Anyone who studies closely the life and writings of John Locke will notice that he was a remarkably secretive person.
Maurice Cranston began his biography of Locke by observing: "Locke is an elusive subject for a biographer because he was an extremely secretive man. He modified a system of shorthand for the purposes of concealment; he employed all sorts of curious little cyphers; he cut signatures and other identifiable names from letters he preserved; at one time he used invisible ink" (Cranston 1957: xi).
Peter Laslett began his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government in a similar way by noticing Locke's strange obsession with concealing his authorship of his writings:
"'Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained, than in a book entitled, Two Treatises of Government.' This remark was made by John Locke in 1703, not much more than a year before he died. It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of his own works as a guide to a young gentleman anxious to acquire 'an insight into the constitution of the government, and real interest of his country.' It must be even rarer for a man who was prepared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle's Politics and Hooker's Eccesiastical Polity, to write as if the work were written by somebody else, somebody whom he did not know. Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative [the Rev. Richard King]. What could possibly be the point of concealing this thing, from a man who probably knew it already?" (Locke 1988: 3).
The best answer to Laslett's question here is that Locke feared persecution if he stated too openly views that would shock the popular prejudices of his day, and therefore he had to engage in secret writing that would conceal his unpopular thoughts from most of his readers. That Locke himself saw the need to do this is suggested in some of his remarks in his private notebooks that he never intended to be published.
For example, in an early entry in his Journal (1678), he copied this sentence from a French treatise he was reading: "The popular mind takes offense at everything that conflicts with its prejudices." He then wrote this annotation: "One ought to take care therefore in all discourses, whether narrative of matter of fact, instructive to teach any doctrine, or persuasive, to take care of shocking the received opinions of those one has to do with, whether true or false." This was published for the first time in 1830 in Peter King's Life of John Locke (1:227-28).
Locke's concern "to take care of shocking the received opinions" of his readers would explain why he never resolved the obvious contradiction between his apparent acceptance of slavery and his teaching about human equality in natural rights. As I argued some years ago, Locke had to engage in secret writing to convey to his careful readers his opposition to slavery as unjust oppression, but without explicitly saying so, and thus hiding this from those many readers of his time who would be shocked by this denial of their "received opinions" about the justice of slavery.
And yet, some scholars--such as David Armitage (2004)--have claimed that Locke's role in helping to write and edit the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina shows his active endorsement of African slavery in the Province of Carolina. But now, we have Holly Brewer's new article that argues that Armitage's reading of the manuscript evidence for the composition of the various versions of the Fundamental Constitutions is mistaken, and that Locke was not actively involved in writing the provisions supporting slavery.
Here is the map for the Province of Carolina, 1663-1729, and the Provinces of North Carolina and South Carolina, 1729-1776. You might need to click onto the map to enlarge it.
In 1663, Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) and seven other Lords Proprietors were given "absolute power and authority" over Carolina in a royal charter by Charles II. This royal grant of power and authority was reiterated in a second charter of 1665 when the territorial reach of Carolina was extended further north and south along the Atlantic Coast, and westward across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Ashley became the leader of the Carolina project.
In 1666, Locke became Ashley's personal secretary; and, in 1668, he became the Secretary of the Lords Proprietors, a post that he would hold until 1675. Years later, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the installation of King William and Queen Mary, Ashley would appoint Locke as the secretary of the new Council of Trade and Plantations.
In 1669, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina established the governmental and social order of Carolina. The was actually the first of five Fundamental Constitutions--the others were issued in 1670, in January of 1682, in August of 1682, and the last in 1698. For a long time, it was thought that Locke was the primary author of the Fundamental Constitutions. But now most scholars agree that Locke was only one of many secretaries who wrote or edited these documents; and ultimately the final acceptance of these documents depended on the approval of the Lords Proprietors.
Since the Fundamental Constitutions asserted not only the "absolute power and authority" of the Lords Proprietors over Carolina but also the "absolute power and authority" of Carolina's slave masters over their African slaves, this seemed to contradict the liberalism of Locke's Two Treatises. But now the "postcolonial" scholarship that has emerged over the past forty years teaches that there is no contradiction here because what we see here is, as Armitage has said, "a mutually constitutive relationship between liberalism and colonialism" (602). Read in the light of the colonial context manifest in the Fundamental Constitutions, we can see that Locke's Two Treatises were written to justify the absolute power of proprietary lords over their colonies and of colonial settlers over their African slaves and over the Native Americans who would be dispossessed of their lands.
