Thursday, April 30, 2015

Reviews for The Bloodhound Law

Left to right:  Brian Bradford, Christopher Kidder-Mostrom,
Alex Glossman, John Blick
"Kristine Thatcher has written an important play, and it has landed in the hands of exactly the right theatre company . . . . we should all attend."   Aaron Hunt, Newcity                    click here for full review 
 "Sharp and stirring, taut and true under Terry McCabe's direction . . . . The Bloodhound Law is an invaluable chronicle of a turbulent time."
Lawrence Bommer, Stage and Cinema
click here for full review 

Left to right: David Fink, Alex Glossman, Brian Bradford

"An elegant, almost expressionistic collection of scenes that lets the drama of the events speak for itself."                       Christine Malcom, EDGE Media              click here for full review
"The Bloodhound Law needs to be seen . . . . Highly Recommended."               Tom Williams, chicagocritic.com               click here for full review 

And here is the link to our NEW half-price tickets page:
http://www.citylit.org/#!half-priced-tickets-/c1pd9


The Bloodhound Law video




Here's the promotional trailer for The Bloodhound Law, running through May 24 at City Lit.  Later today I'll post reviews.

In the meantime, here is the link to our new half-price ticket page.  We've stopped listing with GoldStar altogether (a step I think more theatres should take) and have replaced them with our own page.  Lower service fee for the customer, and no third-party fee at all for us.  The link:  http://www.citylit.org/#!half-priced-tickets-/c1pd9

Friday, February 20, 2015

Emailed notes to designers of The Bloodhound Law in lieu of a first production meeting

Dustin, Beth, Liz, Hazel:

The point of our play needs to be more than "slavery is bad," because Uncle Tom's Cabin was the last play that needed to make that point.  It is also true that the intent of our Civil War Project is not to present a bunch of plays about an interesting historical period, but to try to explore, or examine, or illustrate, or something, the legacy of the war.  The Civil War is still with us, most obviously in our political divisions:  among those states which were in the Union back then, the most reliable (though not perfect) indicator of whether it's a red state or blue state today is whether, 150 years ago, it was a slave state or free state.  The conservative idea that the federal government over-regulates things and should instead not interfere with the workings of free enterprise is the descendant of the idea that the federal government should have no right to interfere with the spread of slavery. 

Kristine has pointed out to me that the play's (historically accurate) scene in which Francis McIntosh is grabbed off a St. Louis street by police officers and ends up being killed by a mob is not that different in theme from the riots that happened last year in a St. Louis suburb because a police officer shot a black man on the street.

All of Kristine's plays are at bottom about the value of an individual human life.  Throughout this play, we see character after character confront the stakes of his own life as those stakes relate to the world around him.  Repeatedly, they choose to lose themselves in the pursuit of something larger than themselves, which paradoxically is what saves them and makes them who they are.  I think that's the point of our play.

It's worth reminding ourselves that the play--like most of our Civil War plays, by the way--does not take place during the Civil War.  This play spans from 1834 to 1850, which is to say a half- to full generation before the war.  That matters, because the war changed everything about the country, including how it looked.  It made the country more industrial and less pastoral, more urban and less rural, more mass-manufactured and less homespun, more dirty and less clean.  So our play takes place in a world we can't even find in old photographs.

Here's a happy coincidence:  one of the characters is Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton; his great-great-nephew, also named Thomas Hart Benton, was the 20th-Century American artist whose paintings evoke a mythic America.  Bright and colorful symbolic landscapes, vibrant clothes, wide blue skies, muscular people.  It's tempting to imagine that the old lost America actually looked like this. Here are five of his paintings, below which I ramble on some more.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Thomas_Hart_Benton_-_Achelous_and_Hercules_-_Smithsonian.jpg

Benton-Sources_lowres1
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0163031ec041970d-600wiThomas Hart Benton Cradling Wheat
 http://www.asergeev.com/pictures/archives/2005/465/jpeg/02e.jpg

I would like us to use Benton's paintings as a starting point for design discussions.  I think the irony of slavery existing in a land founded on individual liberty is put on stage if the awful events of the play are happening in an American version of paradise.

