Locke's Secret Writing on Slavery: Brewer Versus Armitage on the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina"

 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.

The Lockean Liberal Evolution of Symbolic Niche Construction in the Declaration of Independence: A Declaration of "Free and Independent States"

The Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics rests on the idea that human beings mentally create social institutions through collective recognition of those institutions as symbolic realities, which Locke identified as the language of "mixed modes."  While other animals can mentally create cultural traditions, only human beings have the evolved cognitive capacity to create collective symbolic traditions, because human beings are unique in having 16 billion neurons in their cerebral cortex, which probably gives them the capacity for collective symbolism.

The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality in our minds as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.

If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).

The Declaration of Independence is what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  So, for example, a twenty-dollar bill has monetary value as long as we recognize that a twenty-dollar bill (X) counts as currency (Y) in the monetary system of the United States (C).  Similarly, the American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans against the British was in the Saratoga Campaign, June through October 1777.  For the first time in history, an entire British army surrendered in the field.  When French King Louis XVI learned of this, he began negotiations with Benjamin Franklin to form a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won the Saratoga Campaign, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

There are many good objections to my Lockean and Darwinian reading of the Declaration of Independence.  And over the years, I have responded to most of them.  

But I haven't yet answered in full an objection suggested by David Armitage in his important book--The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.  2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  As its subtitle indicates, Armitage's book is a global history of the Declaration from 1776 to the end of the twentieth century, concentrating mostly on its implications for international law, particularly as expressed in the many "Declarations of Independence" from Vermont in 1777 to Eritrea in 1993.  The American Declaration of Independence was the first of over one hundred such declarations over the past 250 years.

Armitage claims that the primary purpose of the Declaration of Independence is prominently stated in the opening and closing sentences of the Declaration.  It begins with one long sentence:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

It concludes:

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."

This shows, Armitage observes, that this was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states.

At the end of the Declaration, the Continental Congress claimed to act "in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies" to declare that the colonies are "Free and Independent States."  But the Congress had no legal authority under British law to do this.  Their authority came from the Laws of Nature and Nature's God, as stated in the second paragraph, that entitled them to secure the "unalienable Rights" of men by exercising the "Right of the People" to "alter or abolish" a government that fails to secure their natural rights and "to institute new Government . . . as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

As I have argued, not only the second paragraph but the whole of the Declaration of Independence echoes the language and principles of Locke's Second Treatise of Government.  This is certainly true for the Declaration's claims about "free and independent states."  In the state of nature, men are "by Nature, all free, equal, and independent," and no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his consent (ST, 95).  But while once people have formed political societies by consent, they have left the state of nature, the governments they have formed are in themselves in a state of nature:  "all Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments all through the World, are in a State of Nature" (ST, 14).  These governments can enter into international agreements by mutual consent, but as long as they are politically independent of one another, they are in an international state of nature, and each government is naturally equal and independent.

This Lockean understanding of the law of nature in the international state of nature was elaborated in Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations in 1758:

"Nations being composed of men naturally free and independent, and who, before the establishment of civil societies, lived together in the state of nature,--nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature."

"It is a settled point with writers on the natural law, that al men inherit from nature a perfect liberty and independence, of which they cannot be deprived without their own consent.  In a state, the individual citizens do not enjoy them fully and absolutely, because they have made a partial surrender of them to the sovereign.  But the body of the nation, the state, remains absolutely free and independent with respect to all other men, all other nations, as long as it has not voluntarily submitted to them" (Vattel 2008: 68).

Armitage recognizes Vattel's book as "the standard text on the subject in Europe and the Americas for more than half a century," and thus the best guide to the American understanding of how people can claim the rights and powers of "free and independent states" as rooted in the law of nature.  But he does not recognize how this contradicts his argument that the appeal to the law of nature in the Declaration's second paragraph is unnecessary for the primary purpose of the Declaration in declaring independence for the United States in the international system of states.

Armitage also argues that the many declarations of independence after 1776 show the unimportance of the second paragraph of the Declaration in the global history of the document:  "The earliest imitations of the Declaration in Europe and beyond set the pattern for most later documents by taking the Declaration's opening and closing sentences as their template while overlooking the self-evident truths of the second paragraph" (113).  Surveying the more than one hundred such documents, he says that "relatively few . . . contained a declaration of individual rights that paralleled the second paragraph of the American Declaration" (104).

