by Jill Lepore
This was more than a thought experiment; this was a known place: “In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.”
This state of nature, for Locke, was a state of “perfect freedom” and “a state also of equality.” Locke’s egalitarianism derived, in part, from his ideas about Christianity, and the equality of all people before God, “there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” From this state of natural, perfect equality, men created civil society—government—for the sake of order, and the protection of their property.
To understand how governments came to exist, then, required understanding how people come to hold property. This, for Locke, required looking to the example of America. Half of the references to America in Locke’s Second Treatise come in the chapter called “Of Property.”57 He considered, for instance, kings like Powhatan, whose deerskin cloak Locke might well have held in his hands, fingering its snail shells, since the cloak was housed in a museum at Oxford. “The Kings of the Indians in America,” Locke wrote, “are little more than Generals of their Armies,” and the Indians, having no property, have “no Government at all.” Kings like Powhatan had no sovereignty, according to Locke, because they did not cultivate the land; they only lived there. “God gave the World to Men in Common,” Locke wrote, but “it can not be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it).” People who leave “great Tracts of Ground” to waste—that is, uncultivated—and who owned land in common, have therefore not “joyned with the rest of Mankind.” A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.
It’s not that this idea was especially new. In Utopia in 1516, Thomas More had written that taking land from a people that “does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste” was a “most just cause for war.”58 But Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.
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.” 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
The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It would take a long time to grow, and longer to wither.
IV.
THE REVOLUTION IN AMERICA, when it came, began not with the English colonists but with the people over whom they ruled. Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, long before George Washington crossed the Delaware, long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions came in waves that lashed the land. They asked the same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?
It often seemed to England’s colonists as if these rebellions were part of a conspiracy, especially when they came one after another, as they did in 1675 and 1676, a century before the English began their own struggle for independence. In June of 1675, a federation of New England Algonquians, led by a sachem named Metacom (the English called him “King Philip”), attempted to oust the foreigners from their lands, attacking town after town. The Indians, one Englishman wrote, had “risen round the country.” Before it was over, more than half of all the English towns in New England had been either destroyed or abandoned. Metacom was shot, drawn, quartered, and beheaded, his severed head placed on a pike in Plymouth, a king’s punishment. His nine-year-old son was sold as a slave and shipped to the Caribbean, where a slave rebellion had just broken out in Barbados. The English in Barbados believed that the Africans there “intended to Murther all the White People”; their “grand design was to choose them a King.” (Panicked, the legislature on the island swiftly passed a law banning the buying of any Indian slaves carried from New England, for fear that they would only add to the rebellion.) New England and Barbados, one New Englander remarked, had “tasted of the same cup.”
That cup spilled over. Even as war was raging in New England and rebellion was seizing Barbados, natives began attacking English towns in Maryland and Virginia, leading Virginia governor William Berkeley to declare that “the Infection of the Indianes in New-England” had spread southward. Berkeley’s refusal to retaliate against the Indians led to a rebellion incited by a colonist named Nathaniel Bacon, who led a band of five hundred men to Jamestown, which they burned to the ground. More mayhem would have surely followed had not Berkeley lost his governorship and Bacon died of dysentery.60