Most of his settings are rural, whereas our play takes place for the most part in towns and cities, so maybe I'm talking more about his style than his specific content.  However, my favorite thing about his paintings in general are his beautiful and clean skies, which is one reason I have already mentioned I would like our set to have a cyc.  I think it will open up the space and suggest an infinite horizon.  The other reason is practical: the play is a bunch of short scenes, and we can go from one to the other without the dialogue stopping if we use a cyc to throw everyone into silhouette as soon as the old scene ends and keep it that way as actors exit and enter until the actors for the new scene are in place a line or two into the scene, which we then join in process by bringing up area lights.  This may be an easier device to make clear in person than by email, but it works great and will keep the play moving.  I believe City Lit has a cyc, and I will dig it out before our first face-to-face meeting.

One thing I like in particular about the bottom one of the five pictures is how he's used the stage space.  There's a country road, and a town square, and a business district, and whatever locale it is supposed to be where the two guys are sawing a log, and it's all  together and it's all distinct at the same time.  Not saying we need to do that--we may need something more fluid--but I do like how he's made it work.

Kristine has suggested, and I like the idea, that perhaps the actors never or almost never leave the stage.  Perhaps there are places for them to sit on the fringes of the action until they enter a scene.  I'm not married to this idea, but one advantage it might have relates to the costumes.  Every actor plays multiple characters, and the play is written against the idea of full costume changes every time an actor becomes someone else.  The idea that changing a single piece changes the character might be an easier sell if we see the change happen onstage.  As long as we look like a production and not like a workshop.  If we go this way, it seems like it will call for some place onstage for costume pieces to live when not being worn  Hooks on the wall, maybe, though I'm not crazy about the view of the wall being dominated by costume pieces hanging up in full sight the whole time.  So maybe something else.
As we have a fair number of political speeches, a raised speaking platform (one largish one?  a couple or a few small ones?  I dunno) somewhere onstage is probably a good idea.  Maybe with bunting as in the bottom painting?

Certainly the main floor of the stage is an open, fluid area (or areas) that becomes whatever the actors say it is.  The furniture can be as simple as a table and a few chairs that are used transformationally to suggest whatever we need.  I expect this means the lighting will be called upon to help define a given scene--a window gobo when Wright and Mooney are looking out at the mob, and so on.  At one point the script requires us to burn a man alive onstage, and suggests that be accomplished by shining a red light or two on him.  If there is any way we could achieve a flickering effect, that would be fab.
That's all for now from me.  Email me any questions you have, if you like.  See you soon.

thanks,

Terry

Thursday, February 12, 2015

206-year-old man in the news

Lock of Lincoln's hair, amid other auction items

Lincoln in the news on his birthday:

The Fresno Bee has an editorial out this week calling for Lincoln's birthday to be made an official holiday.  The editorial maybe doesn't do the best job of making the case:  it's unclear if it's calling for a national holiday or a California state holiday, and dwells longer on his having beaten Jack Armstrong in a fight back in New Salem than on his having beaten the Confederacy and saved the Union, plus it gets wrong the date he was shot.  But it recognizes the inadequacy of the lamest national holiday, President's Day, and points out the embarrassment that more states officially recognize Robert E. Lee's birthday than Lincoln's.  Seems California used to celebrate Lincoln's birthday, but in 2009--the Bee points out the irony that this was his bicentenary year--the legislature deleted the holiday to save money.

Pete Muggins's letter (click to enlarge)
The New York Times reviews Lincoln Speaks:  Words that Transformed a Nation, an exhibit of original manuscripts of 80-some of his speeches and pieces of correspondence and so on, running through June 7 at New York City's Morgan Library and Museum.  Also included in the exhibit is material written to or about Lincoln, including Walt Whitman's handwritten "Oh Captain! My Captain!", and some books from Lincoln's personal library, including one of his Shakespeare collections opened to his favorite play, Macbeth.   Perhaps the most entertaining item exhibited
is the original of a letter mailed to Lincoln in Springfield a couple weeks after he was elected President; as the Times decorously puts it, the letter "remains unprintable in a family newspaper 155 years later."  Via the less fastidious Adam Matthew Digital, which has the original in its digital archives, here is a transcript:
Fillmore, La.  Nov 25th 1860
Old Abe Lincoln
God damn your god damned of hellfire of god damned soul to hell god damn you and god damn your god damned family's god damn hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation god damn them and god damn their god damn families to eternal god damnation god damn souls to hell god damn them and God Almighty God damn Old Hamlin to go hell God damn his God damned soul God all over everywhere double damn his God damned soul to hell.
Now you God damned old abolition son of a bitch God damned you I want you to send me God damn you about one dozen good offices Good God almighty God damn you God damned soul and three or four pretty Gals God damn you you
And by doing God damn you
Will oblige
Pete Muggins 
 Speaking of insults, MLive.com--the M stands for Michigan--posts a piece today thanking Lincoln for either coining or popularizing the term "Michigander."  Attacking Lewis Cass, the 1848 Democratic nominee for president, Lincoln called Cass "the great Michigander," his dual point being that Cass's policies were as silly as a goose and that Cass was so fat he waddled.  And we are told that political discourse was more elevated then than it is now.  MLive points out that 58% of, um, Michiganders now use the term to refer to themselves.  It does not point out that the term of Lincoln's day for someone from Illinois, a "sucker," has not held up as well.

