Abstract

From 1668 to 1675, John Locke served as the Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the newly founded Carolina Colony. Sometime between 1675 and 1683, he wrote the Two Treatises of Government. This essay considers whether his experience as Secretary influenced his drafting of chapter V, ‘Of Property’ in the Second Treatise. Documents relating to Carolina Colony reviewed by Locke are compared with excerpts from chapter V about Native Americans and their use of land. Rather than accepting that Locke intended, at least in part, for chapter V to justify the appropriation of Native American lands, it is proposed that he never intended for his labor theory of property to apply to the Colony. He knew the Natives had a flourishing agricultural society, and the early settlers depended on them for food. Instead, he developed his labor theory to show how men could acquire property without the express consent of others, inventing a fictitious group of Native Americans for that purpose. Chapter V was written as a brief history of commerce, culminating with the purchase of large tracts of land. When Locke finished chapter V, he knew that land in Carolina Colony was purchased from its Natives, not appropriated under his labor theory. It is proposed that a better reading of chapter V is that, even though not explicitly stated, Locke implicitly recognized that Native Americans had a sophisticated enough society and economy to contract for the sale of land to Carolina Colony and that the colonists did not simply appropriate it, as a superficial reading of the chapter might suggest. This interpretation casts Locke in a better light with respect to his views of Native Americans than does applying his labor theory of property to the settlement of Carolina Colony.