Wars and rebellions and rumors of more filled the pages of colonial letters and newspapers. Word spread wide and far, and invariably had this effect: racial lines hardened. Before King Philip’s War, ministers in New England had attempted to convert the natives to Christianity, to teach them English, with the idea that they would eventually live among the English. After the war, these efforts were largely abandoned. Bacon’s Rebellion hardened lines between whites and blacks. Before Bacon and his men burned Jamestown, poor Englishmen had very little political power. As many as three out of every four Englishmen and women who sailed to the colonies were either debtors or convicts or indentured servants; they weren’t slaves, but neither were they free.61 Property requirements for voting meant that not all free white men could vote. Meanwhile, the fact that slaves could be manumitted by their masters meant that it was possible to be both black and free and white and unfree. But after Bacon’s Rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, and it became nearly impossible for black men and women to secure their freedom. By 1680, one observer could remark that “these two words, Negro and Slave” had “grown Homogeneous and convertible”: to be black was to be a slave.62
Fear of war and rebellion
haunted every English colony, lands of terror, and of terrifying political instability and physical vulnerability. In 1692, nineteen women and men were convicted of witchcraft in the Massachusetts town of Salem. What looked like witchcraft, though, appears to have been the aftermath of Indian attacks, the haunting memories of terrible suffering. During the witch trials, when Mercy Short said the Devil had tormented her by burning her, she described the Devil as “a Short and a Black Man . . . not of Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour.” Two years before Satan and his witches afflicted Mercy Short, she had been captured by Abenakis, who raided her family’s home in a town in New Hampshire, killing her parents and three of her brothers and sisters. Mercy Short had been forced to walk into Canada. Along the way, she witnessed atrocity upon atrocity: a five-year-old boy chopped to pieces, a young girl scalped, and a fellow captive “Barbarously Sacrificed,” bound to a stake, and tortured with fire, the Abenakis cutting off his flesh, bit by bit. Witches call the Devil “a Black Man,” the Boston minister Cotton Mather observed, “and they generally say he resembles an Indian.” Mather took that to mean that blacks and Indians were devils, of a sort, instruments of evil. But what haunted Mercy Short wasn’t the working of witchcraft; it was the working of terror.63
Even in years and places where there were no attacks, there was news of them, from other places, and, always, there was a terror of them. There were uprisings everywhere, and where there were not uprisings, there was fear of uprisings. Some of the plots that the settlers were forever suspecting, detecting, and suppressing were real, and some were imagined, but they all have this in common: parties of men, slaves or Indian, were planning to topple the government and erect their own.
Wars, rebellions, and rumors: what the colonists feared was revolution. On the Danish island of St. John’s in 1733, ninety African slaves seized control of the island and held it for half a year. On Antigua in 1736, a group of black men “formed and resolved to execute a Plot, whereby all the white Inhabitants of the Island were to be murdered, and a new Form of Government to be established by the Slaves among themselves, and they entirely to possess the Island,” its leader, a man named Court, having “assumed among his Country Men . . . the Stile of KING.”64 Sometimes, rebels faced trial; more usually they did not. In waging war against Indians, the English tended to abandon any ideas they had earlier held, about under what circumstances war was just; they tended to wage those wars first, and justify them afterward. And in suppressing and punishing slave rebellions, they abandoned their ideas about trial by jury and the abolition of torture. In Antigua, men charged with conspiracy were tortured under the terms of a new law making grotesque punishments legal; black men were broken on the wheel, starved to death, roasted over a slow fire, and gibbeted alive. On Nantucket in 1738, English colonists believed they had detected a conspiracy of the island’s Indians “to destroy all the English, by first setting Fire to their Houses, in the Night, and then falling upon them with their Fire Arms.” One Indian’s explanation for this plot was “that the English at first took the Land from their Ancestors by Force, and have kept it ever since.”65
Conquest was always fragile, slavery forever unstable. In Jamaica, where blacks outnumbered whites by as many as twenty to one, Africans led by a man named Cudjoe fled plantations and built towns—the English called them “maroon” towns—in the mountains in the island’s interior. The First Maroon War ended in 1739 with a treaty under which the British agreed to acknowledge five Maroon towns, and granted Cudjoe and his followers their freedom and more than fifteen hundred acres of land. It had been a war for independence.
