This is from THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT- University of California at Davis Law Review
"Slavery was not only an economic and industrial system," one scholar noted, "but more than that, it was a gigantic police system." Over time the South had developed an elaborate system of slave control. The basic instrument of control was the slave patrol, armed groups of white men who made regular rounds. The patrols made sure that blacks were not wandering where they did not belong, gathering in groups, or engaging in other suspicious activity. Equally important, however, was the demonstration of constant vigilance and armed force. The basic strategy was to ensure and impress upon the slaves that whites were armed, watchful, and ready to respond to insurrectionist activity at all times. The state required white men and female plantation owners to participate in the patrols and to provide their own arms and equipment, although the rich were permitted to send white servants in their place.
Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia all had regulated slave patrols. By the mid-eighteenth century, the patrols had become the responsibility of the militia. Georgia statutes enacted in 1755 and 1757, for example, carefully divided militia districts into discrete patrol areas and specified when patrols would muster. The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search "all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition" and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.
In the South, therefore, the patrols and the militia were largely synonymous. The Stono Rebellion had been quickly suppressed because the white men worshiping at the Wiltown Presbyterian church on that Sunday morning had, as required by law, gone to church armed. Some of the accounts of Stono refer to the body of white men who attacked the black insurrectionists as the "militia" while others refer to them as "planters." This is a distinction without a difference; the two groups were one and the same. Virtually all able-bodied white men were part of the militia, which primarily meant that they had slave control duties under the direction and discipline of the local militia officers.
The militia was the first and last protection from the omnipresent threat of slave insurrection or vengeance. The War for Independence had placed the South in a precarious position: sending the militia to the war against the British would leave Southern communities vulnerable to slave insurrection. The Southern states, therefore, often refused to commit their militia to the Revolution, reserving them instead for slave control. Nor could the South help by sending much in the way of arms, for rifles were in short supply and necessary to defend against possible slave insurrection.
After the war, the militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population. Anything that might weaken this system presented the gravest of threats. The South's fear that the North might destabilize the slave system ¾ weakening white control over the slave population ¾ gave anti-Federalists a powerful weapon.
