Tench Coxe (as “A Pennsylvanian”), 6/18/1789
“The people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”
Coxe was an abolitionist who served as a member of the Continental Congress and as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Alexander Hamilton. “A Pennsylvanian” was his known pseudonym.
James Wilson, Lectures on Law, Delivered in the College of Philadelphia, 1790-1792
“Homicide is [permitted], when it is necessary…With regard to [defense of one’s person], it is the great natural law of self preservation, which, as we have seen, cannot be repealed, or superseded, or suspended by any human institution. This law, however, is expressly recognized in the constitution of Pennsylvania. ‘The right of the citizens to bear arms in the defence of themselves shall not be questioned.’ This is one of our many renewals of the Saxon regulations. ‘They were bound,’ says [English legal scholar John] Selden, ‘to keep arms for the preservation of the kingdom, and of their own persons.’”
Wilson was the only Founder to sign both the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and also serve as a Supreme Court Justice. He served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where his ideas served as the basis for the American presidency. He proposed a single executive elected by popular vote, but slave owners demanded Congressional approval of this position so he proposed the Electoral College as a compromise. He also created the Three-Fifths Compromise, which “did not recognize the right to own other individuals explicitly in the text, something that Wilson as an opponent of slavery had sought to exclude from the Constitution.” He also ensured that the Fugitive Slave Clause contained no enforcement mechanism, and avoided using the word “slave” in the Constitution so as not to endorse the practice.
During his time on the Supreme Court, Wilson also taught law at the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) where he delivered a series of lectures on law. President Washington, Vice President John Adams, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and numerous members of Congress attended Wilson’s first lecture on December 15, 1789. Wilson’s lectures discussed the importance of law, its history, and how the law should be taught and administered in the United States. Specifically, Wilson advocated for thinking about the Constitution and future laws as an extension of natural law.
Joel Barlow, 1793
“Many operations, which in Europe have been considered as incredible tales or dangerous experiments, are but the infallible consequences of this great principle [that all men are equal in their rights]…[One] of these operations is making every citizen a soldier, and every soldier a citizen; not only permitting every man to arm, but obliging him to arm…The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the government, not to the society; and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage.”
Barlow was highly influential figure of the Revolutionary and early post-independence periods; an anti-religion and anti-slavery poet appointed by Madison as Minister to France and requested by both Madison and Jefferson to write histories of the Revolution from their perspectives. He helped draft the Treaty of Tripoli establishing that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” and was a personal friend of Thomas Paine.
William Rawle, 1/1825
“No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a [villainous] attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, [the Second] amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both…
In England, a country which boasts so much of its freedom, the right was secured to protestant subjects only…and it is cautiously described to be that of bearing arms for their defence, ‘suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.’ An arbitrary code for the preservation of game in that country has long disgraced them…The prevention of popular insurrections and resistance to government by disarming the people, is oftener meant than avowed, by the makers of forest and game laws.”
Rawle was requested by Pres. George Washington to be US Attorney General. He served as chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar and president of the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and argued against the constitutionality of slavery before the Supreme Court.
Hon. Henry Chipman, 3/5/1829
“It has never been dreamed that [the First Amendment] can take away the common law action for slanderous words, any more than it can alter the law of libels for a printed slander…The constitution of the United States also grants to the citizen the right to keep and bear arms. But the grant of this privilege cannot be construed into the right in him who keeps a gun to destroy his neighbor.”
Chipman had moved to Michigan specifically in order to live in a state that didn’t practice slavery.
He supported the anti-slavery Whig Party and was appointed to the Michigan Supreme Court by Pres. John Quincy Adams.
The History and Topography of the United States, 1832
“The military power is vested in the government of the Union, not in the separate states, the president being commander-in-chief; but the right to have arms is not taken away from individuals.”
Hinton was an anti-slavery minister and author.
Chambers’s Information for the People, 1838
“Congress is prohibited by [the original articles of the Constitution] from making any law concerning the establishment or free exercise of religion, [etc.] The people are secured in the right of bearing arms, of fair trial, and in the possession of their property, against all aggressors, either public or private. Of these rights no act of Congress, or other authority, can deprive them.” (Book p. 90/Viewer p. 114, bottom of 1st col.)
Robert Chambers was an early proponent of evolution, and William Chambers served as director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Rep. Francis OJ Smith (ME), 2/16/1838
(paraphrased) “Mr. S…had no idea, nor would he be in haste to believe, that all the honor to be acquired by deeds of arms, nor all the wealth which the whole treasury of the country could supply, would induce an officer of the Army or Navy, or a freeborn citizen of the United States, to disarm his neighbor, or prevent him in the exercise of his constitutional right to bear arms. He would not believe that such an odious system of tyranny could ever be carried into execution by American citizens against American citizens!...