But Armitage's reader should notice that of the ten declarations that he reproduces in his book, seven contain passages that echo the language of the second paragraph (187, 199, 205, 211-12, 217-18, 227-29, 231, 239-40).  For example, the Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (January 4, 1790) opens by saying; "Since it has pleased Divine Providence to restore our natural rights of liberty and independence  by severing the bonds that once fastened us to a Prince and House whose domination was ever harmful to the interests of Flanders, we feel obliged to recount for present and future generations the events which inspired and accomplished this happy Revolution" (187).  The Declaration of Independence by the People of Texas (March 2, 1836) appeals to "the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable right of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right toward themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their welfare and happiness" (212).

Even those declarations that do not explicitly speak of the "natural rights of liberty and independence" do implicitly assume the natural right to government by consent of the governed and the right to overthrow governments that do not secure the natural rights of the people.  After all, any group of people who declare their independence from an established government and their right to establish a new government are engaged in an extralegal act that can only be justified by an implicit appeal to a natural right beyond positive law.

REFERENCES

Armitage, David. 2007. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shain, Barry Alan, ed.  2014.  The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Vattel, Emer de.  2008.  The Law of Nations.  Eds. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Weddle, Kevin J.  2021.  The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

The "Inner Logic" of Equal Liberty in Evolved Human Nature: A Response to Darrin McMahon

THE "INNER LOGIC" OF EQUALITY

I have written about Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights as an illustration of the Darwinian neurohistory of human rights, in which the understanding of human rights arises from the human brain's evolved capacity for feeling empathy for the victims of injustice.  

Part of her argument is that human rights have a kind of "inner logic" or a "kind of conceivability or thinkability scale" (150). She illustrates this by showing how the French revolutionaries of 1789 were driven by the logic of human rights to extend the circle of humanitarian concern. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had declared: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."  The abstract universalism of this declaration inevitably inclined them to extend that equal protection to new groups of human beings, and thus expand the circle of human empathy.  So, for example, once the French revolutionary leaders had granted religious liberty not only to Catholics but also to Protestant Christians, this made it easier to see the need for granting liberty to Jews.

Another example of the "inner logic" of equal liberty being extended to ever more groups of people is how the right to vote in America has been broadened so far that eventually almost all adult citizens have the right to vote.  Hunt illustrates this with a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776.  

Since the Americans had begun their revolutionary overthrow of British rule, the Second Continental Congress had called upon the American states to begin writing their first constitutions.  Part of the debates over those constitutions was the question of voting rights.  In England, electors had to own a 40-shilling freehold (land that produced an annual rent of at least 40 shillings).  In the American colonies, because of the cheapness and availability of land, this property requirement allowed between 50 percent and 80 percent of all while males to vote, which was a much wider franchise than was the case in England, where no more than 20 percent of adult males could vote.  But even so, when the Revolution began, some Americans questioned these property requirements for voting.  If republican government was based on the consent of the people, and if all the people had an equal right to consent to the laws, then it would seem to follow logically that all the citizens should have an equal right to vote.  That was the argument of James Sullivan for universal suffrage in Massachusetts, which he presented to John Adams.

Although Adams agreed that this was a logical application of the principle that all human beings have an equal natural right to consent to government, he warned Sullivan that making such a proposal was risky:

"Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So fruitful a Source of Controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters.  There will be no End of it.  New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.  Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.  It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell."

Adams admitted to Sullivan that women "have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property."  And so, once the property qualification for men is abolished, there will be no grounds for denying the right to vote to women.  "There will be no end of it."

Thus, Adams foresaw that declaring the equal human right to consent to government would logically require the constant expansion of the right to vote so that finally all citizens would have an equal right to vote.

Similarly, Abraham Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence as setting a standard of human equality of rights that would be constantly approximated as its influence spread and deepened over American history.  The authors of the Declaration declared that "all men are created equal" in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"This they said, and this they meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.  In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon.  They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Lincoln 1989, 1:398).

Thus it was, Lincoln claimed, that the Declaration of Independence "gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance" (1989, 2:213). 

Lincoln's contribution to fulfilling this "promise" of equal rights was to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and to lead the Union in defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War so that the emancipation of slaves could be fully enforced in the South.  After his death, during the Reconstruction era, the North forced the Southern states to respect the equal rights of the freed slaves.  But with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white supremacist leaders were able to establish Jim Crow laws that enforced a system of racial segregation that denied the equal rights of black citizens. 

In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial and speaking to 250,000 people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King invoked Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty and particularly his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as providing the "standard maxim of free society."  King began his "I Have a Dream" speech by pointing to Lincoln.  (I have written about this speech as showing the superiority of King's rhetoric of equality over George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation.)

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  . . . But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free."