The Religion News Service  says that anyone claiming to be outraged by President Obama's
comments at last week's National Prayer Breakfast should also feel the same way about Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:

Obama appeals to the mystery of God and, without specifically saying it, asks us to remove the speck from our own eye before we set out to remove the log from our neighbor's eye. . . .  When Obama tells Americans to get off their "high horses" and realize that sin has been present throughout human history, even American history, he echoes Lincoln's words on that rainy morning on March 4, 1865. . . .  Both the North and the South, he said, "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we not be judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered.  That of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes."  
On the other hand, Mark Levin on Sean Hannity's FOX News show (as a service to the readers of this blog, I am not providing a link) says that if Lincoln had shared the sentiments Obama expressed at the prayer breakfast, he would not have fought to end slavery.  Sigh.

The Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Daily News believes that Lincoln would not at all approve of pretty much anything Obama says or does.  It delves into metaphysics to prove the point:  "Abraham Lincoln's birthday is upon us.  And with a reluctant but free-spending captain now at the helm of the free world's flagship, we are reminded how sorely we miss Lincoln.  Were he with us now, at the advanced age of 206, what would he think of how his beloved United States has evolved in the 150 years since that fateful night at Ford's Theater?  What would he think of the Oval Office's current occupant?"  Remarkably, the answer to this poser is that Lincoln would agree with the opinions of the op-ed writer asking the question:  "he would want to know what happened to the role of government, and why it sees fit to intrude so regularly in the lives of its citizens."  Good to know.

Auctioned:  funeral admittance card for White House service
Finally, down in Dallas, a lock of Lincoln's hair was recently sold at auction for an amount equal to a year of his presidential salary, $25,000.  It was part of a large collection of Lincoln memorabilia (much of it, for instance a piece of blood-stained linen from his deathbed, and Booth's arrest warrant, centered around the assassination) that brought in a total of $803,889, twice what was expected.  Left unsold was an 1862 letter from Lincoln acknowledging that the Civil War was not going well.


Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Music for New Year's Eve 2014

 
Happy New Year.  Down by the Riverside is an African American spiritual whose exact pre-Civil War origin is obscure.  It may have originated among slaves held on and near the Georgia Sea islands, whose rich musical contributions include Michael Row the Boat Ashore, Wade in the Water, and Swing Low Sweet Chariot.  The riverside in question is simultaneously that of the Jordan and the Ohio, across which first the Hebrew slaves and then the American ones would find the promised land and live in peace.  The song was popularized after the war by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who also (decades later, with a different lineup) made its first recording.

This video is from Rainbow Quest, a show that Pete Seeger hosted and produced with money from his own pocket for one season in the mid-1960s, during his fifteen-year ban from network television for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  It was shot on a no-budget set without rehearsals or a studio audience and broadcast on a single, mostly Spanish-language, UHF (ultra-high frequency) station in Linden, New Jersey in the days when UHF reception was notoriously poor.  Clips from it are all over YouTube these days, not because of the production values, but because of the quality of the performances by Seeger and his great guests, at least some of whom declined payment for being there.  There are 39 episodes and only the one with an obviously stoned Johnny Cash is a disappointment.

Here, Sonny Terry on harmonica and Brownie McGhee on guitar are less than halfway through their almost forty-year partnership.  They paired up in New York City in 1941 or '42, and toured (sometimes eleven months per year) and recorded together until 1980.  They were also occasionally actors, and here's a small irony--they appeared in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Burl Ives, who had a few years earlier named Seeger's name to HUAC.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans' long wait at the Texas DMV may be over soon.