Mr. S. went on to say that the effect of the bill would be to raise a band of men indefinite in number, who, while they possessed the character of officers of the Government, would in fact be so many spies upon our citizens, and be set over them as judges whether or not they should be permitted to enjoy the privilege of bearing arms. These petty despots would be empowered to say to the free citizens of this republic, ‘I come clothed with the power of the Chief Magistrate of the U. States, and say to you, lay down your arms.’ Mr. S. wanted to hear the chairman of the committee who had reported this bill explain how it was in conformity with the provisions of the Constitution which declared that ‘the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’…
If Congress could do this, where was an end of the exercise of power by this body?...He would ask the gentleman whether he was acquainted with the free citizens of this country, on which this bill was to operate? And whether he believed the President could purchase men in this country, who would be slaves enough to execute a law like this?…Could a law be found on the whole statute book, which so completely surrendered the whole naval and military power of this Government into the hands of the President? So far as this bill went, there was nothing to restrain him. He might, if he pleased employ the whole Treasury in the appointment of a corps of petty officers without number, as spies on the freedom of our People…
Mr. S said he begged he might not be misunderstood, while objecting to the tyrannical power conferred in this bill. He did not call in question the ability, integrity, or upright purpose of the President to execute the law in good faith. He would as soon entrust such a power to the present Executive as to any other Chief Magistrate…How awful might the consequences prove on such a precedent in the hands of a military and tyrannical Chief Magistrate? There was no end to the oppression which might be perpetrated under such a grant of power.”
Smith was opposed to slavery.
Rep. Samson Mason (NY), 2/17/1838
(paraphrased) “The bill is opposed on the ground that it is a violation of the constitutional right of the People to bear arms. It is not the right, but the abuse of it, that is intended to be restrained and punished. This right must be exercised in such a manner as to do no unnecessary injury to others…The right to bear arms is not a right to make war on our neighbors; it is, therefore, no infringement of the right to punish its abuse.”
Mason was a member of the Whig Party, which tended toward opposition to slavery.
Rep. Richard Menefee (KY), 2/20/1838
(paraphrased) “The bill…involved a gross and most alarming infraction of more provisions than one of the Constitution, meant to secure the citizens from unreasonable seizures and searches, their right to bear arms, [etc.]…I shall not forget the rights of my own nation, or of its citizens, or my duty to the Constitution.”
Menefee was strongly endorsed by fellow representative and radical abolitionist Cassius M. Clay, but became too ill to serve; upon his early death, he was eulogized as having spoken eloquently in support of a law prohibiting the importation of slaves.
Rep. Isaac Toucey (CT), 2/22/1838
(paraphrased) “The Constitution of the United States declares that the right of the people to bear arms shall remain inviolate…If this [bill] was adopted, any citizen of the United States who might be found with arms or munitions of war in his possession, and he expressed an intention of using them in carrying on hostilities in a conterminous country, he is guilty of a high crime by your law, and subject to fine and imprisonment.” (p. 196, 1st col., 3rd full paragraph from bottom)
Toucey, who was consistently more liberal than the vast majority of his fellow congressmen, went on to serve as governor of Connecticut, US Attorney General, US senator, and secretary of the Navy.
The Liberator (Boston, MA), 9/21/1838
“You must leave [man]…free exercise of religion, of speech, of the press, [etc.]…We will mention one more—that is the uninfringible right to keep and bear arms. All these and many other rights and immunities too numerous to be mentioned are secured to him by adamantine provisions in the constitution.”
The Liberator was “the most influential abolitionist publication in the United States during the nineteenth century.”
Solomon Southwick, 7/4/1839
“Till [eternal peace and liberty] shall descend upon us, never yield the right to possess arms and to bear them, if necessary, in defence of your altars and your fire-sides, against domestic tyrants, as well as foreign foes…Every citizen should be a soldier, and ready, at a moment’s warning, to gird on his armor for battle against foreign foes or domestic tyrants.”
Southwick was a Founding-era newspaper publisher and politician who ran for governor of New York as a member of the anti-slavery Anti-Masonic Party, and corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He advocated “the total abolition of war” and “the abolition of domestic or personal slavery.”
Joseph Story, 1840
“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms…The friends of a free government cannot be too watchful, to overcome the dangerous tendency of the public mind to sacrifice [rights] for the sake of mere private convenience…The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the [safeguard] of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them…There is certainly no small danger, that indifference may lead to disgust, and disgust to contempt; and thus gradually undermine all the protection intended by this clause of our National Bill of Rights.” (p. 264-265)
Story is generally considered one of the greatest Supreme Court justices of all time. “A renowned writer and orator, Joseph Story’s writings and opinions fundamentally influenced early American jurisprudence.” He also served as a US representative from Massachusetts and Speaker of the House of Representatives of that state. Ruling in favor of US abolitionists represented by John Adams, he authored the decision to free the kidnapped Africans who had mutinied against their enslavers aboard the Amistad.
Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 9/16/1843
“‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Now, the latter clause of this sentence is, as all must see, the material and the significant part of the amendment—its essence and its purpose. The rest is but an allegation, a motive; and at any rate is not stated in the Constitution as an independent proposition. That allegation, moreover, is a very disputable one; for many free States have subsisted without a militia.”
The Daily National Intelligencer was founded by Samuel Harrison Smith, and in 1843 was being run by Joseph Gales and William Winston Seaton; Smith was a friend of Thomas Jefferson, who called the Intelligencer “the only reliable source of information regarding government actions and positions.” Gales and Seaton maintained the paper’s close relationship with Jefferson; both also served as mayor of Washington, DC and were members of the American Colonization Society, an anti-slavery organization.
Christian Contributor (Utica, NY), 6/21/1848
“The Amendments to the constitution provide that…‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’ [etc.] These prohibitions all apply to the power of Congress within the District of Columbia; and they all imply personal liberty on the part of the people.”
