The Invention of an Epidemic

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2:05Pushkin.

2:12Hello, hello, everyone. It's Malcolm Gladwell. I am here today to bring you something special. A chapter from my new book, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. It's chapter two, called The Slave Owner's Lament. And it is, to use a word we love here at Revisionist History, the absolutely bananas story behind a Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Gun Rights Amendment. With guest appearances by 18th century Virginians, a brilliant Australian linguist, the delightfully named historian Carl Bogus, a lot of cranky Supreme Court justices, and most of all, a charismatic African slave named Jemmy.

2:54I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Four episodes in all on maybe one of the most complicated and perplexing of American social issues. My new book is coming out September 29th. You can find all of my book tour dates on my website, global.com. Come and see me. And if you're in the New York area, I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in conversation with Katie Tour of NBC News on the evening of September 29th, which should be really fun. Doing this book opened my eyes, and I hope it will do the same for you. You can get The American Way of Killing at whatever bookstore you frequent or online platform you like.

3:40And you can find the audiobook version at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever you get audiobooks.

3:54I want to close my eyes and forget my sorrows. I don't care if the devil takes tomorrow. Ashes to ashes if I must. I want to leave all my troubles dust to dust.

4:23Chapter 2. The Slave Owner's Lament In the early years of the 18th century, in the long stretches of marshland known as the South Carolina Low Country, the local authorities decided they needed to dig a network of canals leading off the Stono River. The Stono is a tidal channel just south and west of Charleston, snaking its way between John's Island and James Island. In the spring, its banks would overflow, flooding roads and homes and farmland, and the idea was to build the equivalent of storm sewers off the river. They were six feet deep and 15 to 20 feet wide, so substantial that many are still there today.

5:08Digging them out of the heavy mud was a massive undertaking. The historian Peter Charles Hoffer writes, Quote, bending over shovels and mattocks in the snake and insect infected waters, the diggers were exposed to the elements, disease, and exhaustion. He went on, the summer heat would create terrible thirst, but the brackish water at the diggers' feet was filled with deadly bacteria, parasites, and waste. End of quote. This was not a task the white colonists of South Carolina would ever dream of doing themselves. It was a job for their slaves.

5:49Imagine a group of two dozen or so bondsmen, as slaves were often euphemistically called, digging ditches off the Stono River. It's early September, 1739. The profits from rice cultivation in that part of South Carolina were so large that it was often cheaper for plantation owners to work their slaves to death and buy replacements and to try and keep their existing slaves alive. So these are men fresh off the boat from Angola in what was then called Congo with a K. It was a Saturday. They had been out in the hot sun all day and faced the prospect of having to do the same thing the following day because ditch digging was considered so urgent that the normal Sunday day of rest was suspended.

6:37They were exhausted. Their white overseer had left early. They were on their own. Across the river from where they were working was a general store called Hutchinson's. At the end of the workday, they crossed over the river and made their way to the store for food and refreshment. No one knows exactly when and why this ragged band of slaves changed course. But between the ditches and Hutchinson's, exhaustion turned to anger. One of the group, Jemmy, emerged as the leader. The store was closed. They broke in. They found two men inside. They killed them both. Someone would later allege that the rebels cut off their victims' heads and impaled them on a stake outside.

7:23They looted the store, taking rifles and ammunition and alcohol with them. They started off marching down the road, beating drums and crying, Liberty! Other slaves joined them. It was now the middle of the night. When they saw the houses of slave owners, they made a decision. Is this someone who treats us with even a modicum of kindness? If so, they skipped the house. If not, they burned the house down and killed everyone inside. One contemporary account reads, They marched on with colors displayed and two drums beating, pursuing all the white people they met with and killing man, woman, and child when they could come up to them.

8:07End of quote. By morning, they were more than a hundred strong and miles from the Stono River. Since it was Sunday, most of the white population of the Lowcountry was in church, so Jemmy's band marched on without incident. Finally, they were spotted by South Carolina's Lieutenant Governor, William Bull. Bull had been sounding the alarm for some time that South Carolina's slaves, quote, which were the state's chief support, may in little time become their enemies, if not their masters, and that this government is unable to withstand or prevent it, end of quote. One of his companions raced to a nearby church, Willtown Presbyterian.

8:50He rounded up as many men as he could. News spread. Other men grabbed their guns and joined. The rebels were resting on Pons Pons Road near Jacksonboro. The two sides clashed, and in a fierce and bloody encounter, the rebels were defeated.

9:11This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now, imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving.

9:52And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S.

10:37has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Pre-order The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. If you were a slave owner in the South, you knew about the Stono Rebellion, especially if you lived in South Carolina or Virginia. You read about it in the newspaper, or someone who was there wrote you about it or told you about it at church. Every white planter knew that a day of reckoning was coming. In Barbados, where many of the founding fathers of the South Carolina colony came from, the British could barely keep their slaves under control.