He then turned to the promise of equal liberty in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'  It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note."

He explained his Dream, repeating "I have a dream" eight times.  He began:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

In this way, King advanced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as the fulfillment of the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence.

McMAHON'S CRITIQUE

And yet, Darrin McMahon (in his book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea) has argued that Hunt,  Lincoln, and King were all wrong about the Declaration of Independence as supporting the "inner logic" of equality as a progressively unfolding tendency in history.

Lincoln was wrong, McMahon claims, for two reasons.  First, far from promising equality for all men, the Declaration of Independence was really only a promise of "white freedom," so that black slavery would be preserved (166).  Second, "the Declaration was less a promissory note for the future, or a charter of individual rights, than an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163).

Although McMahon does not mention Stephen Douglas's debates with Lincoln, McMahon's two points here repeat the two claims made by Douglas about the Declaration of Independence.  In defending the Dred Scott decision that blacks could not be citizens, Douglas insisted that the signers of the Declaration "referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared all men to have been created equal," and that the only purpose of the Declaration was "justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown" (Lincoln 1989, 1:399).

Because he agrees with Douglas, McMahon can say that King was wrong in describing the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal as a "declaration of intent" and a "promissory note" that would be fulfilled in time.  Actually, McMahon observes, "it is doubtful . . . that the Declaration intended any such thing, and still less that Jefferson's well-worn proposition was meant to portend the coming equality of all" (371-72).

Similarly, McMahon insists that Hunt was wrong about the proposition that all men are created equal having an inherent tendency that would drive revolutionaries to extend equal rights to all human beings.  In Hunt's "inner logic story," "equality is presented in strikingly idealist and teleological terms, as if it were gradually, yet inexorably, spreading across the globe according to some powerful necessity, overcoming barriers one by one" (219).  Clearly, McMahon thinks such a teleological conception of history patently absurd.

But McMahon's arguments for these conclusions are weak.  First of all, his assertion that the Declaration of Independence promises only "white freedom" is not grounded in the text of the Declaration.  The Declaration says that "all men" are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.  It does not say that only "all white men" are created equal.

In some previous posts, I have shown that Jefferson and the other founders always condemned slavery as an unjust violation of natural human liberty, and that slavery must eventually be abolished, although they disagreed about how and when slavery could be abolished without disastrous consequences.  Actually, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a clause condemning the King for supporting the British slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another" (Jefferson 1984, 22).

Jefferson reports that this clause was struck out because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

Notice that slaves are identified as "men," and thus entitled to the "rights of life and liberty" that belong to "all men."  Notice also the reference to the "market where MEN should be bought & sold."  Since female as well as male slaves were sold on the market, this must imply that "men" is being used in a generic sense to include women as well as men.  If so, then the affirmation in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" must include slaves and women.

Enslaving human beings is said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  This appeal to human nature as the moral standard for natural rights appears often in Jefferson's writings, where one repeatedly finds language about "the rights of human nature" and the abolition of slavery as "a complete emancipation of human nature" (1972, 87; 1984, 116).

Some of the most important Black Americans of the founding era recognized that the Declaration's principle of human equality of rights meant that slavery was an unjust violation of natural right.  In one sentence, McMahon identifies the African American preacher Lemuel Haynes as saying this (162).  But there were many other Black Americans who said the same thing (Basker 2023: 132, 152-54, 190-93, 251, 367, 510-511). 

One of those Black Americans directly engaged Jefferson himself and accused him of contradicting the principle of human equality in the Declaration of Independence by holding black slaves.  Benjamin Banneker was an African American mathematician and scientist.  He was the child of a free black mother and a formerly enslaved father from Africa.  On August 19th, 1791, he sent a long letter to Jefferson, who at the time was the Secretary of State in President Washington's cabinet.  He explained to Jefferson that slavery violated "the rights of human nature," because as human beings by nature, black slaves were endowed with all the natural rights to which all human beings are entitled.  Banneker quoted from Jefferson's Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  He charged Jefferson with contradicting this principle of human equality "in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves."

Along with his letter, Banneker enclosed his hand-written manuscript of an astronomic almanac that applied his knowledge of astronomical mathematics to predict the positions of astronomical bodies for the next year.  He presented this to Jefferson as evidence of the intellectual abilities of a black man.

Jefferson responded to Banneker in a letter of August 30, 1791:

"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talent equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America.  I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit.--I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which you whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them."

On the same day, he wrote to Condorcet:

"I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the sone of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician.  I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Potomac, and in the intervals of his leisure, which on that work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he me in his own handwriting, and which I inclose to you.  I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him.  Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable member of society.  He is a free man.  I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any different in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends."