The Christian Contributor was published by Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor, a prominent abolitionist who founded the first college in the nation to have the purpose of educating both black and white students, including women.
Joel Tiffany, 1850
“The 2d article of the amendments to the constitution…is another of the immunities of a citizen of the United States, which is…accorded to every subject for the purpose of protecting and defending himself, if need be, in the enjoyment of his absolute rights to life, liberty and property. And this guaranty is to all without any exception; for there is none, either expressed or implied. And our courts have already decided, that in such cases we have no right to make any exceptions.
It is hardly necessary to remark that this guaranty is absolutely inconsistent with permitting a portion of our citizens to be enslaved. The colored citizen, under our constitution, has now as full and perfect a right to keep and bear arms as any other; and no State law, or State regulation has authority to deprive him of that right. But there is another thing implied in this guaranty; and that is the right of self defence. For the right to keep and bear arms, also implies the right to use them if necessary in self defence; without this right to use the guaranty would have hardly been worth the paper it consumed.”
Tiffany was a prominent abolitionist attorney who served as the official reporter of the New York court system.
Lysander Spooner, 1853
“The second amendment to the constitution declares that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ This right ‘to keep and bear arms,’ implies the right to use them – as much as a provision securing to the people the right to buy and keep food, would imply their right also to eat it. But this implied right to use arms, is only a right to use them in a manner consistent with natural rights.”
"These provisions obviously recognize the natural right of all men ‘to keep and bear arms’ for their personal defence; and prohibit both Congress and the State governments from infringing the right of ‘the people’—that is, of any of the people —to do so…This right of a man ‘to keep and bear arms,’ is a right palpably inconsistent with the idea of his being a slave. Yet the right is secured as effectually to those whom the States presume to call slaves, as to any whom the States condescend to acknowledge free.”
Spooner was a prominent abolitionist, pro-labor attorney and philosopher who founded the first private national mail service.
The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New Lisbon, OH), 5/7/1853
“There are guarantees in [the Constitution] wholly incompatible with slavery. Guarantees of liberty. Among these are the rights of free speech, a free press. The right to assemble peaceably for the redress of grievances, the right to bear arms and the right of jury trial.”
The Freeman (Montpelier, VT), 7/7/1853
“In showing that the United States Constitution forbids, and, if enforced, would prohibit Slavery, I enquire…What rights are secured?...The right to ‘bear arms’—the right of full and impartial trial by jury [etc.]…All these are secured to all, of all classes, without exception. All the natural rights of man, without reservation or exception.”
Frederick Douglass, 1/17/1856
(paraphrased) “He was satisfied with the Constitution, and so were all black men, only let the people live up to its requirements [which] he enumerated with considerable particularity, arguing that it conferred upon the slaves all the rights of freemen—among them the right to keep and bear arms.”
Douglass was “the most important leader of the movement for African American civil rights in the 19th century.”
Sen. Charles Sumner (MA), 5/19/1856
“Such is the madness of the hour, that, in defiance of the solemn guarantee, embodied in the Amendments to the Constitution, that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,’ the people of Kansas have been arraigned for keeping and bearing them, and the Senator from South Carolina has had the face to say openly, on this floor, that they should be disarmed—of course, that the fanatics of Slavery, his allies and constituents, may meet no impediment.” (pp. 64-65)
Two days after concluding this speech, Sumner was famously beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by Rep. Preston Brooks, who was a relative of “the Senator from South Carolina.”
Henry R. Selden, 7/7/1856
“Freedom of speech and of the press—the security of dwellings from unreasonable searches and of persons from unlawful arrests—the right to bear arms for the defense of one’s family, against the assaults of savages, and of the hireling bandits of despotic power…These are some of the cardinal doctrines of democracy.”
Selden served as lieutenant governor of New York, but he is best known for encouraging Susan B. Anthony to cast her vote and defending her at trial for free. He was also an abolitionist who helped found New York State Republican party as well as Western Union.
Alonzo Jackson Grover, 8/1/1856
“Franklin Pierce…has, in the exercise of the functions of his office, trampled the Constitution of the United States, which he has sworn to support…He, as commander-in-chief, has used the military of the nation to…take from peaceable citizens of that Territory the ‘right to keep and bear arms’” (p. 140, 2nd col., final paragraph)
Grover was attorney and newspaper editor who advocated against slavery and gave the first documented speech in Illinois supporting women’s suffrage.
Rep. Edward Wade (OH), 8/2/1856
“[The First Congress]…proposed diverse amendments, the chief objects of which were to negative all power in Congress, which bad men might claim to be implied in the original Constitution, to make oppressive laws, or to wrest from men their inalienable rights…‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ In this amendment the same SPIRIT OF LIBERTY is developed, as was so apparent in the preceding. The right to ‘keep and bear arms,’ is thus guaranteed, in order that if the liberties of the people should be assailed, the means for their defence should be in their own hands. But this right of the people of the United States, of which the free-state settlers of Kansas are a part, has been torn from them by the treasonable violence of this ill-starred administration, which is used as the mere pack-mule of the slave democracy.” (p. 6, bottom of 2nd col. & p. 7, bottom of 2nd col.)
