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June 6 - June 10, 2021
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 convinced many in the North that genuine compromise with the South was impossible because it came at the expense of cherished values and governance. Meanwhile, it emboldened those in the South. They saw how even the revered Daniel Webster of Massachusetts bowed down and worked to wrangle enough votes to put the act through.
The brutal reality of turning the entire United States into a slave catchers’ paradise meant that Blacks had very few places to run; they were going to have to stand and fight and defend themselves “with the surest and most deadly weapons, including bowie knives and revolvers.”193 Frederick Douglass clarified that the only way to make the Fugitive Slave Act dead law was to have “half a dozen or more dead kidnappers carried down South.”
Robert Purvis, a Quaker who had previously been an abolitionist adverse to violence, said, “Should any wretch enter my dwelling … to execute this law on me or mine, I’ll seek his life and I’ll shed his blood.”
The joint anger at the Fugitive Slave Act was an outlier, however, that gave the illusion of a right to self-defense for Black people. The bitter truth was articulated in 1831 by Attorney General Roger Taney in a legal opinion to an official in South Carolina. Taney wrote that free Blacks “are permitted to be citizens by the sufferance of the white population and hold whatever rights they enjoy at their mercy.”
The melee in Cincinnati also, as with Lovejoy’s in Illinois, reveals the irrelevance of being armed or unarmed, because the key variable in the way that the Second Amendment operates is not guns but anti-Blackness.
The right to self-defense, therefore, was and is no firewall to prevent the attempted annihilation of Black neighborhoods.
Saint Domingue, Gabriel’s Rebellion, and the 1811 slave revolt, as well as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, affirmed and reified the foundational fear of Black people. That fear required white safety above all else, and the solution was to continue to whittle away at whatever concept of rights and access to weaponry that Black people—enslaved or free—had. A series of laws and actions thus established that Black people did not have the right to bear arms, the right to a well-regulated militia, or the right to self-defense.
The chief justice’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) asserted in a 7–2 decision that Blacks, including free Blacks, had never been considered citizens of the United States. Not in the founding documents. Not in the initial discussions and laws of Congress such as the 1790 Naturalization Act or the 1792 Militia Acts. Nor by the attorney general and the secretary of state, who refused to issue passports to Blacks because they “were not citizens of the United States.”
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.
Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was instrumental in sabotaging efforts to craft a political and legal environment in which the formerly enslaved and free Blacks could live fully.
Black Codes
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.13 And the hard-fought-for change in the legal status of Black people could not scramble the DNA, the operating principles of anti-Blackness.
In other words, the presence or lack of presence of Black troops was not the catalyst for repeated attempts to commit mass murder. The “peace” that the unreconstructed rebels wanted, instead, was Blacks’ quiet subjugation, a willingness to be owned in a post-slavery society. An acquiescence to white supremacy.
United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
When word of the massacre reached President Grant, rage and sadness combined because he realized something horrible. Truly horrible. “Hamburg, as cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked, and as uncalled for as it was,” he said, “is only a repetition” of Mississippi, Louisiana, and all these Southern states. The common thread among them, Grant solemnly acknowledged, was not civilization, not Christianity, but “the right to Kill negroes … without fear of punishment, and without loss of caste or reputation.”67 Simply the right to kill Black people.
The bullets, of course, did their damage. But so, too, did the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a series of devastating decisions including Cruikshank, “tore down the edifice of Reconstruction law, brick by brick.”
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),
Jim Crow—
Whites, thus, had a near paranoid sense of being “besieged, even though no one [was] at the gates.”
How so?
The mob was not sated. With its appetite whetted by the carnage inflicted on African Americans where they worked, dined, got their hair cut, or played pool and drank, the mob then set out for where they lived. This was going to be a pogrom.
Message finally received. African Americans did what the police would not. And Darktown’s “defensive success blocked the advancement of whites farther eastward into an area heavily populated by blacks.”
They not only encouraged the slaughter; they also committed the sin of omission. The lynching, beating, torturing, and shooting of Black people saw no real intervention by authorities. Over the course of a five-day bloodletting spree, “police arrested only forty whites, or less than 1 percent of the mob’s members.”105 Yet when Blacks who had been hunted for days mistakenly fired on plainclothes officers, the response by the state was an overwhelming, awe-inducing, machine-gun-toting show of force.
He called U.S. entry into the conflagration necessary because this would be a “war to make the world safe for democracy.”125 The autocrats and empires were relics of the past, he scoffed.126 American democracy was the present and the future. Yet for all the soaring language, the United States was a nation locked into a prison of anti-Blackness absolutely unsafe for democracy and also for African Americans.
Black men in the military fought for and served the United States, yet they were defined “as domestic enemies.”
The question was both fantasy and dogma to a nation simultaneously frightened of Black people but desperately in need of their presence to provide whites with labor, racial status, and a cultural touchstone to mark what was “civilized” and what was “primitive” or “savage.” African Americans never bought into the paradigm, however, and challenged both the “facts” of white supremacy and that they had ever blithely accepted their subjugation. The Stono Rebellion, Gabriel’s uprising, Charles Deslondes’s march to New Orleans, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Cincinnati, Christiana, Colfax, Atlanta, and
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Red Summer, an orgy of lynching, terror, and racial pogroms, was the nearly nationwide concerted effort in 1919 to beat and burn the very idea of equality right out of African Americans.