These letters were published shortly after they were written.  Some of Jefferson's Federalist critics saw this as evidence that Jefferson was actually a dangerous abolitionist.

Notice that Jefferson does not dispute anything Banneker said about slavery infringing on "the rights of human nature" and about the natural mental and moral talents of blacks that are suppressed by the "degraded existence" of slavery.

Notice also that Jefferson does not say that "all men are created equal" applies only to white men, which is what McMahon says.  Actually, McMahon does not even mention this correspondence.

Now, it is true that the purpose of Jefferson's Declaration was to declare the independence of the United States as "Free and Independent States" under international law and "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."  But this does not mean that the Declaration's affirmation of the natural equality of men as endowed with unalienable rights was not critically important.

McMahon relies on David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History for his claim that the Declaration was not "a charter of individual rights" but rather "an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163, 451n.12).  But I have shown that Armitage's denigration of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration is unjustified.

Armitage observes that the Declaration was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence of the Declaration, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states. 

It was that second paragraph of the Declaration that King saw as the "declaration of intent" or "promissory note" that would be fulfilled by achieving the equality of rights for both white and black Americans.  But McMahon objects that the Declaration did not in fact intend this, and "King likely knew that too."  McMahon explains: "To assume that the underlying logic of the country would eventually work itself out--that the founding principle of equality would somehow force Americans into line by dint of its inherent justice and right--was to risk 'complacency' and 'comforting myth.'  King was anything but complacent" (372).

McMahon here is referring to a paragraph in King's essay "A Testament of Hope":

"It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality.  There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive.  Americans who genuinely treasure our national ideals, who know they are still elusive dreams for all too many, should welcome the stirring of Negro demands.  They are shattering the complacency that allowed a multitude of social evils to accumulate, Negro agitation is requiring American to reexamine its comforting myths and may yet catalyze the drastic reforms that will save us from social catastrophe" (King 1986: 315).

Contrary to what McMahon suggests, King is not denying that the Declaration was a "declaration of intent" to eventually guarantee equal liberty for all American citizens.  Rather, King's argument is that to fulfill that "declaration of intent," we must give up the "comforting myths" in "our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," and then we must satisfy the "Negro demands" for "the drastic reforms" required to finally guarantee equal liberty for all.

THE EVOLUTIONARY "END OF HISTORY" IN LOCKEAN EQUAL LIBERTY

But then, we must ask, what explains those "Negro demands" for the "drastic reforms" that would secure the equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence?  

One answer, suggested by Christopher Boehm's evolutionary theory of "reverse dominance hierarchy," is that these "Negro demands" express the natural desire of our evolved human nature to be free from exploitative dominance and to exercise the equal liberty to which all human beings are naturally inclined.  That's what John Locke saw in the evolutionary state of nature.

In the first chapter of his book, McMahon adopts Boehm's theory as the best explanation of the original foraging society in which the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy was shaped:

". . . the theory balances nicely the bipolarities of our nature.  For at work in the construction of reverse dominance hierarchies is both something like a will to power and a will to parity, a drive for dominance and a drive for fairness, a desire to rise up the ranks and a resentment of those who do so by bullying others.  The reverse dominance hierarchy accommodates both hierarchical and anti-hierarchical feelings at once.  As one anthropologist's East African informant summed up the logic, 'All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule, they prefer to remain equal'" (38).

This evolutionary theory of egalitarian hierarchy and the "bipolarities of our nature" runs throughout McMahon's history of equality, either explicitly or implicitly.   In the last paragraph of his book, he reaffirms the primacy of this evolutionary psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance:

"Resisting hierarchy is part of who we are as a species.  But we are also better than any other at building it back up, using the vaunted wisdom of Homo sapiens to construct regimes of hierarchy and domination of a scale and intensity unknown in the animal kingdom.  We will never make them go away entirely, and we must be mindful of how our views of equality can serve to reinforce them.  But we hold it in our power to make them less severe, and more fair, by recalling the vigilance of our ancestors who have fiercely resisted upstarts and fought against the force of things, imagining equality in different figures and forms" (419). 

At the beginning of McMahon's history, we see the equal liberty of our foraging ancestors: "equality, and its early concomitant, freedom, . . . were arguably among the greatest blessings our foraging ancestors knew, even if they didn't know it.  The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).

