No one meant no one, including the ruler of the state. In the Second Treatise, Locke rejected the belief that the divine creator of the universe also judged the affairs of “man,” and he insisted that man-made law must be based on due processes of government and legislature. This assertion that an abusive monarch is an illegitimate one is essentially the same argument that cost Algernon Sidney his head. It also inspired the American founders to risk their own lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding also endorsed separation of religion and politics in a chapter titled “Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces.” He knew both provinces and was clear about their differences and their boundaries.42 While a dedicated rationalist, he was also a member of the Church of England who was well-read in the Bible. His letters from Holland to friends in England suggest that excluding accounts of supernatural events, he had found wisdom in both the Old and New Testaments. He had faith in God but would never try to persuade others to do likewise, since he could offer no proof of the deity’s existence.
Back in the Province of Reason, Locke could explain and defend his propositions with evidence and logic. Authorities could enact laws and create institutions as long as they did not intrude into the private chapel of the mind. During the first four years after his return to England, he wrote A Letter concerning Toleration, laying down a broad admonition to any government: “The care of each man’s soul, and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self.”43
Locke believed that no “judge on earth”—rulers and lawmakers—possessed the capacity to pronounce verdicts on spiritual matters.44 For that reason alone, officials of the state had no business forcing citizens to adopt a “true religion” while suppressing adherents of other faiths.45
Publishing the Two Treatises of Government anonymously may not have been necessary, given how little notice it received. The British historian John Kenyon writes that Locke’s ideas were mentioned rarely in the early stages of the Glorious Revolution, up to 1692, “and even less thereafter, unless it was to heap abuse on them.”46
The aging philosopher ached with disappointment as he approached the end of his life. He saw himself as a second-tier figure in the eyes of his contemporaries and likely to be unknown in the future. According to his Essay, when he scanned the landscape of “the commonwealth of learning,” he saw “masterbuilders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity.” He singled out Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of nature put him in the first rank of physics, astronomy, mathematics, optics, and cosmology. Comparing himself with Newton, Locke was, he said, “an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”47 Locke’s reputation as a master designer of republican government reached its apex well after his death. The Declaration of Independence embraced the concept that all human beings are equal at birth and have unalienable liberties, one of which is the pursuit of happiness. Locke made the argument for the right of revolt against an unjust ruler. The Constitution endorsed Locke’s rationale for separating the branches of government, and the Bill of Rights echoed his promotion of freedom of speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition for grievances.
The founders of the United States of America were intensely aware that among those Englishmen who prepared the philosophical ground with ideas and ideals for a revolution, a government, and a new kind of nation, Locke had the most influence.
However, Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, lays down a caveat to the loose bond between the thinkers of the Old World and the doers of the New World: “The leaders of resistance … were not philosophers.… They did not write for formal discourses, nor did they feel bound to adhere to traditional political maxims or to apparently logical reasoning that led to conclusions they feared.”48
Moreover, the founders owed a deeper debt to their American ancestors who, in the seventeenth century, braved months at sea, settled for the rest of their lives in a new world, and, unknowingly, spread seeds of a new country.
3
An Errand in the Wilderness
America [is] the only country in which the starting point of a great people has been clearly observable.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Most of the first British settlers on the North Atlantic seaboard came to the New World because they were impoverished, persecuted, fleeing from the law, or alienated from family, society, or politics. Although they were subjects of the Crown, they welcomed its distance.
In 1607 three ships owned by the Virginia Company dropped anchor off the banks of the James River, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. About a hundred passengers, most of whom would never see England again, founded Jamestown, named after the Stuart monarch of the day. They were male and mostly adventurers. Not until the following year did women arrive: a Mistress Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras, followed by a few more a year later, including Temperance Flowerdew, the wife of Captain George Yeardley, who later became governor of the colony. They were a pitiful but vital addition to what would be the first permanent British colony in the Americas. In 1619 the company recruited about 150 Englishwomen to travel to the colony and wed the males. These brave, poor, and desperate volunteers, while compensated for their journey, were unprepared for the hardships at sea and those at their destination. Within a few years, many died from starvation or disease, or in raids by indigenous people.1
The charge from James I was threefold: Create a settlement on the southern Atlantic coast as a buffer against Spanish conquistadors encroaching on what would be British America; reap the bounty of the land—gold and silver was the hope, but tobacco was the bonanza; and convert to Christianity the descendants of clans who had lived in that hemisphere tens of thousands of years before Europeans sailed into their world.
The first two goals were, after many setbacks, successful, but the third was a grotesque charade and failure. Few natives joined the Church of England, and many resisted the white man’s incursions. They were experienced warriors whose arrows, spears, and tomahawks might have outmatched the invaders, especially when the tribes captured and bought guns. But they were not armed with European immunities against European diseases. They succumbed quickly up and down the Atlantic seaboard. By some estimates, 90 percent of the coastal indigenous population died from alien microbes.
Twelve years after the founding of Jamestown, a British privateer, the White Lion, attacked the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship, off the coast of New Spain (now Mexico). The British seized the human cargo, consisting of twenty captives from the Kingdom of Ndongo, a region in what is today Angola. They were sold into bondage to work in the tobacco fields in the Virginia Colony.2
Two infamies inflicted on people of different color stained the American soul and soil for centuries to come.
More than a decade later, in 1620, a new wave of settlers set forth for New England. They called themselves Pilgrims, a radical offshoot of Puritanism, which rose out of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. The Pilgrims were passionately and inflexibly pious or, as they said, godly. In their eyes, mainstream Anglicanism had relapsed into worldliness and, worse, into corrupt Catholic practices. Their mission was to establish
