America's Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life 9780226820415

Citation preview

A m er i c a ’s P h i lo s o p h e r

A m er i c a ’s P   h i lo s o p h e r John Locke in American Intellectual Life

C l a i r e Ry d el l A rc en a s

The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­63860-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82041-­5 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820415.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arcenas, Claire Rydell, author. Title: America’s philosopher : John Locke in American intellectual life / Claire Rydell Arcenas. Other titles: John Locke in American intellectual life Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021054529 | ISBN 9780226638607 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226820415 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Locke, John, 1632–1704—Influence. | United States— Intellectual life. | United States—Civilization—English influences. Classification: LCC B1295 .A73 2022 | DDC 192—dc23/eng/20211123 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054529 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents And for Scott

Contents

Preface 1 1

Locke’s Legacy in Early America  8

2

Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras  31

3

Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States  58

4

Locke Becomes Historical  84

5

Making Locke Relevant  103

6

Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition  121

7

Lockean “-­isms”  147



Epilogue  163 Acknowledgments 167 List of Abbreviations  171 Notes 173 Bibliography 227 Index 251

Preface

T

hree thousand miles east across the Atlantic Ocean, in a quiet English churchyard, America’s Philosopher lies buried amidst green grass and clover.1 Though he never set foot on American soil and died long before the creation of the United States, John Locke stands—­and has always stood—­at the center of American intellectual life. In this book, I explain how and why a seventeenth-­century English philosopher has captivated our attention for more than three centuries, exerting an unparalleled influence on the development of American thought and culture. What follows is the story of Locke in America. When I first set out to write about Locke in America, in the early 2010s, I thought it would be a straightforward task. I knew Locke as the author of the Two Treatises of Government (1690), honorary founding father, and particular favorite of the libertarian right. And everything I read, heard, and saw—­from Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) to episodes of Parks and Recreation (2009–­15)—­suggested that Americans had always known him as such. Effortlessly packaged as an adjective—­ “Lockean”—­Locke seemed to have inspired an American political tradition that continued uninterrupted across the centuries. All I needed to do was investigate the one part of the story that

2

P R E FA C E

seemed a bit murkier—­the part that spanned the long nineteenth century, between the founding era and the twentieth-­century publication of so many articles and books, like Hartz’s, that set Locke at the heart of this political tradition. As soon as I started asking questions about Locke’s legacy in America, however, I discovered something unexpected. The Locke I knew and thought I would find in the historical record was missing. He was nowhere to be found. And the text I thought defined Locke’s relevance—­his Two Trea­ tises—­was conspicuously absent as well. Between 1773 and 1917, it wasn’t even published in an American edition.2 John Locke himself, however, was far from absent. Indeed, he seemed to be everywhere I looked, though in unfamiliar guises and in unexpected places. While nineteenth-­century American presses did not publish his Two Treatises, they churned out editions of his (much better known, as I discovered) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).3 The Essay’s influence at colleges was so pervasive that one Massachusetts-­based observer declared it “undoubtedly the best known of all his works.”4 Indeed, familiarity with the Essay was so widespread that, in San Francisco, the editors of the Daily Evening Bulletin could reward their readers for making it through the Saturday news with a good Locke joke: “Can a curl over the forehead be called, ‘Locke on the Understanding’?”5 Nineteenth-­century men and women also knew Locke as a moral authority who promoted generosity, temperance, and effective communication; as a religious writer, whose A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1705–­7) provided the best “method of studying the scriptures”; and as the developer of a popular approach to taking notes on one’s reading.6 They admired his preference for good conversation over the fleeting pleasures of a card game and applauded his (perceived) distaste for alcohol. And, in the pages of popular histories, they encountered him as the author of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)—­“an American lawgiver,” as George Bancroft put it, whose disastrous attempt at real-­world legislation could be held up as an example of the fact that abstract political theories often failed when put into practice, no matter how virtuous or wise their creators.7 Moving backward in time, I discovered that Locke was everywhere in eighteenth-­century America too. He appeared in diaries, newspapers, personal letters, and magazines as an immediate, pervasive, and essential presence. He taught both men and women how to raise children, cultivate friendships, rise above controversy, retain knowledge, form neighborhood associations, and



Preface 3

make sense of their everyday experiences through empirical reasoning. And his “reasonable” Christianity and persuasive arguments in favor of toleration provided sustenance and inspiration for generations of Americans seeking a more enlightened, hopeful future free from persecution and religious strife. This Locke, “the great Mr. Locke,” who taught mothers to immerse their toddlers in ice water, urged young men away from frivolous pursuits, and directed old ministers back to their Bibles, was relevant in ways unfathomable today.8 The story of Locke in America is not, then, one of continuity or absence but rather one of striking transformation. Variously idolized, marginalized, embraced, and rejected, Locke has, since the early eighteenth century, impacted every corner of American intellectual life. But his influence, his role in the story, has changed substantially over time. In the chapters that follow I chart these changes from 1700 until the present day. I show that, over the course of this period, Americans transformed Locke, his works, and his ideas in five interrelated ways. First and most visibly, Locke went from being known primarily as the epistemologist-­ author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to being known primarily as the political-­philosopher-­author of the Two Treatises of Govern­ ment. Second, and more importantly, Locke’s significance both narrowed and diminished. Once an omnipresent influence in the daily lives of early Americans, a model and guide for cultivation of the self through proper action and education, Locke became a role-­player—­essential when the time came to address certain topics, such as political institutions, but otherwise irrelevant. Third, Americans moved away from thinking about Locke the man, a historical figure whose shortcomings and celebrated qualities alike were worthy of serious consideration, to invoking Locke’s name as an adjective and an ism—­an ideological abstraction that could be used to invoke, symbolize, or represent a variety of concepts: for example, “Lockean liberalism.”9 Fourth, Americans began to claim Locke as their own. While earlier Americans generally emphasized Locke’s Englishness, beginning in the mid-­twentieth century, they came to represent Locke as fundamentally American. Finally, and largely as a consequence of the other four changes, Americans weaponized Locke, making him into an avatar of what seemed to them uniquely and quintessentially American political ideals of individual liberty, property rights, and limited government. Locke was so central to the new concept of an American Political Tradition that, by the 1950s, he and his Second Treatise had become nothing less than “a massive national cliché.”10

4

P R E FA C E

Locke’s American story is worth telling—­ and worth knowing—­ for many reasons. It reveals and elucidates major transformations in American intellectual life. It is as much about the major transformations in American intellectual life over the past three hundred years as it is about Locke. For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locke helped Americans address concerns about the moral and intellectual character of individuals and their communities. He provided guidance for living virtuously, learning effectively, and improving both self and society. By the mid-­twentieth century, Locke’s importance for the American public was no longer about achieving virtue and understanding. Instead, Locke was important insofar as the perceived influence of his political philosophy revealed something exceptional about American political institutions. No longer taken as a model for how to live one’s life, Locke in the middle of the twentieth century was deployed as a weapon of liberal democracy and capitalism in the ideological battles of the Cold War. In short, Locke’s story reveals how Americans have, over time, addressed what is arguably the central question of any democratic-­republican society: how to ensure its (continued) flourishing. The argument that follows places American intellectual life in conversation with processes of transatlantic cultural, political, and intellectual exchange among nations, organizations, and other groups that looked quite different at my story’s start than at its end. From James Logan’s travails selling imported copies of Locke’s works in early-­eighteenth-­century Philadelphia to American reviews of Englishman Maurice Cranston’s 1957 John Locke: A Biography, Locke’s American story demonstrates the extent to which the scope of American intellectual history transgresses both national and disciplinary boundaries. When, for example, nineteenth-­century scholars and students of the historical and political sciences understood Locke’s political philosophy as standing in opposition to their modern theories of Staatswissenschaft, they did so as participants in a transatlantic conversation that extended from Cambridge, England, to Heidelberg, Germany, to New York City. It is important to emphasize, however, that this book does not provide a global reception history of Locke. Nor does it offer a comprehensive survey of Locke, his works, and his ideas in American thought and culture over the last three hundred years. Rather, it seeks to capture who both Locke the historical figure and “Locke” the symbolic representation of certain ideas (and ideals) were for the widest possible variety of American men and women—­ranging from journalists to judges, students to professors, private citizens to members of Congress. This, then, is not a book about John Locke, the seventeenth-­century



Preface 5

English philosopher, but rather a book about how Americans over time have understood and made sense of him, his work, his ideas, and his relevance.11 I present interpretations of Locke’s life, ideas, and works through the eyes of my subjects—­not the lenses of modern scholars. What we know or think about Locke is not always what earlier Americans knew or thought about him. Nor is it how they would have conceptualized “Locke” in the abstract. For example, observers before roughly 1960 knew—­or, rather, thought they knew—­that Locke wrote his Two Treatises to justify the so-­ called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and thus frequently labeled him an apologist for the revolution. Today, we know that Locke wrote his Two Treatises in the late 1670s or early 1680s, not in response to the events of 1688.12 It is tempting to say that we are “right” and earlier Americans were “wrong,” but doing so would lead to another misunderstanding—­the projection of our present back onto their past. When it comes to Locke, humility seems sensible. Even today, Locke’s authorship of and involvement in the creation of another document, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, is debated.13 And we still do not have complete or “objective” knowledge about his life, writings, and thoughts. New writings by Locke are still being unearthed. Thanks to the discovery and publication in 2019 of a new text weighing the merits of extending toleration to Catholics, for example, we know a great deal more today about Locke’s intellectual development vis-­à-­vis the question of religious toleration than we did only a few years ago.14 While this is not a book about Locke the man, it will be helpful to know a bit about him.15 Born in 1632 in Somerset, England, Locke lived during some of the most tumultuous and transformative times in English history. His seventy-­two years encompassed the English Civil War (1642–­51), the Glorious Revolution (1688–­89), and the rapid growth of English colonization in North America. He bore witness—­and contributed—­to transformations in science, medicine, and metaphysics. By the end of his life, Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and its account of terrestrial gravity had replaced the Aristotelian scholasticism that had dominated European centers of learning for centuries. Locke was, as one historian has put it, “a child of the Reformation and a progenitor of the Enlightenment.”16 Locke was a well-­educated man, known for his quick mind and sharp wit. He studied, and later taught, at Christ Church, Oxford, where he found himself drawn to René Descartes and the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle rather than the classical and scriptural texts that formed the foundation of the scholastic tradition.17 A medical doctor by training, Locke in 1667 became the personal physician, secretary, and confidant of Lord Ashley, later the Earl

6

P R E FA C E

Figure 0.1 John Greenhill, John Locke, 1672. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

of Shaftesbury. A year later, in 1668, Locke was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Twice in exile (once in France from 1675 to 1679 and once in Holland from 1683 to 1689), Locke was no stranger to church censorship and absolute monarchy. The author of hundreds of essays, tracts, and letters, he wrote to oppose political tyranny and religious persecution, and to free the mind, body, and soul from the shackles of mysticism and skepticism. At the same time, he condoned slavery, denied women full inclusion in civil society, and, ultimately, excluded atheists and Catholics from his calls for toleration.18 Although popular with several female friends, including Lady Masham (née Damaris Cudworth), Locke never married. Nor did he have children. Accounts of his close friendships and love for rousing conversation and good company have fascinated Locke’s biographers across the centuries; so too have his many personal travails, including his lifelong struggle with asthma.



Preface 7

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; title page 1690) showed readers that, born without innate ideas, they could think for themselves and acquire knowledge about the world around them through the use of their five senses. Ideas, Locke argued, were formed by sensory perception and reflection. His Essay contains among the most important early modern accounts of a philosophy of language. In Some Thoughts Con­ cerning Education (1693), Locke provided strategies for compassionate childrearing and proposed plans for education in accordance with his understanding of how people gained knowledge. Baptized into the Church of England and raised a Calvinist, he argued for (limited) toleration, freedom of religious practice and conscience, and separation between church and state in numerous writings, including A Letter Concerning Toleration (1685; 1689, trans. William Popple). And, as he explained in works such as The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke saw Christianity as entirely rea­ sonable and, quite simply, good for mankind. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689; title page 1690) comprises, as the title suggests, two essays. The first refuted Sir Robert Filmer’s theory of the divine right of kings in his Patriarcha (1680). The second provided an account of the origins and purpose of civil society and government. Born free and equal in a state of nature in accordance with natural law, men, Locke argued, join together to create a political society and system of government to ensure protection of their rights. He subsumed these rights—­ men’s “Lives, Liberties and Estates”—­under the term “Property.”19 Having originated government through consent, those who create it can likewise destroy it. Like several of Locke’s other writings, the Two Treatises remained anonymous until after his death.20 No cloistered philosopher, Locke wrote in response to the real-­world events of the seventeenth century. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the impact English colonial endeavors in North America had on his life and work. Early in his career, he was a secretary and adviser to the proprietors of the English colony of Carolina. Decades later, in the 1690s, he served on the Board of Trade, a vital instrument of imperial policy. Following his return from exile in Holland in 1689, Locke was a high-­level civil servant in the English government and played an important role in debates over coinage in the 1690s. By the time he died in 1704, many of Locke’s works had made their first appearance in England’s North American colonies. This New World was a place the philosopher never visited, but it was a place about which he knew, thought, and had read a great deal.21 For Locke, “in the beginning all the World was America.”22

1 Locke’s Legacy in Early America

J

ohn Locke’s debut in America was a minor disaster. In 1700, William Penn, proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony, ordered a shipment from the London booksellers Awnsham and John Churchill.1 Among the 125 titles that arrived in Philadelphia, then a provincial outpost on the west bank of the Delaware River, John Locke was the author most represented; nearly a quarter of the books were written by him.2 They included An Essay Con­ cerning Human Understanding, Some Thoughts Concerning Edu­ cation, Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c., three letters on toleration, three essays on the reasonableness of Christianity, three responses to criticism of the Essay, and the Two Treatises of Government.3 Once the books arrived in Philadelphia, Penn’s agent and secretary, James Logan, was tasked with their sale. Unfortunately for Logan, however, buyers proved scarce. Two years later, he reported to Penn that “many of ye Books” remained “unsold.”4 In 1706, he was forced to write the Churchills to “request [their] further Patience” regarding payment for the books’ sale.5 After nearly a decade, many of the books were still without buyers, leaving Logan exasperated and Penn in debt.6 Locke’s story in America, it seems, was off to an inauspicious start.

Locke’s Legacy in Early America 9



But it was just beginning. Locke’s writings would soon be well known throughout the North American colonies. Indeed, several—­especially his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education—­would become some of the most important books in early America.7 What is more, eighteenth-­century men and women would come to celebrate Locke, follow his example, and invoke his authority in ways quite unimaginable to us today. The following chapter explains how and why this came to be.

: : : Who was Locke to early Americans? One answer is that Locke meant different things to different people—­that engagement with Locke was multifaceted and diverse.8 Locke had something to say about practically everything, and early Americans listened. Indeed, they used Locke and his writings to think about issues relating to education, knowledge acquisition, religion, money, civil government, childrearing, community improvement, old age, and friendship—­to name just a few. Consequently, it would be possible to write many different histories of Locke’s influence during this period. One can imagine, for example, histories of Locke’s influence on currency debates in Massachusetts in the 1730s, politics in Maryland in the 1740s, or education in Pennsylvania in the 1750s.9 But focusing on the diversity of Americans’ engagement with Locke obscures a more important truth—­that the ultimate source of Locke’s authority in all of the aforementioned areas was the same: namely, his status as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his reputation as a man of good character, and his crucial role as a guide, model, and moral exemplar—­an immediate and pervasive presence in people’s daily lives, who taught them how to rear children, study scripture, and pursue a variety of other activities related to improving both themselves and their communities.

: : : In the early 1740s, South Carolinian Eliza Lucas was a tenacious, determined young woman. Tasked with managing her family’s expansive Wappoo Plantation and its enslaved residents when she was not yet seventeen years old, Eliza quickly became an expert in cultivating both rice and, after much experimentation, indigo. Afforded the luxury of a home library, she woke up before five o’clock most mornings to read and study, a habit that served her well. When she died in 1793, Eliza was remembered for her “understanding” and “uncommon strength of memory.”10

10

Chap ter One

These observations should not surprise us. Eliza, after all, knew her Locke. In 1741, her friend, and eventual husband, Charles Pinckney, recommended that she read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Charles’s suggestion proved timely. With Locke’s Essay in hand, Eliza embarked on a period of dogged self-­reflection. After a particularly fun-­filled visit to nearby Charleston—­“the Metropolis . . . a neat pretty place,” as she described it—­Eliza found herself down in spirits, a change in mood she attributed to “that giddy gayety and want of reflection wch I contracted when in town.” In search of answers that might explain and improve her sorry state of mind, Eliza observed, “I was forced to consult Mr. Lock over and over to see wherein personal Identity consisted and if I was the very same self.”11 From book 2, chapter 27, section 19 of the Essay, Eliza gleaned that “per­ sonal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance” but rather “in the Identity of consciousness.”12 Consulting Locke on this matter made her confident of his relevance for further self-­improvement. “In truth,” she explained to a correspondent, “I understand enough of him to be quite charmed.” “I rec[k]on,” she continued, “it will take me five months reading before I have done with him.”13 Charles and Eliza’s shared engagement with Locke’s Essay in the early 1740s is, in many respects, unremarkable. The Essay was, far and away, Locke’s most popular and influential work in early America.14 And as Eliza’s experience reveals, it made a deep impression on its readers. From the Es­ say, they learned that people were born without innate ideas and that they acquired knowledge about themselves and the world around them from a combination of sensation and reflection. They learned of the humbling difficulties associated with putting their ideas into words—­that is, of the shortcomings of language for conveying meaning. And they learned, to use Locke’s own words, that people “are fitted for moral Knowledge, and natu­ ral Improvements” and that “Morality is the proper Science, and Business of Mankind.”15 However many months she spent with the Essay, Eliza’s devotion to Locke was only just beginning. Sometime around 1742, she read the second part of Samuel Richardson’s popular epistolary novel Pamela, or Vir­ tue Rewarded, which endorsed—­explicitly, in over a hundred pages of references—­Locke’s approach to pedagogy and childrearing.16 When she first read Pamela, Eliza was unmarried with no children of her own, so it is not surprising that aspects of Pamela’s apparent vanity made more of an impression than the novel’s retelling of Locke’s emphasis on, for example, the importance of teaching young children self-­sufficiency. Before long,

Locke’s Legacy in Early America 11



however, Eliza seems to have decided that Locke’s educational recommendations demanded not only careful investigation but also scrupulous implementation. In 1746, now married to the man who had introduced her to Locke, Eliza gave birth to a baby boy. And when the time came to raise her son, Eliza knew one thing for certain: she would “teach him according to Mr. Locks method.”17 This method, explained in Locke’s popular Some Thoughts Con­ cerning Education and grounded in his theory of human understanding and dismissal of long-­standing beliefs regarding the innate sinfulness of children, transformed childrearing practices on both sides of the Atlantic.18 Locke’s approach made—­or, at least, was intended to make—­learning how to read and write more enjoyable. He pushed back against the “ordinary Road of the Horn-­Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible” in which learning was incentivized by a child’s fear of punishment. Instead, he advocated for making learning seem “another sort of Play or Recreation.”19 Eliza was an eager and enthusiastic adopter of Locke’s recommendations. She “carefully studied” Some Thoughts Concerning Education and from it concluded that it was best for her baby boy “to play him self into learning,” as Locke advised.20 Unfortunately, however, she was missing one key piece of the puzzle: the right sort of toy to facilitate this sort of learning-­through-­ play. Lacking options at home, but determined to do as Locke directed, she dashed off a request to an English friend for an ivory ball with lettered sides such as the philosopher described.21 By any measure, Eliza’s efforts to follow Locke were successful. Before he was two years old, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney—­later a Revolutionary leader, signer of the Constitution, and two-­ time presidential candidate—­was learning to read and spell, whether he liked it or not, thanks to his mother and Locke.22

: : : Not two years after John Locke died in Essex, England, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A self-­described “bookish” boy, Franklin first encountered Locke in the 1720s, when he read the Essay as a teenage apprentice to his older brother, the Boston printer James Franklin.23 Perhaps James had brought Locke’s Essay back with him from London, where he had been working, or perhaps young Ben himself found it on the shelves of a Boston bookseller.24 Locke’s Essay had an immediate and profound influence on Franklin.25 It formed the basis of his resolution, at age twenty, to reform his life according to a plan “for regulating my future Conduct in Life,” which included

