The Second Amendment’s ratification assuaged Southern fears about federal power over slave-control militias

Evidence

The Bill of Rights, which focused on the limits of federal power, shut down the phalanx of opposition to the Constitution. The Second Amendment, in particular, which declared, “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,” short-circuited Mason’s, Henry’s, and other Southerners’ worries “that the federal government would, in one way or another, render the militia impotent as a slave control device.” The scholar Carl T. Bogus writes in a law review article, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”: The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, codified for white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 794

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core reframing thesis about slavery being foundational even to the Bill of Rights, and to the Wilentz dispute over whether such claims are historically supportable.
• QUESTION: Is Bogus’s ‘Hidden History’ thesis widely accepted, or is it one of the contested empirical claims historians (like Wilentz) disputed?
• SHARE: Send to anyone who holds the conventional reading of the Second Amendment as purely militia-protective.