The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

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.