12

Chap ter One

commitments to be frugal, sincere, industrious, and honest.26 Several years later, these resolutions became Franklin’s now-­famous “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” which included precepts along the lines of “eat not to Dulness.”27 In his Essay, Locke emphasized the importance of tackling pain, unease, and unhappiness through action, especially habitual action.28 Here and elsewhere, Locke set Franklin on the path of cultivating—­or, at least, extolling the benefits of cultivating—­strong habits of moderation, even self-­denial, to achieve virtue.29 It seems fitting then that once he had established himself as a bookseller in Philadelphia, Franklin sold copies of “Lock of Human Understanding”;30 that his Poor Richard’s Al­ manack was advertised as containing references to “Locke, the famous John, Esq”;31 and that the catalog Franklin printed for the Library Company of Philadelphia called attention to Locke’s Essay with the notation “esteemed the best Book of Logick in the World.”32 More than just motivating Franklin’s personal pursuit of self-­responsibility, however, Locke provided guidance on public pursuits as well. These included, for example, his Philadelphia association, the Junto, founded in 1727. Franklin scoured Locke’s “Rules of a Society, which met once a Week for their Improvement in useful Knowledge, and for the Promoting of Truth and Christian Charity” for guidance on a proper format for the Junto. Like Locke’s proposed society, the Junto met weekly on Friday evenings, and its meetings were structured around debating and discussing questions of interest. In sizing up prospective society members, Franklin required answers to four questions: 1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? –­Answer. I have not. 2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? –­Answ. I do. 3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? –­Ans. No. 4. Do you love truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? –­Answ. Yes.33

These queries mirrored Locke’s almost exactly.34 Following Locke, Franklin envisioned the Junto as a space for ensuring the “mutual Improvement” of its members and their community through charitable projects such as a volunteer fire station and a library.35 Rather characteristically, Franklin did not acknowledge the source of his idea for the Junto, but he was certainly familiar with “Rules of a Society.” It was, after



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 13

all, part of Locke’s A Collection of Several Pieces, which Franklin donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1733.36 Franklin also turned to Locke for help while developing a plan to educate young Philadelphians in accordance with the principles he had employed during his own self-­education.37 In his Proposals Relating to the Edu­­ cation of Youth in Pensilvania (1749)—­a prospective outline of his vision for the academy he established in 1751—­he identified “the great Mr. Locke, who wrote a Treatise on Education, well known, and much esteemed, being translated into most of the modern Languages of Europe” as one of his major sources of inspiration.38 He also adopted many of the specific practices promulgated by Locke. For example, he recommended that students cultivate their writing style by “writing Letters to each other, making Abstracts of what they read; or writing the same Things in their own Words,” noting that “this Mr. Locke recommends.”39 He also relied on Locke’s authority to support his recommendations for specific curricular content, including that students read Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, whose De Jure naturali & gentium Locke regarded as “the best book” on society’s origins.40 And in a later discussion of the academy’s curriculum, he recommended that students read Locke for themselves in their final year of study.41 Franklin’s academy had a lasting impact on education in Philadelphia; it became the Academy and College of Philadelphia in 1755 and was eventually incorporated into the University of Pennsylvania. Locke, then, was clearly an important influence on Franklin throughout his life. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Franklin was, in many ways, an eighteenth-­century “Lockean.”42 Insofar as we wish to apply, retrospectively, the adjective to Franklin, however, it would have little to do with another retrospectively applied term—­“liberal”—­or with Franklin’s donation of the Two Treatises to the Library Company of Philadelphia.43 And it would have rather more to do with his dedication to Locke’s Essay, his invocation of Locke’s authority as author of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and his familiarity with the range of Locke’s writings on strategies for self-­improvement. Locke provided Franklin with critical guidance on matters of self-­cultivation, inspiring him to undertake certain personal reforms in his youth and later to motivate others in his broader community to do the same. For Franklin, Locke was, in other words, an exemplar, an immediate presence across many areas of his life, not a narrowly construed philosopher—­political or otherwise. In Locke, with his wide-­ranging interests and expansive expertise, Franklin doubtless saw some of himself—­and some of the man he wanted to become.44 He was not alone.

14

Chap ter One

: : : Before he became president of Harvard in the early 1770s, Samuel Locke (no relation) wanted to be a minister. He also knew that this would take hard work, industry, and careful study. Luckily for him, young Samuel had another Locke by his side. More specifically, he had John Locke’s model and method of keeping a commonplace book, which was widely recognized as the “best” by the 1720s.45 As a young man like Samuel knew all too well, it could be downright tedious to keep track of what one read—­not to mention what one thought about it. Honed over decades of trial and error, Locke’s method for commonplacing, posthumously published as A New Method of Making Common-­ Place-­Books (1706), streamlined, simplified, and regimented this process.46 Specifically, Locke’s method entailed indexing entries on a grid, in cells, based on an assessment of a reading’s most appropriate title or subject head, using both the first letter and first vowel of the subject. Locke recommended

Figure 1.1 The index from John Locke’s popular method of keeping a commonplace book. John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-­Place-­Books (London, 1706). EC65 L7934 706n, Houghton Library, Harvard University.



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 15

using capital letters for the heads or titles and Latin for these as well as for the index. One could, for example, record notes from a reading under the title “EPISTOLA,” writing it in large letters in the margin of a page for notes and then index this entry by writing the page number for these notes under the first letter “E” and the first vowel “I” in the index. Locke’s approach meant that someone like Samuel could create the index as he went, rather than waiting until the notebook was full. But because the titles were not written out fully in the index, the user had to accurately remember that he had, for example, selected “EPISTOLA” as the appropriate categorization. In contrast to more free-­form approaches, Locke’s demanded precision. Samuel considered Locke his surest guide for reading with maximum comprehension and retention. More than a tool for straight content retention, however, commonplacing was a key component of Samuel’s efforts to make something of himself—­to cultivate his intellect and character.47 Following “Lock’s plan” allowed Samuel to follow the great Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s “direction,” as Samuel recorded it, for aspiring ministers to keep a commonplace book.48 Each and every time they sat alert (or fidgeting) at their desks, poised to read and study as Locke advised, young Americans like Samuel experienced, firsthand, the authority of “that great Master of Order Mr. Locke,” a man who had “above all things, loved Order.”49 That their efforts did not always meet Locke’s exacting standards—­measured margins! headings in Latin!—­says less about their shortcomings than about the lengths to which they were willing to go to fulfill even a semblance of Locke’s recommendations. Samuel, for example, though he did not adopt Locke’s preferred Latin headings or margin formatting, followed Locke’s instructions to keep the index to two pages and referred to his collection as an Adversaria (from the Latin adversariorum methodus), just like Locke.50 Samuel was a diligent notetaker. Under the heading “Education, mine at College,” for example, he wrote “see Locke on Education p[e]r totum” along with a list of expenses he had incurred.51 He also referred to many other works by Locke, including An Essay Concerning Human Understand­ ing, Two Treatises of Government, A Letter Concerning Toleration, and The Reasonableness of Christianity. Samuel almost certainly got his Locke from an edition of the popular three-­volume Works, which had recently, in 1751, entered a fifth, and significantly expanded, edition. Samuel’s example provides us with an opportunity to consider what it would have been like to read Locke in the eighteenth century. With the notable exception of the Essay and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which were widely available in stand-­alone editions, Locke’s writings were

Figure 1.2 The index from Samuel Locke’s commonplace book on John Locke’s method. Samuel Locke, Commonplace Book, 1755–­[1778?]. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

Locke’s Legacy in Early America 17



most commonly encountered in multiwork editions, such as A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (1720) and Locke’s three-­volume Works, first published in 1714. For readers of these collections, simply finding any given work would have required some effort. In the three-­volume Works, for example, the Two Treatises were buried in the middle of volume 2, between three works on money and three letters on toleration. Consequently, readers rarely encountered any single text in isolation. Every time they opened a volume to read one of Locke’s writings, they would have paged by, and perhaps lingered to peruse, a range of Locke’s other works. They would also have encountered biographical sketches of Locke: for example, Pierre Coste’s The Character of Mr. Locke, which accompanied A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (1720), or an abstracted version of Jean Le Clerc’s “Life of the Author,” first published in 1706, which appeared in editions of Locke’s Works beginning in 1751. From these accounts of Locke’s life, as well as those that appeared in magazines and newspapers, readers learned a great deal about Locke’s exemplary character and conduct.52 They learned, for example, of Locke’s honesty, abstemiousness, and self-­discipline, as well as his skill at storytelling, dislike of time wasting, and deep regard for basic civility.53 They encountered Locke as a man devoted to truth and order and as someone who achieved “the respect of his inferiors, the esteem of his equals, the friendship and confidence of the greatest quality.”54 And they learned how Locke “instructed others by his own Conduct.”55 The experience of reading Locke in a collected volume has important implications. The close and unavoidable juxtaposition of individual texts with both other works by Locke and biographical accounts of the man himself would have encouraged early Americans to read texts like the Two Treatises holistically—­as works written by a real man of exemplary character who had also written on a variety of other topics that mattered to them.

: : : New York’s second newspaper, the New-­York Weekly Journal, first appeared in November 1733 to galvanize opposition to the colony’s royal governor, William Cosby. Printed and published by John Peter Zenger (who, in 1735, was tried for seditious libel in one of the century’s most famous court cases), the popular opposition-­party paper was the brainchild of a cohort of politically minded New Yorkers that included James Alexander, Lewis Morris, Lewis Morris Jr., William Smith, and Cadwallader Colden. Much to the displea­ sure of Cosby and his associates, they essentially “wrote every word of it.”56

18

Chap ter One

In the summer of 1734, the Journal printed a story designed to highlight the superiority of men from the “Country” (i.e., those in line with the Journal’s anti-­Cosby sentiments) over men of the “Town” (i.e., those with Tory, pro-­Cosby sympathies). Though the story was attributed to a citizen of New York, who went by the pseudonym “Paterculus,” we can assume that it was written by one or more of Alexander et al. According to the story, Paterculus goes out to Long Island to visit a friend whose many qualities—­ among them honesty, charity, and tolerance—­he venerates and whom he extolls as being “as communicative as the Sun of its Beams” for his ability to impart wisdom to others. Paterculus and his country friend are conversing on the present “state of Affairs in this Province,” that is, the political situation under Governor Cosby, when the friend’s son appears and asks to speak with his father. Excusing himself to counsel his wayward son—­whose time in town has produced a host of financial and moral vices—­the host implores his visitor to “entertain” himself “with the first Volumn of Mr. Locke’s Essay on Humane Understanding, which then accidentally lay on the Table.”57 As Paterculus reads, his host listens to the circumstances of his son’s failures and—­with great fatherly affection—­provides him with several pieces of advice along the lines of “keep a fair Book” and “let your home be the Place where you are most to be found.”58 We are privy to their heartwarming exchange through a dialogue Paterculus reconstructs for his readers. The presence of Locke’s Essay in the story is no accident. Rather, it serves a crucial function. Retrospectively, it confirms the author’s earlier description of his friend’s sterling qualities and offers a partial explanation for them. Prospectively, it foreshadows the ensuing conversation and ensures that knowledge of the friend’s celebrated character remains in the reader’s mind throughout. Like an artist selecting objects for a patron’s portrait, Paterculus uses the physical presence of the Essay to symbolize the upstanding character and conduct of his host, explain how he developed such exemplary qualities, and, in so doing, increase the persuasive capacity of his story. This story tells us a great deal about the position of Locke and his Essay in early American intellectual life. In the first place, it clearly indicates that the author himself knew the Essay well—­well enough to know that it was an appropriate text to convey both good sense and good character, that it appeared in two volumes, and that the first volume contained the chapters most relevant to the points at hand. It is both tempting and plausible, moreover, to interpret the conversation between the country gentleman and his son as an allusion to Locke’s own well-­known writings on the qualities of good parenting in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Second, the story

Locke’s Legacy in Early America 19



suggests that the author was far from alone in possessing this knowledge. Symbolic deployment of the Essay would have made little sense unless a substantial portion of the Journal’s readers could be counted on to understand it. Third, the story tells us a good deal about what Locke meant to both the author and his intended audience. In the story as told, the Essay is used not as a demonstration of academic excellence or intellectual pedigree—­the way a copy of Ulysses or Les mots et les choses lying on a twentieth-­century table might have been. Rather, it is used as a symbol of upstanding character. In so doing, it suggests that familiarity with Locke and his Essay was taken to be an indication not of erudition but rather of moral authority. The Journal’s story—­more parable than reporting—­makes sense only in a world where recognition of Locke’s authority was so widely dispersed and deeply held that a reference to his Essay could be used to demonstrate a man’s good character. It makes sense only in a world where the reputation and authority of Locke, as author of the Essay, can be taken for granted and assumed—­even in the pages of a popular, rabble-­rousing newspaper. Eighteenth-­century America was such a world. Across the first part of the eighteenth century, Locke’s reputation and authority developed in tandem with Americans’ deep familiarity with—­if not wholesale acceptance of—­his work on the nature and limits of human understanding. Like their British counterparts, American commentators unfailingly concurred with the observation of Locke’s friend and translator, the seventeenth-­century theologian Jean Le Clerc, that the Essay was the “work, which has made [Locke’s] name immortal.”59 When, for example, many decades after his travails selling Penn’s shipment of books, James Logan probed Locke’s Essay and noted a point of disagreement between the Englishman and himself, he knew one thing for certain: that in the colonies of the 1730s, Locke’s “Reputation and Authority” were “so firmly established . . . that what ever carries an appearance of inconsistency with his Doctrine [as presented in the Essay] will scarce fail of meeting with strong prejudices against its Reception.”60

: : : By the 1730s, young men teaching or studying at a college in Britain’s North American colonies would have immediately associated Locke with his Es­ say and its philosophy of human understanding, especially its central claims regarding the acquisition and retention of ideas and knowledge and the relationship between these ideas and the words people used to express them.61 But the process by which Locke’s Essay became a curricular cornerstone was not without contestation.

20

Chap ter One

At the turn of the eighteenth century, students at Harvard, America’s first colonial college, founded in 1636, pursued a fixed curriculum in subjects such as rhetoric and grammar that were part of a deep scholastic tradition.62 Harvard’s curriculum also mandated the study of logic, and it is here that Locke first appeared.63 At the time, Harvard’s logic curriculum was grounded in the teaching of philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–­1650).64 In contrast to earlier Aristotelian and Ramist forms of logic, Cartesian logic emphasized the acquisition of knowledge through introspection rather than the application of abstract external formulas such as the three-­part syllogism. Most relevantly, Descartes argued that there were certain truths lodged in the mind that existed a priori or apart from external experiences. Like Descartes, Locke argued that substances could be divided into two categories: mind and matter. In stark contrast, however, he gave no credence to innate principles, ideas, or notions. According to Locke, arguments that there were “certain innate Principles” or “some primary Notions . . . Characters, as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives in its very first Being” were demonstrably false.65 All knowledge came from a combination of sensation (that is, experiencing the physical, material world using the five senses) and reflection (an internal process, based on the active power of the mind). The popularity of Cartesian logic was one of the obstacles that complicated the early reception of Locke’s Essay at Harvard. Two others related to religion and mere expediency. In the first place, the theological implications of Locke’s text were problematic. Locke’s arguments against the existence of innate ideas, for example, extended to the knowledge of God—­which he saw as certain, but not innate—­and thus sat uneasily alongside the theological commitments of the college’s Puritan ministers.66 As Locke put it in book I of the Essay, “Though the knowledge of a GOD, be the most natural discovery of humane Reason, yet the Idea of him, is not innate.”67 Furthermore, in accordance with his belief that the mind was a tabula rasa—­a “white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas”—­the English philosopher rejected the possibility of original sin, a key tenet of Puritan belief.68 In the years to come, these arguments would become the very backbone of Locke’s lasting appeal and smooth integration into a secularizing American society. But at the time, they did his reputation among the Harvard Puritan elite no favors. Furthermore, many of Harvard’s leading theologians were followers of the philosopher’s ardent critics back in England. For example, during his tenure as Harvard’s president between 1708 and 1724, John Leverett was immersed in works by the English reverend



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 21

William Sherlock, dean of St. Paul’s.69 In 1696–­97, Sherlock had used his pulpit to denounce Locke’s arguments against the existence of innate ideas and attack the Essay for espousing atheism. Sherlock’s thorough rejection of Locke was published in London in 1704 as part of A Discourse concerning the Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked, in the Next World. Challenging Locke, Sherlock made the case for “inbred Knowledge” in the soul, explaining “that the Soul of Man . . . is not a Rasa Tabula, without any Notions or Ideas of Truth imprinted on it; but that it has its most natural and perfect Knowledge from within.”70 Locke, who died only a few months later, never found time to respond to Sherlock as he had to Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester.71 For readers such as Leverett, it probably seemed providential that Sherlock got the last word. The final obstacle that faced Locke’s Essay at Harvard was more mundane. In short, the text was long and unwieldy. What had started out as a single page of notes, sparked by a conversation among friends, ballooned over the years into four books and roughly 200,000 words.72 It took dedication to read—­much less teach—­the Essay in its entirety. Accordingly, it generally appeared in more digestible abridgments and abstracts.73 In fact, the Essay appeared in abridged form (in French) before its full publication. And it seems likely that Harvard faculty and students first encountered Locke through the periodical The Young Students Library, containing Extracts and Abridgments of the Most Valuable Books Printed in England and in the Foreign Journals (1692).74 John Dunton, the London bookseller who published The Young Students Library, had visited Harvard in 1686 and had connections in Cambridge that may have helped him circulate his work there.75 The Young Students Library was present in Harvard’s first library catalog of 1723, two years before any unabridged version of Locke’s writings.76 If at first Locke could be brushed aside by those deeply enmeshed in studies of Cartesian logic or rejected by those swayed by his theologian critics, this was not the case for long. At Harvard, Locke’s Essay was read and taught by individual tutors decades before the faculty voted in 1743 to include it as part of the formal curriculum.77 And when, in the 1750s, faculty began shifting Locke from his place in the logic curriculum to that of metaphysics—­that is, the study of the limits and nature of human understanding more broadly—­ students were still required to confront Locke’s most important claims. In 1755, for instance, degree candidates were examined on the proposition that “non dantur Ideae innatae”—­there are no innate ideas.78 Locke’s first appearance at Yale was also in the logic curriculum.79 Beginning in the late 1710s, his work was taught together with Isaac Newton’s

22

Chap ter One

Principia, thus beginning a long, close relationship between those texts in college curricula. For Yale tutor Samuel Johnson and many others, Locke provided the rational underpinning for Newton’s portrayal of the physical universe operating according to certain, empirically ascertainable laws. In 1717 or 1718, Johnson together with fellow tutor Daniel Browne “introduced the study of Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton as fast as they could,” and two of the logic theses at Yale’s 1718 commencement clearly drew from Locke’s distinction between an object’s primary and secondary qualities.80 By the early 1730s, Locke was celebrated as foundational to the study of logic at the college.81 And by 1743, the same year Harvard’s faculty formalized the Es­ say’s inclusion in their curriculum, there were two copies of Locke’s Essay in the Yale College Library, organized under the “Logic” curriculum heading.82 Under the catalog heading “Political Essays,” by contrast, none of Locke’s works appeared.83 By midcentury, in colonial college curricula, Locke’s Essay reigned supreme.84 Because there were no electives, no student could make it through his college years without gaining at least some mastery of it. Especially eager students—­those willing to follow an instructor’s recommendations for reading in their private hours or those pursuing a master’s degree, what was sometimes called a “Second Degree in the Arts”—­were certainly aware of a wider range of Locke’s writings and the arguments they contained.85 Cambridge scholar Thomas Johnson’s popular Quaestiones Philosophicae in Justi System­ atis Ordinem Dispositae (1735), which was the source for many eighteenth-­ century Harvard master’s commencement quaestiones, or academic exer­cises, included Locke’s Two Treatises in a list of works to consult on the question of when it was proper to resist one’s government. Harvard master’s degree candidate Samuel Adams, for example, drew directly from Johnson’s Quaes­ tiones Philosophicae for his now-­famous 1743 quaestio asking whether a supreme magistrate could be resisted if there was no other way to save the republic.86 And some students, at Harvard and elsewhere, read Locke’s other works, such as his Letter Concerning Toleration, for themselves—­rather than coming across their arguments secondhand.87 This more expansive reading in Locke’s corpus, however, never came at the expense or exclusion of the Es­ say. The work of Locke eighteenth-­century students and their teachers knew best was, beyond doubt, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

: : : The preeminence of the Essay in eighteenth-­century American intellectual life did not mean that Locke’s ideas went unchallenged. Nor that they were