Word of rebellions in Jamaica and Antigua reached the Carolinas and Georgia in a matter of weeks, New England only days later. English colonists on the mainland had family on the islands—and so did their slaves, who, like their owners, traded gossip and news with the arrival of every ship. In 1739, more than a hundred black men rose up in arms and killed more than twenty whites in the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, a colony where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one. “Carolina looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people,” one visitor wrote.66 The rebels hoped to make their way to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish had promised fugitive slaves their freedom. As they marched, they shouted, “Liberty!” They were led by a man named Jemmy. Born in Angola, he spoke Kikongo, English, and Portuguese, and, as was very often true of the leaders of slave rebellions, could read and write.67
What laws might quiet these rebellions, what punishments avert these revolutions? This was the question debated by colonial legislatures, in meetinghouses built of brick and wood and stone, even as Indians and Africans threatened to tear those meetinghouses down. In 1740, in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes, a new set of rules for relations between the rulers and the ruled. It restricted the movement of slaves, set standards for their treatment, established punishments for their crimes, explained the procedures for their prosecution and codified the rules of evidence for their trials; in capital cases, the charges were to be heard by two justices and a jury comprising at least three men. The law also made it a crime for anyone to teach a slave to write, in hopes of averting the next Jemmy, reading and preaching liberty.68 The English, as Samuel Purchas had remarked, enjoyed a “literall advantage” over the people they ruled, and they meant to keep it.
Word of rebellions spread so fast in the colonies because, while suppressed among slaves, literacy was growing among the colonists, who had begun to print their own pamphlets and books and, especially, their own newspapers. The first printing press brought to Britain’s colonies arrived in Boston in 1639, and the first newspaper in British America, Publick Occurrences, appeared there in 1690. Censored, it lasted for only a single issue, but a second newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, started in 1704, and carried on, printed from a shop on a narrow, cramped street in the narrow and cramped town of Boston, not far from the Common, where sheep grazed and where, at every hour, the lowing of cows could be heard as an unending thrum beneath the tolling of church bells.69
At first, colonial printers reported mostly news from Europe but, more and more, they began reporting the goings-on in neighboring colonies. They also began questioning authority, and insisting on their liberty and, in particular, on the liberty of the press. Its fiercest advocate would be Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston in 1706, the son of a Puritan candle maker and soap-boiler.
Benjamin Franklin was the youngest of his father’s ten sons; his sister Jane, born in 1712, was the youngest of their father’s seven daughters. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to read and write, and then he taught his sister, at a time when girls, like slaves, were hardly ever taught to write (they were, however, taught to read, so that they could read the Bible). He wanted to become a writer. His father could only afford to send him to school for two years (and sent Jane not at all). Another of their brothers, James, became a printer, and at sixteen, Benjamin became his apprentice, just when James Franklin began printing an irreverent newspaper called the New-England Courant.70
The New-England Courant brooked no censor: it was the first “unlicensed” newspaper in the colonies; that is, the colonial government did not grant it a license, and did not review its content before publication. James Franklin decided to use his newspaper to criticize both the government and the clergy, at a time when the two were essentially one, and Massachusetts a theocracy. “The Plain Design of your Paper is to Banter and Abuse the Ministers of God,” Cotton Mather seethed at him. In 1722, James Franklin was arrested for sedition. While he was in prison, his little brother and hardworking apprentice took over printing the Courant, and there appeared on the masthead, for the first time, the name BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.71
While his little sister remained at home dipping candles and boiling soap, young Benjamin Franklin decided to thumb his nose at the government by printing excerpts from a work known as Cato’s Letters, written
by two radicals, an Englishman, John Trenchard and a Scot, Thomas Gordon. Cato’s Letters comprises 144 essays about the nature of liberty, including freedom of speech and of the press. “Without freedom of thought,” Trenchard and Gordon wrote, “there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man.”72 Jane Franklin read those essays as well, and maybe, raised and schooled in a family of rebels, she began to wonder about the rights of every woman, too.
James Franklin fought his prosecution, got out of prison, and kept on printing, but in 1723, young Benjamin Franklin thumbed his nose at his brother, too, and ran away from his apprenticeship, which also meant that he abandoned his sister Jane. Not long after, at the age of fifteen, she was married. Benjamin Franklin began his rags-to-riches rise, a phrase that, at the time, was meant both figuratively and literally: paper is made of rags and Franklin, the first American printer to print paper currency, turned rags to riches. Jane, who would have twelve children and bury eleven of them, lived the far more common life of an eighteenth-century American and especially of a woman, born poor: rags to rags.
Leaving his sister in Boston, Benjamin Franklin eventually settled in the tidy Quaker town of Philadelphia and began printing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In its pages, he fought for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”73