The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

Yet how quickly the NRA’s swagger disappeared when government agents gunned down Philando Castile and Alton Sterling for merely carrying guns. Sterling’s death didn’t even merit acknowledgment.

Yet here the guardian of the Second Amendment was now deliberately ignoring the inconvenient fact that Black men had been killed for merely possessing a firearm.

The eighteenth-century origins of the “right to bear arms” explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not “carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever” unless “in the presence of some white person.” Moreover, the state’s various militias had the “power to search and examine all negro-houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.” In Delaware, there could be no valid earthly reason that any “bought Servant, or Negro, or Mulatto slave … be allowed to bear Arms.”

As early as 1639, Virginia prohibited Africans from carrying guns because “what white Southerners feared the most … [was] an armed black man unafraid to retaliate against both the system of slavery and those who fought to defend it.”

Indeed, 81 percent of slave-owning estates had firearms, and plantations with the largest number of enslaved people were 4.3 times more likely to have guns than those with few or no slaves.49

As early as 1680, Massachusetts banned “Negroes and slaves” from the militia because the colony feared what would happen if they were armed.

In 1775, North Carolina issued a decree to “search for and seize ‘all kinds of arms whatsoever’ which Negroes might possess.” And added that those who regularly searched Negro quarters for “guns and other weapons would receive a tax cut and be exempt from road work, militia duty, and jury service.”

Nothing that Blacks—free and enslaved—did could overcome the ethos of Black betrayal and treachery. Even the sizable numbers who enlisted in the Continental army, whose terms of service were significantly longer than whites and whose rates of going AWOL were substantially lower, weren’t enough.81

As the war ended, it was in this mythologized landscape that only whites fought for liberty. It was only whites who stood toe-to-toe with the tyranny of monarchy. It was only whites who defeated the British, and therefore, it was whites who were now ready to build a nation committed to “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”83

One of South Carolina’s first governors, Rawlins Lowndes, was unequivocal: “Without Negroes, this state would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the union … Negroes were our wealth,” he said, “our only natural resource.”

There were two divergent goals for the Constitutional Convention. The Deep South was intent on strengthening the slaveholders’ power and the institution of slavery. That is why they were there. Meanwhile, the other delegates were determined to create a viable nation. The asymmetry in aims allowed the dream of the United States of America to be held hostage to the tyranny of slave owners. If South Carolina and Georgia, in particular, did not get nationwide protection for slavery, did not get to have inordinate power in the halls of government, and did not get to enrich their wealth on the backs of the Atlantic slave trade, they “threatened to bolt.”97

The Southern militias not only quelled rebellions; they were also there to prevent another Stono. They oversaw the slave patrols and regularly searched the homes of the enslaved for weapons.130 Georgia even upped the ante with a “standing warrant to search any black’s house,” enslaved or free, for “offensive weapons and ammunition.”131 In short, James Madison, the Virginian, knew “that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the South, was slave control.”

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.5

The committee recommended that Congress place an exorbitant tax on the importation of slaves so that it would be too expensive to engage in that nefarious business.

As his biographer Joseph Ellis noted, Madison had mastered the “Virginia straddle,” talking Northern but thinking Southern.7 This time was no different.

Before then, however, the Naturalization Act of 1790 declared that only white immigrants who had lived in the United States for at least two years could become naturalized citizens.

So it wasn’t actually “immigrant” that became the defining characteristic for American citizenship. The only thing the nation could rely on was phenotype. White skin.14

And that very burden meant that there was nothing they could do, no level of patriotism, no amount of God-fearing godliness, no depth of bravery, no proof of being born in the sweet land of liberty, and no “evidence of time-in-residence … [that] could alter their natural-born state of unfitness.”