Then, beginning in the Neolithic era, we see the transition into agricultural settlements and urban states in which rulers become despotically dominant and most human beings live as peasants or slaves.  Once this despotic inequality reaches a breaking point, moral and religious reformers begin to denounce the injustice of the elites; and resistance to domination is expressed as peasant revolts.  These are signs of what McMahon calls a "legitimation crisis" (78-79,  82-83, 146-47).

McMahon does not recognize how this idea of "legitimation crisis" points to the Lockean idea that all government depends on the consent of the people, and that even the most powerful tyranny needs at least the acquiescence of the people to dominance.  Sometimes McMahon exaggerates the power of the first "god kings" in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and he ignores the evidence that these states were weakened by resistance and rebellion (60-62).

The most recent stage in this history of egalitarian hierarchy is the emergence of modern liberal democracies over the past three hundred years.  McMahon recognizes these evolutionary stages of history in Peter Turchin's "Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism" (84-85).   First, human foraging bands moved away from the extreme inequality of ancestral primate groups to the egalitarianism of the foraging order.  Second, human beings moved away from foraging egalitarianism to the extreme inequality of archaic states.  Finally, in recent centuries, human beings have moved to constitutional democracies that approximate the egalitarianism of the foraging order.

McMahon does not notice that this confirms Boehm's claim that modern liberal democracies fulfill the natural human desires for equal liberty as they were shaped in the foraging state of nature (Boehm 1999: 225-258).

Previously, I have written about the similar three-stage evolutionary history of Douglass North and his colleagues: the foraging order, the limited access order, and the open access order.

McMahon does not recognize how this evolutionary history of egalitarian hierarchy culminating in the equal liberty of modern liberal democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history".  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger; and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.

In one sentence, McMahon speaks about Fukuyama's claim "the 'the end of history' was on the horizon and that it was the 'march of equality' that was taking us there, to a time when political evolution would end in liberal democracy for all" (400).  McMahon argues that this idea has been refuted by the evidence that over the past fifty years there has been a global turn to massive inequality, even in the modern liberal democracies.  He thinks the proof for this is clear in Thomas Piketty's collection and analysis of the data for economic inequality (404-405).

But McMahon makes no attempt to answer the many criticisms of Piketty's handling of his data--criticisms that I have surveyed in some previous posts.

McMahon also says nothing about the fact that countries ranking high on the Human Freedom Index tend to have the lowest Gini coefficient scores.  Liberal social orders have low levels of inequality and high levels of freedom.

Moreover, McMahon ignores the fact that Lockean liberal social orders tend to have Gini coefficients comparable to those for foraging societies.   This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the evolutionary state of nature.

I take all of that as evidence that Fukuyama was right about the "end of history": the "inner logic" of equal liberty in evolved human nature has reached its consummation in liberal democracy.

REFERENCES

Basker, James G., ed.  2023.  Black Writers of the Founding Era.  New York: The Library of America.

Boehm, Christopher.  1999.  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hunt, Lynn.  2007.  Inventing Human Rights: A History.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1972.  Notes on the State of Virginia.  Ed. William Peden.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1984.  Writings.  Ed. Merrill D. Peterson.  New York: The Library of America.

King, Martin Luther.  1986.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches.  Ed. James M. Washington.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 volumes.  Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher.  New York: The Library of America.

McMahon, Darrin M.  2023.  Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.    

Captain Preston's Popular Lockeanism

David Armitage repeatedly identifies the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence as a statement of "abstractions" that had nothing to do with the practical reality of declaring independence and fighting a revolutionary war.  But if Locke was right about the emergence of natural liberty in the state of nature as the environment of evolutionary adaptation in which human nature was shaped, then that liberty is not a philosophical abstraction but a practical expression of a natural human instinct and popular human folkways.

Consider this story that has often been told by historian David Hackett Fischer (Liberty and Freedom [2005], 1-2):

In the year 1843, a bright young scholar named Mellen Chamberlain [21 years old] was collecting evidence on the origins of the American Revolution.  He interviewed Captain Levi Preston, ninety-one years old, a cantankerous Yankee who had fought on the day of Lexington and Concord.

"Captain Preston," the historian began, "what made you go to the Concord fight?"  The old soldier bristled at the idea that anyone had made him fight.

"What did I go for?" he replied.  The scholar missed his meaning and tried again.

"Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?"

"I never saw any stamps," Captain Preston answered, "and I always understood that none were ever sold."

"Well, what about the tea tax?"

"Tea tax?  I never drank a drop of the stuff.  The boys threw it all overboard."

"But I suppose you had been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?"

"I never heard of these men," Captain Preston said.  "The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts' Psalms, and hymns and the almanacs."

