Securing Civil Rights Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms

Unique and well-researched, this study concentrates on the right to keep and bear arms and analyzes the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment. Examining the history of the recognition of the right of freedmen to keep and bear arms in the period between 1866 and 1876, this comprehensive volume analyzes the extent to which American political society was willing to secure the same civil rights to all without regard to race or previous condition of slavery.

Dr. Stephen P. Halbrook is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. Dr. Halbrook received his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and Ph.D. in social philosophy from Florida State University, and he has taught legal and political philosophy at George Mason University, Howard University, and Tuskegee Institute. He is the author of the bestselling The Founders’ Second Amendment among many other books. Robert J. Cottrol is Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law at George Washington University. Previously, he taught at Rutgers University and Boston College and had visited at the University of Virginia. As well as specializing in American legal history, Professor Cottrol has also taught torts and criminal law. His writings on law and history have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, American Journal of Legal History, Law and Society Review, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies and American Quarterly, among others.