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 23

transmitted in isolation or unmediated—­either inside or outside the college setting. Quite the contrary, in fact. Throughout the eighteenth century, those Americans who engaged with Locke’s ideas often did so in conversation with a range of other perspectives. Furthermore, they often encountered Locke’s ideas secondhand: as elaborated or revised by more recent, eighteenth-­century thinkers. Before the 1750s, two of Locke’s most important interlocutors were the English theologians and philosophers Isaac Watts and George Berkeley. Berkeley’s and Watts’s revisions to Locke made their way to the American colonies in the 1720s and 1730s thanks to Watts’s tireless self-­promotion and Berkeley’s boots-­on-­the-­ground presence. Watts sent copies of his publications as part of major donations to Harvard in 1724 and Yale in 1730.88 His Logick: or, The Right Use of Rea­ son appeared in Harvard’s library by 1725, only a year after its publication in London. And at Yale in 1733, Watts received commendation alongside Locke as a critical figure for “logick in a beauteous system” in a poem by John Hubbard.89 In his Logick, Watts articulated many of Locke’s key arguments about rational bases of knowledge, but in a softer tone. More specifically, Watts downplayed (because he disagreed with) Locke’s rejection of innate ideas, especially regarding knowledge of God’s existence, a particularly sticky issue for the deeply religious, if not wholly sectarian, college curriculum of the eighteenth century. For those conflicted about the less palatable (to them) aspects of Locke’s philosophy, Watts served as intermediary between Locke and an older, more theological approach to the study of human understanding.90 To be sure, there were some early on who eschewed Locke’s arguments in favor of Watts’s. Puritan minister Cotton Mather, for instance, happily recommended Watts on logic but refrained from recommending Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding despite its being, as Mather put it in 1726, already “much in Vogue.”91 For most, however, Watts’s work made clear the Christian and distinctly Protestant “implications” of Locke’s Essay.92 Meanwhile, the philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley’s revisions to Locke’s ideas gained ground thanks to the years he spent in North America in the late 1720s and early 1730s. While in the colonies, he developed connections at Harvard and had an especially big impact on Yale thanks to his close relationship with Samuel Johnson, the prominent New Haven philosopher.93 Best known for his idealism, Berkeley reworked Locke’s theory that knowledge came from the combination of ideas acquired through sensation (experience of the external world) and those acquired through reflection (within one’s own mind). Contra Locke, Berkeley

24

Chap ter One

argued that no ideas existed outside the mind because knowledge of the external world was the direct result of God’s willing it—­imposing it—­on humans, rather than the result of an individual’s experience of the physical, material world.94 Yet Berkeley’s reworking of Locke did not make knowing the earlier philosopher’s work any less important. Even for a Berkeley admirer such as Johnson, there was no doubt that Locke had done “much service” to philosophy, past and present.95 And the fact that Berkeley himself donated the folio edition of Locke’s Works to Yale underscores Locke’s integral place in colonial college libraries and classrooms, despite ongoing philosophical and theological revisions to arguments from his Essay.96 At American colleges after the 1750s, the Essay was increasingly read and taught alongside works by practitioners of what would come to be known as the Scottish moral or common sense school of philosophy. Two especially important texts that appeared in college libraries and made their way into the curriculum were Francis Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) and Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Com­ mon Sense (1764). When John Witherspoon arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1768, he transformed the College of New Jersey’s curriculum, injecting it with his moderate Presbyterianism and his commitments to Scottish moral philosophy.97 In particular, Witherspoon drew on work by his fellow Scotsmen, especially Hutcheson, to emphasize the existence of an intuitive moral sense, which stood in contrast to Locke’s insistence that humans were born with no innate ideas.98 Aimed at promoting his students’ cultivation of virtue, Witherspoon’s lectures sought to help them align their faith with good action. Owing in large part to Witherspoon’s prominence, which extended far beyond the classrooms of the College of New Jersey, Scottish moral philosophy would become central to the development of American philosophy across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By essentially adding a sixth, moral, intuitive sense to Locke’s five-­sense-­based empiricism, the Scots, as we will see, augmented, rather than negated, Locke’s philosophical status in the colonies and early United States for decades to come. Beyond the college setting, in the eighteenth-­century colonies, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding also received close attention from men at the center of American intellectual life, who then disseminated their readings and reworkings of the philosopher’s ideas to a wider public. Minister, theologian, and intellectual celebrity Jonathan Edwards was an especially important figure in this regard. Edwards’s reconfiguration of Locke’s central arguments regarding perception through experience and the duality of mind and matter played an integral role in the continued development of Calvinism across eighteenth-­century New England, in particular.99



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 25

Like many eighteenth-­century Americans, Edwards knew Locke as a wise exemplar for living and learning. As a young minister in the 1720s, he sought out “Lock of Education” together with Richard Steele’s work that warmly recommended Locke’s educational ideas. He also knew Locke as a proponent of religious toleration and the author of several letters on the subject.100 Over the course of his life, however, there was no work that Edwards read with more “delight and profit” than Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he first encountered as a student (AB 1720) at Yale college.101 For Edwards, Locke’s thought was not a fleeting interest of his student days; rather, it was the object of a lifelong commitment, later shared with congregations through sermons he preached across New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Edwards’s sustained regard for the philosopher is captured in the following account from his biographer and fellow theologian Samuel Hopkins: “Taking that Book [Locke’s Essay] into his Hand, upon some Occasion, not long before his Death, he said to some of his select Friends, who were then with him, That he was beyond Expression entertain’d and pleas’d with it, when he read it in his Youth at College; that he was as much engaged, and had more Satisfaction and Pleasure in studying it, than the most greedy Miser in gathering up handfuls of Silver and Gold from some new discover’d Treasure.”102 Edwards’s equation of Locke’s Essay with some newly discovered treasure was no exaggeration, either personally or professionally. Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703 to parents prominent among New England’s Calvinist elite. After assuming the position of chief pastor from his grandfather Solomon Stoddard in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1729, Edwards influenced important revivalist, evangelical awakenings across the 1730s. In the 1750s, following a series of humiliating professional setbacks (in an age of increasing church liberalization, he was expelled from his congregation for some hardline positions), he returned to serious inward contemplation, producing works such as Freedom of the Will (1754). Before his untimely death in 1758 from a smallpox inocu­ lation, he briefly assumed the presidency of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Edwards’s lifelong engagement with Locke’s approach to determining the nature and extent of human knowledge was both intellectually rigorous and theologically grounded. As his own thinking matured and developed, Edwards made several significant revisions to Locke’s metaphysical framework. Broadly speaking, he reconciled key aspects of Locke’s metaphysics with Calvinism’s insistence on a sovereign and supernatural God. If, for Locke, experience was the sole basis of knowledge, for Edwards, God was

26

Chap ter One

present in all experiences; to experience the world was to experience God’s omnipotence. What Locke separated into primary and secondary qualities of objects—­one existing inside, and the other outside, the mind—­Edwards combined, understanding both qualities as existing in God’s mind; what Locke separated into ideas gained through sensation (from the external, physical world) and those gained through reflection (internally, involving self and mind), Edwards reworked into an “integrated conception of mind” that clarified how Christians, specifically, experienced the world through the perception of God’s ideas.103 Edwards provided a solution to the problem of how one knows, and can be certain of, God’s (omnipresent) existence—­how, to use Calvinist terminology, the elect, as visible saints, gained spiritual knowledge. The issue was how to square the infiniteness and unknowability of the divine with the limits of human perception as set forth by Locke.104 Edwards’s response was to describe the way in which God acts in the minds of religious men “as an internal vital principle.” As Edwards explained it, “the inward principle from whence they [the gracious affections] flow, is something divine, a communication of God, a participation of the divine nature, Christ living in the heart, the Holy Spirit dwelling there, in union with the faculties of the soul, as an internal vital principle, exerting his own proper nature, in the exercise of those faculties.”105 In this reconfiguration of Locke’s sensationalism and empiricism, Edwards presented “an indwelling light that could, in fact, supply an unprecedented degree of certain knowledge” regarding divine matters and the essence of the human soul. This approach stands in stark contrast to other eighteenth-­century perspectives, including Scottish philosopher David Hume’s more radical skepticism, as found in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).106 By reconciling what were at once Enlightenment and Protestant knowledge and belief systems, and through active participation in the religious debates of his day, Edwards left his mark on the intellectual landscape of eighteenth-­century America. If not many Americans wrestled with Locke as penetratingly or with such intensity as Edwards, his readers, congregants, and followers, as well as his opponents, encountered Locke’s arguments through him—­whether or not they were aware of it. And as his interlocutors, sympathetic and not, knew well, Edwards was not alone in his esteem for the seventeenth-­century philosopher.

: : : Beyond Jonathan Edwards’s life and work, Locke’s expansive, far-­reaching authority was central to the development and transformation of American



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 27

Protestantism more broadly in the eighteenth century. In ways that would have baffled the historical Locke, a man constantly mired in theological controversies, he became decidedly uncontroversial in the mid-­eighteenth-­ century North American colonies. Locke’s relatively uncontroversial status is remarkable, given the innumerable disputes among the diverse range of American Protestants who seized on him and his arguments concerning toleration, the freedom of conscience, the rationality of Christianity, and the importance of individual scriptural interpretation. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration was the philosopher’s first work printed in the American colonies.107 In 1743, Boston newspapers advertised its printing and sale at Rogers and Fowle’s shop on Queen Street, calling it “very suitable for the present Times.”108 The startling success of itinerant ministers such as George Whitefield had sparked debates over restrictions on itinerant preaching and other efforts by the established “old light” or “old side” Calvinists to counteract the “new light” or “new side” evangelical revivals sweeping town and country. During this period of rapid evangelical expansion—­what has come to be known as the First Great Awakening—­ Locke’s Letter emerged as an essential text.109 Written in Latin in 1685, the Epistola de Tolerantia was a direct response to Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes that year. Immediately translated into English by the Unitarian merchant William Popple for publication in 1689, the Letter Concerning Toleration resonated deeply with eighteenth-­century Americans.110 In it, they encountered arguments for God’s omnipotence regarding the care of human souls, for a church as “a free and voluntary society,” and for the idea that, consequently, “the magistrate has no power to enforce by law, either in his own Church, or much less in another, the use of any rites or ceremonies whatsoever in the worship of God.”111 Although written for a seventeenth-­century European audience, Locke’s case for toleration, and with it freedom of religious belief and practice, was compelling for eighteenth-­century American readers.112 In the early 1740s, the Letter resonated with many pro-­revivalist clergymen keen to emphasize the highly personal nature of religion and the notion that religious belief and practice could not be coerced, and thus that individuals alone—­not a state, government, or particular church—­knew how and in what way they should worship the God who created them. Elisha Williams, a Harvard graduate and former Yale College rector, provides a particularly interesting example.113 Angry about the new limitations being placed on itinerant preachers in Connecticut, he paired the Letter Concerning Toleration with

28

Chap ter One

the Second Treatise and used them to demonstrate the “essential rights and liberties of Protestants” and argue that, under the constitution of British government, matters of religion were under God’s authority alone, not the civil power of magistrates or other men.114 Another important contributor to Locke’s authority among rival groups of believers was his celebrated Reasonableness of Christianity and two subsequent Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke’s Reason­ ableness, composed in the long winter of 1694–­95, used evidence from and “unbiassed” analysis of the historical books of the New Testament to make the case that Christianity “as delivered in the Scriptures” was entirely reasonable and thus countered rationalist attacks on Christian faith.115 He also sought to resolve or at least mitigate doctrinal disagreements by emphasizing fundamental principles shared by all Christians, regardless of denomination. In the immediate aftermath of its publication, however, Locke’s disquisition had precisely the opposite effect. It caused a ruckus in England and was immediately attacked by those such as hardline Calvinist preacher John Edwards (no relation to Jonathan Edwards), who accused him of Socinianism and questioned his belief in the Trinity.116 In response, and with great haste, Locke offered up a counterattack in two Vindications of the Rea­ sonableness of Christianity. All three tracts—­both Vindications and the original Reasonableness—­were published as part of Locke’s multivolume Works across the eighteenth century. And it was primarily through the Works that his American interlocutors came to know of Locke’s writings on the reasonableness of Christianity. In the colonies of the mid-­eighteenth century, Locke’s Reasonableness was deployed to great effect, and it received warm approbation from even those readers who were well aware of his spat with Edwards. In 1753, William Stith, president of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, could hardly contain himself after reading Locke’s work during the final stages—­or so he claimed—­of preparing a sermon that addressed many of the same points Locke had made. Stith, a liberal Anglican keenly opposed to the overly emotive evangelicalism that had become popular, was a self-­proclaimed “great Admirer of Mr. Locke’s Writings” and “no instudious Reader of them.” Yet, to his chagrin, Stith had only recently come to know the contents of the Rea­ sonableness of Christianity, having been, in his youth, discouraged from reading it by “the long Roll of Controversy with Edwards.”117 What Stith found in Locke’s treatise was pure gold—­an almost-­too-­ perfect articulation of his central claims in The Nature and Extent of Christ’s Redemption, the sermon Stith preached before the colonial assembly in



Locke’s Legacy in Early America 29

Virginia in 1753. So similar were their arguments regarding the use of scripture that Stith felt compelled to acknowledge “that it will not be easily believed, that I have not borrowed from him.” Perhaps, Stith allowed, he had come across Locke’s work as a student, despite any discouragement he had received. But having no (inconvenient) recollection of such an encounter that would have made his sermon the work of a copyist, he was free to persuade the world of a more advantageous and striking point—­that, separated by an ocean and more than half a century, he and Locke had “both hit on the same Truths by the same Means.” To convince readers of the quality of his sermon’s argument, Stith identified what, precisely, he had in common with Mr. Locke: “a free, couragious, and honest use of our Reason, assisted and improved by a diligent Study and Search into sacred Scripture.”118 It would be inaccurate to characterize Stith’s use of Locke’s Reason­ ableness of Christianity here as “reception”: the integration and reworking of another’s ideas or text into one’s own. Indeed, as Stith made a point of emphasizing, he had done no such thing. Rather, he was delighted to have discovered—­after the fact—­just how closely his understanding of Christian­ ity resembled that of Locke. While Stith’s work—­like so much of eighteenth-­ century Americans’ engagement with the philosopher—­cannot be categorized as an example of the straightforward reception of Locke’s ideas, it can be categorized as a full-­throated endorsement of Locke’s status as a thinker and man with whom it was expedient to align oneself in mid-­eighteenth-­ century America. A third key to Locke’s religious authority was his contribution to biblical study and religious self-­instruction—­especially his A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul. Completed at the very end of his life, the Para­ phrase and Notes expressed Locke’s deeply held belief that all Christians had a duty to study scripture and that scriptural study was the key to eternal salvation. First published (posthumously and without Locke’s name on the title page) in 1707, it appeared in numerous stand-­alone editions as well as in publications of Locke’s Works (beginning in 1714) across the eighteenth century.119 Both popular and influential in the eighteenth-­century colonies, the Paraphrase and Notes occasionally provided support for such disputed points as women’s right to active, public participation in the church, which Locke discussed in his remarks on 1 Corinthians.120 Nevertheless, it was widely celebrated, and it had a generally unifying effect. Even those who disagreed profoundly with both Locke’s theology and his interpretive approach readily acknowledged widespread dedication to his method of scriptural notetaking by paraphrase. “Old side” theologian

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Ezra Stiles of Newport, Rhode Island, for example, opposed the impetus for and results of Locke’s undertaking. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that, by the 1770s, Locke’s work had provided an entirely “new Mode of Scripture Commentary, by Paraphrase & Notes,” to which many Americans adhered. Locke’s “Reputation as a Scripture Commentator,” Stiles observed, “has been exceeding high with the public.” And as Stiles made a point to emphasize, Locke’s “Mode received great Applause . . . even from those who differed from Mr Lock as to Doctrines & religious principles.” Stiles’s recognition of Locke’s authority in this respect is made more striking because Stiles himself was convinced that the Bible as it appeared in English “is too intelligible to need the Paraphrase of even a Locke.”121 For Stiles, however, such widespread celebration of Locke’s example and model for studying scripture was certainly not surprising. After all, he knew Locke well as “the great Mr. Locke,” whose portrayal of the mind at birth as “a rasa tabula” in the famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding had helped Stiles frame his argument for broad Protestant unity in the 1760s.122 With a reputation grounded in his celebrated Essay and bolstered by his religious writings, which included A Letter Concerning Toleration, The Reasonableness of Christianity, and A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, Locke, “that great reasoner,” as Baptist preacher Isaac Backus recognized him in the 1770s, proved a unifying figure across denominations and among religious leaders, who drew support from his well-­known writings on Christianity.123

: : : Despite the inauspicious start to his story in America, Locke quickly became a central figure in colonial life. The “great Mr. Locke” showed early Americans the importance of thinking critically and judging matters for themselves and what it meant to seek improvement—­to pursue a brighter, better future. Both men and women turned to Locke to show them, be it through toys, neighborhood societies, or scriptural study, what “methodical and disciplined action” was needed to better themselves, their families, and communities.124 And they drew on Locke’s authority to support arguments on topics ranging from freedom of religion to metaphysics. In short, they re­­ lied on Locke as an essential companion—­authority, exemplar, and guide, all at the same time—­in nearly every aspect of their lives. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Locke’s polyvalent influence had permeated American society. And, as we will see, it would only increase in the decades to come.

2 Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras

I

n 1766, there was an urgent appeal from London for North American colonists to read John Locke—­to read, that is, Locke’s Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives: The Production of Silk: The Preservation of Fruits, which had just been published for the first time. For anxious observers of imperial unrest, the appearance of “this useful little tract,” in the same year Parliament would repeal the disastrous Stamp Act, seemed timely. As introduced by its editor and announced in congratulatory magazine reviews, Locke’s work contained materials—­i.e., instructions for “encouraging the growth and produce of vines and olives, silks and fruits, which cannot be advantageously raised in England”—­vital for strengthening the economic ties between Britain’s North American colonies and the metropole. And it was fervently hoped that, should it be read by British settlers on the Atlantic’s western shores—­who could cultivate what those at home could not—­“it will be of far more extensive use both to that country [i.e., the colonies] and to Britain.”1 To modern readers, this cheerful announcement recommending Locke’s tract “particularly to the attention of the inhabitants of America,” with the hope that it would remind everyone of the happy—­until recently—­imperial union, may come as a surprise.2

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Given what we know—­or rather think we know—­about Locke’s role in the debates of the 1760s and beyond, the thought that anyone in London was encouraging anyone on the western shores of the Atlantic to pay more attention to Locke for the sake of the empire seems ironic, if not downright amusing. And discussions of viticulture, silkworms, and olives seem largely irrelevant to the story of Locke during this tumultuous period. But what is Locke’s story during this period—­what we, today, know as the age of revolution?3 To be sure, the answer is not (only) grapes and silkworms. Nor, however, is it only—­or even primarily—­Locke’s ideas about government, where most investigations into Locke’s story in the late eighteenth century begin and end. Rather, the story of Locke at this time is that of an omnipresent philosopher, whose authority on an expansive and diverse range of subjects—­from human understanding and education to politics and religious devotion—­spanned the northern Atlantic, and who served as a guide, model, and exemplar for both ordinary and exceptional men and women. It is also a bit like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where knowledge of only one part generates misunderstandings of the whole. If this sounds very much like the Locke introduced in the previous chapter, it should. In most respects, Locke in the period between c. 1760 and c. 1790 looks identical to Locke in the 1750s or, as we shall see, the 1810s. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding remained Locke’s best-­known work, and men and women continued to use his model of commonplacing, rely on his expertise in matters of childrearing and education, and celebrate his work on behalf of their Protestant religion. At the same time, however, the nature of Locke’s political authority changed. So too did the ways in which the colonists-­turned-­citizens of the new United States used Locke’s political thought. To the limited extent that Locke’s authority relied on his political writings, it increased in the years leading up to the American Revolution (c. 1760–­1776) but then decreased, dramatically, immediately following independence. Far from establishing Locke as a foundational influence on American political thought, his political writings were relegated by late-­eighteenth-­century Americans to the realm of abstract, speculative theory just as those Americans were turning their attention to more practical matters—­namely, the formation and proper administration of a real government. The writings and lives of men and women like James Otis Jr., Abigail Quincy, John Adams, and James Kent tell these interrelated stories of continuity and change and in the process reveal the breadth, depth, diversity,



Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras 33

and overall magnitude of Americans’ engagement with Locke during the Revolutionary and founding eras.