Daily Evening Traveller (Boston, MA), 2/29/1860
“If we cannot make up our mind to treat the colored man as our equal before the law, we are far from feeling sure that we have any moral right to object to any thing the slaveholders may see fit to do with their ‘people.’ To break down slavery merely to create a low caste race, mere pariahs, would be as little the part of benevolence as of wisdom. Hence, to exclude the colored race, by formal action, from the right to bear arms, the exercise of that right being one of the evidences of the existence of political equality, is condemnable alike by philosophy and by philanthropy.”
The Principia (New York, NY), 3/17/1860
“If [the Constitution] recognizes no slaves, then it recognizes no notion of ‘the people of the United States,’ and their ‘posterity,’ who are not entitled to the…right ‘to keep and bear arms,’ [etc.]” (Top of 3rd col.)
The Principia was an abolitionist publication.
Sidney George Fisher, 1863
“The first amendment recognizes expressly ‘the right of the people to assemble and petition the government’; the second, ‘the right to keep and bear arms’; and the fourth, ‘the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers.” All these rights are held by the ‘citizens,’ the ‘people,’ under the assurance of the Constitution.”
Fisher was an attorney and essayist who formerly tolerated slavery but became an abolitionist during the Civil War, when this article was written.
Isaac T. Hutchins, 6/23/1864
“[Examine the anti-slavery clauses of the Constitution] as you have its fancied pro-slavery clauses, the trial by jury, the habeas corpus, the right of every man to keep and bear arms, [etc.]”
Hutchins was an executive of the American Abolition Society.
Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), 11/17/1865
“The Constitution of the United States, which is now good law for the negro in Mississippi, provides that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Hence, every negro in Mississippi has the right to keep and bear arms.”
Brig. Gen. Davis Tillson, Report of the Congressional Freedmen’s Bureau, 12/22/1865
“Article 2 of the amendments to the Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms, and states that this right ‘shall not be infringed’…All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families, or themselves.”
The Loyal Georgian (Augusta, GA), 2/3/1866
“‘Have colored persons a right to own and carry fire arms?’…Almost every day, we are asked questions similar to the above. We answer certainly you have the same right to own and carry fire arms that other citizens have. You are not only free but citizens of the United States. and, as such, entitled to the same privileges granted to other citizens by the Constitution of the United States…Any person, white or black, may be disarmed if convicted of making an improper or dangerous use of weapons, but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.”
Sen. Lyman Trumbull (IL), 2/8/1866
“There is also a slight amendment in…the section which declares that negroes and mulattoes shall have the same civil rights as white persons, and have the same security of person and estate. The House have inserted these words, ‘including the constitutional right of bearing arms.’ I think that does not alter the meaning.” (p. 743, bottom of 1st col.)
Trumbull co-authored the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery.
Brevet Maj. Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, Report of the Congressional Freedmen’s Bureau, 2/14/1866
“[Black veterans’] arms are taken from them by [Kentucky] authorities, and confiscated…Thus the right of the people to keep and bear arms as provided in the Constitution is infringed…The loyal soldier is arrested and punished for bringing into the State the arms he has borne in battle for his country.”
Sen. Samuel Pomeroy (KS), 3/5/1866
“What are the safeguards of liberty under our form of Government? There are at least, under our Constitution, three which are indispensable—Every man…should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.” (p. 1182, middle of 2nd col.)
Rep. Henry Jarvis Raymond (NY), 3/8/1866
“Make the colored man a citizen of the United States and he has every right which you or I have as citizens of the United States under the laws and Constitution of the United States. He has…a right to defend himself and his wife and children; a right to bear arms.” (p. 1266, bottom of 3rd col.)
Raymond was more liberal than the majority of his colleagues in Congress.
Sen. Jacob Howard (MI), 5/23/1866
“To these privileges and immunities [of Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution], whatever they may be—for they are not and cannot be fully defined in their entire extent and precise nature—to these should be added the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as…the right to keep and to bear arms…The course of decision of our courts and the present settled doctrine is, that all these immunities, privileges, rights, thus guaranteed by the Constitution or recognized by it, are secured to the citizen.” (p. 2765, middle of 3rd col.)
Supplementary Freedmen’s Bureau Act, 7/16/1866
“In every State or district where the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted…and in every State or district whose constitutional relations to the government have been practically discontinued…and until such State shall have been restored in such relations, and shall be duly represented in the Congress of the United States, the right…to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens.” (pp. 149-150)
Sen. James W. Nye, 7/22/1868
“[‘A well regulated militia…’] is the language of the Constitution. It shows the right of the citizen to bear arms and the duty of the Government to furnish them when organized regularly as militia of States.”
Nye belonged to the abolitionist Free Soil Party and was appointed by Pres. Lincoln as governor of Nevada Territory.
John Neal, 1869
“One [objection to women’s suffrage] was, that women would not care for the privilege, because men do not always vote…Would it be a good argument for any of our people, who might be forbidden to keep arms, to tell them, that very few of those who are allowed to keep arms ever do keep or use them?...Give us the right of voting, and the right of keeping arms, and leave us to judge about the necessity or expediency of using these rights.”
Neal was a writer known as an advocate of women’s and minority rights.
Rep. Benjamin F. Butler (MA), 2/20/1871
“Your committee fear the negro may be pressed too far, and be compelled to take up arms in his own defense. These men who oppress him in the manner before mentioned seem to dread this, for in many counties they have preceded their outrages upon him by disarming him, in violation of his right as a citizen to ‘keep and bear arms,’ which the Constitution expressly says shall never be infringed.”
