These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society. “Every Freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and Authority over his Negro slaves,” Locke’s constitution read. That is to say, notwithstanding the vehement assertion of a natural right to liberty and the claim that absolute power is a form of tyranny, the right of one man to own another—impossible to conceive in a state of nature or under a civil government, impossible to imagine under any arrangement except a state of war—was not only possible, but lawful, in America.59