Was the Second Amendment political payback?
There’s a great deal of controversy over “Critical Race Theory,” with some state governments trying to ban its teaching in the schools. I believe we should stop calling it “theory,” stop limiting it to race, and begin to use critical thinking in the way we approach our history in both school and in public discourse.
As someone who started school in the ’40s, I was indoctrinated by the myths I was fed in school, in movies, and in magazines such as “Life.” Our Thanksgiving pageants celebrated the “collaboration” between Indigenous people and the first European immigrants; life for those enslaved on plantations was portrayed in movies with “benevolent” slave-owner Shirley Temple or enslaved Uncle Remus in “Song of the South”; Native American portrayals were as “renegades,” leaders pursued, tamed by the U.S Cavalry and returned to the reservations where we were shown they belonged. These were what taught me my country’s “history.” And Life magazine provided the current lives of Blacks happy in their positions as servants, shoe shine “boys,” or in other menial jobs.
In school, I was taught that the honor of our founding fathers was “sacred,” as were the documents they produced. It wasn’t until college that I began to understand that these “fathers” were political beings who negotiated and bargained, and their honor was more political than “sacred” as they produced the document that would bind us in law, the Constitution.
Which brings me to the Second Amendment.
At the time of the Constitutional Convention, there were approximately 500,000 enslaved Black people in the country, and they made up 40% of the Southern states. There were slave owners who “despised” the condition of slavery, but the reality was that they also relied on it to raise the rice, tobacco and cotton which made them among the wealthiest states.
If the enslaved population were counted, it would affect the following: the number of representatives for a state; the number of votes in the electoral college; and the amount a state would pay in taxes.
The population of enslaved Black people gave power to the states which kept them in slavery, and the Southern States were willing to trade taxes for that power. Thus it enabled Georgia and the two Carolinas to delay the year the federal government would be able to ban the slave trade (Section 9) from 1800 to 1806, bringing about a six-year influx of kidnapped Black people, not only from overseas, but also from the illegal kidnapping of freed Blacks in the North.
The Constitution gave the federal government power over the state militias (Section 8:15-16). But the “slave states” used their militias to intimidate enslaved Black people by searches of their cabins to find contraband: guns and books. Such militia raids were a show of force, a warning that any attempts for an uprising would be put down forcibly and cruelly.
As the discussions of slavery raged during the Constitutional Convention, delegates determined to have a Constitution for this new country made concessions to some delegates who refused to sign because there was no Bill of Rights which included states’ rights.
The Constitution was voted on before the Bill of Rights was written. Did the Second Amendment pass because delegates from the slave states were promised this particular amendment? Was the intent of the Second Amendment political pay-off for their votes? It ensured that these states could continue to use their state militias to control the populations of enslaved Black people, and it perpetuated the characteristic that Blacks were only 3/5 human, a characteristic that lingered long after the abolition of slavery, through Jim Crow, and remains embedded in the systemic racism that we are only beginning to examine today.
The Second Amendment has been lauded as a “right of the people.” Perhaps it is time to re-examine it as simply the trade-off between politicians of states with conflicting interests, who put those interests above a truly sacred law that would outlaw slavery and ensure equality of all people — equal justice for all then and forever — in the Constitution which would be the law of our land.
Cynthia Loring MacBain lives in Southampton.