Butler also served as governor of Massachusetts.
Rep. John Bingham (OH), 3/31/1871
“The privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, as contradistinguished from citizens of a State, are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution of the United States…These eight articles I have shown never were limitations upon the power of the States, until made so by the fourteenth amendment.” (2nd Col.)
Bingham was one of the most antislavery members of Congress and the primary author of the 14th Amendment, for which he is considered a leading figure of the “Second Founding.”
Rep. Henry Dawes (MA), 4/5/1871
“In addition to the original rights secured to him in the first article of amendments, [man] had secured the free exercise of his religious belief, and freedom of speech and the press. Then he had secured to him the right to keep and bear arms in his defense...And still later, sir, after the bloody sacrifice of our four years’ war…every person born on the soil was made a citizen and clothed with them all.” (p. 475, bottom of 3rd col.)
Dawes supported full citizenship rights for Blacks.
David T. Corbin, 12/11/1871
“If there is any right that is dear to the citizen, it is the right to keep and bear arms, and it was secured to the citizen of the United States on the adoption of the amendments to the Constitution…As Congress heretofore could not interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms, now, after the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, the State cannot interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms.”
Corbin was a Union Army officer and served as US Attorney for South Carolina, where he prosecuted the Klan. He was later elected US senator from that state and was nominated as Chief Justice of the Territory of Utah.
Sen. Allen G. Thurman (OH), 2/6/1872
“Our fathers were apprehensive that the original Constitution did not sufficiently recognize the rights of citizens; and hence…they demanded a more full and explicit recognition of those rights, and the first eight articles of amendment to the Constitution relate wholly to their recognition and protection. Let us see…‘Article II. A well-regulated militia…’ Here is another right of a citizen of the United States, expressly declared to be his right—the right to bear arms; and this right, says the Constitution, shall not be infringed.”
Thurman was elected president pro tempore of the Senate, served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and was President Grover Cleveland’s running mate; as US congressman and senator, he was consistently more liberal than his colleagues in those bodies.
New Orleans Republican (New Orleans, LA), 6/14/1874
“When the American people admitted the negroes to the rights of citizenship, that of keeping and bearing arms was included. This is a right which the constitution says shall not be infringed.”
The Irish World (New York, NY) 8/4/1877
“That it is the right of every citizen to have and bear arms is indisputable—just as good a right as either hired captain, or hired man, or hired government of the city. The necessity has now arisen for every citizen to have at his hand a weapon as formidable for his defence as the police…If the citizen lies tamely down under abuse of this kind his liberty is gone, and the Republic is subverted…[but] let us not resort to even defensive war till the very last extremity.”
The Irish World was published by Patrick Ford, who “embodied the radical elements of the abolitionist movement, but also those of the Irish nationalist, labor, and anti-imperialist movements.”
Hon. Carter Henry Harrison, Sr., 4/29/1879
“The Constitution of the land guarantees to all citizens the right to peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances. This carries the right to free discussion. It also guarantees to the people the right to keep and bear arms. But it does not give to any one the right to use arms to threaten or to resist lawful authority.”
Harrison was a United States representative and five-term mayor of Chicago; He moved from Kentucky due to his disgust with slavery and “was the first mayor to cater to the various ethnic groups in his city.”
Charles Nordhoff, 1883
“You have a right to keep and bear arms, but not, in most of our states, to carry them concealed upon your person…These are the sacred and inalienable rights of all American citizens, and no constitution or law can deprive him of them. They make him secure against unjust or usurping rulers, and against unscrupulous attacks from a fellow-citizen. They enable the citizen to be safe against injustice, or to obtain, by summary or immediate methods, redress against unjust attacks. They are possessed by all the people—women and children as well as men.”
Nordhoff was an anti-slavery, pro-labor author and journalist who, as the Washington correspondent of The New York Herald, “won the friendship of the leading men of the day, and a high place among the political writers of the country. His letters were recognized as the authoritative presentation of the news, and the final word on the moral merits of a controversy.” He “was not only one of the few correspondents in whom public men confided, but one of still fewer whom they consulted.”
The Labor Enquirer (Denver, CO), 9/11/1886
“The [second] amendment is peculiar and likely to be misunderstood if its history is unknown…Our wise forefathers knew that all governments and parts of governments were prone to corruption and usurpation against the common people, caused by man’s natural love of wealth and power, and for this reason they put arms, free speech, free press, a right to assemble, and a right to talk treason, all at the disposal of the people individually…They gave every individual the right to talk treason and prepare for rebellion, but did not give him the right to act…We should never surrender these great rights to the avarice and cunning of grasping law-makers and judges.”
The Labor Enquirer was a socialist paper.
Hermann Von Holst, 1887
“It has…been argued that the [Second Amendment] refers only to arms necessary or suitable for the equipment of militia; although it must not be inferred from this that the right is restricted to those citizens who belong to the militia.”
Von Holst was chair of the History Department at the University of Chicago, where he his focus was “the incommensurability of liberal ideals and the institution of slavery.”
George Henry Williams, 8/6/1887
“Under a militia system the citizen and the soldier are one and the same person…Liberty is not imperiled by the right of the citizen to bear arms, but, on the contrary, is protected and preserved in that way under a government by the people and for the people. Intelligence, patriotism and self-interest lead the citizen to bear his arms against the equally dangerous extremes of despotism and anarchy.”