: : : In the winter of 1761–­62, James Otis Jr. had a problem. His personal and political nemesis, Massachusetts Superior Court Chief Justice Thomas Hut­ch­ inson, had taken to the pages of the Boston Evening-­Post to argue for re­ ducing the value of gold to guarantee that silver would remain the primary basis of the provincial currency.4 The problem for Otis, a middle-­aged, politically minded lawyer, was that Hutchinson’s views on gold were, as Otis acknowledged in his preferred platform, the Boston Gazette, “almost literally the same” as John Locke’s arguments in his influential works on money, penned during the Great Coinage Crisis in England of the 1690s.5 What is more, Otis disagreed with those arguments. In his mind, “our silver and gold, as now regulated, are exactly agreeable to the sterling standard of both” and they required no modifications of the sort proposed by the future royal governor. But proving Hutchinson wrong would mean arguing against Locke, whom Otis knew and revered as “one of the princes of the philosophers.”6 Cognizant of Locke’s authority yet in disagreement with his ideas, Otis knew he faced a challenge. To make his case against Hutchinson, Otis had several arguments at his disposal. They ranged from dry mathematical calculations of currency rates, to comparative observations invoking the example of China as “the only country in the world where gold is not money, or a tender,” to recruiting the assistance of Sir Isaac Newton, “the only single name that I should have dared to mention against Mr. Locke.”7 But the best way for Otis to solve the problem of Hutchinson’s alignment with Locke was to use the authority of Locke himself—­not Locke the authority on money, but Locke the authority on matters of human knowledge, Locke the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. What is more, he could count on his readers to understand and appreciate what he was doing, however subtle his argument might be. Otis was a clever man, known for his bookishness. He had graduated from Harvard in 1743, the same year the faculty voted to include Locke’s Essay as part of the formal curriculum. In a series of articles published in the Boston Gazette between December 1761 and January 1762, Otis paired his knowledge of Locke’s Essay with his recognition of Locke’s celebrated philosophical reputation and used both to his advantage. Specifically, he used Locke’s well-­known theory of human understanding to make a case

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that the validity of his own arguments “may be seen by any one who will be at the pains to calculate them.” Then, with an explicit nod to Locke’s Essay, Otis suggested that readers could use their own powers of human reasoning to disprove Hutchinson’s arguments “without being a Newton in mathematicks or a Locke in metaphysicks.”8 In short, Otis was using Locke’s Essay as a way to counter Locke’s authority on money by giving his readers license à la Locke to think for themselves. Hutchinson responded to Otis’s invocations of Locke by doubling down, staking his own claim to the philosopher’s celebrated authority. “Mr. Locke,” Hutchinson argued, “advances what it seems as if no body could contradict.” He then undertook an extensive historical survey of colonial coinage to support his argument.9 Before he responded to Hutchinson’s challenge directly, Otis went off on a (Lockean) tangent. His next reply involved a series of elaborate metaphors in which he positioned himself as Locke—­arguing against Hutchinson, whom he variously cast as William Lowndes (with whom Locke had sparred during the Great Coinage Crisis) and the bishop of Worcester (a vehement critic of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding).10 Viewed in the context of Otis’s earlier arguments, this rhetorical device only underscores his commitment not to relinquish the authority of Mr. Locke to the man he so despised. And Otis’s need for Locke’s expansive authority was only just beginning. In a series of important political pamphlets in the early 1760s, Otis brought seventeenth-­century legal and political doctrine to bear on pressing questions about political legitimacy and power.11 He did so with close, though certainly not exclusive, attention to Locke and his Two Treatises. In his first political pamphlet, A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-­Bay (1762), Otis performed a close reading of Locke’s arguments in chapters 4 (“Of Slavery”), 11 (“Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”), and 14 (“Of Prerogative”) of the Second Treatise to support recent actions taken by the Massachusetts legislature against the governor.12 And in his most influential pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), Otis quoted at length from Locke’s Two Treatises and recommended it to his readers, alongside the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nations (1758) and “their own consciences.”13 Written in response to the revenue-­raising Sugar Act of 1764, this pamphlet explored the authority of Parliament and the natural rights of British subjects, and it inserted Otis—­somewhat uncomfortably—­ into the debate concerning Parliament’s authority to levy taxes in the North American colonies.



Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras 35

At first glance, Otis’s use of Locke’s Two Treatises appears puzzling. In the first place, Otis did not agree with Locke’s basic understanding of the origins of government, as the result of a compact among people agreeing to leave the state of nature and form a political society.14 He thought the state of nature itself was essentially incomprehensible and rejected the idea that those who were born long after the compact was made were nonetheless bound by the original agreement. To the contrary, Otis argued in Rights of the British Colonies, “government is . . . most evidently founded on the necessities of our nature.” For Otis, government was natural, a result not of a compact but of God’s will. Government “is by no means an arbitrary thing depending merely on compact or human will for its existence,” he declared.15 Second, there was a fundamental disconnect between Locke’s discussion of natural rights and political society and Otis’s own arguments. Specifically, Otis was interested in the preservation of natural rights in political society, while Locke stressed that rights had to be given up—­that is, relinquished or transferred.16 As Locke put it, “The only way whereby any one devests himself of his Natural Liberty, and puts on the bonds of Civil Society is by agreeing with other Men to joyn and unite into a Community.” Using the terms power and right interchangeably, as he often did, Locke explained that those leaving “a state of Nature unite into a Community, must be understood to give up all the power, necessary to the ends for which they unite into Society, to the majority of the Community.”17 Consequently, using Locke’s arguments to defend (the preservation of ) the God-­given natural rights of American colonists required some intellectual acrobatics on the part of interpreters like Otis. What, then, accounts for Otis’s decision to deploy Locke, despite what appear to be substantial points of disagreement? Why was Locke’s “authority,” as Otis explained in 1762, “preferred to all others”? The answer to these questions is threefold. First, in Boston of the early 1760s, Locke was a relatively safe political bet. In contrast to more polemic or radical writers—­Algernon Sidney, for example, whose republican zeal had led to his execution in 1683—­Locke was recognized as an all-­around moderate: the embodiment of the constitutional arrangement in place since 1688 and, as Otis explained, as “great an ornament, under a crown’d head, as the church of England ever had to boast of.”18 Second, Locke provided American colonial subjects like Otis with ways of conceptualizing their local concerns against the backdrop of, and as part of, timeless theoretical questions about the nature of political legitimacy and authority—­questions that had deep roots in but also extended beyond the English constitution.19 Third, and most

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foundationally, Otis never lost sight of the basis of Locke’s authority. He framed his use of Locke by calling attention to the essential nature of Locke’s relevance—­to the fact that Locke was a man of wisdom, honesty, and impartiality, that Locke was “not only one of the most wise, as well as most honest, but the most impartial man that ever lived.”20 Otis offers an especially striking example of the ways in which a cohort of politically involved men—­many of whom were lawyers—­began to engage with Locke’s political thought in the 1760s and early 1770s. These commentators and pamphleteers referenced Locke’s work on government with noticeable frequency and used it as critical support for (but not, it bears emphasizing here, the source of ) their claims about the origins of political society, the nature of government, and the relationship between, for example, taxation and representation. They set Locke alongside a host of other readily summoned political-­legal thinkers, publicists, and popularizers ranging from Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Edward Coke, to James Harrington, John Milton, and Algernon Sidney, to John Selden, Benjamin Hoadly, and Jean-­Jacques Burlamaqui, to John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and their famous Cato’s Letters.21 And while Locke was no “sole idol” in their political temple—­far from it—­his broad, polyvalent authority made him a particularly effective point of reference for the new set of questions with which they were engaging, questions that have, in hindsight, become those of the age of revolution but that were, in their context of the 1760s and early 1770s, part of an intra-­imperial debate.22 As Otis’s mental decline necessitated his retreat from public life, in the late 1760s and 1770s, others would follow his general line of reasoning, if not the specifics of his expansive understandings of equality and rights. And the logic underlying Otis’s reliance on Locke—­that is, the philosopher’s unquestionably celebrated reputation—­would permeate writings across the period.23 Writing as “Candidus” for the Boston Gazette in late 1771, for example, Samuel Adams referenced the “reasoning of that great and good man” when citing Locke on government in support of his argument that by levying taxes without the consent of the colonists, the British Parliament was depriving Americans of their constitutional and natural rights and liberties. “Mr. Locke,” Adams made clear “has often been quoted in the present dispute between Britain and her colonies, and very much to our purpose. His reasoning is so forcible, that no one has even attempted to confute it.”24 On this last point, at least, many in Britain would have agreed. In London, Locke was not a figure to be feared or rejected for inculcating radicalism and rebelliousness among Americans an ocean away. On the contrary,



Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras 37

Whig statesmen at the center of British political life saw themselves as the better disciples of Locke and the more careful readers of his Two Treatises. As tensions rose between the colonies and their imperial center, Englishmen did not attempt to diminish the philosopher’s authority. They did not relinquish Locke or dispute the force of his reasoning. Rather, they held him tight and accused their American counterparts of slander.

: : : For a striking demonstration of this point, we need look no further than George Grenville, former prime minister and chief architect of the ill-­fated Stamp Act of 1765. In August 1768, Grenville wrote to the English bureaucrat William Knox, summarizing his views on the present conflict with the colonies. As he explained to Knox, Grenville found himself strongly opposed to the lord chancellor, the Earl of Camden. Camden had voted against the Declaratory Act establishing Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, arguing, with the help of Locke, that taxation and representation went hand in hand. As Grenville knew, American colonists had seized on Camden’s speech. In early 1768, for example, newspapers in Boston had reprinted it for wide distribution as welcome support for colonists’ arguments.25 And in his famous Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, lawyer John Dickinson had drawn on Camden’s speech and its citation of Locke’s defense of property to argue that Parliament did not have the authority to levy taxes on the colonies.26 In his letter to Knox, Grenville asserted, against Camden, that taxation and representation had never gone hand in hand in Great Britain or the American colonies. “You wish me to state how this matter stands and to trace the origin of the notion of Representation in our Constitution,” Grenville summarized. “This is too much for the Bounds of a Letter but in general I think Mr Locke has done it very truely not only with regard to our own but likewise with regard to all Government whatever.”27 Confident as he was of the broader utility of his arguments, Grenville invited Knox to use them as long as he left Grenville out of it. Knox did just that. In his rabble-­rousing and now-­famous articulation of parliamentary sovereignty in The Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1769), he recycled Grenville’s arguments for a wide audience.28 Knox’s pamphlet and the responses it drew from colonists helped demarcate the shift from an imperial debate centered in questions of representation to one focused on the location and nature of sovereignty in the British Empire.29 Questions such as Are colonists in Massachusetts represented in

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the British Parliament? were replaced with others such as What is the ultimate source of a government’s power? The king? Parliament? The people? In rejecting Parliament’s authority to levy taxes, the American colonists, Knox declared, were inconsistent and mistaken. How, he asked, could they recognize Parliament’s sovereignty when it came to, say, trade regulations but not taxation? And they were wrong, he argued, because they misunderstood a key text they cited in support of their claims. When colonists invoked Locke’s work on government to argue against the powers of Parliament vis-­à-­vis taxation, Knox explained, they seriously (and dangerously) misrepresented his argument. Copying Grenville, Knox began The Controversy by quoting at length from Locke’s Second Treatise. He then undertook an exercise in close reading to persuade his audience that it was impossible to infer from Locke’s work any argument against Parliament’s right to tax. Before berating at length colonial misinterpretations of Locke, Knox laid some groundwork. First, following Grenville, he explained that he “quoted these passages from Mr. Locke’s Treatise upon Civil Government, because his opinions in this treatise have been principally relied on as the foundation of many extravagant and absurd propositions which he never meant to encourage.” Second, Knox laid out his (and Grenville’s) own particular devotion to Locke’s text: “I have the highest regard in general for the good sense and free spirit of that excellent work, written to defend the natural rights of men, and particularly the principles of our constitution, when they were attacked both by force and fraud.” Locke’s work on government was not some radical, revolutionary text owned by Americans, he argued, but a sound defense written by an Englishman of the very rights and constitutional principles Knox cherished. Third, he made a point of acknowledging that Locke was not infallible. In fact, according to Knox, Locke was wrong about one of the very points Americans seemed increasingly interested in making—­namely, that the king had the power to act above and at times even “against” the law (in this case, Parliament’s sovereignty) in the interest of his subjects. “I can by no means agree with him, especially when he defines prerogative to be ‘a power in the prince to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.’” Lest anyone mistake his careful reading and analysis for displeasure, however, Knox clarified his admiration for the great author: “I mean not by this to throw any blame upon Mr. Locke, but merely to shew, that in a work of this extent there must be some inaccuracies and errors, and that it is not an infallible guide in all cases.”30 Knox also accused detractors of parliamentary sovereignty of doing more than misreading or misinterpreting Locke. He accused them of tarnish-



Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras 39

ing  Locke’s reputation—­an accusation that would have resounded clearly across the Atlantic. “Any argument to exempt the property of any subject from taxes imposed by the supreme legislative for the public service [in contrast to ‘their own private use or purpose’ as Locke had written],” Knox declared, “must impute to him such inconsistencies as Mr. Locke was incapable of, and charge him with contradictions which ought to destroy his credit, both as an honest man and a clear reasoner.”31 Americans who wanted to use Locke were free to do so, he implied, but if they did so in such absurd and contradictory ways, they were eviscerating his authority and reputation “as both an honest man and a clear reasoner”—­the very same points that lay at the foundation of their usage. Others who defended Parliament’s power to levy taxes on the American colonies invoked Locke’s authority and used his work on government to similar ends. Knox’s pamphlet followed, for example, parliamentarian Soame Jenyns’s 1765 defense of the Stamp Act, in which he pointed out that “Lock, Sidney, Selden, and many other great Names” all agreed “that every Englishman, whether he has a Right to vote for a Representative, or not, is still represented in the British Parliament.”32 Jenyns’s point was hotly contested by Benjamin Franklin, who argued that Americans’ resistance to Parliament’s “unconstitutional exertion of power” emerged not from selfishness, as Jenyns argued, but instead “from a strong sense of liberty” and “a public spirit,” which England’s “most celebrated writers on the constitution, your Seldens, your Lockes, and your Sidneys, have reasoned them [the colonists] into.”33 Knox’s pamphlet, too, was met with a flurry of responses, the most famous of which—­by the Massachusetts-­born pamphleteer Edward Bancroft, then living in London—­struck back and accused Knox of his own flawed interpretation of Locke.34 And when Jonathan Boucher, a strong advocate of imperial unity, urged restraint on the part of the First Continental Congress in 1774, he was adding his own voice to the chorus of those who recognized just how malleable Locke was and what weight his name carried. “Let not Mr. Lock be quoted partially, by those who have read him, to mislead Thousands who never read him,” Boucher exclaimed, before himself quoting Locke, for good measure. Specifically, Boucher was tired of people’s citing Locke to make arguments about the necessity of taxation by consent, but then failing to define consent as Locke did, i.e., as “the Consent of the Majority, giving it either by themselves, or their Representatives chosen by them.”35

: : : Why did people like Knox, Bancroft, and Boucher react so strongly to (what they saw as) misinterpretations of Locke? To answer this question, we have

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to look beyond the specific issues they were debating and consider Locke’s broader significance in the transatlantic milieu they all shared.36 Once we turn our attention to this related but nonetheless distinct topic, the answer is easy to find. They cared so deeply about misinterpretations of Locke because he was recognized, on both sides of the Atlantic, as more than just a political philosopher. For all their differences, Englishmen and Americans could agree that Locke was, and ought to be revered as, a man of clear reasoning and honesty.37 Locke’s recommendations for cultivating knowledge, manners, and vines; his status as a model for learning and childrearing; and his authority as an exemplar of good character bridged both political and oceanic divides. On both sides of the Atlantic, magazines and newspapers fostered readers’ regard for Locke’s authority and upstanding character with stories that shared lessons from and details of his life, including his patience, despite persistent struggles with asthma, and his steadfast “good manners.”38 In March 1775—­mere weeks before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord—­readers of Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette, for example, encountered an “Anecdote of the Celebrated Mr. Locke” on the paper’s front page. In this widely circulated story, a shabbily dressed man interrupts Locke at breakfast and requests an audience. Magnanimous in every circumstance, the philosopher cuts short his meal and finds “to his great astonishment” that the man is a childhood friend who, years before, seriously wronged and sought to “ruin” him out of jealousy at his success. “Reduced by a life of cunning and extravagance to the greatest poverty and distress,” the former friend has come seeking Locke’s forgiveness and help. After a moment’s thought, Locke offers the poor man a “fifty pound note” and a lesson whose message is clear: “Though I sincerely forgive your behaviour to me . . . It is impossible to regain my good opinion; for, know, friendship, once injured, is forever lost.”39 Also on both sides of the Atlantic, Locke’s reputation as a celebrated exemplar was bolstered by his continued authority as an educational and childrearing guru. This point finds striking embodiment in a portrait of a mother and her two sons from the late 1760s by the Scottish-­born artist Allan Ramsay. The boys in the painting are not yet old enough to be in trousers, but everything depicted in the portrait indicates the dignity of the setting. The three subjects are adorned in delicate lace. Behind them hang heavy tapestries, plush and dark. Beside the young mother and her two small sons is Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, with its spine turned to face the viewer. The woman is no ordinary sitter. She is Queen Charlotte, wife

Figure 2.1 Allan Ramsay, Queen Charlotte with Her Two Eldest Sons, 1769. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

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of one king, mother of another, and her two sons are no ordinary boys: one will be the head of a nation and empire, then in turmoil. Jewels and other finery aside, the painting’s subjects could have been any ordinary mother-­and-­sons trio in any number of places around the North Atlantic basin. An ocean away, mothers in the North American colonies—­ women like Abigail Quincy of Boston, Massachusetts, for example—­would not have struggled to see themselves in the portrait of Queen Charlotte. They may have worn more homespun than lace, lived in more modest dwellings, and supported husbands who were lawyers, not kings, but they raised their sons on Locke just the same.

