Madison’s Militia, by distinguished law professor Carl T. Bogus, is appropriately subtitled The Hidden History of the Second Amendment. Among the things you’ll learn from this book: (1) state militias in slave-holding states were primarily slave patrols; they were worthless fighting the British and mostly stayed home because Southerners were more afraid of slave revolts than the British; (2) the backdrop for debates about arming militias was the experience of civil-war torn Britain, where Catholic-leaning King James had disarmed Protestant militias, voiding the will of the Parliament, and then attempted to impose a Catholic-favoring tyranny; consequently, the 1689 British Declaration of Rights, part of the deal made with King William of Orange (whom the Protestants invited in to replace James) prohibited any King from disarming Protestants without Parliament’s permission; (3) the 2nd amendment was included in America’s Bill of Rights to appease the race-baiting of Patrick Henry and the anti-federalists who warned that if the Constitution were adopted, federalists controlling the new national government would disarm slave patrols the way King James disarmed Protestant militia. In the words of the author: “[W]hat would James Madison and his colleagues in the First Congress – who, in their discussions about the Second Amendment, focused exclusively on military concerns related to the militia— have made of the United States Supreme Court declaring, for the first time in the year 2008, that the Second Amendment grants individuals a right to have guns for their own purposes, entirely divorced from the militia? Surely, they would have been astounded.”
Here’s what Kirkus Reviews says:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/carl-t-bogus/madisons-militia/