Williams served as US Attorney General and was nominated by President Grant as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court; he was previously chief justice of the Territory of Oregon and United States Senator from that state. He was opposed to slavery.
Sen. William E. Chandler (NH), 9/28/1888
“The further proposition is that colored people of Louisiana shall none of them be allowed to keep or bear arms, and that the gun and pistol of every colored man shall be taken away from him…We shall have the colored people, no one of them with any instrument of offence or defence, and all this in defiance of the natural and the constitutional right of the citizen…The colored men will keep their arms and they will use their arms when they see fit to do so in defence of those rights as American citizens, which belong today, at the South as well as the North, to every American citizen.”
Chandler also served as Secretary of the Navy.
The People (New York, NY), 3/6/1892
“In order that every citizen may fit himself the better for efficient service in the defense of his country, his right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed to him by the Constitution. The theory that a small or select portion only of the people should be armed and drilled in warfare, whereas the masses should be disarmed and unpracticed in the use of weapons, thereby placing the latter at the mercy of the former, was repudiated by the founders of the Republic as the very fundament of despotism, and the possibility of its being ever adopted in this country was duly provided against by the aforesaid clauses of the Constitution.”
The People was an official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of America.
Sen. David Turpie (IN), 4/23/1895
“There are certain things over which the will of the majority has no authority. They are set out in full in the bill of rights. The right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the various others named in that famous bill, are all rights which cannot be taken away…They are sovereign in the individual…All these rights are subject to abuses…But is abuse of any of these any excuse for prohibition? Shall we have no more eating and drinking, no more free speech, no more freedom of the press or no more right to bear arms?”
Turpie was consistently more liberal than his Senate colleagues.
Hon. Stephen Johnson Field, 6/23/1896
“As said by counsel for the appellant: ‘The freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press; the right to bear arms; [etc.]…are, together with exemption from self-crimination, the essential and inseparable features of English liberty.’”
Justice Field was appointed to the US Supreme Court by Pres. Lincoln in large part due to “his staunch support of the Union cause.”
Resolution of the St. Louis Convention of Labor Leaders, 8/31/1897
“Whereas, Our capitalistic class, as is again shown in the present strike, is armed, and has not only policemen, marshals, sheriffs and deputies, but also a regular army and militia, in order to enforce government by injunction, suppressing lawful assemblages, free speech and the right to the public highway; while, on the other hand, the laboring men of the country are unarmed and defenseless, contrary to the words and spirit of the Constitution of the United States; therefore, be it…Resolved, That no nation in which the people are totally disarmed can long remain a free nation; and, therefore, we urge upon all liberty-loving citizens to remember and obey Article 2 of the Constitution of the United States, which reads as follows: ‘The right of the people, to keep and bear arms shall not infringed.’”
This event was described by socialist leader Eugene V. Debs as “the most important convention of labor this country has ever witnessed.”
Laura Donnan, 1900
“As Englishmen [the Founders’] forefathers had forced from the king the right to keep and bear arms, and as Americans they claimed that this right must be secured to them in the organic law of this nation. This clause does not mean that only organized state militia may keep and bear arms, but it means that every citizen may do so. To keep and bear arms means not only to have them, but to have them and to be able to handle them.”
Donnan was a noted educator and civil rights activist.
Sen. Donelson Caffery (LA), 2/5/1900
“Every man who belongs to the political community of the United States is constitutionally under the protection of the Constitution so far as individual rights go. They can not be infringed; they can not be set aside…Are you going to guarantee to [the people of a new overseas US territory]…the right to bear arms…?” (p. 1494, top of 1st col.)
Caffery was consistently more liberal than his Senate colleagues.
Rep. Francis Newlands (NV), 2/20/1900
“It is impossible to believe that [the Founders]…proposed that the people of the Territories should not enjoy the personal and property rights for which they had fought and which they protected by the prohibitions and limitations of Congress. It can not be contended for a moment that they…designed that the people of the Territories should not be secure in…the right to keep and bear arms…The prohibitions of the Constitution relating to the rights of individuals were to be enforced wherever the jurisdiction of the Republic extended.” (p. 1995, middle of 2nd col.)
Newlands was consistently more liberal than his House and Senate colleagues during all but the first two of his 25 years in Congress.
The Evening Journal (Jersey City, NJ), 3/9/1904
“That is a peculiar provision in the new military bill that prevents all organizations from bearing arms. The Irish, Polish and Italian military companies, the German Schuetzen Corps., the school cadets and boys’ brigades are all opposed…It is contrary to the United States Constitution, which guarantees to the citizens the right to bear arms.”
The Journal was founded by “Civil War veterans who sought to promote equal rights for freed slaves” and still publishes today.
“Socialist View on 4th of July,” Montana News (Helena, MT), 6/28/1905
“History proves that no people have ever been able to maintain even a semblance of liberty were they not awake and vigilant and armed ready to maintain their rights. The constitution and the law ‘guarantees’ to every American citizen free speech, trial by jury, the right to keep and bear arms, to be secure against unwarranted searches of their homes and arbitrary arrests without due process of law. Yet we have seen all these ‘guaranteed’ rights denied and laughed at by the capitalist class…Tame submission to tyranny never has nor never will gain liberty for any people. When the members of the American working class are around with a rifle, and determined to protect themselves and families from the outrages that are heaped upon us, our ‘guaranteed’ rights will be respected and liberty will awaken to bless mankind.”
