“The True Palladium of Liberty”: Federalists, Jeffersonians, and the Second Amendment

Abstract The first systematic effort to explore the role of the Second Amendment in America’s new constitutional system was undertaken by the learned Virginian judge St. George Tucker. These observations were made in a series of lectures at the College of William and Mary, where Tucker held the prestigious chair in Law and Police. Tucker believed that The Federalist provided a superb analysis of the theoretical foundations of the Constitution, but he lamented that “Publius” had not treated the defects of the Constitution candidly, something that Tucker resolved to do in his lectures. The other impetus for organizing his thoughts about the Constitution in a systematic manner was the recent adoption of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Tucker believed it was vital to provide his students with a detailed guide to the new law of the land.