MaxedOutMama

Chief Justice Henry Lumpkin’s decision for the GeorgiaSupreme Court in Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243 (1846), illus-trates this view. In assessing state power to regulatefirearm possession, Lumpkin wrote that he was “awarethat it has been decided, that [the Second Amendment],like other amendments adopted at the same time, is a restriction upon the government of the United States, anddoes not extend to the individual States.” Id., at 250. But he still considered the right to keep and bear arms as “anunalienable right, which lies at the bottom of every free government,” and thus found the States bound to honor it.

Certain abolitionist leaders adhered to this view as well. Lysander Spooner championed the popular aboli-tionist argument that slavery was inconsistent with con-stitutional principles, citing as evidence the fact that itdeprived black Americans of the “natural right of all men‘to keep and bear arms’ for their personal defence,” whichhe believed the Constitution “prohibit[ed] both Congressand the State governments from infringing.” L. Spooner,The Unconstitutionality of Slavery 98 (1860).

These beliefs, combined with the fact that most state constitutions recognized many, if not all, of the individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, madethe need for federal enforcement of constitutional liberties against the States an afterthought. See ante, at 29 (opin-ion of the Court) (noting that, “[i]n 1868, 22 of the 37States in the Union had state constitutional provisionsexplicitly protecting the right to keep and bear arms”). That changed with the national conflict over slavery.

In the contentious years leading up to the Civil War, those who sought to retain the institution of slavery foundthat to do so, it was necessary to eliminate more and moreof the basic liberties of slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists. Congressman Tobias Plants explained that slaveholders “could not hold [slaves] safely where dissentwas permitted,” so they decided that “all dissent must besuppressed by the strong hand of power.” 39th Cong. Globe 1013. The measures they used were ruthless, re-pressed virtually every right recognized in the Constitu-tion, and demonstrated that preventing only discrimina-tory state firearms restrictions would have been a hollow assurance for liberty. Public reaction indicates that the American people understood this point.

The fear generated by these and other rebellions ledSouthern legislatures to take particularly vicious aim at the rights of free blacks and slaves to speak or to keep and bear arms for their defense. Teaching slaves to read (eventhe Bible) was a criminal offense punished severely insome States. See K. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution:Slavery in the Ante-bellum South 208, 211 (1956).

Many legislatures amended their laws prohibitingslaves from carrying firearms18 to apply the prohibition to free blacks as well.

As the Court explains, this fear led to “systematic efforts” in the “old Confederacy” to disarm the more than180,000 freedmen who had served in the Union Army, aswell as other free blacks. See ante, at 23. Some States formally prohibited blacks from possessing firearms.

The pub-licly circulated Report of the Joint Committee on Recon-struction extensively detailed these abuses, see ante, at 23–24 (collecting examples), and statements by citizensindicate that they looked to the Committee to provide afederal solution to this problem, see, e.g., 39th Cong. Globe337 (remarks of Rep. Sumner) (introducing “a memorial from the colored citizens of the State of South Carolina” asking for, inter alia, “constitutional protection in keeping arms, in holding public assemblies, and in complete libertyof speech and of the press”)

The problem abolitionists sought to remedy was that, under Dred Scott, blacks were not entitled to the privileges andimmunities of citizens under the Federal Constitution and that, in many States, whatever inalienable rights statelaw recognized did not apply to blacks. See, e.g., Cooper v. Savannah, 4 Ga. 68, 72 (1848) (deciding, just two yearsafter Chief Justice Lumpkin’s opinion in Nunn recognizingthe right to keep and bear arms, see supra, at 39, that “[f]ree persons of color have never been recognized here as citizens; they are not entitled to bear arms”).

As Frederick Douglass explained before §1’s adoption, “the Legislatures of the South can take from himthe right to keep and bear arms, as they can—they would not allow a negro to walk with a cane where I came from,they would not allow five of them to assemble together.”In What New Skin Will the Old Snake Come Forth? An Address Delivered in New York, New York, May 10, 1865,reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 79, 83–84 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds., 1991) (footnote omitted). “Notwithstanding the provision in the Constitu-tion of the United States, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged,” Douglass explained that “the black man has never had the right either to keep or beararms.” Id., at 84. Absent a constitutional amendment to enforce that right against the States, he insisted that “the work of the Abolitionists [wa]s not finished.” Ibid.