Edward Boyce, 6/27/1907
(paraphrased) “He had in mind the misconduct of state troops in Colorado, the use of troops elsewhere against the federation and the constitutional right of all citizens to bear much a right of arms, which was as much a right of the miner as of the aristocrat.”
Boyce was a founder of the Western Federation of Miners and fought to suppress the Ku Klux Klan.
Marxian Club Socialists, The Evening Standard (Ogden, Utah), 1/28/1911
“The constitution expressly provides: ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’…To enter the domiciles of orderly citizens and confiscate the arms of their tenants is not merely the violation of a principle of freedom; it is worse still, it is an assault upon the rights of those who set up and uphold the government.”
Daily People (New York, NY), 1/31/1912
“As if to eliminate the error that a Tyrant could not spring up from within, the Militia is not made the objective of the Second Amendment. The objective is the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The object of the Second Amendment is the insurance of the people’s freedom. From the ranks of an arms-keeping and arms-bearing people the militia organization was to spring…
By a series of circuitous routes the right of the people to keep and bear arms has been infringed; by a variety of circuitous routes the militia, intended originally to be the emanation of an arms-keeping and arms-bearing people, has become the emanation of a thoroughly developed political, hence, class government, whereby to overawe a working class stripped of arms, a defenceless class.”
Rep. Thomas Sisson (MS), 4/11/1912
“The Constitution of the United States guarantees to a man the right to bear arms. The courts have held that the legislature can prescribe the manner in which arms may be carried, but neither a State legislature nor Congress can pass a law forbidding entirely the carrying of arms.”
(p. 4596, top of 1st col.)
Sisson was consistently more liberal than 90% of his House colleagues.
William Leavitt Stoddard, The Milwaukee Leader (Milwaukee, WI), 7/1914
“[The miners’] strike, as everybody knows, was lost. Who knows whether it would have been different if the men had resorted to the permission given them in the second amendment to the constitution of the United States.”
Stoddard was administrator of the National War Labor Board and achieved “de facto recognition of unions, eight-hour work days, better wages, improved work conditions and collective bargaining.”
The Milwaukee Leader was at one time “the most widely circulated English-language socialist daily in the United States, and was ultimately the longest-lasting socialist paper in the country.”
Theodore Schroeder, 1916
“Unabridged free speech means the right to advocate treason (or lesser crimes) so long as no overt criminal act is induced as a direct consequence of its advocacy. We must inquire how far this conclusion is confirmed by the constitutional guarantee to carry arms. Again the obvious import is to promote a state of preparedness for self-defense even against the invasions of government…[One complaint of the English revolution of 1688] was that of ‘causing several good subjects, being protestants, to be disarmed and employed contrary to law.’ If we are to erect this complaint against disarming part of the people into a general principle, it must be that in order to maintain freedom we must keep alive both the spirit and the means of resistance to government.”
Schroeder was an anti-religion, pro-free speech, pro-choice attorney who founded Free Speech League, the precursor to the American Civil Liberties Union. This organization was the first in U.S. history committed to free expression regardless of subject or viewpoint, and is considered to have taken a broader view of the First Amendment than the ACLU; among those it defended were advocates of sexual freedom, people accused of obscenity, radical leftist feminist Emma Goldman, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and the major labor union Industrial Workers of the World.
Nashville Globe (Nashville, TN), 12/27/1918
“The bill of rights conferred on the citizen fundamental rights and privileges which government cannot invade. Such are the rights of trial by a jury,…the right to bear arms, [etc.] They constitute a shield of protection of the individual citizen against arbitrary and irresponsible power.”
The Nashville Globe was a black-owned paper.
Supreme Court of North Carolina, 5/1/1921
“The ‘right to keep and bear arms’…is a sacred right, based upon the experience of the ages in order that the people may be accustomed to bear arms and ready to use them for the protection of their liberties or their country…The ordinary private citizen, whose right to carry arms cannot be infringed upon, is not likely to purchase [submarines, planes, etc.]”
The opinion was joined by Walter P. Stacy, who was appointed by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt as chairman of the National Steel Labor Relations and Textile Labor Relations Boards, and was strongly considered by Roosevelt for nomination to the US Supreme Court.
Benjamin S. Dean, 4/1/1922
“It is announced that Senator William M. Calder and others have introduced or are about to introduce a bill into Congress to provide for a Federal monopoly of firearms, and that the right to issue permits to carry weapons concealed on the person also would be reposed in the national Government. Of course this is strictly a police power which has never been delegated to the Congress, while the Second Amendment specially provides that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’”
Dean was an advocate for women’s suffrage and clean drinking water, and a delegate to the 1894 New York Republican Convention.
WH Chapman, 2/7/1923
“[A reader] states that the right to keep and bear arms was granted by article 2 of the amendments to the constitution to militia only. This writer quotes the sentence referring to a militia force as if it were a qualifying sentence, whereas it is plainly merely explanatory. It conveys the information that this right to keep and bear arms is granted so that the people may be skilled in the use thereof for the better service of the public if called upon for service in a posse or militia; the term being used in a broader sense at that date than at present.”