: : : Josiah Quincy Jr. died in 1775. Famous for his participation in events of the 1760s and early 1770s, especially his work alongside John Adams in the trials following the Boston Massacre, Quincy is generally known to history as a political figure and committed patriot. In the courtroom, he wielded precedents of English common law together with the political writings of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Whig theorists to defend the rights and liberties of his fellow British subjects living in the American colonies. Quincy was also the father of a young boy, Josiah Quincy III. Upon his death, Quincy Jr. left his three-­year-­old heir a large number of books. These included works by the seventeenth-­century republican Algernon Sidney and the natural philosopher and Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, as well as “John Locke’s Works in [3] vols.”40 Much has been made of Quincy’s leaving his son works by Sidney, Locke, and Bacon. As early as 1825, the painter Gilbert Stuart memorialized Quincy “the patriot” in a posthumous portrait surrounded by their works.41 Recognizing, but setting aside for the time being, the fact that Quincy Jr. also left his son works by Bacon and Sidney, how should we interpret his decision to leave his son Locke’s works? One part of the answer may be that the Works contained Locke’s Two Treatises, which was buried in the second of the three volumes. Quincy knew Locke’s ideas on government well. In his famous 1770 defense of Captain Thomas Preston and the British soldiers of Boston Massacre fame, for example, Quincy referenced Locke as a “very great, theoretic, writer” on matters of government and invoked his authority as “a man whose praises have resounded through all the known world, and probably will, through all ages, whose sentiments are as free air, and who has done as much for learning, liberty, and mankind, as any of the Sons of Adam.”42 Quincy’s use of Locke was both more specific and more expansive than we might expect. On a specific level, he referenced Locke because the En­



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glish jurist William Blackstone—­his primary focus at this point in his speech—­ discussed the Two Treatises in the relevant sections of his recently published Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–­69). In an effort to explain what had happened that spring in Boston, when the red-­coated British soldiers had fired on the mob of rowdy Bostonians, he used Blackstone’s detailed analysis of Locke’s Two Treatises to address a variety of important questions related, for example, to the distinction between “justifiable” or “excusable” and “felonious” homicide. In so doing, Quincy acknowledged Blackstone’s point that in elaborating the state of war scenario for the Second Treatise, Locke had taken the doctrine of justifiable killing too far—­to a “visionary [i.e., too theoretical] length.”43 More expansively, the “sagacious” Locke, grouped with other “wise men,” provided a human angle, from which to counter any argument that Quincy’s defense rested on “rigid notions of a dry system.” Although he agreed with Blackstone that Locke had taken his theory too far, Quincy thought that “there seems to be something very analogous to his opinion, which is countenanced in our laws.” Locke, in other words, nicely articulated key elements of the system of English jurisprudence from which Quincy drew. Locke’s perspective, as an Englishman and celebrated defender of English liberties, helped make visible that “there is a spirit which pervades the system of English jurisprudence, which inspires a freedom of thought, speech and behaviour.”44 Quincy hoped, then, by leaving his son Locke’s works, paired with Sidney’s defense of republican forms of government and Bacon’s understanding of English constitutional practice and history, to ensure that the same spirit of English liberty that had inspired him would also bless his son.45 It would be easy to leave the story of Quincy and Locke here. But to do so would be to miss another part—­and, moreover, an intellectually and conceptually prior part—­of the answer to the question of what value Quincy saw in Locke’s works. It would be to miss that Locke was, for Quincy, more than a great theoretical writer on the principles of government. It would be to miss that he had been, in Quincy’s own life, more than just the encapsulation of a philosophy; rather, he had been a companion in thought and an exemplar. When, after all, Quincy had seen value in Locke in the courtroom, it was precisely for the holistic nature of the latter’s authority and humanity, not just for a set of abstracted ideas that could be as “dry” as English common and constitutional law. Like many of his peers, Quincy knew Locke as an immediate, daily authority. When, for example, he roused himself from a cozy reading nook to make an entry in his legal commonplace book, he took inspiration from

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Locke. He adopted Locke’s method of organizing commonplace entries using headings and an easy-­to-­navigate index.46 And once we recognize that commonplacing was an activity Quincy practiced for his whole professional career, it seems difficult—­and ill-­advised—­to separate Quincy’s overtly “political” engagement with Locke from the more immediate ways in which Locke was, for Quincy in his daily life, a figure of, as he put it in his diary in 1773, exemplary “ingenuity.”47 Quincy clearly hoped the same would be the case for his son. When he made his will in 1774, Quincy would have known it would be a number of years before his young son could read any of what Sidney, Bacon, or Locke had written. What may have comforted him, however, was the knowledge that his widow, Abigail, would ensure that young Josiah would encounter Locke—­and on a daily basis—­long before he learned to read. In his later years, Josiah Quincy III was known to have “attributed the excellent health which he had during his long life to his good early training, and the correct physical habits he acquired under his mother’s tuition.” His mother’s strategies were, as he remembered, based largely on Locke’s instructions and model. When his own son, Edmund Quincy, recorded details of Josiah’s early upbringing, he had this to say about the Quincy family in the 1770s: Locke was the great authority at that time [ca. 1775] on all subjects which he touched, and in conformity with some suggestion of his, as my father [ Josiah III] supposed, Mrs. Quincy caused her son, when not more than three years old, to be taken from his warm bed, in winter as well as summer, and carried down to a cellar-­kitchen, and there dipped three times in a tub of water cold from the pump. She also brought him up in utter indifference to wet feet,—­usually the terror of anxious mammas,—­in which he used to say that he sat more than half the time during his boyhood, and without suffering any ill consequences. This practice, also, he conceived to have been in obedience to some suggestion of the bachelor philosopher.48

Josiah Quincy III was quite right to identify Locke, the bachelor philosopher, as the reason for his mother’s actions. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which began volume 3 of the edition of Locke’s Works in his father’s library, Locke instructed that a child should “have his Shooes made so, as to leak Water; and his Feet washed constantly every Day in cold Water.”49 Abigail Quincy, it seems, knew her Locke well—­so well, in fact, that her son and grandson would not forget his “great authority” in Revolutionary-­era



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America, nor the irony that it was a man who had no children of his own who provided these instructions so diligently followed by Abigail. Not long after her husband died, Abigail’s father-­in-­law, the first in the line of Josiah Quincys, wrote her on a number of matters, in the course of which he referenced Locke’s authority as author of the Two Treatises. “If the great Mr. Locke’s opinion is decisive,” Quincy senior explained, the growing swell of colonial resistance in 1775 was entirely justified.50 What thoughts came into Abigail’s mind as she read these words? Did she open Locke’s Works and read the Second Treatise herself? Did she smile in satis­ faction knowing that if she could not offer political resistance outright, she could bring the wisdom of the great philosopher into her own home? We will never know. But it seems likely that reading about “the great Mr. Locke” in her father-­in-­law’s handwriting in September 1775 would have meant something to Abigail that cannot be understood without taking her rich eighteenth-­century context into account. And what might be said of her may, just as easily, be said of any number of other individuals and families whose own engagement with Locke in daily, holistic ways further illuminates Locke’s authority in the Revolutionary and founding eras.51

: : : In October 1758, John Adams, a young, twenty-­something lawyer, chronicled a recent visit with two of Josiah Quincy Jr.’s brothers and a friend, Peter Chardon. Something struck Adams about Chardon on that autumn day. Unlike those of other boys his age, Chardon’s “Thoughts [were] not employed on Songs and Girls, nor his Time, on flutes, fiddles, Concerts and Card Tables.” Instead, Adams recorded, Chardon “quotes Locks Conduct of the Understanding and transcribes Points of Law into a Common-­Place Book on Locks Modell.”52 Upon observing such devotion to Locke, Adams expressed confidence that Chardon would “make something” of his life and “reach to a considerable Height.”53 Adams also took what he saw to heart. Not long after this encounter with Chardon, Adams, too, began keeping a legal commonplace book inspired by Locke’s model.54 Indeed, Locke proved to be a constant companion and authority figure for Adams. Writing to his friend Jonathan Sewell in 1760 about why their age was superior to Cicero’s in ancient Rome, Adams sang the philosopher’s praises: In Metaphysicks, Mr. Locke, directed by my Lord Bacon, has steered his Course into the unenlightened Regions of the human Mind, and like Columbus has discovered a new World. A World whose soil is deep and

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strong producing Rank and unwholesome Weeds as well as wholesome fruits and flowers; a World that is incumbered with unprofitable Brambles, as well as stored with useful Trees; and infested with motly Savages; as well as capable of furnishing civilized Inhabitants; he has shewn us by what Cultivation, these Weeds may be Extirmined and the fruits raised; the Brambles removed as well as the Trees grubbed; the savages destroyd, as well as the civil People increased.55

Given what Adams says about Locke’s value for unpacking invalid assumptions, it is notably ironic that, at the same time he was arguing that Locke’s writings marked a key point of separation between ancient Rome and eighteenth-­century Massachusetts, Adams allowed his own assumptions about Native Americans to stand unchallenged. Metaphors like these, tangled with references to the “civilized” and “nat­ ural” worlds, likely enhanced Locke’s significance for Adams as he embarked on what would be a long and successful career in law, politics, and government. Across the 1760s and 1770s, Adams would take part in and bear witness to many of the most important events of the Revolutionary era, arguing legal cases in Massachusetts’s top courts, serving in his province’s House of Representatives and as a delegate to both Continental Congresses in Philadelphia, and offering forceful arguments in defense of “revolution-­principles” such as those offered by the triumvirate of Sidney, Harrington, and Locke.56 As he surveyed the tumultuous political landscape, Adams invoked “Sidney, Harrington, Locke, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, and Hoadly” to support his argument that “there is no good government but what is Republican,” as he put it in his pamphlet Thoughts on Government (1776).57 Adams never lost sight of Locke as a model for leading a republican and civic-­minded life. In October 1775, for example, Adams, who was then in Philadelphia as a delegate to Congress, found time, as he so often did, to write home to his wife, Abigail, about her role as mother and educator for their young children. “The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline,” Adams declared, “are truly sublime and astonishing.” “Newton and Locke,” he continued, “are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.” “It should be your care,” he concluded, “and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and



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creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”58 As it turned out, Adams had no cause for worry. Nor would his children want for opportunities for continual engagement with Locke’s ideas. In 1785, Abigail and John’s eldest son, John Quincy Adams, returned home from London (where he had been while his father served as minister to the Court of St. James’s) only to discover that if he wanted to gain acceptance into Harvard’s junior class, he would need to master Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Although a revolution now separated his arrival in Cambridge from that of his father decades earlier, much about the Harvard academic experience remained unchanged.59 To be sure, the library had new books, including new editions of Locke’s writings, thanks to the generosity of Thomas Hollis following a devastating library fire in 1764. And the curriculum included additional authors, such as Scottish common sense philosophers like Thomas Reid, whose An Inquiry into the Human Mind, On the Principles of Common Sense followed Locke’s Essay in the curriculum. But Locke’s exploration of the nature and limits of the human understanding (paired with Watts’s Logic, as discussed in chapter 1) still consumed the time and energy of the college’s students.60 Having been denied admission his first attempt, John Quincy solemnly admitted to his sister that, regarding his college preparation, “I have much more to do, than I had any Idea of.”61 After months of study and tutoring to bring him up to speed, he grew weary of Locke, noting that even “Guthrie’s Grammar”—­William Guthrie’s dry Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar (1770)—­was “at present a more entertaining study, than Locke.” Unlike the Essay, he observed, it did “not require so close application.”62 The young Adams’s toils paid off. On March 15, 1786, the eighteen-­ year-­old passed his entrance exams and joined the college’s junior class. The exam, he recounted, had gone well enough, and most questions he found within reach. John Quincy did admit, however (though only to himself ), that of “a considerable number” of questions regarding “Locke, on the Understanding,” he was able to answer only a “very few.”63 Although the young Adams, perhaps wisely, neglected to mention his lackluster performance on the Locke portion of his examination to his father, whose own devotion to Locke he knew, he did confirm his father’s estimation of Harvard as the finest place for him to study. Despite long days of study to pass the examinations, “take it all in all,” John Quincy allowed, “I am strongly confirmed, in your Opinion, that this University is upon a much better plan, than any I have seen in Europe.”64 Like his father before him, John Quincy Adams in the 1780s was learning

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from Locke how humans acquired knowledge about themselves and the external world. And the philosopher’s argument about the absence of innate ideas was satisfying, the younger Adams noted, because Locke “appears to reason in such a manner that I am very much inclined to think him right.” The “manner” of Locke’s reasoning would become only more familiar—­ perhaps too much so—­to Adams.65 He would complain, several months into his time at Harvard, that all his “reciting in Locke, is the most ridiculous of all.”66 He was more than eager for his studies of Locke’s Essay to end.67 John Adams would not have been sympathetic to his son’s complaint. Throughout his life, Adams Sr. was a devoted pupil of Locke’s metaphysics, primarily because he saw careful adherence to it as beneficial for both the individual and the state. When, for example, he recommended to his younger son, Charles, in the 1790s, a careful study of Locke’s “Chapter on the Abuse of Words,” the third book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it was because attention to Locke’s theory of language was in the public interest and would carry one down a path of “Virtue Honor and Knowledge.” “Read Mr Locks Chapter on the Abuse of Words and see if the Frauds and Knaveries there described do not too often decide the Spirit of popular Representation, and bestow the highest rewards” in the United States, Adams cautioned his son, reminding him that partisan faction and polemics had a great deal to do with “abuse of words” and (mis)applications of their meanings on the part of political rivals.68 As Adams was well aware, the uncertainties and imperfections of language had played important roles during the public debates over ratification of the Constitution in 1787 and 1788, and they continued to do so as tensions between Federalists and Anti-­ Federalists (and later Democratic-­Republican supporters of Jefferson) intensified during the 1790s.69 Adams’s devotion to Locke held steady throughout his life even as revisions, if not outright challenges, to the philosopher’s rationalist metaphysics advanced by Scottish philosophers became increasingly popular. While Adams came to hold the early volumes of Dugald Stewart’s work, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) and Outlines of Moral Philosophy (1793), in high regard, he never warmed to David Hume, due in large part to what he knew of Hume’s low opinion of Locke.70 Decades after the fact, Adams remained incensed by a story Benjamin Franklin had told him about Hume’s opinion of Locke as “the greatest Blockhead that ever existed.” When reminding his friend, the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, of this travesty in 1807, Adams grumbled that he still regarded “the opinion of this fastidious, insolent Scotchman [Hume], whose whole works are not



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worth John Locke’s chapter on the abuse of words,” as being nothing more than “an engine to batter down Locke’s Character in the Learned world.” Furthermore, that the philosopher was, by Adams’s assessment, a good Christian was certainly a quality not to be overlooked.71

: : : At this point in our story, it is necessary to address the elephants in the room: Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. A central myth of the American Revolution is that John Locke (who died in 1704) first gave life to American independence and then to the United States itself.72 We imagine Jefferson, in Philadelphia in 1776, quill poised, with Locke’s Second Treatise at hand, ready to compose the Declaration’s opening lines that there are “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”73 A decade later, with the Revolution won, we imagine Jefferson passing the pen to the framers of the Constitution, who built Locke into the foundations of the new nation. Incorrect in fact, this image is also wrong in spirit. It reads our modern understandings of Locke and his relevance back onto the past. If we are ever going to grasp the nature and extent of Locke’s importance in late-­eighteenth-­century America, we must acknowledge and come to terms with this irony: that it is entirely possible to write about Locke in the eighteenth century without mentioning the American founding documents or Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia, and it will be entirely impossible to write about Locke in the twentieth century without them. But because we all live in a post-­twentieth-­century world, the questions that animate the Lockean tales most familiar to Americans today—­particularly those about Jefferson and 1776—­are important to address before we leave the eighteenth century behind. So, was Locke Jefferson’s chief source for declaring American independence? Did the Second Treatise inspire independence? Did Locke, through Jefferson’s pen, give life to the United States? In a word, the answer is no. But there are several more nuanced things to say on the matter, all of which point to the simultaneous relevance and irrelevance of Locke to the defining moment of 1776, and the simultaneous relevance and irrelevance of 1776 to Locke’s (immediate) legacy in America.74 First, if we do nothing else, we must recognize how strange our present-­day questions about influence would have seemed to Jefferson and his contemporaries. Second, and relatedly, we must grasp that two things can be true at the same time: that Jefferson knew his Locke, and that his knowing Locke did not make the Declaration a “Lockean” document, in the way it would

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later come to be understood. In other words, the fact that Jefferson knew Locke and the Second Treatise does not mean that we should credit Locke for the ideas contained in the Declaration.75 Here’s why. No eighteenth-­century person with any sort of legal knowledge or understanding of the English constitution could have understood Locke—­no matter how great his authority—­as the source for ideas about either consent-­ based government (the idea of an “original contract”) or rights to life, liberty, and property, which Englishmen revered and to which American colonists time and again declared their allegiance. Ideas about an “original contract” between ruler and ruled that established the basis for a government among men—­which differed from Locke’s conception of a “social contract” where men leave the state of nature to form society—­not only predated Locke’s Second Treatise but also found clearer, more authoritative articulation in English and British constitutional legal sources that the founders and framers knew well.76 Even when settlers-­turned-­revolutionaries quoted and cited Locke’s words on consent, contract, and government—­directly, in ways Jefferson did not in 1776—­they understood, as one historian has observed, that Locke was providing commentary on and “defining an old constitutional doctrine, not promulgating something new.”77 Indeed, to think of Locke’s Second Treatise as providing any kind of political-­intellectual origin story for contract-­based government would have puzzled people in the eighteenth-­century colonies. And the same can be said for Locke’s (perceived) authority and influence on eighteenth-­century ideas about liberty and natural rights. Far from being understood as “Lockean,” these concepts were thought to lie at the heart of the English constitution itself.78 Furthermore, no eighteenth-­century person—­including its authors—­ would have understood the Declaration’s “pursuit of Happiness” as a substitution for, or translation of, Locke’s “property” in the Second Treatise.79 In the first place, as careful readers of Locke’s work on government know, Locke does not mention the popular tricolon “life, liberty, and property” anywhere in the Second Treatise.80 When he discusses the formation of political society for “the mutual Preservation of [its members’] Lives, Liberties and Estates,” he announces that he will call these rights—­all together—­“by the general Name, Property.”81 If the Declaration’s “pursuit of Happiness” was either intended to be, or understood as being, simply Locke’s “Property”—­ i.e., “Lives, Liberties and Estates”—­the opening of the Declaration of Independence would have been redundant: life, liberty, and (the pursuit of ) life, liberty and estate. In the second place, the word happiness as it appears in the Declaration



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has a very specific connotation that prevents it from meaning “property” in either Locke’s sense or a narrower sense of private ownership and wealth.82 In the Declaration, the word happiness is distinctively public in its meaning; it does not mean what happiness means today (or what it will mean any time after the eighteenth century): that is, “an emotional state of self-­ fulfillment and personal well-­being.”83 Rather, happiness as Jefferson used it was synonymous with public, social happiness resulting from a people’s well-­being—­their safety and security—­and their ability not as atomistic individuals but as a society to “judge whether or not a particular government made [them] happy” and either accept or reject it, accordingly.84 For these reasons, John Adams could speak of the science of politics as “the science of social happiness.”85 And when George Mason listed the “certain inherent natural rights” for the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776—­a document with which Jefferson and the Declaration’s other drafters were familiar—­he knew to separate the rights of “acquiring and possessing property” from those of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”86 In these ways, the Declaration’s “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” cannot be even a relatively loose Lockean translation, with the substitution of Locke’s “property” for Jefferson’s carefully chosen words: “the pursuit of Happiness.” These points are worth underscoring. To recite the “Lockean” origins of the Declaration and reference “Lockean” attachments to the protection of life, liberty, and property is to perpetuate a powerful—­and, for some, politically expedient—­myth. This is a myth that attaches the origins of the United States, as well as American ideas about the purpose of government, to capitalism, private property, and the individual pursuit (or accumulation) of wealth. It is also a myth that will become dominant and contested in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. But it is a construct that was unknown to eighteenth-­century Americans, even those who admired Locke’s work on government. For them, as for Locke’s many admirers who never read the Second Treatise, Locke’s authority and “knowing Locke” meant something quite different and had very different implications. None of this, as we have seen, is to say that Jefferson and his contemporaries did not know, read, admire, and/or disagree with Locke and any number of his works, including his Second Treatise. For years after 1776, Jefferson would regularly refer to Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton as “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.”87 But the Locke Jefferson and his contemporaries knew was an eighteenth-­century Locke, one who has been forgotten, brushed aside by weighty historiographical debates, calculated political maneuvers, and the simple passage of time.