Of all the evidence for this conclusion that Armitage finds in the Fundamental Constitutions, the most dramatic is the "most notorious article"--article 101 of the 1669 version--"Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute <power and> Authority over his Negro slaves of what opinion or Religion soever." Armitage explains: "Though none of his later detractors could have known it, Locke himself had augmented the slaveholders' 'absolute Authority' by adding that '<power and>' in the 1669 manuscript now among the Shaftesbury papers." And we know that because that insertion of "power and" is in Locke's handwriting (Armitage 2004:609).
Brewer develops various arguments against Armitage's "postcolonial" interpretation of Locke's involvement with the Fundamental Constitutions. Her most important argument is that Locke did not in fact add the words "power &" to the sentence about the absolute power and authority of masters over Negro slaves in the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript.
Armitage's concern is with Locke's contributions to the version of the Fundamental Constitutions between the first signed document (signed July 21, 1669) and the second signed document (signed Mar 1, 1670). Armitage claims that Locke was responsible for inserting those two key words--"power &"--to a sentence about the Freeman's "absolute Authority over his Negro slaves." But if you look at the handwritten manuscript and compare it with other examples of Locke's handwriting using the words "power &," you can see that the "power &" in the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript is not Locke's handwriting. Brewer reproduces photographs of the texts in her article (pages 16-19), so that her readers can judge this for themselves. Locke's handwriting does appear in some other places in this manuscript, but his additions have nothing to do with slavery. (As far as I know, Armitage has not disputed Brewer's claim here by asserting that the words "power &" really are in Locke's handwriting.)
This is consistent with my claim that Locke opposed slavery although he thought he could not say this openly without offending the supporters of slavery. He did not try to strike out the articles supporting slavery in the Fundamental Constitutions, but neither did he add any language strengthening the document's endorsement of slavery.
Armitage makes further claims about Locke's involvement in the revising of the Fundamental Constitutions in 1782. He says that "all" of Locke's revisions were accepted, and that the article about the absolute power and authority of masters over slaves "went untouched in the 1682 revisions even as Locke renumbered it with the rest" (Armitage 2004: 615, 619).
This is a crucial point for Armitage's postcolonial interpretation of Locke's Two Treatises because scholars believe that Locke was writing the Two Treatises in 1682 (although it was not published until 1689), and therefore we can see that Locke was continuing to support the slavery article of the Fundamental Constitutions in 1782 just as he was writing the Two Treatises.
But Brewer points out that Armitage ignores the fact that the article about the absolute power of masters over slaves is missing from the Fundamental Constitutions manuscript of August 17, 1682, which was signed and sealed by the Lords Proprietors. There is no record to explain how or why this happened. But then the article about absolute power over slaves returned in the final version of 1698 after being absent for sixteen years. The reason for the article's reappearance in 1698 is no clearer than its disappearance in 1682.
Did someone involved in editing the 1682 document quietly remove the slavery article, hoping that the Lords Proprietors would sign the document without noticing the absence of this article? Could Locke have done this? We don't know. But it's something we might expect if Locke wanted to subvert the practice of slavery in Carolina but without being noticed.
On the other hand, if Armitage is right about Locke's enthusiastic support for slavery, we might expect that Locke would have become a slaveholder himself. After all, Armitage notes that the Proprietors rewarded Locke for his work on the Fundamental Constitutions by making him a "landgrave" of Carolina, which was a title of nobility. If he had acted on the privileges to which he was entitled as a landgrave, Locke could have claimed 12,000 acres of land in Carolina, and he could have purchased slaves to work that land for him. Other landgraves, including those who were not residing in Carolina, did this. But amazingly, as Brewer points out, Locke never did this, and Armitage is silent about this.
Apparently, Locke had no desire to become a slaveholding land baron in Carolina. Perhaps because he really did believe what he declared in the first sentence of his Two Treatises: "Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't."
REFERENCES
Armitage, David. 2004. "John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government." Political Theory 32 (October): 602-627.
Brewer, Holly. 2024. "Whose Fundamental Constitutions? Locke, Slavery, and Manuscript Evidence." Locke Studies. Volume 2024: 1-57.
Cranston, Maurice. 1957. John Locke: A Biography. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
King, Lord Peter. 1830. The Life of John Locke. 2 volumes. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley.
Locke, John. 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment