Armies…. being necessary to to the security of a free State….

This clever juxtaposition of the Article I word of "armies" and the Second Amendment's preamble on militias by Akhil Reed Amar in his latest book on the Constitution, The Unwritten Constitution, serves to illustrate the concept of America's unwritten Constitution through deed and action ("We the People .. do ordain and establish…") that Amar seeks to impart in the second chapter of his book. In this case, the national draft is a constitutional exercise of Congress' power to raise armies granted in Article 1 because of the enactment played out in the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment. After the Civil War, the Union Army played a vital role in reestablishing republican government in the southern states that had rebelled against the constitutionally elected government of the United States and the states that had remained loyal to the Union.

Amar's argument is that the events and acts that lead up to the proposal and ratification of the Constitution and its amendments compose part of the unwritten Constitution that, interwoven with the actual written Constitution, makes up the foundational fabric of American law. He examines the principle by proposing that the Reconstruction Congress reinterpreted the expectations of the Founders underlying the militia system. The militia system had been established by the Founders to be locally-based and under the control of the States in order to preserve the People's freedoms and liberties from centralized tyrants. However, by the 1860's, the militia system had been turned into an instrument of resistance against the federal government and Civil War erupted, turning the Founder's experiment in republican government on its head. The Union Army, an Army which was composed of conscripted soldiers up until the end of the Civil War, helped to bring the Reconstructed South into the Union, and part of their readmission was the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

So because of the events and actions behind the adoption of this important Amendment, the Constitution was reconstructed and the Army, an institution of suspicion in late 18th century America, was given a new place of trust and prominence because of its role in freeing the slaves and the hold slavery had on the liberties and humanity of all Americans.