I'm going to have to completely agree with this statement and thank you for bringing again the slave patrols as the basis and connection to southern militias. However, I just want to note that I have not yet found any evidence that ALL 13 colonies had these slave patrols. Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1781 by court decree, and Vermont was the first state to abolish it in 1777. The Quakers, who founded Pennsylvania, forbid their members in 1776 from holding slaves, and abolished it not soon after. Connecticut and Rhode Island started the process of abolition in 1784, and New York started in 1785.

Although later in the early 1800s some escaped slaves were captured by out of state bounty hunters, those captured were strongly objected to by the free black Americans. But the fundamental point I'm trying to make that sometimes gets overlooked is that there were already the seeds of the war planted between the north and south before 1789.

When the Constitution was rewritten in 1787 it was a betrayal to the large corporate landowners in South who wanted to keep their power to continue slavery and reap its profits, which heavily existed in the South that made cash crops the North didn't have (cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar) and held 90 percent or more of the slaves. This conflict never ceased, and the South felt betrayed by the new three branch system of federal power that would abolish slavery. The conflict has been de-emphasized because the North withdrew Union troops and allowed the violent white Southerners to lynch and legislate thier way to eliminate the black voice and vote in the South, making it a de facto one-party white run "country" by 1901 that the North no longer wanted to mess with. In the South, the slave patrols won out, and the cross pollination of

militia members (red shirts, klan, white league etc.) and police was common and, in many cases, documented.

So, you're right, DeSantis in a sense does care about Constitutionality: he cares NOT to have it in his state. He is in effect potentially violating the federal Klan Act of 1871 as well as all human decency and sending out a very strong signal on states' rights: that he is white King and is setting up is own army (or state national guard). If the federal national guard steps in to break up a race riot, would the state national guard slave patrol block them: you can bet on it. That's what happened in Arkansas in 1957 with the governor and the federal troops or guard being sent in. Things had to come to a head and DeSantis is pushing the violence in that direction.

I'm just widening the context and the warning. We've always been a nation conflicted. It's time that Northern born whites like me overcome our brainwashing: while "we" of the Union won the military battle and claimed victory in 1865, we then morally withdrew in 1876, failing to convert autocrat white rulers to understand inalienable rights and democracy, who then crushed those democracy institutions set up by 'carpetbaggers' in that brief period after the war. "We the People" abandoned the black Americans in South, let the white supremacists in power crush those newly born institution of voting that had put black Americans in power across the South, and let genocide and autocracy rain down on them without federal intervention. In effect, "we" gave up fighting for what mattered most: inalienable civil rights fought for so hard in the 1700s, believing the white Southern Supremacists would never get there. And so, they haven't.