Almost legal.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans seem a giant step closer to winning their fight with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles over whether the state of Texas should issue specialty license plates displaying the Confederate battle flag.  The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas's appeal of the Fifth Circuit's Court of Appeal's decision overturning, on First Amendment grounds, a U.S. District Court's decision that the DMV was within its rights to decide not to issue the plates for the specific reason it gave at the time.

The issue on appeal relates to the Texas state law that says the DMV can reject any application for a specialty license plate if that plate's design "might be offensive to any member of the public."  Plenty of Texans testified to the DMV board that they were in fact offended by the proposed SCV plate's design, because they recognize the Confederate battle flag to be both a historical symbol of hate and a contemporary tool of racial intimidation, and the board voted the SCV's application down for that reason.

But there is nothing in the Constitution granting the right to go through life unoffended.  To the contrary, the First Amendment requires us to pretty much suck it up and get over it if someone chooses to use his or her individual right of free speech to offend us.  The question the Court has agreed to decide is whether a specialty license plate is part of an individual's private speech, in which case the Texas law against offensiveness is clearly unconstitutional, or if it is part of the state's speech, in which case the First Amendment does not apply and the Texas DMV is free to choose not to offend people.

There seems to be no firm legal category to contain the possibility that a specialty license plate is in fact a hybrid of private and state speech:  the individual requests the specialty plate because he or she supports the specialty content, and the state endorses the specialty content by manufacturing and distributing the plates.  Both the individual and the state seem to have spoken.

The one dissenting Fifth Circuit judge argued for just such a category:
A fundamental error in the majority opinion is describing the government-speech doctrine as presenting a binary choice:  government or private speech. . . . Texas does not prevent SCV from engaging in speech on its or its members' cars in the same way that speech has traditionally been made:  by license plate frames, bumper stickers, window stickers, window flags, or even painting cars with the Confederate flag.  If SCV and its members can do all of those things, why is it seeking an order from a court compelling Texas to sell Confederate plates? The answer is the same answer in Summum [a precedent case involving a monument a religious group had attempted to donate to a municipal park]:  SCV seeks the kind of "adoption" and "embrace" that comes with being on Texas license plates, with appearing next to the state's flag, name, and likeness, and being given the kind of validation that follows from appearing on a state-issued license plate.  It is precisely the reason that SCV wants to force Texas to produce these plates that it should be denied a court order doing so.  Texas, like Pleasant Grove [the municipality in Summum], cannot be forced to associate with messages it does not prefer.
The analogy applies in another important respect.  Unlike pamphleteering, speeches, marches, picketing, and bumper stickers--all of which unquestionably involve private speech, even if they occur on government-owned property--erecting monuments and manufacturing specialty license plates both require the government's assistance and complicity.  That distinction, yet again, makes specialty plates more like park monuments and less like leafleting and bumper stickers.
Because of Texas's dumb law, it may be too late for the DMV to reject the plates for the right reason:  because they would honor men who took up arms against the United States.  Part of the SCV's argument for the plates is that Texas already issues specialty plates honoring Korean War veterans, Vietnam veterans, buffalo soldiers, women veterans, and other such groups; therefore that its refusal to issue plates for Confederate veterans amounts to viewpoint discrimination.   Texas failed to make
Over 3500 Union soldiers are buried at Gettysburg National Cemetery.
It should be needless to point out they were killed by Confederate soldiers.
the obvious response:  the veterans it recognizes on specialty plates are all veterans of the U. S. armed forces, which Confederate soldiers were not.  Surely the government, even of a former Confederate state, should be able to honor those who fought to defend the United States without becoming obliged to embrace honoring those who attacked it.

Confederate soldiers insisted they weren't Americans and considered themselves the army of a foreign nation, and denying them tribute on specialty license plates is viewpoint discrimination only if Texas issues such plates honoring veterans of the Viet Cong or the Luftwaffe.  If the fact that the Confederates were nonetheless of domestic vintage is considered relevant, then Confederate soldiers deserve specialty plate recognition the same day other failed violent domestic groups such as the Weather Underground, FALN, and the Symbionese Liberation Army do so.  As long as Texas would be within its rights to deny applications for specialty plates to any of those veterans, it should be able to deny the SCV application.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Music for Christmas 2014

When I first started working at City Lit ten years ago, we put together a Christmas show that included "The One-Horse Open Sleigh," the original version of the song the public renamed "Jingle Bells."  As you'll hear, the chorus melody is a bit more complicated than the one we know today, and the song has perfectly lovely verses we don't know at all.

