Guns and the Antebellum South

armed "slave patrol"                                                                 America's Black Holocaust Museum

The latest mass shooting took place October 1 at a community college in Oregon. Oddly, as I heard about this, I was in the middle of an article that ties the idea of an armed public to the antebellum South. Quoting antebellum historian Richard Hildreth (1807-1865), the authors of this piece note that "Southern men ... carried weapons both 'as a protection against the slaves' and also to be prepared for 'quarrels between freemen.' " The idea of open-carry, they contend, came from that period as well. "During the antebellum years," they say, "many viewed carrying a concealed weapon as dastardly and dishonorable ... . In an 1850 opinion, the Louisiana Supreme Court explained that carrying a concealed weapon gave men 'secret advantages' and led to 'unmanly assassinations,' while open carry 'place[d] men upon an equality' and 'incite[d] men to a manly and noble defence of themselves.' ” Public-carry, they go on to explain, was much more restricted in the North, as it was in England, even as far back as the 14th century, and in the colonies in the 1600s. Hildreth's observation that "duels 'appear but once an age' in the North, but 'are of frequent and almost daily occurrence at the [S]outh' ” recalls the chicken-or-egg question: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-origins-of-public-carry-jurisprudence-in-the-slave-south/407809/#disqus_thread