"Militia", what that meant then.

[Brian37]

I think the idea that the militias were to put down slave revolts is myopic. The biggest threat to the nascent US wasn't slave revolts, but those could happen, so they were on the list of things the militia would respond to. Hyperfocusing on this one line in the list is agenda-driven.

That is why I said the 3/5ths language  was mixed.  Washington threatened the whiskey makers with a his "militia" and back then no blacks even if free owned businesses. So yea "militias' were used to pressure even white property owners as per the Whiskey Rebellion. 

The Civil War however WAS literally 100% about keeping slaves for the South.

When people point to the fact that the founders own slaves they are still not wrong that the language was put in to allow slave owners to keep their property. But I would also say that with the founders, many of them were conflicted because of their writing of concepts of rights. I do still think even with their flaws, that conflict set the stage for slavery to end in the North as a majority by the time Adams and Jefferson died and set the stage for what Lincoln did.

But skin color aside, I don't see how a musket age law with the words "well regulated" even if your attempt was to keep blacks as property, how that would mean an individual's right to turn a hotel room into a doomsday bunker and commit mass murder?

The 2nd was used to prevent a slave revolt, but I agree, it was also used to prevent a property owner revolt as well. 

The Civil War was 100 percent about keeping the idea of owning other humans. That is the difference between the two wars.

[Minimalist]

, the language they put in ink DID set the stage for Lincoln.

Lincoln had no intention of ending slavery.  By the time he took office the country was coming apart at the seams and he saw his job to restore the union.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.


Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley.  8/22/1862

By August 22, 1862, McClellan's Peninsula campaign had ended in total and humiliating failure and Stonewall Jackson had defeated 3 union armies in the Shenandoah Valley.  Lincoln did not know it but he was a week away from watching John Pope fight the disastrous Battle of Second Bull Run.  He needed an excuse to keep Britain and France from intervening in the war and he needed a military victory to announce his Emancipation Proclamation which was #3 in his list of solutions given to Greeley.

He didn't get a victory.  He did get Antietam which was a bloodbath and a tactical Confederate victory but it stopped Lee's 'invasion' of the north, such as it was.  Lincoln was far from the last president to try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear when it came to the military.