Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
Page Number: 104

Cite as:  554 U. S. ____ (2008) 

37 

STEVENS, J., dissenting 

One  particularly  chilling  account  of  Reconstruction-era 

Klan  violence  directed  at  a  black  militia  member  is  re­
counted in the memoir of Louis F. Post, A “Carpetbagger” 
in South Carolina, 10 Journal of Negro History 10 (1925).
Post  describes  the  murder  by  local  Klan  members  of  Jim
Williams, the captain of a “Negro militia company,” id., at 
59, this way: 

“[A]  cavalcade  of  sixty  cowardly  white  men,  com­
pletely  disguised  with  face  masks  and  body  gowns, 
rode up one night in March, 1871, to the house of Cap­
tain Williams . . . in the wood [they] hanged [and shot] 
him  . . .  [and  on  his  body  they]  then  pinned  a  slip  of
paper  inscribed,  as  I  remember  it,  with  these  grim
words:  ‘Jim Williams gone to his last muster.’”  Id., at 
61. 

In light of this evidence, it is quite possible that at least 
some of the statements on which the Court relies actually
did  mean  to  refer  to  the  disarmament  of  black  militia 
members. 

IV 

The brilliance of the debates that resulted in the Second 
Amendment faded into oblivion during the ensuing years, 
for  the  concerns  about  Article  I’s  Militia  Clauses  that 
generated  such  pitched  debate  during  the  ratification 
process and led to the adoption of the Second Amendment 
were short lived. 

In  1792,  the  year  after  the  Amendment  was  ratified, 
Congress passed a statute that purported to establish “an
Uniform  Militia  throughout  the  United  States.”    1  Stat. 
271.  The  statute  commanded  every  able-bodied  white 
male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45 to be enrolled 
therein  and  to  “provide  himself  with  a  good  musket  or