It was, therefore, impossible to blithely accept how white immigrants gained the benefits of American citizenship, yet Blacks who had been born in the United States, fought for the United States, and had no other homeland besides the United States could not achieve anything more than the lethal limbo of being “halfway members.”22

Many of the Midwest states agreed. Illinois and Indiana forbid free Blacks from moving there. Some, like Ohio, actually required bonds up to one thousand dollars from Blacks to “guarantee good conduct.”

As late as 1857 in Oregon, a lopsided 8,640–1,041 election banned Blacks from settling in the territory, which was codified in the state’s 1859 constitution and not repealed until 1926.33

Virginia and Florida would craft legislation that used the criminal justice system to convict free Blacks of some trumped-up charge and then sell them into “their true condition … absolute slavery.”37

Not surprisingly, given the omnipresent sense of suspicion and danger associated with Blackness, this exclusion carried through to guns. It was “illegal in most states for [free Blacks] to possess a shotgun, musket, rifle or shot unless by special permit.”38

Blacks with guns, outside the control and approval of whites, was a revolution that was not to be tolerated.39

Enlightenment ideas about freedom, liberty, and people-powered and people-centric governments had, of course, wrested the thirteen colonies from King George III and toppled the Bourbon monarchy in France. Those ideas, however, had also sparked a revolution by hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Saint Domingue, current-day Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 in a French-owned colony that not only produced the most wealth for France but also held more than half of the entire Caribbean’s enslaved population.

It showed something else that was equally frightening. Initially, the Saint Domingue plantation owners thought that the insurgents did not have “combinaison d’idées nécessaire” to sustain a successful revolt.63 The ideas that drove the American and French Revolutions were supposed to be “FOR WHITES ONLY.”64 But the Haitian Revolution’s leaders had welded egalité, liberté, and fraternité into a mighty sword for Black liberation.65 They, in fact, exceeded the parameters of the American Revolution by making the struggle not only about civil liberties but about racial equality.66

Meanwhile, as white planter refugees and their enslaved continued to pour into Louisiana, which would soon become American territory, “growing fears of insurrection” rippled from Pointe Coupée to New Orleans.74 In that steamy hotbed of human bondage, “the ideas of liberty, fraternity, and equality were spread to the far corners of the colony, including the slave quarters.”75

Freedom and independence had now become what the Founding Fathers feared—a lethal virus that could not be quarantined in a whites-only world.

White slave owners lived in fear that “the contagion of liberty that had been released by the American Revolution was dangerously spreading to the ‘wrong’ people.” The enslaved.

Year after year of this resistance hardened the farmers until they had amassed a six-hundred-man militia that launched an assault on the sprawling compound, Bower Hill, of the chief federal excise tax collector, John Neville. “This was no rag-tag gathering to brutalize a tax collector, but a serious military encounter.”

Yet, only a handful of the rebels were tried in court, even fewer were convicted, and eventually they all received presidential pardons.88 Most important, unlike in slave insurrections, there was no clamor for state and federal laws to disarm all white men so that the community could feel “safe,” although it is clear from the reports coming out of Western Pennsylvania that many felt threatened, silenced, and cowed. This legislative ennui about musket- and rifle-toting insurgents also ignored that, from Shays’s Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion, white men were the ones who had taken up arms against the United States of America. And in a pattern that would repeat itself well into the twenty-first century, there were little to no consequences for that.

Whites understood that firearms were the only thing that stood between them and Black people’s freedom.

Whereas Blacks had often thought of and used military service to gain citizenship rights, that was not going to happen. They were now supposed to “serve their country,” pay taxes, and put their bodies and lives on the line; but they could not vote, they could not be officers in command of troops, and, as Claiborne had ordered during the 1811 uprising, they had even been banned from purchasing firearms.

Similarly, “Afro-American soldiers who risked their lives for the United States” in battles from Lake Erie to Mississippi “were rewarded with a summary dismissal from armed service because of their race.”