Chapman ran for office as a member of the Socialist Labor Party.
Rep. Thomas Blanton (TX), 12/17/1924
“I want to discuss this bill from the standpoint of the Constitution and what the Constitution means when it says that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ I am arguing from that one standpoint. To keep arms in their homes; that right ‘shall not be infringed’…I am not going to sit here and let a law be passed that will take away the right or infringe upon the right of a citizen to keep arms lawfully in his home—which is his castle and where his family resides—or a revolver, if he wants one, or a double-barreled shotgun, if he wants it. That is his right and it is for the protection of his family, under certain circumstances. Let him keep a rifle, if he wants one. The Constitution gives him that right.” (p. 727, bottom of 1st col.-bottom of 2nd col.)
Blanton was consistently more liberal than his House colleagues during all but the last four of his 20 years in Congress.
J. Louis Engdahl and William F. Dunne, 4/20/1926
“According to the constitution of the United States every citizen has the right to bear arms. In spite of this well known fact certain freaks who profess to talk learnedly of crime, when they know nothing either of its nature or causes, declare that everything would be all right if only all citizens were completely disarmed.”
Engdahl and Dunne were prominent communist leaders.
Rep. Anthony Griffin (NY), 2/6/1926
“These [first] 10 amendments were intended to enlarge human liberty, to protect the citizen in his right to practice his religion, to secure a free press, to guarantee the rights of property, the right to bear arms, and to conserve the sovereignty of the respective States. They all enlarged human liberty, extended human rights.” (p. 3467, top of 2nd col.)
Griffin was consistently more liberal than 90% of his House colleagues.
Gov. George WP Hunt (AZ), 3/26/1927
“I also vetoed House Bill No. 59, which upon the best legal advice obtainable, was in direct violation of the provisions of both national and state constitutions. This bill proposed to discriminate as to the right of citizens to bear arms and placed unlimited discretion in the hands of peace officers as to who were suitable persons to own weapons of defense.”
Hunt, Arizona’s first and longest-serving governor, “established a progressive agenda to protect workers and keep the power of big business in check; he also supported women’s rights and was opposed to capital punishment.
Bertram D. Wolfe, 10/10/1927
“The Constitution of the United States prohibits the passage of laws limiting or abridging freedom of speech, press or assemblage, or limiting the right of every citizen to bear arms.”
Wolfe was an editor of The Communist, the primary monthly theoretical journal of the Communist Party.
The Negro Star (Wichita, KS), 12/2/1927
“The right of individual initiative and freedom from unnecessary restraint is inborn in every American citizen. For some time there has been an effort made to prohibit the ownership of small arms although the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States says: ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Target practice and good marksmanship has been part of the life of the normal American boy.”
The Negro Star was a black-owned paper.
Sen. William H. King (UT), 4/23/1929
“The founders of this Republic had greater fear of the Federal Government than they did of their own sovereign States and of themselves. They kept the power within their own hands to provide for religious freedom and freedom of speech and the press, and the right to keep and bear arms. The lessons of history had taught them that those rights which we denominate ‘personal rights’ are endangered more from centralized governments than from local governments.” (p. 353, topof 2nd col.)
King was president pro tempore of the senate and previously served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Utah Territory and president of the Territorial council. He supported the fundamental elements of the New Deal and was consistently more liberal than the majority of his House and Senate colleagues.
Rep. George Huddleston (AL), 4/11/1930
“If that satisfies the conscience of Congress, we can make a pretense of acting under some clause of the Constitution [to regulate the interstate shipment of firearms] when in reality we are acting wholly without the Constitution. But I am frank to say it does not satisfy my conscience. I believe in the Constitution. I want to live up to it. I do not want to evade the Constitution. I do not want to take advantage of the Constitution in order to do something that the Constitution does not authorize us to do.”
Huddleston was considered a progressive champion who opposed xenophobia and supported racial equality, organized labor, and free speech.
Daily Worker (New York, NY), 2/21/1931
“In the Constitution, it is said flatly and unequivocally, that: ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ It doesn’t say anything about them being ‘concealed’ either. Yet upon that basis the ‘right’ is infringed everywhere. In New York State, the capitalists have a law that ‘infringes’ that so-called ‘right’ completely. The ‘Sullivan Law’ forbids ‘the people’ from even ‘keeping’ arms in their houses—but of course, this is enforced only against the workers. Having thus disarmed the workers…police, as proven by dozens of cases, feel quite safe to ‘crash flats’ especially in the Harlem Negro section.”
Rep. David Lewis (MD), 4/16/1934
“The theory of individual rights that is involved…I have never quite understood how the laws of the various States have been reconciled with the provision in our Constitution denying the privilege to the legislature to take away the right to carry arms.”
Lewis introduced the original House bill to create Social Security.
Sen. Kenneth McKellar (TN), 7/29/1935
“While [the Second Amendment] refers to the militia, the provision is all-inclusive and provides that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall remain inviolate.” (p. 11973, bottom of 1st col.)
“McKellar supported President Wilson’s progressive reform program [and] during the Republican-dominated 1920s, McKellar continued to support progressive legislation that usually failed in Congress.” “Loyal to the New Deal program, McKellar supported federal aid for farmers, New Deal relief programs, and, of course, he helped lead the fight in Congress for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Act in 1933.”