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: : : Locke, then, cannot be understood as the inspiration for the American Revolution—­nor even as the inspiration for Jefferson’s specific contribution to declaring independence. Nor did independence suddenly transform Locke into a political philosopher. Americans did not, in other words, begin to equate Locke and his authority with his political writings. In fact, Locke’s political importance plummeted immediately after 1776. In library catalogs nationwide, Locke’s Two Treatises and Works (which contained the Two Treatises in volume 2 of the three-­volume editions most commonly held) remain conspicuously absent from subject headings related to politics and government.88 Citations of and references to Locke’s Two Treatises plummeted.89 And interested buyers proved scarce. At first glance, an uptick post-­1776 in booksellers’ advertisements for the Two Treatises might suggest increasing popularity. Closer examination, however, reveals an al­ together different story. When, for example, one Boston bookseller in 1779 advertised copies of a cheap pamphlet version of the Second Treatise, printed in 1773, he did so because it had not sold well and excess inventory remained.90 Insofar as Americans continued to read, use, and think about Locke’s political philosophy after 1776, they did so in ways that differed substantially from those of the pre-­Revolutionary period. William Blackstone, the famous English jurist, is an important figure for understanding Locke’s political legacy in late-­eighteenth-­century America. In his massive, four-­ volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–­69), Blackstone often drew attention to the practical limitations of Locke’s political writings, either offering revisions or explicitly noting places where Locke “carries his theory too far.”91 In so doing, he advanced three points salient to our story. First, he articulated an important distinction between political theory and political practice that would become increasingly important.92 Second, he associated Locke and the Two Treatises with the former in contradistinction to the latter. Third, he gave Locke’s status as a theoretical writer on politics a negative, or at least a significantly limited, valence. Before independence, Americans had generally rejected arguments along these lines. Consider, for example, Josiah Quincy Jr.’s reaction to Blackstone’s argument, in book 1 of the Commentaries, against Locke’s support for the “supreme power” of the people (rather than the supreme power of Parlia­ ment, as Blackstone understood it).93 “It must be owned,” Blackstone wrote, “that Mr. Locke, and other theoretical writers, have held that ‘there remains still inherent in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legisla-



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tive, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them: for when such trust is abused, it is thereby forfeited, and devolves to those who gave it.’ But however just this conclusion may be in theory, we cannot adopt it, nor argue from it, under any dispensation of government at present actually existing.”94 Quincy disagreed and indeed rejected the premise underlying Blackstone’s assertion. “Tamen quaere [But inquire],” Quincy wrote in the margin of his copy, “whether a conclusion can be just in theory, that will not bear adoption in practice.”95 In the years before 1776, denials that principles of government and their practical application could stand in opposition were common among American revolutionaries. In the second of his “Novanglus” letters, for example, John Adams denounced the British army officer Robert Prescott (writing as “the Veteran”) for having drawn a distinction—­like Blackstone’s—­between theoretically “noble” principles of government, such as those articulated by Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Sidney, and those applicable in “particular cases” of actual practice.96 This changed in 1776, after which politicians, commentators, and publicists increasingly accepted and elaborated distinctions between the theoretical principles of government and their practical application when it came to the forms and administration of government. Indeed, as Americans undertook the process of state-­building, they began to adopt renderings of Locke’s political authority, similar to and in some cases drawn from those of Blackstone, that had until recently been employed by advocates of imperial unity.97 Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphian polymath and friend of many Constitutional framers, got to the heart of the matter in 1777. “It is one thing to understand the principles, and another to understand the forms of government,” Rush explained. And it was the forms of government that were most “difficult and complicated.” “There is,” Rush declared, elaborating on the contrast, “the same difference between principles and forms in all other sciences. Who understood the principles of mechanics and optics better than Sir Isaac Newton? and yet Sir Isaac could not for his life have made a watch or a microscope.” “Mr. Locke,” Rush continued, “is an oracle as to the principles, Harrington and Montesquieu are oracles as to the forms of government.”98 In contrast to other writers, whose classifications sometimes varied, Locke continued to be classified as a theoretical writer on the principles of government throughout this period.99 In the decades after independence, the certainty and speed with which Americans associated Locke with the principles, rather than the forms or administration, of government is striking.100 To a certain degree, this can be

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explained by Blackstone’s growing transatlantic authority. His well-­known references to Locke’s theoretical, but not practical, value certainly influenced Americans’ renderings of Locke.101 But attention to Locke’s practical limitations was also the product of specifically American experiences. Observers quickly began identifying the newly formed United States as the first—­and only—­place to have put principles and theories of government, of the sort articulated by Locke and others, into practice. When, after independence, observers noted the parallels between the early state constitutions and works of theoretical writers on government, like Locke and Sidney, it was to emphasize the distinction between these articulations of the principles of government and the way Americans put them into practice.102 Their point was that in eighteenth-­century America, the best theories had been, in the best ways, “reduced to Practice,” as John Adams put it, writing of his own Massachusetts constitution of 1780.103 When lawyer James Wilson argued in support of ratifying the newly proposed United States Constitution before Pennsylvania’s state convention seven years later, he made a similar point. There was a great “truth,” Wilson declared, articulating the core tenet of popular sovereignty, that “the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable authority remains with the people.” It was in the United States that popular sovereignty was first realized, Wilson explained, noting that the “the practical recognition of this truth was reserved for the honor of this country.” “I recollect no constitution founded on this principle,” he pointed out, “but we have witnessed the improvement, and enjoy the happiness of seeing it carried into practice.” Wilson was not alone in his understanding of the many political improvements wrought by the successful culmination of the American Revolution. Nor was he alone in how he understood Locke’s place in the story. Regarding the people’s supreme power, Wilson asserted, “the great and penetrating mind of Locke seems to be the only one that pointed toward even the theory of this great truth.”104 For Wilson, the word “even” demarcated a vital distinction: what Locke, with his celebrated mind, had understood only in theory, Americans were realizing in practice. When it came to identifying the practical advancements in government wrought by the Revolution, Locke’s polyvalent authority meant that he served as a particularly important figure for drawing contrasts between what the American founders had achieved in actually creating a government and abstract theorizing about the best ways to do so. Even Thomas Jefferson, who generally viewed theoretical political reasoning more favorably than others, saw and made this distinction. Writing to his son-­in-­law, Thomas



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Mann Randolph Jr., in 1790, with suggestions for the best books on political subjects, Jefferson recommended works by Adam Smith and Montesquieu, and then concluded: “Locke’s little book on government is perfect as far as it goes. Descending from theory to practice there is no better book than the Federalist.”105 Taken on its own, the first part of Jefferson’s statement, implying the perfection of Locke’s work, is easy to misinterpret, especially through the lenses of later, twentieth-­century understandings of the relationship between Jefferson, Locke, and the symbolic significance of 1776. But read as Jefferson intended it, there was an important difference between theory and practice. This was, for Jefferson, a distinction best encapsulated by his description of Locke’s theoretical work on government—­perfect, but only “as far as it goes”—­compared to the practical Federalist, a text that, it deserves mention, nowhere references Locke by name.

: : : At the close of the eighteenth century, several aspects of Locke’s work on government, including those that had generated significant interest among revolutionaries of the 1760s and 1770s, came under close—­and often un­ favorable—­scrutiny.106 With growing interest in the new scientific approach to politics and government, tangible evidence—­derived from experience, as well as the study of past events—­became paramount. Lessons learned from experience—­old and new—­were considered more “scientifically” sound and valuable than (mere) philosophical speculations. As a result, Rush and others interested in advancing the “science of government” in the new United States emphasized the importance of proper instruction early on in schools (to teach the “facts” of historical experiences), as well as the importance of encouraging men to devote their whole lives to practicing politics, thereby acquiring and accumulating political experience.107 These were welcome recommendations for a new nation dedicated to, and counting on, the active and informed political participation of its people. According to their practitioners, these new, more scientific approaches to politics meant letting go of, and at times rejecting, older theories of government, including those of Locke, whose theories relied on two concepts—­ the state of nature and the social compact—­that were increasingly at odds with the new science of politics. Law professor James Kent’s critique of these concepts, presented to his students at Columbia College in New York in the 1790s, encapsulates what many in subsequent decades would identify and further elaborate as their major flaws.108 First, imagining a world without government was, Kent argued, a useless

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exercise “since no such state was intended by the wise Dispensations of Prov­ idence.”109 It was, simply put, ahistorical and not reality-­based. Second, Locke’s thought experiment promoted misunderstanding of both the origins of civil government and the relationship between society and government. Specifically, Kent dismissed the theory of a state of nature because it “seems necessarily to infer that the institution of civil society, was a matter of expediency, rather than the course of our original destination.” Readers may recall that this assessment matches James Otis Jr.’s rendering of Locke three decades earlier. Third, because he failed to recognize the naturalness of government, Locke inaccurately portrayed the relationship between natural rights and government. In Kent’s eyes, it was incorrect to infer “that we could attain” civil government “only on the hard condition of renouncing a portion of natural right.”110 Instead, he preferred Vermont Federalist Nathaniel Chipman’s argument that men are naturally suited for government and thus that joining together in civil government meant expanding the scope of one’s natural liberty rather than renouncing natural rights.111 If earlier eighteenth-­century Americans like Otis had found it in their interest to perform a bit of interpretive ballet around Locke and the preservation of natural rights in political societies—­ that is, reworking, rather than arguing against, Locke—­this was, in the final decade of the century, no longer necessary or of any interest.

: : : James Madison captured Locke’s status in the very early years of the new republic when, writing for the National Gazette in February 1792, he compared Locke’s accomplishments in the realm of the human mind with those of Montesquieu, who sought to understand the “science” of government. Whereas Locke, along with Newton, had “established immortal systems, the one [Newton] in matter, the other [Locke] in mind,” Montesquieu “was in his particular science what Bacon was in universal science” and, in his own way, “lifted the veil from the venerable errors which enslaved opinion, and pointed the way to those luminous truths of which he had but a glimpse himself.”112 Madison knew Locke’s work on government well. He had encountered it in his extracurricular reading at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey), as a bright, precocious student of John Witherspoon, and again as the First Continental Congress met in 1774.113 But the Two Treatises did not, in any way, define who Locke was for Madison, or for any number of his fellow Americans, in the late eighteenth century. Nor would it in the century to come.



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As men like Benjamin Rush and James Kent weighed the relevance of past political writers for their new scientific approaches to politics after independence, Locke’s primary identity in American intellectual life as a philosopher-­exemplar hardly changed or diminished. As commentators came to see the ways in which “the revolution in America has opened new avenues to the science of government” and, in the process, rendered vital parts of Locke’s political writings problematic, the effect on Locke’s overall status was marginal.114 Indeed, Locke’s authority as both a wise philosopher and a guide-­by-­the-­side for those interested in living a good life emerged from the turbulent times of the Revolutionary and founding eras unscathed, ready for what lay ahead.

3 Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States

I

n January 1814, at the start of another year at war with Britain, physician and naturalist David Hosack paid tribute to a hero of the Revolutionary age. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, noted physician, and Philadelphian civic leader had died the previous April, and Hosack was keen to commemorate his friend and colleague with a published account of his life. In it, he explored the sources of Rush’s intellectual prowess. And this, of course, brought him to Locke. It was thanks to Locke that Rush had achieved fame, Hosack emphasized, noting that in his youth the doctor had practiced “the same mode of acquiring knowledge” as that “which was recommended by Mr. Locke.” Even more specifically, Hosack underscored that Rush had early on “adopted” Locke’s “very manner of his commonplace book,” which he “daily continued to the last of his life.”1 In the coming decades, Rush would find himself in the company of other Americans fortunate, as it were, to have their lives memorialized as adhering closely to Locke’s instructions for living and learning. When South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun died in 1850, for example, he was eulogized as having in his youth “met with the immortal work of Locke on the Human Understanding.” Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,



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the eulogist emphasized, rescued the young Calhoun from intellectual isolation, creating for him “an atmosphere of thought in which his mind could freely breathe and expand its energies.”2 In a nation hurtling to civil war, whether Calhoun’s energies were to be embraced was far less certain than the role Locke played in their development. Celebrations such as these of Locke’s “immortal work”—­his Essay—­ harkened back to a time in the preceding century. But they embody equally well key features of Locke’s place in early national and antebellum American intellectual life. Indeed, Locke of the early-­to mid-­nineteenth century was similar to Locke of the eighteenth century in many respects. For example, Americans still recognized Locke, first and foremost, as author of the Essay, which formed the basis of his sterling philosophical reputation—­the “great boast of English philosophy,” as Edward Everett (later of Gettysburg oration fame) put it in 1824.3 They continued to find, in Locke’s exemplary life and method of commonplacing, models worthy of emulation. And even as some aspects of Locke’s educational proposals came to seem outdated, young Americans still found it impossible to escape lessons derived from (and attributed to) his recommendations. In other respects, however, Locke of the early-­to mid-­nineteenth century looks rather different. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, political circumstances both at home and abroad complicated the nature of Locke’s political authority and led Americans to think about his importance in new ways. In the first place, the successes of their revolution and subsequent state-­building project had shown (as they saw it) the benefits of government born from practical political experiences. In the second place, sobering reports of the revolution in France were showing (as they saw it) the dangers of governments born from abstract political theories. Accordingly, by the end of the eighteenth century, American commentators came to see political theory and political practice (and, more specifically, the experience of political practice) as not only different but often opposed. Furthermore, the opposition between theory and practice became increasingly salient in American political discourse. Against this backdrop, a new way of thinking about Locke emerged, one that construed Locke as a negative example. Without abandoning their overwhelmingly positive views of Locke overall, Americans increasingly emphasized his unsuccessful attempt to draft a set of “fundamental constitutions” for the English colony of Carolina in 1669 and interpreted it as an example of abstract political theorizing failing on their own shores.4 Seizing on Locke’s shortcomings “in practice,” they juxtaposed them with the

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philosopher’s celebrated reputation to argue that theories (no matter how good and no matter how wise their creators) could—­and, indeed, often did—­fail. At the same time, key aspects of Locke’s Two Treatises were coming to seem increasingly problematic. As we saw in the previous chapter, the theoretical foundations of Locke’s work—­i.e., thought experiments that were not based, in critics’ eyes, on any historical or scientific reality—­were becoming incongruous within an emerging discourse that valued arguments based on evidence gathered “scientifically,” from history and experience. Accordingly, Americans engaging with Locke’s political writings increasingly rejected the state of nature and the social contract, on the grounds that they were ahistorical, and emphasized the resulting limits of their practical applicability.5 This is not to say that the limitations of Locke’s Two Treatises always outweighed positive assessments of its contribution as a worthy text promoting a general spirit of liberty. When Americans marveled at the apparent absurdity of Locke’s attempt at practical governance, they did so by contrasting it with Locke’s reputation wholesale—­including his status both as a wise metaphysician and as a warm friend of liberty and defender of the same political principles they cherished most. Admiring references to Locke’s Two Treatises did not disappear from orations, periodicals, or other areas of public discourse in the early republic and antebellum periods.6 Rather, these references to Locke, which have in various ways received the most scholarly attention, do not capture the flavor, much less the totality or essence, of Locke’s authority in the United States at the time.7 They are but one thread—­and, moreover, an atypical one—­of a richer, more complex tapestry.

: : : In the nineteenth century, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding re­­ mained the primary basis for Locke’s nationwide authority.8 In 1805, Amer­ ican newspapers were outraged at reports from Spain “that the Inquisition have prohibited Locke on the Human Understanding,” one of the “best books in the English language.”9 In 1818, the Harper brothers’ decision to launch their new imprint, “J. & J. Harper” (later, Harper & Brothers), by publishing Locke’s Essay proved auspicious: observers noted that the Essay’s “name and success afforded a happy prognostic of their future career.”10 And in 1850, when President Millard Fillmore selected books for the first White House library, he included the Essay but no other works by Locke. When



Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States 61

another president, Abraham Lincoln, arrived in the White House in 1861, he would have been pleased to find the Essay in the White House Library. As his law partner William H. Herndon summed up Locke’s influence on Lincoln: “He adopted Locke’s notions as his system of mental philosophy, with some modifications to suit his own views.”11 Meanwhile, faculty at the nation’s colleges, both old and new, continued to draw on Locke’s Essay for their instruction in moral philosophy and metaphysics. At Harvard, adherence to Locke’s Essay—­and its Scottish interpretations—­was particularly pronounced and lasting. Students such as Edward Everett still “recited from it three times a day the four first days of the week; the recitation of Thursday afternoon being a review of the rest.” Like John Quincy Adams a quarter of a century earlier, Everett and his classmates “were expected to give the substance of the author’s remarks, but were at liberty to condense them, and to use [their] own words.”12 They were, in short, expected to apply Locke’s method of study to the philosopher’s own work. Locke’s continued prominence at Harvard into the middle part of the century was due specifically to the efforts of Francis Bowen, who taught at Harvard from the 1830s to 1889 and was awarded the Alford Professorship of Moral Philosophy in 1853.13 Early in his career, Bowen articulated a strong commitment to Locke’s philosophical approach, presenting the philosopher’s ideas and empirical methodology as standing in sharp contrast to a German (particularly Kantian) approach. In an article published in the Christian Examiner and General Review in 1837, Bowen offered what was a standard argument in favor of Locke as a resource for self-­cultivation: namely, that thinking about and thinking with Locke would produce particularly good effects. While, Bowen continued, the study of Locke’s philosophy would result in rational, calm, and deliberate thinking (and, it follows, action), “the study of [German] writings,” such as those of Immanuel Kant (1724–­1804), “tends to heat the imagination, and blind the judgment—­that it gives a dictatorial tone to the expression of opinion, and a harsh, imperious, and sometimes flippant manner to argumentative discussion.”14 For Bowen, the effects produced by reading Locke or Kant were of the utmost importance, regardless of one’s stance on the content of their metaphysics.15 In other New England circles, Locke’s metaphysical reputation fared less well. Among the most ardent and influential critiques of Locke’s Essay came from the Transcendentalists. Locke’s treatment in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller and then Ralph Waldo Emerson, is revealing. In the 1840s, The Dial regularly mounted attacks on

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the philosopher, arguing that his empiricist approach to knowledge—­which began, according to The Dial, “with the tacit assumption that we can know nothing but phenomena”—­led inexorably to skepticism and terrifying uncertainty, even concerning the existence of God.16 Fears that Locke’s philosophy could lead to skepticism were not new. But the Transcendentalists’ solution to the problems raised by Locke’s epistemological arguments, which asserted that sensory perception was necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, was a distinctively nineteenth-­ century one. They combined aspects of the German idealism Bowen had rejected with optimistic beliefs in an individual’s spirituality and ability to perceive the divine in everything.17 Emerson, for example, celebrated Kant for providing a way out of the metaphysical quagmire by revealing first “that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired,” and “that these were intuitions of the mind itself.” Kant, Emerson explained, termed these intuitions “Transcendental forms.”18 Several decades after The Dial’s first run, newspapers still explained “Transcendentalism” to readers by drawing contrasts between “Locke’s philosophical system,” and that of Kant, which, one paper noted, “is named transcendental.”19 Americans reading, reciting, or learning about Locke’s most famous work rarely encountered it unfiltered or unchallenged. In some circles, as we have seen, Kant proved a popular contrast to Locke. Others encountered Locke’s ideas as mediated by a new generation of Scots like Dugald Stewart; English theologians, particularly William Paley, whose work on moral philosophy was especially popular; and Continental European philosophers such as Victor Cousin, whose works inspired revised critiques of the materialism of Locke’s metaphysics.20 New textbooks of moral philosophy, including Francis Wayland’s The Elements of Moral Science (1835) and Thomas Brown’s Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820), also offered revisions to Locke’s system and rapidly made their way into college curricula.21 But even when more modern textbooks supplanted Locke’s work in the curriculum, faculty and their students did not—­indeed could not—­abandon Locke as a critical reference point and guide. Consider, for example, George Tucker, who elected to use Brown’s Lectures “by way of Text-­Book” for his moral philosophy courses at the newly founded University of Virginia (UVA) in 1825. Though Tucker’s lectures drew heavily—­too heavily, one unsatisfied student complained—­from Brown, Locke continued to play a central role. Indeed, Tucker justified his reliance on Brown by telling his students that they were encountering “the profoundest writer on the subject



Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States 63

since the days of Locke.”22 Notoriously insecure about teaching metaphysics and moral philosophy, Tucker knew he needed to understand Locke—­and convey an understanding of Locke to his students—­despite his decision to build his course around Brown.23 Accordingly, he borrowed the first two volumes of Locke’s Works (London, 1824)—­those which contained his Essay—­from the college library no fewer than three times during his first year at UVA.24 If his borrowing record is any indication, Tucker did not feel the same urgency with regard to Locke’s other writings, which he did not immediately check out, even though he also taught classes on topics to do with political economy and government. What students seem to have encountered in Tucker’s classroom was not a cutting-­edge philosopher pushing specific revisions to Locke’s metaphysics, but rather an insecure teacher desperate for help generating content for his lectures. Outside of college curricula, some of Locke’s educational ideas, such as his dismissal of public education in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, became increasingly incongruous in the growing and democratizing nation.25 Nevertheless, Locke continued to exert a profound influence on the ways in which Americans approached their studies, particularly in the early part of the century. From a very young age, they encountered aphorisms derived from Locke’s writings on the pursuit of good learning and good living, for example, “A taste of every sort of knowledge is necessary to form the mind, and is the only way to give the understanding its due improvement to the full extent of its capacity.”26 As young men and women, they were reminded by instructional manuals that “the chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time.”27 And reading Locke’s many “familiar letters” acquainted them with his skill at fostering friendships through communication, thereby encouraging them to become good correspondents themselves.28 Locke also played a prominent role in educational practices and materials that were targeted specifically to women. In elite families, young women were educated in grammar, manners, and the mental and moral faculties according to Locke’s model. They learned the “first principles” of the En­ glish language and Locke’s exemplary method of constructing a grammat­ ically correct sentence.29 And they were familiar enough with Locke and his approach to the acquisition of knowledge for the Reverend John Bennett to use Locke as a metaphor, alongside Isaac Newton, in his frequently published Letters to a Young Lady.30 Private academies for women, such as one near Augusta, Georgia, recognized that “teachers of Females, are recommended the frequent perusal of Miss More’s Strictures on Female Education”