James Pierpont was born in 1822, in the heart of anti-slavery Boston, the son of the Reverend John Pierpont, an abolitionist Unitarian minister and famous in his day for several anti-slavery poems.  James's brother, also named John and also an abolitionist Unitarian minister, moved to Georgia to take on the daunting task of heading an anti-slavery congregation there.  In 1853, he invited James to move there as well, to become his church's music director and organist.

James was 31 and had not really settled down.  Married with two children, he had left his family behind with his parents in Massachusetts in 1849 to join the rush for California gold.  Finding none, he had returned home, but now left his wife and children again--this time for good--to go to Georgia.  In addition to fulfilling his duties at his brother's church, he spent the 1850s writing songs and instrumental pieces for the minstrel circuit.  One of the latter, 1854's "The Know Nothing Polka," was a tribute to the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Know-Nothing Party.  A song, co-written in 1857 with lyricist Marshall S. Pike, "Gentle Nettie Moore," was recorded in the 1930s by The Sons of the Pioneers when Roy Rogers was still in their line-up, and is the uncredited basis for Bob Dylan's song "Nettie Moore" on his 2006 Modern Times CD.

Also in 1857, Pierpont wrote "The One-Horse Open Sleigh" for a Thanksgiving celebration at the church.  It was successful enough that the performance was repeated the following month at Christmas, and the song has been associated with Christmas (when there is more likely to be snow through which to dash) ever since.  Published that same year, it was re-published two years later under the title it had become popularly known by, "Jingle Bells."

By 1859, whatever demand there had been for an abolitionist church in Georgia had evaporated and the Reverend John Jr had returned to the North.  James stayed in Georgia with his second wife and family.  When the war broke out and his 76-year-old father enlisted as a chaplain in the Union Army, he enlisted in the Confederate cavalry as a clerk and continued to write songs, now exclusively pro-Confederate war numbers with such titles as "Strike for the South" and "We Conquer or Die."

Once the war ended, Pierpont never wrote another song.  He lived until 1893, teaching music and working as a church organist.  Inadequate 19th-Century copyright laws being what they were, he never made much money from his great Christmas hit. 

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Alonzo Cushing has a date with President Obama.

 Alonzo Cushing as a West Point cadet, Class of  June 1861
On Tuesday the White House announced that President Obama will award the Medal of Honor to Alonzo Cushing on September 15 of this year, which will be 151 years, two  months, and twelve days after Cushing was shot through the mouth standing at what would become known as the Bloody Angle as the Confederates of Pickett's Charge charged right at him.

From the White House press release:
First Lieutenant Cushing was killed in action on July 3, 1863, at the age of 22. On that day, the third day of the battle, in the face of Longstreet's Assault, also known as Pickett's Charge, First Lieutenant Cushing's battery took a severe pounding by Confederate artillery.  As the rebel infantry advanced, he manned the only remaining, and serviceable, field piece in his battery.  During the advance, he was wounded in the stomach as well as in the right shoulder.  Refusing to evacuate to the rear despite his severe wounds, he directed the operation of his lone field piece continuing to fire in the face of the enemy.  With the rebels within 100 yards of his position, Cushing was shot and killed during this heroic stand.  His actions made it possible for the Union Army to successfully repulse the Confederate assault.
Cushing's headstone at West Point.

Friday, July 11, 2014

1864's Civil War commemorative stamps come out this month!

Other than our own Civil War Project, my favorite part of the sesquicentennial so far is the gorgeous series of commemorative stamps being issued, two each year, by the U.S. Postal Service, all designed by Phil Jordan.

The stamps for 2014 commemorate key military events from 1864, specifically the early days of the Petersburg Campaign and the Battle of Mobile Bay.

