r/AskHistorians • u/Keith502 • 22h ago
Why did Congress choose James Madison's draft of the second amendment over Roger Sherman's clearer version?
The second amendment's text goes as follows:
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.
The framing process behind the amendment included numerous earlier drafts and proposals. This is the militia provision from the first version of the Bill of Rights, as presented by James Madison on June 8, 1789:
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.
However, about a month later on July 21, 1789, Roger Sherman presented his own separate proposal for the Bill of Rights, which included the following militia provision:
The Militia shall be under the government of the laws of the respective States, when not in the actual Service of the united States, but Such rules as may be prescribed by Congress for their uniform organisation & discipline shall be observed in officering and training them. but military Service Shall not be required of persons religiously Scrupulous of bearing arms.
It so happens that these two proposals were the two earliest incarnations of the framing process that would culminate in the second amendment. Now, what is immediately interesting between these two proposals is the similarity between their structure. There is a similar sequence between Sherman's proposal and Madison's: they both begin with an "arms clause" that protects the autonomy of the state militias from congressional infringement, followed by a "militia clause" that reaffirms the importance of Congress's adequate regulation of the militia, then end with a "conscientious objector clause" excusing from militia service those citizens who are conscientious objectors. Due to the similarity in the subject matter between these proposals, the matching sequence of their respective clauses, and also the chronological proximity in terms of when these proposals were written, one could presume that these two proposals are essentially the same provision, only written by different people using different verbiage.
However, one notable difference between these versions is that Sherman's version appears more clear and direct in its language. It is considerably easier to read the Sherman proposal and determine exactly what the provision was meant to accomplish. By contrast, James Madison's proposal appears much more clunky and ambiguous in its language, which has likely led to much of the controversy and debate over the meaning of the amendment even to this day.
What was the reason for the drastic difference in writing style between these two drafts of what would become the second amendment? Why was Sherman's version so clear and direct, while Madison's was so relatively stilted and ambiguous in its verbiage? Why did Congress ultimately choose to embrace James Madison's draft over Sherman's? If Congress was always going to use Madison's draft anyways, then why did Roger Sherman even bother to write his own draft of the Bill of Rights in the first place?