"Well, then, what was the matter?"

"Young man," Captain Preston replied, "what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this:  we always had been free, and we meant to be free always.  They didn't mean we should."

Captain Preston did not need to read Locke to want Lockean freedom.  Wanting to be "free always" was rooted in his ordinary experience of life.  As historian T. H. Breen has observed, even without ever reading Locke, Captain Preston and the other American insurgents were "popular Lockeans"--people whose desire to be free was part of their nature and their way of life.

Was John Locke's Liberalism Proslavery?

In August of 1619, the English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, bought 20 or more African slaves from English pirates, who had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from the west coast of Africa.  This was the beginning of slavery in America, only 12 years after the English had first settled in Jamestown.  Over the next two centuries, over 12 million Africans would be taken captive by slave traders and sold as slaves in the New World.  Over 400,000 of them were sold to British colonists in North America.

In August of last year, on the 400th anniversary of that first landing of slaves in America, The New York Times began its "1619 Project"--a series of articles arguing that America was founded on and shaped by slavery.  It began with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine devoted entirely to the history of slavery and racial segregation in America.  This has sparked an intense controversy over whether these articles accurately depict the importance of slavery as manifesting the racist immorality of American culture, or whether these articles distort that history in ways that advance an ideology of cynical attacks on American traditions.

I will be writing about that controversy in a later post.  Here I am taking up a related controversy.  The 1619 Project has been influenced by historians and other social scientists who in recent decades have contended that the early modern liberal tradition was not only compatible with, but was even dependent upon, slavery.  It is said that the liberal defense of liberty included a defense of the liberty of European slave traders and slave masters to enslave Africans.  Moreover, it is argued that much of the wealth achieved in modern liberal capitalist societies was originally built up through slave labor.  One important piece of evidence for this view of liberalism as founded on slavery is the claim that the preeminent proponent of liberalism--John Locke--justified and profited from slavery.  If this is true, this might help to explain why the signers of the Declaration of Independence could affirm Locke's teaching about the human equality of the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while continuing to own slaves: the American Founders were following the example of Locke himself.

THE PROSLAVERY LOCKE?

Those who argue for this view of Locke point to three kinds of evidence: Locke's helping to write the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Locke's stock investment in the Royal African Company, and his just-war theory of slavery in the Second Treatise.  What I see here, however, is evidence that Locke engaged in secret writing in his often confusing and contradictory account of slavery--so that his careful readers could see that he was condemning slavery without explicitly saying so.  Nevertheless, I must admit that this does not resolve the question of Locke's apparent hypocrisy in supporting the Royal African Company and colonial slavery.

In 1669, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina were adopted by the eight Lord Proprietors of the Province of Carolina, which included most of what is now North Carolina and South Carolina.  It has often been included in publications of Locke's works (Locke 1997).  One of the eight proprietors was Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury), who employed Locke as an advisor and secretary who was also a member of the Shaftesbury household.  Locke acted as a secretary to the Lord Proprietors from 1669 to 1675.  The original manuscript of the Fundamental Constitutions shows Locke's handwriting in the first two paragraphs and in most of the large number of amendments.  

For those who see Locke as a supporter of slavery the most notorious sections are the two sections that recognize slavery.  In section 98, it is made lawful for slaves to join any church that they prefer; but yet, "no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master has over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before."  In section 101, it is declared: "Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever."

In 1672, Locke invested in the British slave trade by buying stock in the Royal African Company, which Charles II had just established as a chartered corporation with a monopoly over all British trade with Africa, which included buying enslaved Africans on the west coast of Africa for shipment to the New World (Pettigrew 2013).

In 1690, Locke's Two Treatises of Government was published.  It was an attack on the royal absolutism claimed by the Stuart monarchs and defended by Robert Filmer as an absurd attempt to persuade all men that they are born slaves.  Locke's scorn for slavery began with the first sentence of the book: "Slavery is so vile and miserable and 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" (FT, sec. 1).  

Oddly, however, Locke also seemed to defend slavery in the Second Treatise when he identified "the perfect condition of Slavery" as one where the slave has "by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it" (ST, sec. 23).  In particular, we can properly identify slaves as those "who being Captives taken in a just War, are by the Right of Nature subjected to the Absolute Dominion and Arbitrary Power of their Masters" (ST, 85).  Scholars like Peter Laslett have inferred from this that Locke regarded "negro slaves as justifiably enslaved because they were captives taken in a just war, who had forfeited their lives 'by some Act that deserves Death,'" and that Locke was satisfied "that the forays of the Royal Africa Company were just wars of this sort, and that the negroes captured had committed such acts" (Laslett 1988, 284-85).

