2nd Amendment a guarantee that Virginia Militias could quash slave rebellions (March, vs)
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I wouldn't be surprised if slavery was a motivator for some founding fathers, but to act like it was the reason for the American Revolution is so narrow sighted.
Not at all, just look at the facts:
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A majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and nearly half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. Four of the first five presidents of the United States were slaveowners.
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Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president, owned slaves. George Washington, revolutionary hero and first president, was one of the largest slave owners in the nation. James Madison, the prime architect of the Constitution and fourth president, held slaves.
A majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and nearly half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. Four of the first five presidents of the United States were slaveowners.
When everyone owns slaves, it speaks volumes about how important it was that America remain a slave nation.
When England banned slavery, British America was terrified. They knew they had to fight to preserve it.
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In 1772, a judge sitting in the High Court in London declared slavery “so odious” that it could not exist at common law and set the conditions which would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England. This decision eventually reached America and terrified slaveholders in the collection of British colonies, subject to British law
One judge in one case saying it's illegal doesn't matter. The same way it doesn't today in the US. In fact, the case isn't even mentioned in the either timeline I linked.
Yes it was. George Washington rebelled against the notion of Britain banning and taxing slavery.
Fighting to preserve slavery was the only way to unite America against the British.
George Washington wasn’t in Massachusetts when the Revolution began. Boston was in full bloody revolt for more than a year before anything of consequence happened anywhere else. The 1619 Project is garbage.
This makes SUCH PERFECT SENSE. Everyone has wondered what was the deal with militias - why was that mentioned in this amendment? Why is it so confusingly written? Surely, the founding fathers who were flush with pride in their brand new government, weren't trying to arm citizens against the government they worked so very hard to carefully create?
Turns out, no, they weren't trying to arm citizens against the US government. But rather, Virginia wanted to make sure they had the ability to regulate their own state militias, without interference from the federal government, to extinguish slave rebellions that they predicted would happen.
The 2nd amendment was added in 1791. The very year the Haitian Rebellion began, where slaves in Haiti rebelled (successfully) against their masters. At that moment, white people were fleeing Haiti with their slaves, and coming to Virginia. The Virginians were rightfully worried that these new Haitian slaves being brought in would organize a rebellion and overthrow the state.
Makes such crystal clear, perfect sense. Like the police forces in the south that were begun with the entire focus of locating and returning runaway slaves, 2A was designed to extinguish a slave rebellion.
The American revolution was a fight to preserve slavery, which was banned in England.
Slavery and the taxation of it, is the ONLY uniting factor in getting both the north and south to fight against Britain.
Lol your facts are that the presidents and a lot of founders owned slaves? Prove that there was any fear that Britain would abolish slavery besides a dumb, ill-cited Vox article. There was no indication that Britain was going to get rid of slavery at that time, considering slavery was ramping up in the British colonies in the Caribbean. Britain was not some moral utopia that got it right on slavery and America got it wrong.
They both were wrong for their involvement in slavery, Britain just abolished it about 30 years before America and without a large conflict. Part of that was to do with the fact that they reimbursed the slave owners and went into debt for some time due to that.
It's laughable that you bought into Britain being some moral crusader during the American Revolution time.
Pffft. I was born with self ownership and property ownership rights. I don't need need to justify them or seek approval from anyone else.
This.
And the Bill of Rights grants nothing beyond the "rights" of the accused in courts, as those are creations of the government, so they saw fit to express certain rights within that construct.
The 9th and 10th Amendment are the guide on how the Constitution views rights. The individual possess them by default even if they are not all listed, and if the federal government was not specifically given power over those assumed rights in specific enumeration elsewhere in the document, then the States and the People retain sovereignty over those innumerable, unlisted ASSUMED rights.
The 2nd Amendment's predicate clause also has that assumption baked inside the statement:
"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
That right is not "granted" or defined anywhere in the Constitution prior to that sentence appearing in the 2A, and thus the 9th Amendment guide applies - it is one of innumerable rights the individual possesses by default because duh, we all get it. Remember, the people who wrote, debated, sold and ratified this document were all familiar with the Scottish Enlightenment, John Locke's 2 Treatises, natural rights theory, etc. To them, assumed inalienable rights as a condition of ones very existence was common knowledge, and THEY STILL INCLUDED THE 9TH/10TH AMENDMENTS, as a "Rights For Dummies" pamphlet.
This relitigating of something so clearly, completely and exhaustively defined in the Federalist Papers, AntiFederalist Papers, speeches/writings of the Virginia Anti-Constitutionalists, speeches/writings by Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, Scottish Enlightenment treatment of individual rights (from where Jefferson essentially plagiarized the Declaration of Independence), etc is absurd.
ALL historical text points to the simple fact that the right to keep and bear arms was/is/will always be assumed and the government shall not infringe upon that right.
Someone here has been bashed across the skull with a dose of CRT revisionism. In one sense it's funny that someone would twist a contextually second fiddle element into the key driver of the revolution. On the other hand it's really sad that people can be so clueless and easily mislead.......Dunning - Krueger in action.
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