Petersburg, Virginia is about 30 miles from Richmond, the Confederate capital, and was in 1864 a transportation center instrumental to supplying food to both Richmond and Lee's army.  Grant spent nine and a half months trying to take the city through a series of battles and the most extensive trench warfare prior to World War One.  The Union scored no victories at Petersburg until late August, and suffered losses that horrified the nation:  at least 42,000 casualties over the length of the campaign; more than 11,000 in its first four days.  But when Petersburg finally fell, the Confederates were forced to abandon Richmond the same day, and Lee's army had no option but a desperate retreat that led to its being surrounded and forced to surrender at Appomattox six days later.

The Petersburg Campaign saw the war's largest concentration of African American soldiers; the specific scene depicted on the stamp is the Twenty-Second U. S. Colored Troops charging Petersburg's outer works on the second day of the campaign.  It's taken from an 1892 oil painting entitled "Charge of the 22nd Negro Regiment during Civil War, 16 July 1864" by J. Andre Castaigne.  The original hangs in the West Point Museum, and no full-color electronic image of it seems to be available anywhere online.  Below is the New York Public Library's print of the painting:


Castaigne's Phantom, 1910
Castaigne was a French illustrator who worked in the United States for five years in the 1890s, and occasionally thereafter.  When he's remembered, it's mainly as the original illustrator of the novel The Phantom of the Opera

The Mobile Bay stamp illustration is taken from an 1886 painting by Julian Oliver Davidson, Battle of Mobile Bay.  It shows the sinking of the ironclad USS Tecumseh, following its running into a Confederate torpedo (an 1860s torpedo was not a projectile, but a stationary underwater mine).  Tecumseh took only 25 seconds to sink, and moments later Union Admiral David Farragut, on the flagship Hartford (second wooden ship from the right in the painting), ordered it to move through the minefield.  It is when the torpedoes in Hartford's way were pointed out to him that he is supposed to have said "Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead."  Whether or not he said precisely that, Hartford did lead the way successfully through the minefield.  This brought the Union fleet out of the range of Confederate land guns and led to the surrender of the Confederate fleet and the capturing of the last important Confederate Gulf port east of the Mississippi.  Here's the full picture:

























Davidson was the country's leading marine artist, and was commissioned by Louis Prang (originator of the American Christmas card) to paint six naval battles as part of his series of well-researched depictions of Civil War battles, which he ran off as inexpensively priced chromolithographs.  It's the same series for which Prang hired Thure de Thurlstrup to paint twelve infantry scenes

Farragut
Porter
This is the second stamp in this series to feature Farragut's fleet; in 2012 one of the 1862 stamps showed him in the process of capturing New Orleans.  His foster brother, Admiral David Porter, commanded the fleet depicted on last year's 1863 stamp running the Confederate blockade at Vicksburg, so their family has been represented on three of the eight Civil War stamps so far.

The stamps are being issued July 30 at Mobile and Petersburg.


Friday, June 27, 2014

Another toxic remnant of slavery

So-called Constitutional originalists like to say that our understanding of any given clause in the Constitution must be rooted in its original intent, what an average reasonable person at the time of its writing would say it meant and was intended to accomplish.  So what does this mean when it turns out the original intent is disgraceful, and in fact would be illegal today?  Should that affect our sense of the clause in question?

Via Brad Delong's economics blog, we're directed to a website called The Smirking Chimp, and from that to a body of historical research that indicates that the original intent of the Second Amendment was to help preserve slavery by guaranteeing southern states the ability to terrorize their slaves.

Much of the research quoted was done by Carl T. Bogus of Roger Williams University, whose full paper on what he calls "the hidden history of the Second Amendment" can be downloaded here.  He documents that, in order to get Virginia to ratify the Constitution, the Amendment was written to guarantee that abolitionist forces in Congress would never be able to disarm the southern militias whose near-exclusive function was to act as slave patrols to prevent "servile insurrection."

From the introduction of slavery into the colonies in the 17th century right up to the Civil War, the slaveowner's biggest fear was of being murdered in his bed during a slave revolt.  Sensibly enough:  Bogus cites research indicating there were around 250
slave insurrections throughout the South during colonial times.  At the time of the ratification debates, the biggest and best-known was in 1739 South Carolina, when and where a group of 20 blacks broke into a store and stole weapons and gunpowder.  Bogus: "They decapitated the two storekeepers, displaying their heads on the front steps, and then headed south, sacking and burning homes and killing whites on the way.  They marched while flying banners, beating drums, and calling out "Liberty!" to attract more slaves to the rebellion."  Eventually they numbered near 100, and were only subdued after fighting two full-fledged battles with mounted militiamen.  After the first, black captives were beheaded and their heads hung from mileposts along the road as a warning to other slaves.  Most of those who had escaped were tracked down a week later by another militia company and wiped out.

