What did the Founders intendon the ‘right to keep a...

 What did the Founders intend
on the ‘right to keep and bear arms’?


          The first mention between Founders James Madison and Thomas Jefferson of what evolved into the Second Amendment appeared in a letter from Paris by U.S. Minister Jefferson Dec. 20, 1787, simply urging “protection against standing armies.”
          Jefferson followed up that point to Madison July 31, 1788, “to abolish standing armies in time of peace” with this general elaboration:
     “If no check can be found to keep the number of standing troops within safe bounds, while they are tolerated as far as necessary, abandon them altogether, discipline well the militia, and guard the magazines with them. More than magazine guards will be useless if few, and dangerous if many. No European nation can ever send against us such a regular army as we need fear, and it is hard if our militia are not equal to those of Canada or Florida…I hope therefore a bill of rights will be formed to guard the people against the federal government…”
An enclosure in Madison’s Sept. 21, 1788, reply included this oblique reference as part of a developing wish list to resolve matters the Constitution itself did not address: “Trial by jury, liberty of the press, and no standing army.”
On June 30, 1789, Madison in writing Jefferson enclosed a rough draft of “the Bill of Rights” dated June 8. The draft included the following:
     “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
On Aug. 28, 1789, Jefferson (not yet having left Paris) replied to three letters of Madison’s including that of June 30. His only suggestion within the context of exchanges on the subject of a standing army vs. reliance upon state militias was the following: “All troops of the U.S. shall stand ipso facto disbanded at the expiration of the term for which their pay and subsistence shall have been last voted by Congress…”
Congress on Sept. 25, 1789, sent to the state legislatures proposed Constitutional amendments including the following, which survived the process as the Second Amendment:
“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.”
The effective date of ratification was Dec. 15, 1791.
Source:  The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Jefferson and Madison, 1776-1826, James Morton Smith, editor; three volumes (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995)
 
 
 

Sally of Monticello: Founding Mother
(complete novel available on Amazon Kindle and in paperback)
The story continues…
 
16
I’d developed what some might judge a sneaky habit—reading Thomas’s correspondence and journals. But he was so open about leaving them around, I’d have been foolish to resist. All he was involved in, every breath he took, had become important to me.
He arrived from his travels exhausted in the wee hours of Thursday morning, the 24th of April, a date I’ve etched in my memory. He went directly to bed. As he slept not far from where I sat, I pored over his travel descriptions.
Near Mainz, Germany, the role of peasant women had become a fascination—
The women do everything here. They dig the earth, plough, saw, cut and split wood, row, tow the batteaux, &c. In a small but dull kind of batteau, with two hands rowing with a kind of large paddle, and a square sail, but scarcely a breath of wind, we went down the river at the rate of five miles an hour.
In Virginia the performance of menial labor by slave women was de rigueur, but had Thomas ever noticed? I couldn’t recall that he had in Notes on the State of Virginia. Perhaps seeing white women at such tasks would adjust his perspective of women generally, regardless of color. Was that too much to hope for?
Thomas and Espagnol had sailed down the Rhine from Mainz to vineyards near Rüdesheim. He’d obtained fifty vines he hoped to root in his garden here at Langeac and, if luck held, to enable viniculture for German wines at Monticello.
Fundamentals of agriculture in various forms as well as mechanics and architecture had absorbed Thomas after they’d departed The Hague and Amsterdam. He’d written extensively and sketched in his notebooks, including a representation of a plow with a new form. He referred to it as a “moldboard plow” and expressed the hope it would prove superior to standard plows now in use.
Ah, I found a later observation, from eastern France on his roundabout return, in which the topic of women picked at him with astonishing results—
The women here, as in Germany, do all sorts of work. While one considers them as useful and rational companions, one cannot forget that they are also objects of our pleasures; nor can they ever forget it. While employed in dirt and drudgery, some tag of a ribbon, some ring, or a bit of bracelet, earbob or necklace, or something of that kind, will show that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them….Women are formed by nature for attentions, not for hard labor.
I intended to ask, in the spirit of my becoming his rational companion, whether he’d mind my sharing that last line with my black sister slaves on the plantations.
I chuckled to myself and read on.
Oh, goodness. Oh, my.
Familiar with Thomas’s style, I was stunned to see a word I didn’t recall his ever having used in his writings. The word was “mulatto,” often used to cite my color as a quarter-Negro.
And he used it not once but repeatedly in his descriptions of the terrain. Had he been thinking of me while viewing spring colors of the countryside? My blood rushed in a pleasant way. My scalp tingled. This was what he’d written in one place—
The spot whereon the good wine is made is the hill side from the church down to the plain, a gentle slope of about a quarter of a mile wide, and extending half a mile towards Mayence. It is of south-western aspect, very poor, sometimes gray, sometimes mulatto, with a moderate mixture of small broken stone.
I was there with the poor aspect and the broken stone, but I was there. And, from just a few days ago—
The plains of the Marne and Sault uniting, appear boundless to the eye till we approach their confluence at Vitry, where the hills come in on the right; after that the plains are generally about a mile, mulatto, of middling quality, sometimes stony. Sometimes the ground goes off from the river so sloping, that one does not know whether to call it high or low land. The hills are mulatto also, but whitish—
Seldom has reading anything taken my breath away. But this was a revelation, that my sleeping giant had carried such a thought of me to an extent it would literally color his writing.
I set the notebooks aside, noticing that Mr. Short had opened and stacked incoming letters from the time Thomas was away. The topmost was a note from Maria Cosway—
Your long silence is impardonable….My war against you is of such a Nature that I cannot even find terms to express it.
Little did she realize that her inconstancy had cost her the leading place in his affections. The man needed warmth, the closeness of a companion sincerely interested in his work, the reliability of an attentive sweetheart and lover. In other words, he needed me.
We were coming onto late afternoon. I expected Thomas would stir himself awake shortly, and he would most assuredly wish to bathe.
It was time.             I rationalized, as I’d recently turned fifteen, it was time.