HOLLY BREWER'S ARGUMENT FOR THE ANTI-SLAVERY LOCKE

Challenging  this apparent evidence of Locke's proslavery position, historian Holly Brewer--writing in the American Historical Review (2017)--has argued that Locke and the liberalism he initiated emerged in opposition to slavery and absolutism as based on the same principle of inherited status.  Explaining the idea of hereditary obligation that Locke denied, Brewer wrote: "Kings inherit the right to rule; subjects inherit the obligation to obey; and so did slaves inherit the obligation to obey masters" (2017, 1045).  Locke and Lockean liberalism rejected all of this.  (Brewer's short summary of her argument is available online.)

Brewer denies that the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina--in affirming the master's "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves"--testifies to Locke's support of slavery.  Locke was only acting as a secretary for the eight Lord Proprietors, Brewer insists, so "he wrote Carolina's constitution as a lawyer writes a will" (2017, 1052).  He was not endorsing anything said in the Fundamental Constitutions.

But in saying this, Brewer understates Locke's involvement in Carolina and its Constitutions.  In 1671, he was made a landgrave (a nobleman) of Carolina. Peter Colleton, one of the Lord Proprietors, wrote to Locke in 1673 remarking "that excellent form of government in the composure of which you had so great a hand."  Locke purchased a hundred copies of the Constitutions and distributed them to his friends.  He clearly was proud of what he had done in the Constitutions, and he was involved in revising them in 1782 (Armitage 2004).

Brewer also denies that Locke's stock in the Royal African Company shows his endorsement of the African slave trade.  When Locke received his stock in the RAC in 1672, Brewer explains, he was the secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Plantations, which was Charles II's committee with oversight over colonial affairs.  Shaftesbury was the chair of that committee.  Since the crown was short of money at that time, Charles II had both Locke and Shaftesbury paid in RAC stock.

In June of 1675, Locke sold his RAC stock; and Shaftesbury began selling his.  1675 was the year in which Locke and Shaftesbury broke with the Stuart monarchy because of its increasing absolutism, which they saw as the enslavement of all the king's subjects.  They became leaders of the new Whig Party in opposition to the Tories.  Shaftesbury was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.  Locke fled to France.  In 1683, Locke and Shaftesbury fled to Holland.  Charles II attempted to have Locke extradited on charges of treason.

After 1675, the RAC shifted more towards the slave trade rather than trade in African goods.  Charles II and James II promoted the slave trade because of the huge revenue it brought to the crown.  After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with William and Mary on the throne, the number of slave trading voyages of the RAC dropped dramatically, as shown in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, although independent traders who competed with the RAC increased their voyages (Pettigrew 2013, 11-13).

In 1696, William created a new Board of Trade and Plantations, and he appointed Locke as one of the members.  Locke used his position on the Board, Brewer argues, to reform the laws in British colonies to favor liberty over inherited status.

The Board began to investigate the laws and practices in Virginia, the first and largest of the colonies in America.  They found many problems.  One of them was that while originally the King had provided that anyone settling in Virginia would be granted 50 acres of land, this rule had been changed so that people were granted 50 acres for each indentured servant or slave that they purchased.  Consequently, large landowners owning many servants and slaves could hold 20 to 30 thousand acres of land, much of it uncultivated.  The Board condemned this headright system as a perversion of the original rule.  They instructed the new Governor of Virginia--Francis Nicholson--to change this.  As chief justice of Virginia's General Court, the Governor in 1699 ruled that the headright of 50 acres of land should go only to individual settlers not to those who might be their masters.  Locke received a written report about this decision saying: "He has made an order against taking up land for the importation of negroes."  In the margin, Locke wrote: "Well Done."  For Brewer, this is a clear indication of Locke's efforts to reduce the slave trade (Brewer 2017, 1065-1070).  Unfortunately, she observes, these efforts were overturned after the death of King William, when Queen Anne renewed the promotion of the slave trade favored by the Stuart monarchs.

Still, however, we might wonder whether Brewer's argument for Locke being anti-slavery is refuted by Locke's just-war theory of slavery--that those who have been taken captive in a just war may by natural right be enslaved as the proper punishment for their crime of unjust aggression.  As Brewer indicates, Locke here seems to be following the traditional justification of slavery, as expressed by Bracton: "Free men are made bond by capture."  But Locke puts severe restrictions on this traditional teaching, so that it cannot justify the actual practice of African-American chattel slavery.

