Notes
- 184 notes introduction 1. Throughout I use the terms “natural rights”and “human rights”interchangeably. This may seem contentious and, perhaps, anachronous.The term “natural rights” was in vogue in the eighteenth century and was used to describe those rights one has because one is a human being. However, some writers were using the term “human rights” at the tail end of the American Enlightenment. 2. Where appropriate, I have chosen to modernize language (spelling, italicization, and capitalization) in primary source quotations. In other places, especially when quoting from the narratives of former slaves, I retain what was recorded. chapter 1. carolina’s colonial architecture and the age of rights 1. Harold Nicholson writes, “Locke is the true originator of our modern conceptions of liberty”—religious, political, and intellectual (274). 2. I use Locke’s traditional section numbers throughout rather than page numbers for ease of reference. 3. John Dunn believes that Locke’s toleration and the social contract rest on religious convictions—these are duties one owes to God (264). 4. The version cited here was signed on March 1, 1669, and published in London in 1670. There were several versions made over the course of the project, and a few in 1669 and 1670. However, the changes made early on were mostly for clarification (Goldie 160). 5. Today, Locke Island is called Edisto Island. 6. Kenneth M. Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution claims that “in 1669, Carolina’s Lords Proprietors promulgated John Locke’s ‘Fundamental Constitutions’which gave every freeman ‘absolute power and authority over his negro slaves’” (18). In his oft-cited history From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin attributes the writing of the Fundamental Constitutions to John Locke. And because of this document, he writes, “Not only was slavery sanctioned, but its existence was protected against any presumed jeopardy to which conversion might expose it. In no other colony did slavery begin more auspiciously, nor was there - 185 notes anywhere any greater prospect for its success”(78). Howard Zinn in 1980 writes: “the Fundamental Constitutions were written in the 1660s by John Locke, who is often considered the philosophical father of the Founding Fathers and the American system” (47). In his 1998 National Book Award–winning Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball claims,“When the English arrived, they carried with them a social contract, the Fundamental Constitutions, written in London by the philosopher John Locke” (30). And in 2000, David Robertson in Denmark Vesey acknowledges that Locke, “the philosopher, secretary to one of the proprietors, devised an elaborate constitution for the new colonists, a copy of which one of the Barbadian Adventurers carried with them” (14). Robertson places much emphasis on Locke’s view of religious tolerance: “And in delayed fulfillment of John Locke’s insistence that the Barbadian founders practice religious tolerance, Charles Town became a sanctuary from the late 1600s for Sephardim and other Jewish refugees from Europe” (16). Again, later on, he gives Locke credit for breeding religious tolerance in South Carolina for generations to come (20, 46). 7. It is quite clear that the colony was primarily a financial venture.See John Locke, “Carolina Notebook,” MS. Locke c.30, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, SCDAH.Thank you to Fred Porcheddu for helping me to decipher this text. 8. Peter Gay paints Johnson as a sort of abolitionist (421–423). 9. In “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England” Winstanley writes that the Diggers intend “to observe the Law of righteous action, endeavoring to shut out of the creation the cursed thing, called Particular Propriety , which is the cause of all wars, blood-shed, theft, and enslaving Laws, that hold the people under misery”(276).This insistence on communal human rights stands in sharp contrast to the self-interest-fueled program of the mercantilists. For a thorough discussion of this concept and its relationship to colonialism, see J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974). 10. See Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. 11. Giles Calvert “printed translations of Henry Niclaes and Jacob Boehme, the works of Saltmarsh, Dell, some Levellers, most of Winstanley, the Wellingborough broadsheet, many Ranters and very many Quakers, as well as the last speeches of the regicides in 1660” (Hill, World 373). 12. Parliament was serious about these new laws. In 1663, John Twynn, a printer, was drawn and quartered for printing a text that supposedly called for an overthrow of the government. chapter 2. dissension in the ranks...
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