Antitrust, and other courses. He has held visiting positions at the Rutgers-Camden, Drexel, and George Washington University law schools.
Bogus has written and spoken extensively about torts and the civil justice system, gun control and the Second Amendment, and political ideology. He is the author of William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism and Why Lawsuits Are Good for America: Disciplined Democracy, Big Business, and the Common Law, and the editor of The Second Amendment in Law and History: Historians and Constitutional Scholars on the Right to Bear Arms.
Bogus applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Madison's Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, and reported the following:
Page 99 discusses Herbert Aptheker’s paradigm-shattering – yet highly controversial – 1943 book Negro Slave Revolts. Previously, the conventional wisdom was that slaves in America had been content and docile. Aptheker upset that applecart by purporting to catalogue 250 slave revolts involving at least ten slaves. I say purporting because many refused to accept Aptheker’s claim.Visit Carl T. Bogus's website.
Aptheker’s book was based on his doctoral dissertation, and Columbia University thought it good enough to award him a Ph.D. And yet, no college would ever give Aptheker a faculty appointment. Was that because Aptheker’s work was shoddy – or because Aptheker was an outspoken member of the American Communist Party? And why does this matter to my book?
My thesis is that James Madison wrote the Second Amendment to assure his constituents that Congress could not subvert the slave system by disarming the militia. Neither Madison nor his colleagues in Congress explained why they wrote the Second Amendment. It is necessary, therefore, to deduce their intentions from the imperatives they faced. In fact, that’s an advantage. Understanding the critical circumstances actors face is a more reliable method of determining their motives than is accepting their own accounts, especially for politicians.
The Second Amendment is expressly related to the militia. It reads: “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.” I show: (1) The South was terrified of slave revolts. (2) The militia was the primary instrument of slave control, and effective for that purpose. (3) The militia performed abysmally during Revolutionary War, demonstrating it was useless as a military force. (4) Patrick Henry and George Mason accused Madison of writing a Constitution that gave Congress the ability to subvert the slave system by disarming the militia. I devote a full chapter to propositions 1 and 2; two chapters to proposition 3; and three chapters to proposition 4.
Was Aptheker correct about 250 slave revolts involving at least ten slaves? Not exactly. With citations to contemporaneous newspaper accounts, Aptheker catalogued 250 slave revolts, conspiracies to engage in revolts, or rumors of such conspiracies. That’s different than 250 revolts, full stop. But all of those revolts, conspiracies, and rumors of conspiracies help to show (along with a great deal of other evidence) that the South lived in constant fear of slave revolts. That’s how page 99 fits in.
--Marshal Zeringue
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