The just conqueror who repels an unjust invasion cannot take the invader's property, which belongs to his family (ST, sec. 180).  Nor can the conqueror enslave those who did not participate in the unjust invasion, because they have not earned the punishment of enslavement (sec. 179).  Nor can the conqueror enslave the children of the unjust invaders, because the children share no responsibility for the unjust war.  Consequently, slavery cannot be an inherited status.

Moreover, contrary to what Laslett says, Locke never says that the slave traders were taking captives in a just war.  In fact, the slave traders were themselves unjust aggressors who took their captives by force, and so their captives would be justified, on Lockean grounds, in rebelling against their captors.

Once one sees that Locke's standards for his just-war theory of slavery cannot possibly be satisfied by African-American slavery, one must suspect that Locke was aware of this, and that he might be intimating to his careful readers the injustice of such slavery.

JAMES FARR:  LOCKE'S SECRET WRITING AGAINST SLAVERY?

James Farr has written some of the best articles on Locke's view of slavery (Farr 1986, 2008).  And although he does not directly say so, I see Farr's writing as suggesting that Locke engaged in secret writing in his account of slavery--so that his careful readers could see that he was condemning slavery without explicitly saying so.

Farr notes that Locke's complicity in the slave trade and in colonial policy allowing slavery contradicts his teaching about human equality in natural rights, and that he "never addressed, much less resolved, this contradiction," because he remained silent about this (1986, 263).

Farr goes on to argue that Locke's just-war theory of slavery is consistent with his natural rights teaching.  But Farr also wants "to show that this theory is woefully inadequate as an account of Afro-American slavery and, further, that Locke knew this.  Indeed, Locke's theory positively condemns 17th century slave practices and any ongoing institution of slavery whatsoever" (264).  So Locke knew that his theory condemned slavery!

Farr also says that "he wrote not a word" to justify New World slavery (2008, 510).  In explaining his just-war theory of slavery, Locke never says that the African-American slaves had been captured in a just war.  Indeed, Locke does not even give one example of people being enslaved in a just war.

 Moreover, Farr says, "no one thought Locke succeeded in justifying slavery in America" (515).  Farr also observes that the antebellum Southern apologists for slavery "rejected Locke's just war theory" and his argument for natural rights in the Second Treatise, which was condemned by people like George Fitzhugh (513).

Farr also notes that Locke ridiculed as childish the notion that "A Negro is Not a Man" because white color is a defining trait of the human species (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.7.16; Farr 1986, 279).

In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke deprecates any "Distinction made between men and men, upon account of their different Complexions, shapes, and Features; so that those who have black Hair (for example) or gray Eyes, should not enjoy the same Privileges as other Citizens" (Locke 2010, 55-56).  Locke was not a racist.

So while Locke was silent about how his liberal political theory condemned slavery, he surely understood this.  Moreover, we know that some of Locke's careful readers saw this.  For example, Farr quotes from James Otis' Rights of the British Colonists Asserted and Proved (1764), who quoted Locke's teaching about the natural equality of rights among human beings in support of the claim that "the Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black." So Otis understood Locke's principles as condemning slavery in all forms, including the American enslavement of African-Americans (Otis 1764, 6, 29; Farr 2008, 511).

Farr says that "Locke is not unlike Aristotle in his mismatch of theory and practice despite their substantive differences about natural slavery" (2008, 520, n. 57).  Aristotle seemed to justify slavery as natural.  But his standards for what counted as a natural slave could not be satisfied by the actual practice of slavery, which was by convention or law (nomos) not by nature (physis).  For that reason, Bartolome de Las Casas could use Aristotle's standards to condemn the enslavement of American Indians as contrary to nature.

All of this looks to me like a secret teaching that slavery is contrary to Lockean natural rights, although Locke does not openly say this.

I grant that this still leaves unresolved the question of Locke's apparent hypocrisy in supporting the Royal African Company and colonial slavery.

REFERENCES

Armitage, David. 2004. "John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government." Political Theory 32: 602-627.

Brewer, Holly. 2017. "Slavery, Sovereignty, and 'Inheritable Blood':  Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery." American Historical Review 122: 1038-1078.

Brewer, Holly. 2018. "Does Locke's Entanglement with Slavery Undermine His Philosophy?." Aeon, September.

Farr, James. 1986. "'So Vile and Miserable an Estate': The Problem of Slavery in Locke's Political Thought." Political Theory 14: 263-89.

Farr, James. 2008. "Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery." Political Theory 36: 495-522.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Otis, James. 1764. Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Boston: Edes and Gill.

Pettigrew, William A. 2013. Freedom's Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.