Newspaper woodcut following Nat Turner's revolt, 1831
In many areas of the South, black slaves outnumbered whites.  Even where that wasn't the case, the ratio of slaves to total population was huge:  while the Constitution was being debated, 44% of Virginia's population was enslaved.  How do you control an oppressed people in your midst when their numbers approach or exceed yours?  Basically, you run a police state.  From early colonial days, a feature of Southern life was organized slave patrols of armed white men who searched slave quarters without notice, whipped slaves found off the plantation without permission, and prevented blacks from gathering in groups of three or more.  The formation after the Civil War of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan was simply an extension of the pre-war slave patrols.

By the mid-1700s, the slave patrols had been put under the auspices of the state militia.  The Smirking Chimp cites Sally Haden's book Slave Patrols:  Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas to the effect that virtually all men between 18 and 45--not even physicians or ministers were exempted--were required to serve in the militia, which is to say on slave patrols.  One reason the 1739 uprising was quelled promptly was that the white men attending Sunday services at a nearby church were, as required by law, armed.

The myth of the citizen militia during the Revolution is that it was an important element in defeating the British--patriot Minutemen rushing from their homes to battle redcoats, and all that.  Bogus points out that in fact a number of Southern states refused even to contribute any militia to the war effort, for the perfectly sound reason that doing so would leave their homes unprotected against slave uprisings.  And on at least one occasion George Washington refused to accept the offer of militiamen, as his experience had taught him that they were too undisciplined to be useful in battle: they tended to desert.  At the battle of Camden, militia from Virginia and North Carolina, though outnumbering the entire British force, fled from the field without firing a single shot.  No, what the citizen militia was good at was terrorizing slaves, and little else.

How does the Second Amendment figure into this?  Well, the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution had inspired a wave of abolitionism in the North, where slavery was not all that economically important.  Between the adoption of the Declaration and the drafting of the Constitution, half the slave states north of the Mason-Dixon line had passed emancipation laws; the rest followed suit by 1804.  Things were different in the South.  During ratification debates, Southerners wanted protection from the possibility that Northerners would use the Constitution to undermine slavery by disarming the slave patrols.  Virginia delegate George Mason, called the Father of the Bill of Rights, and owner of 300 slaves,
No apparent sense of irony or self-awareness
had refused to sign the Constitution when it was drafted in Philadelphia.  Among his reservations was his fear that Article One, Section Eight of the proposed Constitution would empower Northerners to strike against slavery by effectively eliminating the slave patrol militias.  He told the ratification convention:
The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless--by disarming them.  Under various pretenses, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them . . .
Patrick Henry, greatest orator of the Revolutionary era and another Virginia delegate to the ratifying convention, agreed:
If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, [the states] cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress. . . . Congress, and Congress only, can call forth the militia. . . . I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone.
He feared certain others might take his same course.
The Federalists needed Virginia's vote for ratification in order for the Constitution to come into effect.  Nine of thirteen states had to vote yes.  Eight had done so.  Of the five holdouts, Rhode Island was a definite no, New Hampshire and North Carolina were considered doubtful, New York was unpredictable, and Virginia was on the fence.  (In the event, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, four days before Virginia, but that could not have been predicted at the time.)  If ratification failed, the Constitution died, and the United States itself would perhaps dissolve. As part of the Bill of Rights required to secure Virginia's vote (and those of other states as well), James Madison agreed to an amendment answering the concerns of Mason and Henry.  His first draft spoke in general terms of the "security of a free
Ratification votes and dates
nation;" by the time it was adopted, this had been changed to the more-to-the-point "security of a free State."  The security concern was of course not foreign invasion; the nation as a whole would undoubtedly act as one in any such case.  Nor was it, as today's gun advocates pretend to believe, that citizens should be empowered to resist the government's tyranny--has there ever been a government that gave formal written permission for itself to be attacked?  The security concern at the heart of the Second Amendment's original intent is that the captive Americans among us might rise up to claim their freedom.

The legacy of all this is that we today have been convinced we have no practical means of stopping crazy people from gunning down children.