insurrection plots. Hadden mentions, for example, that there were conspiracy rumors in Beaufort, Pitt, Edgecombe, and Craven counties in North Carolina in 1775. Speaking of other quashed conspiracies, Hadden observes: “Even if the threatened revolts never materialized, the fear white Southerners experienced was real.”
Hadden writes: “With the growing slave population in the colonial era, it was, perhaps, only a matter of time before insurrections took place. Some African slaves arrived in North America with military training and experience, which doubtless contributed to the unrest. …Like a lit match next to a powder keg, the idea of freedom continued to place masters in the gravest danger from their own servants.”
According to other historians, there are 579 identified rebellions or attacks by slaves on slave ships or auxiliary boats, and almost eighty percent of these occurred during the period 1726 to 1800. See David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, Shipboard Slave Revolts and Abolition, in Who Abolished Slavery (Drescher and Emmer, editors, 2010). These historians show that news reports of these episodes were escalating during the latter half of the eighteenth century.
The South was also quite aware of slave uprisings in the Caribbean. In 1733, slaves revolted and took control of the entire island of St. John. For much of the eighteenth century, slaves struggled with their owners on the French colony of St. Dominguez. These struggles escalated into a series of revolts in 1790, and then in August 1791 into a full-scale revolution that was ultimately successful and resulted in the independent black state of Haiti.
Hadden quotes historian Robert Weir as writing that the large slave population “meant that any lapse in vigilance, any failure of government, appeared to threaten the white community with annihilation.”
The bottom-line is this: Even if there were not as many insurrections and documented conspiracies as Herbert Aptheker claimed, no one can understand the enormous and continuous effort that the South put into slave control and not reasonably conclude that whites were very much afraid.
Hadden also makes clear that, except for North Carolina, slave patrols were organized and maintained by the militia. Slave patrols were really a subset of the militia. Even more importantly, the patrols were a prophylactic measure to prevent insurrections, but should they fail and an insurrection occur, it was the militia that would respond and attempt to quell the rebellion. In the South, the militia was primarily a bulwark against slave revolts.
In ascertaining people’s motivations, it is at least as important to know their circumstances and what was important to them as it is to know their professed reasons for doing what they did. In Virginia and the South generally, an armed militia was of life-and-death importance because it protected whites against rebellion by a large – and in many places majority – enslaved black population. This – far more than soapbox rhetoric about having an armed militia to reduce the need for a standing army – had to be in the forefront of Southern minds when they talked about an armed militia being necessary to the security of a free state.
I do not here lay out my full Hidden History argument. For that, you will have to read the article (linked in the first sentence of this post). It is a good read, even if I do say so myself. And, yes, I remain convinced of its thesis.