legal historians such as Carl T. Bogus, Robert Cottrol, and Raymond Diamond place white anxieties about control of black populations at the center of these debates as well. In an extensively researched “hidden history” of the Second Amendment, Bogus finds that “the militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population.” Bogus also details how anti-Federalists stoked fears of slave rebellions as a way of fomenting white Southern opposition to the Constitution, forcing Madison to placate slave-owning Virginians and
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