Gorsuch then threatened to burn the house down with them in it. Parker’s wife, Eliza, sensing the full scale of the danger, ran into the garret and blew the horn, which was the warning signal for the Black Self-Protection Society, a community self-defense committee, to grab whatever they could lay their hands on to fight, because the slave catchers were far too close and hunting. Two of Gorsuch’s men, surmising that Eliza’s trumpet blast was a call to arms, immediately climbed the tree outside the house, aimed their guns at her, and began shooting. As the bullets whizzed by, she ducked down and kept blowing, blowing, blowing.198

This understanding of rights as predicated on whiteness and white benevolence affected even those who weren’t Black but appeared to have a Black-driven agenda. Elijah Lovejoy, a white abolitionist in Illinois, had his printing press destroyed multiple times by angry white mobs. In 1837, they came to burn it down again. He’d had enough. He got his gun, but the mob got to him first and shot him dead. His assailants, although they were the aggressors, potential arsonists, and actual murderers, were found “not guilty.” Lovejoy, while just trying to protect himself and his property, clearly did not have the right to self-defense. Worse yet, some of his allies in the abolitionist movement blamed him for his own death, surmising that “the mob would not have killed Lovejoy if he had not taken up arms.”208

The carnage in Cincinnati provides another insight into the irrelevance and the malevolence of the Second Amendment for Black people’s right to self-defense. It didn’t matter to officials that whites had stormed into the Black neighborhood to burn it down and kill whoever lived there. Instead, all the authorities saw were Black people with guns and identified that (and not the white mob hauling a cannon, intent on committing mass murder) as the problem.

The end of chattel slavery should have made the difference. Even citizenship should have made the difference. But it didn’t. Because as the years after the Civil War would make clear, “the core of white supremacy was not chattel slavery, but antiblackness.”224 And that is the foundational root of the Second Amendment.

Johnson had no qualms whatsoever about this “slow-motion genocide.”5

Blacks still weren’t allowed to testify in court against whites, which meant there were no consequences or legal remedies for the rampant, unchecked violence that had led to thousands of African Americans being lynched after the Civil War.7

The defeat of the Confederacy, despite all the elegiac language about “a new birth of freedom,” had not changed the meaning or the goal of the Second.12 The anti-Blackness that undergirded slavery, that had made it possible, and that sustained it for centuries still remained strong and unrepentant in post–Civil War America.

Blacks tried to hold on to their guns, knowing the horrific penalties that awaited them for doing so but also well aware of the consequences of relinquishing the only thing that stood between them and the barbarism of re-enslavement by another name.

With the 1862 Militia Act and the subsequent Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans had once again joined the ranks of the military and would eventually make up 10 percent of U.S. forces.18 Frederick Douglass understood early on what this meant. He keenly observed, “Once you let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, ‘U.S.,’ let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on Earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”19

The overall sense was that “blacks were not respectable soldiers capable of keeping order—they were a degraded mob hell-bent on race war and anarchy.”

The presence of Black troops was destabilizing, especially because the aura of authority and power they carried directly contradicted the stereotypes of African Americans as “shaggy, slovenly creatures … not far removed from the primitive days of savagery.”

Even before the war ended, they had already drafted and passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and was ratified in December 1865.39 Then, seeing the recalcitrance of the Southern governments and the widespread bloodletting, it was obvious how untenable it was to suggest that the only right Blacks had was the right not to be enslaved.

Congress agreed and passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which for the first time laid out the foundational principle of born-in-the-USA citizenship. In other words, no longer was whiteness the gateway to becoming a citizen of the United States.

The Reconstruction Act, however, also divided the Old Confederacy into five military districts with U.S. troops stationed in this defeated but unconquered land as an occupying army. Like singing an old refrain, Johnson vetoed; Congress overrode him, again.

Whites slaughtered African Americans for trying to protect the right to vote in Camilla, Georgia; New Orleans and Opelousas, Louisiana; and Memphis, Tennessee.45 Louisiana, in fact, had an “all-out ‘nigger-hunt’ complete with bloodhounds” and more than one thousand dead within the span of a few months.46