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as well as “Edgeworth’s Practical Education,” referencing two works by British educational practitioners, Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More, that emphasized Locke’s educational authority and were published widely in the early-­nineteenth-­century United States.31 More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, for example, recommended that young women read “such strong meat as . . . some parts of Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding.”32 Locke’s reputation was grounded in the metaphysical contributions of his Essay, but the work was not the sole basis of Locke’s authority for early-­to-­mid-­nineteenth-­century Americans. As they had in the eighteenth century, educated men and women continued reading widely from Locke’s corpus, recognizing his authority on a broad range of topics. In matters of religion and scriptural analysis, his reputation remained particularly high.33 It was the combination of Locke’s theological writings and his well-­known later-­in-­life devotion to scriptural study that prompted renderings of Locke as a religious model, guide, and exemplar. As Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing observed, Locke had “carried into the interpretation of the Scriptures the same force of thought, as into the philosophy of the mind.”34 And Alexander Campbell, prolific religious author and editor of the Millennial Harbinger, made it a point to draw parallels between Locke’s and his own method of translating and interpreting the scriptures.35 As waves of religious awakening swept the nation, newspapers and instructional advice manuals regularly published Locke’s advice to read the holy scriptures in response to the question “what is the shortest and surest way for a young gentleman to attain to the true knowledge of the Christian religion?”36 In 1810, Albany’s newly established Bible and Common Prayer Book Society cited Locke as “an eminent scholar, who devoted” to the Bible “his most serious attention.”37 Locke’s reliance on scripture alone, rather than on any commentaries, allowed an editor of an early-­nineteenth-­ century edition of The Reasonableness of Christianity to label him decidedly as “Wise, virtuous, and celebrated.”38 “Even if he had not been the first metaphysician of any age,” likewise observed Boston Unitarian preacher and theologian Andrews Norton, prefacing a new edition of A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, “he would still be remembered as the first among the English theologians of his own age.” Norton, father of the more famous Charles Eliot Norton, knew Locke as “that great man” who “rendered the most important services to religion . . . and has contributed, perhaps more than any other individual, to give correct views respecting the proper method of studying the scriptures.”39



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: : : Across the early part of the nineteenth century, Locke’s American interlocutors continued to understand both the way they thought about the world and the way they ought to be in the world on the basis of his advice and example. Nowhere is this clearer than in their continued enthusiasm for his “new” method for keeping a commonplace book. “For facility of reference, and for general use, Mr. Locke’s method, which is well known, is at least equal, if not superior to any other,” explained one catalog that accompanied a circulating library in New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century.40 Self-­help author John Mason, whose work was published frequently in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, concurred, suggesting that the best way to attain knowledge of oneself was to “recur to the help of a common place book, according to Mr. Locke’s method; and review it once a year.”41 Americans wishing to follow such advice would not have lacked for options. Commonplace books on Locke’s model were widely available from both British and American publishers.42 Catherine Post, of New York, for instance, used a commonplace book, printed in London, that celebrated in its preface the fact that “ever since the days of Locke, there certainly has been no deficiency in Common Place Books after that great Author’s plan.”43 And Charles Francis Adams—­grandson of John Adams—­was but one of the many who relied on A Common Place Book Upon the Plan Recommended and Practised by John Locke, Esq., printed in Boston.44 These commonplace books based explicitly on Locke’s model soon had to compete with new and (ostensibly) improved methods of notetaking. Yet even when authors proposed their own schemes, they felt obliged to mention Locke’s name in explaining the nature of their plans’ improvements. Massachusetts minister John Todd’s Index Rerum (1833) was one particularly popular example.45 The Index Rerum, which burned through thirty-­ four editions by 1865, promised great rewards for its adopters. To justify abandoning Locke’s method, Todd noted that although “The Common-­ place Book of Locke is the only one that has come into much notice” in the United States, this was “not owing to any intrinsic merit which it possesses, but to its bearing his [Locke’s] own great name, and professing to be the result of his experience.”46 In his critique of Locke’s method, Todd had hit upon and articulated what others knew but did not always say: Locke’s authority was a product as much of his reputation, in name, character, and force of reasoning, as of the “intrinsic merit” of his proposals.

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Beyond their commonplacing practices, Americans, across the first half of the nineteenth century, also revered Locke as a guide for living well. This included following Locke’s example when it came to leisure activities and personal health.47 Locke remained, for instance, an authority on rejecting card games in favor of conversation. The lessons from one popular juvenile magazine’s “Anecdote of Mr. Locke” from 1802 were clear: Mr. Locke, having been introduced by Lord Shaftsbury to the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Halifax; these three noblemen, instead of conversing with the philosopher, as might naturally have been expected, on literary subjects, in a very short time sat down to cards. Mr. Locke, after looking on for some time, pulled out his pocket-­book, and began to write with great attention. One of the company, observing this, took the liberty of asking him what he was writing. ‘I am endeavouring,’ says Locke, ‘as far as possible, to profit by my present situation; for having waited with impatience for the honour of being in company with the greatest geniuses of the age, I thought I could do nothing better than to write down your conversation; and indeed, I have set down the substance of what you have said for this hour or two.’ This well-­timed ridicule had its desired effect; fully sensible of its force, they immediately quitted their play, and entered into a conversation more rational, and better suited to the dignity of their characters.48

This well-­known anecdote was used to caution young readers “never to play a single card” and provide them with an example of conduct that was virtuous, clever, and constructive.49 Nearly three decades later, “Locke on Cards” was still a popular addition to publications such as the New England Farmer & Horticultural Journal that wanted to stress the deleterious effects of card playing, or how “to a spectator of a card table, the insipid conversation of whist players is . . . disgusting.”50 Until 1829, what nineteenth-­century Americans knew of Locke was no different from what had been available to their eighteenth-­century counterparts. And the business of recounting anecdotes that revealed Locke’s distaste for cards and producing character sketches of the philosopher was largely a recycling act.51 With the publication of Lord Peter King’s Life of Locke, however, the situation changed, and readers hungry for more information about the “illustrious John Locke” could satisfy themselves with tantalizing—­or, rather, tantalizingly mundane—­pieces of new evidence regarding his life, character, and works.52 Thanks to King’s work, readers now



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had more “pleasing” examples “of the playfulness and good humor of the celebrated John Locke.”53 As its American reviewers noted, King’s work was a significant contribution to biographical knowledge of Locke’s life. Readers learned, for example, of Locke’s medical knowledge and education as a physician. Furthermore, King published extracts from, and alerted readers to the existence of, previously unknown manuscript material. These included drafts of the Essay—­the work that, as Boston’s Penny Magazine reminded its readers, “has given Locke an immortal name”—­as well as new correspondence between Locke and his friends, which revealed the character of “this admirable man” to be “one of the most beautiful and stainless that ever adorned human nature.”54 Across the country, Americans of all ages greeted the discovery of new Locke manuscripts and the arrival of a biography that utilized them with excitement.55 The publication of King’s biography was, after all, timely; it appeared just ahead of the two hundredth anniversary of Locke’s birth, an occasion celebrated across the United States in 1832 as “The anniversary of the birth of John Locke, the eminent author of the Essay on the Human Understanding.”56 And for years afterward, American periodicals recycled material from King’s biography and the new manuscripts for their curious readers. The Franklin Farmer, of Lexington, Kentucky, provides a typical example. In 1840, it reminded readers that “the Great Locke” was “not . . . ashamed to ask for information” from as wide a range of interlocutors as possible.57 Elsewhere, Americans enthusiastically embraced Locke’s creed—­newly printed—­that “it is man’s business to seek happiness and avoid misery.”58 Among those who found examples—­new and old—­of Locke’s exemplary character most useful were proponents of temperance, who exploited Locke’s well-­known commitments to moderation in support of their effort to make their towns and communities dry. In 1830, the Connecticut Courant offered up Locke’s “temperate mode of life” as the reason for “the increase of those intellectual powers, which gave birth to his incomparable work on the human understanding, his treatises on government and education, as well as his other writings, which do so much honor to his memory.”59 Another paper noted that “his common drink was water, to which he attributed the preservation of a naturally feeble constitution.”60 Others emphasized that the “remarkably abstemious” Locke was in good company: “When Newton wrote his celebrated treaties on optics,” reported the Connecticut Journal, “he used only vegetables and water.”61 Accounts such as these were quite right to point

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out Locke’s lifelong aversion to wine, despite his best efforts at studying viticulture. Perhaps conveniently, however, their authors remained unaware—­ or at least neglected to mention—­that for much of his life, Locke’s choice drink was not, in fact, water but beer.62

: : : In most respects, then, Locke served as a positive model, an exemplar and guide for virtuous living. When it came to matters of politics and government, however, he served a very different role—­that of a negative model, an example of what Americans should avoid: namely, a reliance on theory or abstract philosophy, rather than practice or experience. Beginning in the 1780s, Locke and what was his first and most direct “influence” in North America, his Fundamental Constitutions for the English colony of Carolina from 1669, came to be seen as exemplifying what was wrong with politics and statecraft done speculatively or unscientifically. And in the decades that followed, wariness of Locke’s political efforts—­both real and imagined—­ only intensified. All over the country, politicians, journalists, educators, lawyers, and ordinary observers of American life grappled with Locke’s political shortcomings and how to square them with the philosopher’s celebrated reputation overall. As Americans were well aware, Locke had never set foot on their continent. He was spared the harrowing voyage across the Atlantic—­a blessing, given his lifelong struggles with poor health, particularly asthma.63 Locke’s good fortune, however, was not that of Carolina—­the English colony that suffered the consequences of his failure at practical politics. Carolina was not spared Locke, or so many Americans argued, as they turned with surprising interest and intensity to Locke’s efforts at statecraft. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina comprised 120 briefly stated declarations, or laws, for the English colony of Carolina, which had been granted a charter from King Charles II in 1663. Taken together, they proposed a system of government intended to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy,” which placed all authority in the hands of the “lords proprietors” of the province.64 Landownership was aristocratic, guaranteeing a significant portion to the proprietors themselves.65 Indeed, the Constitutions established what was in essence a complex feudal system, complete with titles of nobility such as landgrave and cacique and markers of serfdom with labels such as leetman. Locke himself had been granted the title of “landgrave.”66 To the freemen settling in Carolina, they guaranteed freedom of religious belief—­but established Anglicanism, born of the Church of England, as the



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state religion—­as well as complete and entire sovereignty over their African slaves. Instead of being timeless or “fundamental,” however, the Constitutions proved entirely incompatible with the realities on the ground. The proprietors revised and altered them many times, producing and adopting new iterations as early as 1670. Versions of the Constitutions were sent to the colonial governors across the later seventeenth century but were never entirely implemented—­at least in part because what the proprietors envisioned (for example, a significantly weaker position of governor than what was already in place) proved unacceptable both to those already in the colony and to those considering immigrating there under the original charter.67 By the early eighteenth century, even a pretense of adhering to them was gone.68 Today, historians and political theorists debate the extent and significance of Locke’s involvement in the Fundamental Constitutions. Their works illuminate important questions regarding the extent to which English colonial efforts in places like Carolina influenced Locke’s other writings and whether Locke exemplifies the development of liberalism in tandem with imperialism and race-­based slavery.69 Generally speaking, however, these concerns about Locke’s efforts were not those of his eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century American interpreters. To be sure, they shared at least some of modern historians’ concerns—­namely, as David Armitage summarizes, that the Fundamental Constitutions codified nothing short of an “antidemocratic slave society” ruled by an aristocratic elite.70 By and large, however, earlier American critics’ fascination—­in equal parts horror and trepidation—­with Locke’s efforts at crafting a government for Carolina had less to do with specific proposals in Locke’s plan, good or bad (religious toleration, slavery, or a legislated oligarchy, for example) than with what the entire package revealed about the dangers of relying too much on abstract thinking for practical politics. For much of the eighteenth century, observers knew the Fundamental Constitutions as the work of Locke, and that he had written them at the request of one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had employed Locke as his personal secretary.71 They were printed under Locke’s name in 1720 and by 1751 had become part of his collected Works. Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, they garnered only limited attention and seemed unproblematic for Locke’s legacies. Benjamin Franklin, for example, positively referenced Locke’s involvement in the Carolina constitutions in marginal comments on Allan Ramsay’s Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government (1769).72

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During the early nineteenth century, commentators continued to recognize Locke as the author of the Fundamental Constitutions.73 Their evaluations of his efforts, however, became far more negative. As lawyer William Barton summarized in 1803, the Fundamental Constitutions were “the crude and monstrous scheme of government, framed by Mr. Locke.”74 A key text for understanding this reevaluation of the Fundamental Constitutions is John Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.75 Written while he was serving as foreign minister to the Court of St. James’s, it was published in three volumes and, as a whole, rebutted the French economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot’s criticisms of post-­Revolutionary American state-­building projects. The first volume, published in London in early 1787, comprised fifty-­five letters, the penultimate of which (letter 54) discussed Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions.76 The impact of Adams’s Defence—­and of letter 54, in particular—­was swift, intense, and lasting.77 It arrived in Philadelphia in time for the Constitutional Convention, where many participants in that summer’s deliberations read it with enthusiasm.78 By 1788, the first volume had been published in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.79 Within a few years it could be found on library shelves up and down the eastern seaboard.80 Furthermore, newspapers and other periodicals were quick to reprint selections from letter 54 for readers on both sides of the Atlantic.81 And by the end of the next year, historians were already citing Adams’s Defence while discussing the “operation and fate of Mr. Locke’s system” in Carolina.82 Adams’s discussion of Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions presented two themes that would, over the course of the following century, through repetition, refinement, and elaboration, come to define interpretations of not only Locke’s constitutional project but also his political thought overall. First, Adams used Locke as a particularly striking example of the fact (as he saw it) that having good theories of government did not necessarily result in the creation of good governments in practice. The example of “Mr. Locke,” and his “plan of legislation for Carolina,” Adams explained, showed that “a philosopher may . . . pursue his own enquiries into metaphysics to any length you please, may enter into the inmost recesses of the human mind, and make the noblest discoveries for the benefit of his species; nay, he may defend the principles of liberty and the rights of mankind, with great abilities and success; and after all, when called upon to produce a plan of legislation, he may astonish the world with a signal absurdity.”83 Following Adams’s lead, many of those engaging with Locke across the 1790s and early nineteenth century would wonder at how a philosopher as wise and as



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warm a defender of the “liberty and the rights of mankind” as he was could have failed so miserably when it came time to put his ideas into practice. Locke’s “signal absurdity” provided Adams with material for a second, related argument, one that would also become a touchstone for subsequent generations: good laws and good governments originated organically from the people and conditions on the ground, not abstractly or speculatively from the private study of a philosopher. Following David Hume’s assessment in his “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary,” Adams noted, tongue in cheek, that Locke “should have first created a new species of beings to govern, before he instituted such a government” as he had for Carolina.84 Both of the arguments Adams raised in the Defence were echoed across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, geographies dedicated to illuminating the origins of the new United States picked up on Adams’s discussion of Locke’s “signal absurdity.”85 In his Sketches of the Principles of Government (1793), Vermont Federalist Nathaniel Chipman suggested that if Locke had better understood “the administration of government,” he would not “have fallen into such impracticable absurdities, in his constitution of Carolina.”86 And in his Commentaries on American Law, published in 1826, New York jurist James Kent echoed Adams on Locke’s most “unwise” attempt at putting theory into practice, quoting directly from his Defence.87 Adams’s observation regarding Locke and the importance of self-­ government proved no less influential. When in 1817, Thomas Jefferson cited the “organisations of Locke” that were impractical for Carolina, he did so as a negative example that demonstrated, by contrast, the imperative of self-­governance.88 And those interested in both the United States Constitution and the many state constitutions used similar assessments of Locke’s failure in order to advance arguments that laws could not make a people but should instead originate from them. “Locke’s celebrated constitution of Carolina,” explained the American Jurist and Law Magazine in 1832, is a “lively memento of the singular preposterousness of attempting to form a people by laws.”89 Locke’s one attempt at actual constitutional creation served as a point of contrast with good constitutional creation—­of the kind practiced and enjoyed in the United States. Criticisms of Locke, such as these, did not go uncontested. Indeed, in at least one instance, a concerted effort was made to rescue Locke from what a Democratic-­Republican newspaper out of New York deemed faulty

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Federalist renderings of Locke’s failure.90 In two articles printed in October 1801, the American Citizen and General Advertiser steered its readers away from Adams and Chipman and aimed to rescue the philosopher’s political reputation by pointing readers to Locke’s other writings on government, namely, his Second Treatise. In their analyses of Locke’s failures, the piece argued, Adams and Chipman were wrong to derive broad lessons about the disadvantages of putting theory into practice. For the Carolina constitutions could not be interpreted as an example of the shortcomings of Locke’s philosophy—­whose excellence, the paper argued, was too often overlooked but undeniable, as it contained nothing less than “those principles on which the best parts of our federal constitution rest.” Rather, they should be attributed to the “radically bad” political principles of the colony’s proprietors. For the American Citizen and General Advertiser, incongruities between the Fundamental Constitutions and the Second Treatise were best interpreted as evidence that “the constitution he made . . . was not agreeable to his own ideas of civil polity.” Accordingly, they revealed not that there was tension between theory and practice but rather that bad ideas were, quite unsurprisingly, bad in practice. A better understanding of Locke’s own ideas about government, the paper argued, would show that the widely disseminated “doctrine of the incompatibility of theory, with practice,” was incorrect and, from the pens of power-­hungry Federalists like Adams and Chipman, amounted to a “monarchical declaration  .  .  . opposed to every argument in favor of political improvement” in the new United States.91 Ultimately, however, the efforts of the American Citizen and General Advertiser to disassociate Locke’s name both from his failure in Carolina and from claims about the failure of theory in practice gained little traction and proved unsuccessful. Instead, arguments that emphasized the theoretically sophisticated aspects of Locke’s system—­conflating the entirety of his philosophical efforts with the specific declarations of the Fundamental Constitutions—­to set up a contrast between the outcomes of abstract political theorizing (generally bad) and those of real political experience (generally good) grew in importance. Why was this so? Put simply, the French Revolution made the problems with Locke’s “signal absurdity” both more obvious and more urgent for American observers.92 When American newspapers shared reports of the events in France, they expressed concern that the ultimate outcome of the Revolution was too much in the hands of philosophers rather than practical politicians. Following 18 Brumaire, when the Abbé Sieyès drafted a new



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plan of government for France, ushering in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Consulate (1799–­1804), skeptical American newspapers made a direct connection between the philosophically inclined Sieyès and Locke. “It is to be feared,” reported the Carolina Gazette in 1800, that Sieyès “is too much of a philosopher to be a good practical politician.” “What may appear delightful in theory,” it reminded its readers, “often proves, if indeed practicable, very unsuccessful in operation.” As proof of this point, one need look no further, the paper explained, than to “Locke, whose mind explored every region of philosophical research, [and] was yet an incompetent politician.” “His theories evinced various and beautiful features,” the Gazette noted, “but their very excellences, being too refined for common application, were so many proofs of their inutility.”93

: : : Throughout the nineteenth century, discussions of Locke’s failure with the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina both intensified and diversified, spreading across the expanding country in a broad range of media, including orations, histories, and newspapers. Accordingly, Locke’s status as a negative example became not only a core feature of the philosopher’s legacy in the early national and antebellum decades, but also a core feature of American political thought. Across New England in the decades before the Civil War, the failure of Locke’s efforts in Carolina provided the single best example of the differences between, as one Fourth of July orator in Boston in 1852 put it, a government born of “theoretical legislation, however symmetrical its proportions” (bad), and “that which has the vital spirit of a people in it” (good).94 In this way, Locke’s plan of government for Americans served as a foil for the form of government eventually born from their country’s founding moment. It was a particularly useful foil precisely because of its physical connection to the North American continent. When the Boston lawyer George Hillard took the podium on the Fourth of July in 1835 to argue that “every nation has about as good a government as it deserves,” he made this point explicitly. “We need not go to France and point to those monstrous abortions of government” as evidence. “We may find them exemplified most strikingly in the history of a portion of our own country and in the labors of a philosopher ‘all-­compact’ of vigorous English sense—­I mean the illustrious John Locke.” Echoing John Adams half a century earlier, Hillard explained the origins of Locke’s plan of government for Carolina and offered the following assessment of its significance for his New England audience: “from its

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repugnancy to the tastes, feelings and opinions of the colonists,” Locke’s plan “was so signal a failure and was, from necessity, abandoned so soon, as to afford the strongest evidence of the incapacity of the wisest of men for legislating, in their closets, for the eager, impetuous crowds, that dwell in the out-­of-­door world and are hurrying to and fro, along the great thoroughfare of life.”95 With a pointed contrast to Locke legislating in his closet (private study), Hillard had managed to capture the spirit and energy of the New England way. Other orators invited to address community gatherings, like Fourth of July celebrations, painted detailed pictures of Locke as a speculative thinker out of touch with reality, and of a constitution imposed on, rather than born from, a people.96 Townspeople in Bangor, Maine, celebrating the Fourth of July in 1838, for example, listened as the day’s speaker, their local Unitarian minister Frederic Henry Hedge, described for them “bubble Constitutions, which burst as soon as blown,” which “Men of speculative minds, in all times, have loved to blow . . . for their own amusement.” “The English philosopher, Locke,” Hedge offered by way of evidence, “blew one for the people of South Carolina, with three orders of nobility, which they blew to pieces as soon as it was wafted to them.”97 Orators trying to rouse feelings of pride in the citizens of the young nation found in Locke’s attempt at putting theory into practice valuable lessons from the past for their present world. A slew of books about the nation’s history underscored the fruitfulness of such lessons from the past. With the notable exception of South Carolinian David Ramsay’s History of the United States (1816), early national histories published in the decades following the War of 1812 reliably discussed the significance of Locke’s failed constitutional attempt for Carolina. In fact, when Locke appeared in their pages, he did so in sections on the colonial Carolinas, rather than in discussions about the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, or Thomas Jefferson. Nineteenth-­century discussions of “Locke, as an American lawgiver,” as historian George Bancroft characterized him, presented almost formulaic renderings of Locke’s misguided attempt at statecraft: too complex, too removed from realities on the ground, Locke’s constitutions represented the chasm between theory and practice and offered a cogent reminder, through example, that Americans in the nineteenth century were still served better by relying on experience than on abstract ideas.98 Although they drew from and cited the same works in their discussions of the “constitution of Locke,” these early national histories were nonetheless each distinctive, providing, as it were, variations on a common theme.99 In



