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| Scuffle outside the Springfield, Massachusetts courthouse, 1786; 19th-century wood engraving, Granger Academic. |
From here https://t.co/dccKX08vue
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
https://t.co/qc2kxI5gC2 pic.twitter.com/s7qO4tfQRr
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
Five years later, as Secretary of State, he was signing Washington's proclamation denouncing the 1792 preview of the Whiskey Rebellion and threatening to meet it with force (which happened in 1794, when Hamilton led an army into western Pennsylvania to suppress the violence)
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
Founders didn't even want a Bill of Rights, as is well known, but included it only under extreme pressure from a few state delegations, with the right to keep and bear arms tied to the idea of an official militia specifically to detach it from the concept of rebellion.
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
And likewise the 2nd Amendment, guaranteeing arms de facto only to whites, as Patrick Henry and George Mason openly said, for slave-patrol militias against some future possibility of emancipation https://t.co/QmzJMbAOG4
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
/fin
— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021
And in the end Henry, the Charles Grassley or Susan Collins of his day, didn't vote for it anyway, though he did deign to serve as an elector in the first presidential election. And that is the short version of how we got the 2nd Amendment, and why it's ultimately pointless to argue over what its real purpose was. It's really the artifact of a messy political process that was focused on something entirely different, which was in fact creating a central government strong enough to put down an insurgency, whether of tax protestors or enslaved people, depending on what you happened to be afraid of at the moment (Henry was afraid of the slaves, Jefferson was afraid of the English, Hamilton was afraid of the French, and Washington was afraid of the veterans who had never gotten their pay). Also, in the long run, Henry was right: It took 75 years, but somebody finally did "look at that paper" and find that it permitted abolishing slavery. LOL. It's really a kind of stupid accident that never did much harm, until conservatives started taking it up as one of those fear weapons they use to get votes from relatively poor people.
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