The governor of the Mississippi territory fearfully imagined the powder keg that was bound to explode in America’s slaveholding democracy: “That we deprive them of the sacred Boon of Liberty is a Crime they can never forgive.”4 The fear of retribution for slavery and the flat-out denial of citizenship only strengthened the anti-Blackness of the Second Amendment and shaped whether Blacks, even free Blacks, had the right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia, or even the basic right to self-defense.
