What effect would it have on US political history if this had been the finally adopted text of the Second Amendment? Would it have caused issues in the Civil War?
(Or intermediate wordings to much the same effect)
Not really, because the U.S., despite lacking the second clause of the original Second Amendment, did actually generally avoid taking action that would directly cause pacifists to have to avoid service. In the Civil War, the much maligned substitution policy was in fact
explicitly designed so that any Quakers, Mennonites, Amish and other pacifists who were drafted would be able to find substitutes from non-pacifist reigious communities; they just didn’t think that the First Amendment would allow them limiting the acquisition of substitutes on the basis of religion.
Even in later wars where the draft was put into place, the government has broadly created systems for pacifists to either be completely exempt therefrom or for them to be drafted into non-military (such as extra farm labor, factory labor, maintenance work, quarantine servicing to prevent wide outbreaks, and other roles designed to keep the country going despite a large part of its population having been sent abroad) or non-combat roles (often unarmed medics and military hospital medical and nonmedical staff, or being in the supply train as part of recovery and rehabilitation for civilians after the military passed through; e.g., in World War II, when it was American soldiers who liberated the death camps, it was often Quakers and Mennonites who nursed their remaining victims back to health).
If protection of pacifist religious minorities were enshrined in the Constitution, if anything it would have made the draft in the Civil War
more functional, because they might have been explicitly introduced religious tests for substitution and thus make it a broadly less-resented policy in some regions.
It's an interesting idea.
I've always thought that a "better" Second Amendment would say something like "The right of the people to practice personal or collective self defence shall not be infringed", but the chances of that passing at the time would be low.
The problem is that “personal” self-defense
wasn’t at that time considered a usual reason for possession of a firearm. They were tools for hunting and a means for states and localities to raise militias to deal with native attacks. Even at the time of the Founding Fathers, the states did all introduce restrictions that would make the NRA purple with rage about what weapons were of legitimate use and when they could be carried and under what circumstances; in regions where hunting and native attacks weren’t a usual issue, the rules could be very strict indeed.
