Securing Civil Rights

Stephen Halbrook's groundbreaking study of freed slaves and the right to bear arms in the aftermath of the Civil War, cited in Supreme Court cases, now with a new foreword by Robert J. Cottrol. What did it mean to take civil rights seriously—especially the “right to bear arms”—in the years following the abolition of slavery? By quoting legislative debates, Congressional hearings on Ku Klux Klan violence, and newspapers and law books of the time, constitutional scholar Stephen Halbrook shows that