White fear of slave revolts shaped the constitutional militia debate.

Evidence

Southern delegates worried that placing control of the militias in the hands of Congress was risky because the federal government could decide not to fund or arm the state militias. In this situation, white people would be defenseless against those they enslaved, an unthinkable proposition. This anxiety was driven in part by arguments that had been made during the Constitutional Convention by delegates from the North, such as Gouverneur Morris, who questioned the morality of forcing militias from the North, where numerous states had begun to legally end slavery, to travel south to crush enslaved people’s freedom rebellions. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 788

Categorization

• QUESTION: This North-South split on the militia echoes the later Compromise-era fights — worth tracing how Gouverneur Morris’s objection recurs in later sectional disputes over fugitive slave laws.