These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

In both the Carolina constitution and in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke treated both property and slavery. “Slavery” is, in fact, the very first word in the Two Treatises, which begins: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” This was an attack on Sir Robert Filmer, who had argued, in a book called Patriarcha, that the king’s authority derives, divinely, from Adam’s rule and cannot be protested. For Locke, to believe that was to believe that the subjects of the king were nothing but his slaves. Locke argued that the king’s subjects were, instead, free men, because “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”