After the debates between the church and the conquistadores discussed above, one of the earliest well-known proponents of the degeneration theory was John Locke. Locke was the seventeenth-century architect of English colonial policy who drafted the constitution for the Carolinas. He accepted the biblical account of human origins but believed that the equality at creation and the endowment of natural rights to all humans no longer had to be applied because the American Indians were not using their land properly.