11:21Uprisings were a constant worry on the slave ships coming from Africa. Slaves ran away. They fought back. They engaged in frequent acts of disobedience and resistance. You could whip your slaves into submission, starve them, punish them, or simply sell the troublemakers to someone else. But at the end of the day, you had to live with the reality that it was only a matter of time before the cauldron bubbled over. At the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson lived with his immediate family, there were as many as 140 slaves at any given moment, and only a few white overseers. In South Carolina, slaves composed over 70 % of the total population of the colony.

12:07And if you ventured out as far as the Stono River, the ratio of black to white on plantations reached 10 to 1, or even 15 to 1. If you had to ride to town on business or go to the state capitol for a few days, leaving your wife and children at home, could you feel safe? Thomas Jefferson would famously describe the practice of slavery as grabbing a wolf by the ears. It was too dangerous to continue, but too dangerous to stop. And then comes the Stoner Rebellion, and that pit in your stomach becomes a molten mass. What was behind Jemmy's insurrection? They were headed south, which suggests that perhaps they were trying to reach Florida, then under Spanish control, where escaped slaves could find safe haven.

12:58But if that were the case, why did the slaves go on such a rampage? A more plausible explanation, and to the slave owners of the South, the more terrifying one, is that Jemmy and his followers were just out for blood. This is how the law professor Carl Bogus described it to me. They beat drums and made noise and cried out liberty and flew flags and asked people to join them. I think clearly their objective, we're just going to kill as many of you as possible. Of course, there was a lot of rage. This chapter is about the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The sentence that squats at the very center of every discussion of the place of guns in American society.

13:42It's about how the conversation around the Second Amendment is every bit as dishonest as the conversation around assault rifles. And why is it dishonest? Because it pretends that we can talk about the meaning of the Second Amendment without regard to the motivations of the men who conceived of it back in the 18th century. As historian Peter Charles Hoffer has written, The master portrayed himself as the good father, the head of an extended household in which slaves were childlike laborers, women were submissive helpmeats, and servants were obedient and loyal. Masters could put on a stern face like the biblical patriarchs or act the loving and affectionate father.

14:27Hoffer is speaking of the psychology of the white men who grabbed their guns that Sunday morning and rode off to confront Jemmy's band. But it was all an act. He goes on. However he handled sentiment and authority, the planter was an anxious man.

14:51The only major country in the world other than the United States to give its citizens the constitutional right to bear arms is Mexico. Article 10 of the Mexican Constitution reads, The inhabitants of the United Mexican States have the right to keep arms at home for their protection and legitimate defense, with the exception of those prohibited by the federal law and those reserved for the exclusive use of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard. Federal law will state the cases, conditions, requirements, and places where inhabitants can be authorized to carry weapons. Those two sentences that make up Article 10 were written in 1917, firmly in the modern era.

15:41You may or may not agree with its intent, but there is no uncertainty about what it means. It says, plainly, that the Mexican government cannot take guns away from its citizens. At the same time, though, it gives Mexico's lawmakers a very clear set of instructions about how they can limit that right. The government can define the, quote, cases, conditions, requirements, and places, end quote, where guns are and are not allowed. Mexico has had its own very serious problems with lethal violence in recent years, but none of Mexico's problems with controlling guns are caused by any ambiguities in the country's constitution.

16:27Article 10 is crystal clear. By contrast, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, America's equivalent to Article 10, is a puzzle. 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. That sentence was written in the late 18th century, an era closer to Shakespeare's time than our own. and no one would write a sentence like that today. It starts with what some linguists call an initial being clause, which is a thought that precedes the main body of the sentence. So, quote, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, comma.

17:18Then, after that comma, is what's known as the operative clause, quote, The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. End of quote. We don't use initial being clauses much anymore. Moreover, we would almost never use a being clause next to an operative clause where the two clauses have different subjects. That last quirk is what makes the Second Amendment so awkward to our ears. We keep expecting that militia, the subject of the initial clause, is also going to be the subject of the main clause. And to our grammatical bewilderment, it isn't. The first half of the Second Amendment is perched on the second half like a top hat on an elephant.

18:08So, what does it mean? What is the relationship between those two clauses? Does the early reference to a militia mean that the right of the people to keep and bear arms applies strictly in the context of military service? Or is there reason that the first half has as its subject militia and the second half has as its subject right, that we're supposed to think of them as separate thoughts, with the initial being clause acting as a kind of throat clearing? Militias are necessary. Also, owning guns is a right. For years, this was an open question. It was the kind of thing that bookish legal scholars or gun enthusiasts might argue over.

18:57But the meaning of the Second Amendment wasn't something the Supreme Court spent much time thinking about. In its entire history, through the early years of the 21st century, only a handful of Second Amendment cases had ever come before the court. And they concerned narrow and tangential issues, like whether Americans had the right to carry a sawed-off shotgun in public. The First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech, or the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants all Americans equal protection under the law, raised the kinds of questions that commanded the Supreme Court's time. The Second Amendment was an afterthought.

