Understanding the Third Amendment

The Framers of the Constitution had fresh memories of the Quartering Act of 1774, which amended the Quartering Act of 1765.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly noted:
He has combined with people others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.

And it was in 1788, during the debate at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, seeking to replace a weak Articles of Confederation with a stronger Constitution, which even permitted a standing army, that Patrick Henry famously said:
One of our first complaints, under the former government, was the quartering of troops among us. This was one of the principal reasons for dissolving the connection with Great Britain. Here we may have troops in time of peace. They may be billeted in any manner — to tyrannize, oppress, and crush us.

The Third Amendment, then, serves as the chief protector against tyranny and oppression, enacted so as to prevent that causus belli that would warrant the mustering of troops against a sovereign.  Defenders of the Second Amendment hold that that amendment protects all other rights, but it is the Third Amendment that stands to preserve that most sacrosanct right, the sanctity of one's home, against governmental occupation.  With this in mind, we should never forget the specific legislation that brought about the Third Amendment.  Embedded below is the text of the Mutiny in America Act of 1775 (15 Geo. iii, c. 15), amending further the 1774 Quartering Act, the most intolerable of the Intolerable Acts.
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