19:40All of that changed, however, when in 2008, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called District of Columbia v. Heller. It involved a police officer in Washington, D.C. named Dick Heller, who thought he should be able to keep his handgun at home, just as he was able to keep a handgun on him while he was on duty. Under D.C. law, however, personal handgun ownership was forbidden, denied a gun, Heller sued, saying that D.C.'s law violated the Second Amendment and the case rose all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course, if the United States had a version of Mexico's Article 10 in its constitution, deciding District of Columbia v.

20:25Heller would have been straightforward. Was the district's law permissible under the authority given to the government to limit the cases, conditions, requirements, and places where guns are allowed. Plainly, it was. But the Second Amendment is not Mexico's Article 10. It is an initial being clause attached awkwardly to an operative clause like a top hat on an elephant. And in order to figure out whether Heller's Second Amendment rights were violated, the court first had to figure out what the Second Amendment meant. In other words, before they could be jurists, the Supreme Court justices had to be grammarians.

21:10So it was that on Tuesday, March 18, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court assembled to hear this most consequential of cases. Imagine a scene. The justices are seated in a row behind a long, curved mahogany table in the court's central chamber, an imposing room in the grand neoclassical revival style. 44-foot ceilings, 24 ionic columns in marble, shipped from Liguria, Italy. Supreme Court cases begin with oral arguments when the judges hear lawyers from both sides advocate for their clients. And here is how the proceedings that day begin. The lawyer for the District of Columbia, Walter Dellinger, goes first.

21:58The Second Amendment was a direct response to concern over Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gave the new National Congress the surprising, perhaps even the shocking power to organize, arm, and presumably disarm the state militias. To Dellinger, it was clear that the people drafting the Second Amendment were thinking about militias. That's why they put the Being Clause, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, at the beginning of the sentence, framing our understanding of the operative clause. The Amendment's first clause confirms that the right is militia-related.

22:42The Second Amendment is about the right to bear arms in the context of military service. The D.C. ban on handguns, then, is perfectly appropriate. Immediately, the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, interrupts. If you're right, Mr. Dellinger, it's certainly an odd way in the Second Amendment to phrase the operative provision. If it is limited to state militias, why would they say the right of the people? In other words, why wouldn't they say state militias have the right to keep arms? The Chief Justice is saying that if the initial being clause and the operative clause were intended to be read as one seamless thought, they would have the same subject.

23:29Dellinger shakes his head. Mr. Chief Justice, I believe that the phrase the people and the phrase the militia were really in sync with each other. You will see references in the debates. The Federalist Farmer uses the phrase, the people are the militia, the militia are the people. If that's right, doesn't that... It may look like two clauses with different subjects, but it should be read as two clauses with synonymous subjects. Got that? The oral argument is only a minute old, and the Supreme Court has turned into the equivalent of a fifth grade classroom. with the students at the blackboard puzzling over how to parse a sentence.

24:15It's Justice Anthony Kennedy's turn. It seems to me that there is an interpretation of the Second Amendment that conforms the two clauses and in effect delinks them. The first clause, I submit, can be read consistently with the purpose of simply reaffirming the existence and the importance of the militia clauses. And so, in effect, the amendment says we reaffirm the right to have a militia. We've established it. But in addition, there is a right to bear arms. The being clause, Kennedy is saying, can be delinked from the operative clause. Kennedy is one of those people who see the first clause about a well-regulated militia as an hors d 'oeuvre that has nothing to do with the entree.

25:03And the entree, in his reading, is all that matters. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The Second Amendment guarantees that everyone in the U.S. has the right to own and carry a gun. D.C.'s law is unconstitutional. Dellinger replies, no, no, no, that makes no sense. That's not how being clauses work. The function of a being clause is to clarify the meaning of the rest of the sentence, to contextualize the operative clause. Otherwise, why would the framers of the Constitution have put it there at all? What you see is a clause that literally transposes to this, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be...

25:52Well, the subject is arms in both clauses... The back and forth continues. Justice Antonin Scalia chimes in. No, no, no. I don't see how there's any contradiction between reading the second clause as a personal guarantee and reading the first one as assuring the existence of a militia. The two clauses go together beautifully. Since we need a militia, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Dellinger tries to counter. Yes, but once you assume that the clause is designed to protect the militia, surely it's the militia that decides whether personal possession is necessary.

26:36Kennedy jumps in again. Do you think the clause is related, the second clause, the operative clause is related to something other than the militia? No, I think the second clause... The exercise began with one student at the blackboard with a piece of chalk, diagramming the sentence. But now the whole class is involved, everyone jostling for space at the front of the room while they furiously add their own notations. Asked to weigh in on one of the most serious of all social issues facing the United States, the Supreme Court has instead become hung up on the grammatical structure of a sentence drafted more than 200 years before, written in a style of English that no longer exists.

27:23The fight over assault rifles is a dishonest conversation because it pretends to address a real issue when, in fact, every assault rifle ban devotes more pages to the high-powered rifles exempt from the ban than the ban itself. But the Second Amendment conversation is equally dishonest because you can't debate 18th-century grammar if all you know is 21st-century grammar. And you can't understand the meaning of an 18th-century sentence unless you know something about the person who wrote that sentence. So let's start again and try and imagine what an honest conversation about the Second Amendment looks like.