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his History of the United States, for example, New Hampshire politician and printer Salma Hale stressed Locke’s English context.100 He went to great lengths to demonstrate how what seventeenth-­century Englishmen—­who “then much read and admired” Locke’s political writings—­thought to be “wise” had proven to be utterly untenable in the New World. In so doing, he emphasized the divide not only between what seemed good in theory and what proved good in practice, but between what seemed “wise” to “English politicians” and what matched the “sentiments and habits of the people for whom it was prepared”—­i.e., Americans.101 In A Political and Civil History of the United States of America, Connecticut lawyer and historian Timothy Pitkin emphasized Locke’s disconnectedness from the real world, noting that Locke’s “theoretical and complex system of government, formed in the closet, was ill adapted to the circumstances and situation of a people settling in a wilderness.” Because it had been conceived in the “closet”—­that is, a space for study separated from the real world—­Locke’s constitution, Pitkin observed “was soon found, in some respects, impracticable, and in others, extremely inconvenient and oppressive.”102 By contrast, in The Annals of America, Abiel Holmes, minister of the First Church in Cambridge, seemed to echo the American Citizen and General Advertiser when he relieved Locke of some responsibility. Juxtaposing the 120 declarations with the contents of Locke’s other writings, including the “celebrated ‘Treatises of Government,’” Holmes revealed what he called incongruities, which suggested that the role played by the proprietors could not be overlooked. Ultimately, Holmes wanted to show that “were it not for the writings, by which his name is immortalized,” Locke would have been “consigned to oblivion” like the others involved in the Carolina project.103 In the early 1830s, however, new support for Locke’s involvement surfaced: a manuscript copy of the Fundamental Constitutions in Locke’s hand, with a facsimile of his “autograph” attached, that the collector Robert Gil­ mor Jr. of Baltimore, Maryland, deposited at the Charleston Library Society in 1833.104 Those keen to emphasize Locke’s role in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions were buoyed by the new evidence. Early in his sweeping, ten-­ volume History of the United States, George Bancroft, for example, noted the existence of the Charleston manuscript and used it as evidence to support his argument that Locke took pride in his involvement in the Fundamental Constitutions.105 Aside from establishing the Church of England as the colony’s state religion, Bancroft noted, the constitutions were “in harmony with the principles of his [Locke’s] philosophy, and with his theories on

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government.” While some “American writers have attempted to exonerate Locke from his share in the work which they condemn,” the Charleston manuscript demonstrated without a doubt that until “his late old age he preserved with care the evidence of his legislative labors, as a monument to his fame.”106 Bancroft’s assessment of Locke’s “legislative labors” was damning on several counts. He argued, for example, that “Locke forgot the fundamental principles of practical philosophy” and neglected the “prerogative of self-­ government.” Bancroft also emphasized the short duration of Locke’s constitutional project. Unlike William Penn’s framework of government for Pennsylvania, of which the “essential principles remain to this day without change,” Locke’s “designs . . . were abandoned in despair.”107 For Bancroft, the Fundamental Constitutions “merit[ed] attention” primarily because they were “the only continued attempt within the United States to connect political power with hereditary wealth.” Having “bowed his mighty understanding to the persuasive influence of Shaftesbury,” Bancroft complained, Locke “believed it possible to construct the future according to the forms of the past.”108 Surveying decades of writing on the topic for his midcentury History of the United States, George Tucker observed that “Locke has always been held responsible for the failure of this political experiment.” Locke’s efforts were, in his eyes, nothing less than a most “notable failure of speculative philosophy.”109 The irony of the failure of the philosopher’s ideas at the moment of their practical application surely would not have been lost on a man who had, as a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia, devoted the first months of his teaching career in the 1820s to understanding the contours of Locke’s metaphysics.

: : : For nineteenth-­century observers, Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions did more than offer insights into the depths of the American national story. They also provided important lessons for those interested in—­and concerned about—­current affairs. When John Quincy Adams, son of John and Abigail Adams and now president himself, faced criticism of his politics in the late 1820s, newspapers nationwide printed a comparison between the bookish Adams and Locke, who “stands as one among the finest scholars of his day, and was perhaps one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever existed, and yet . . . could not embody a code of laws fit to govern a British colony.” “Their aristocratic features,” the comparison noted, as a caution against Adams, “caused an insurrection.”110 “The most eminent theoretical



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politicians of modern times,” one New York newspaper in 1827 noted, referencing Locke with an excerpt from the diplomatist Alexander Hill Everett’s recent work on the Americas, “have not added much to their renown, by their attempts at actual legislation.”111 That same year, in the pages of the Daily National Intelligencer, two writers spent weeks debating the question of how the “brightest order of human intellect” is exhibited—­whether through action, writing, or some other endeavor. To weigh the respective merits of action and experience against thinking and theory, they juxtaposed Locke’s work on toleration and civil government with his plan of legislation for Carolina.112 From the Atlantic to the Pacific, commentators employed Locke’s perceived shortcomings to evaluate a range of current issues, ranging from “Indian removal” to territorial expansion to statehood. Sometimes the parallels were rhetorical more than anything else. During the administration of President Andrew Jackson, for example, newspapers drew comparisons between Locke’s plan for Carolina and “the plan for the removal of the Indians beyond the Mississippi.” Those who saw “Indian removal” as deeply flawed, “entirely visionary,” and lacking the “experience among men to sustain it,” as one widely disseminated article put it, used Locke as evidence that these sorts of visionary, speculative plans for governance not founded on actual experience were merely “chimerical.” According to their arguments, the “personal experience” of those Indian agents who saw that removal would “end in their destruction” was more valuable than any number of brilliant theories. To support the claim that “theoretical plans of government . . . have uniformly and utterly failed,” opponents pointed out that “So wise and able a man as Mr. Locke was totally incompetent, as the experiment proved, to form a government for an American colony.”113 For those concerned about the deleterious effects of “Indian removal,” Locke’s failure provided key evidence that experience—­not theory—­was sacrosanct. Territorial expansion and the inclusion of new states in the Union meanwhile ensured that sovereignty and self-­government remained contentious topics. And disagreements about the expansion of slavery as the United States pushed westward made the stakes even higher. When Virginia Dem­ ocrat Thomas H. Bayly took to the floor of the House of Representatives in May 1848 to argue against barring the expansion of slavery in the territories, he referenced the ineffectiveness of imposing constitutions on others compared with allowing governments and constitutions to emerge organically from the conditions and people on the ground. In doing so, he cited Locke as a helpful touchstone. Echoing what had become a rallying cry of

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pro-­slavery, states’ rights advocates in the Southern states, Bayly was troubled that the federal government had “performed the part of another Locke, and proposed constitutions in which the people of the Territories have acquiesced.”114 When it came to questions of legislating and managing the terri­tories’ domestic affairs, the United States government, in his estimation, would be best served by recognizing Locke as negative example and learning from his mistakes. On the other side of the continent, for those thinking about California’s new statehood in the early 1850s, Locke offered a useful point of contrast—­ both pro-­and retrospectively. Prospectively, a writer for San Francisco’s Daily Alta newspaper held Locke up as a negative example to illustrate, by contrast, what characteristics the new senator from California should have. The future senator “should possess as thorough and intimate a knowledge of this country and its wants, its capacities, resources, and modes of development as is possible: and he also should be practical in thought and action.” Just as “Locke could not make laws in England which would work in an American Colony, neither can great mental ability do for us what is absolutely necessary unless the metaphysical be tempered by the real, the argumentative be balanced by the actual.” “The speculative intellect” of the future senator, the piece continued, “in order to be of the right kind for us, must be capable of practical development and application.” For a man representing the Union’s newest state, Locke’s model demonstrated that brilliant ideas and theories were useless without the lessons of experience.115 Retrospectively, a decade after achieving statehood, at least one of California’s first senators was celebrated with a direct contrast to Locke that would have pleased the Daily Alta’s author. When David Broderick, the state’s junior senator and a former member of the California state constitutional convention died in 1859 (the result of an unfortunate duel), he was eulogized as having “formed one of those American constitutions and schemes of government which neither the genius of Locke nor the wisdom of Plato ever approached.” Instead, his colleague, New York representative Daniel Sickles, noted that Broderick and his peers who created the state of California’s government had relied on their own “practical wisdom” and “experience which they had gained on the Atlantic shores in the affairs of government.”116 While Locke’s scheme of government for Carolina was occasionally invoked alongside the impractical commonwealths (both actual and theoret­ ical) of other philosophers like Plato, James Harrington, or Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, it received significantly more attention from American commen­ tators. One reason for special interest in Locke’s failed experiment was the



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philosopher’s celebrated status in everyday American intellectual life—­some­­ thing not enjoyed to the same extent by others such as Harrington or even Plato. A second reason was Locke’s connection to Americans’ “own country,” as one observer put it.117 When an account of Locke’s life noted—­ somewhat unusually for the period—­the philosopher’s “special claims to the consideration of Americans, as a sufferer in the cause of liberty, and the advocate of those constitutional principles which justify our revolution,” it did not fail to note that Locke was “moreover, employed . . . in drawing up the fundamental constitution of Carolina.”118 For nineteenth-­century Amer­icans across the country, Locke’s sterling reputation and actual connection to the early settlement of an American colony made the stakes of his failure higher. Nowhere was this more the case than for people living in North and South Carolina.

: : : Generally speaking, there were three approaches that Carolinians and their Southern peers adopted when discussing the implications of Locke’s work for their particular situations. The first, no different from that of Northern commentators, was to point out Locke’s shortcomings and their deleterious effects. In 1818, Daniel Huger, chairman of the South Carolina Penal Code committee, used Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions—­“that memorable instance of the fallacy of human wisdom, when speculating upon laws and government, recorded in the early annals of our own country”—­to argue for the establishment of a penitentiary system on the grounds that experience, and not theory, “will ever prove the best source of wisdom and surest foundation of policy.”119 In March 1821, the editor of the Raleigh Register, and North-­Carolina Gazette republished a piece from the North American Review out of Boston, Massachusetts, because, he told his readers, the Review had, for once, done “justice” to the state of things in the Southern state.120 The reprinted article highlighted recent successes in North Carolina and offered an explanation for the state’s “slow improvement”—­one connected not to the constraints of a slave society and cotton-­based economy but instead to the shoddy political origins of the colony thanks to none other than John Locke and his creation, as the Review put it, of a “defective . . . government.” Locke, in short, was to some extent responsible for both North Carolina’s initial ills and their lasting consequence.121 A second approach was to celebrate that early Carolinians “obstinately set aside the philosophical intricacies of Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions, and would have nothing to do with them,” as Thomas Hanckel declared in

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1860.122 This approach, foregrounding the agency of Carolinians in rejecting Locke’s ill-­conceived plans, is exemplified earliest and best by South Carolina polymath historian David Ramsay. When Ramsay wrote his History of South Carolina (1809), he set out to rectify what he saw as inaccurate accounts of Locke’s influence on his home state. “The feeble and distracted state of the proprietary government was not, as has been erroneously represented, the effect of the speculative political theories of John Locke, introduced as the Constitution of South Carolina,” Ramsay argued. “Neither his fundamental constitutions nor their successive modifications by the proprietors, were at any time the law of the province or the rule of its government.” By distancing Locke’s speculative scheme from what actually took place on the ground in Carolina, Ramsay could happily applaud the good sense of his forebears in realizing that Locke’s plans “were wholly unsuitable and even impracticable for the immediate government of an infant colony” and in disregarding them.123 This separation, moreover, allowed Ramsay to emphasize a different relationship between Carolina’s settlers and the philosopher. The “celebrated” Locke, as Ramsay put it, had taught Carolinians the importance of trusting their own judgments rather than aimlessly following others.124 In short, they had the wherewithal to bask in the rays of Locke’s enlightening philosophies and—­due in large part to what they had learned from him—­at the same time entirely reject the Fundamental Constitutions.125 Prominent political economist Thomas Cooper adopted an approach similar to Ramsay’s. Cooper had initially struggled over the question of whether to include the Fundamental Constitutions in his compilation of the state’s statute laws in 1836. In the end, he decided to do so, “especially as the high reputation of the author renders it a document of legislation of much curiosity.” But he made sure his readers knew, from the outset, that they formed “no part of the laws of South Carolina.”126 In the end, Cooper’s decision to include Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions drew more attention than he may have liked. In a glowing review of the Statutes at Large of South Carolina published in American Jurist and Law Magazine, readers learned that Locke’s efforts in Carolina proved “if proof were necessary, how utterly incompetent are abstract politicians and speculative scholars, to construct a frame of government for man as he is.”127 A third approach to discussing Locke’s influence on the Carolinas explicitly used his work to justify race-­based slavery. In his attempt to rescue both Locke and the origins of the South Carolinian government, one commentator went so far as to claim that when Locke proposed a system of lords and landed nobility, he was looking ahead; he was predicting the eventual



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existence of South Carolina as a racially divided slave society. “In referring to these famous constitutions of Locke, I will venture to make a suggestion,” diplomat, politician, and historian William Henry Trescot explained in 1859. He told his South Carolina audience that Locke’s system of lords and leetmen (essentially serfs) was “absurd” and “revolting” when applied to those of the “Anglo-­Saxon” race. “But if we suppose that he looked forward to the application of these constitutions to a country peopled by two races—­one superior, the other inferior; one white, the other black; one master, the other slave—­is it not very possible that this was an ingenious provision by which he hoped in time to attach the laborer to the soil, to convert slavery into serfdom?”128 However useful such a (mis)rendering of Locke’s efforts could have been for Carolinians keen to link their past to Locke’s name, Trescot’s interpretation was the least common of the three approaches. More generally speaking, his desire to rescue Locke was shared by few Southerners, most of whom saw little value in the philosopher’s wider political corpus. Indeed, it was in the South, among those committed to justifying and defending the institution of slavery, where Locke and his speculative political project faced the most violent criticisms. In part, this was due to the direct connection that Carolinians, in particular, felt between their own past and the failure of the Fundamental Constitutions. There was also, however, another important factor at play. Locke threatened to undermine efforts to develop intellectual justifications for slavery because his most famous thought experiments—­the state of nature and social contract, articulated in the Second Treatise—­emphasized the idea (catastrophic to their pro-­slavery arguments) that men were born equal. At Virginia’s state constitutional convention of 1829–­30, for example, the lawyer Abel P. Upshur, later secretary of state under President John Tyler, urged Virginians to “go for experience and practicality, and disdain ‘speculative systems’” of natural rights and social contract theorizing. As Upshur saw it, Virginians—­and Americans, for that matter—­did not need Locke’s theory of private property (as an artificial construct) to justify what was, in his eyes, natural and had existed in Virginia long before Locke put quill to parchment. This was an argument inextricably connected to a defense of slavery; by property, Upshur meant human chattel as well.129 In the following decades, Southern intellectual heavyweights including John C. Calhoun, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and George Fitzhugh—­most famously in Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857)—­would advance sim­ ilar arguments in favor of adopting “what history and experience had tested” rather than “a priori speculations.”130

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At the College of William and Mary, students in Professor Henry Augustine Washington’s lectures on political economy and history in the late 1850s learned of their instructor’s conviction that “no Govt founded upon abstract principles or theory can maintain itself.”131 As the nation stood on the brink of civil war, the question of whether the United States Constitution was a document in the same speculative genre as Locke’s plan for Carolina or a product of experience gained through practice was a point of debate for those questioning the durability of the Union itself.132 As will become clear in the next chapter, concern about the foundations of Locke’s political thought was not, by any means, a feature of Southern thought alone. It was a feature of political thinking nationwide. In the context of growing interest in a new science of government—­what would, over the course of the later nineteenth century, become a full-­fledged discipline of political science—­Locke’s willingness to work from what were seen as philosophical abstractions relegated him to a past realm of political theory, not a present realm of practical significance. By the end of the nineteenth century, as we will see, Locke increasingly became a historical figure rather than a useful intellectual companion—­someone who, although still interesting to think about, was no longer useful to think with. Americans of the nineteenth century—­even those who saw Locke as an ally in promoting liberty, equality, and natural rights—­took pride in their ability to do what Locke had failed to achieve in government: to realize practical outcomes, not only theoretical beginnings. They found in works by the eighteenth-­century English jurist William Blackstone and later American writers like James Kent, Joseph Story, and Francis Lieber intellectual and legal defenses of, for example, private property that were more relevant and more useful than “cobweb theories” like those of the Second Treatise.133 And they found in their own state constitutions practical examples of men coming together to create governments of the sort Locke had only imagined.134 They shared the opinion of Francis Lieber, first-­ever professor of political science in the United States, who regarded Locke as a man who “expresses the view which is almost always taken by philosophers who stop short with theory and do not add the necessary considerations of the statesman and friend of practical liberty.”135

: : : For generations intimately familiar with Locke as a model and moral exemplar, the ironies of the philosopher’s “stopping short with theory” were all the more obvious, all the more poignant and significant, given the emphasis



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generally placed on the symbiotic relationship between Locke’s personal experiences and his metaphysical, religious, and instructional writings. And the irony deepens once we recognize the extent to which Locke’s utility as a negative example (of speculative politics) relied on his overall status as a positive exemplar (for living a virtuous life). Seen another way, however, what nineteenth-­century Americans were doing in assessing Locke’s polit­ ical relevance was not ironic at all. They were simply turning Locke’s empirical metaphysics back on the man himself. Why should they follow speculations when, as most believed, the best way to find the answers they needed was to gather empirical evidence and analyze it for themselves? Locke’s own Essay had, after all, taught them to value knowledge derived from their sensory experiences of the world around them. For the time being, many were comfortable squaring Locke’s moral authority as exemplar with his political shortcomings. But just how far did—­and could—­the authority of the learned, wise, and great Mr. Locke extend? This very question would become only more urgent as the nineteenth century pressed forward, and Locke’s once inviolable status in American intellectual life and culture itself came into question.

4 Locke Becomes Historical

I

n 1865, with the Civil War barely over and the United States facing the daunting task of national reconstruction, Colman’s Rural World and Valley Farmer—­a periodical for farmers and their families out of St. Louis, Missouri—­printed an article on John Locke. “Great as were Locke’s services to his country and to the cause of civil and religious liberty,” the piece explained, “his fame rests on the ‘Essay on the Understanding,’ which marks an epoch in the history of philosophy.”1 For readers at the time, this assessment of the seventeenth-­century philosopher was a familiar one, and it will be familiar to readers of this book who have followed Locke’s trajectory over the preceding chapters. The article’s printing, however, marks a period of transition and change rather than continuity for Locke’s American legacies. In the decades following 1865, as Reconstruction gave way to the Gilded Age, Locke’s role in American intellectual life and culture fractured and diminished to such a degree that by 1900, he teetered, if not on the brink of obscurity, at least on the precipice of irrelevance. The late nineteenth century reveals intellectual worlds in flux. Published in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had upended ways of thinking that were centuries old. From that point



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on, the natural world and almost every aspect of social, political, and economic life could be conceptualized in terms of survival, adaptation, struggle, change, and progress.2 These were concepts the Civil War, too, had imbued with new meaning. And the staggering losses Americans had inflicted on each other—­more than half a million young men dead—­led many to question the role of religion both in their private lives and in American society as a whole. After the war came a period of stunning growth and regeneration. Cities boomed, population soared, and these developments raised new and important questions about the foundations of the individual self, society, corporations, and the state that professional philosophers and social scientists rushed to address.3 As Locke’s legacies confronted these “raging waters of modernity,” they faltered, seeming—­to many who met them—­increasingly poor navigational aids.4 Locke still played a role in Gilded Age America. But it was an increasingly peripheral one. The unsteadiness of his late-­nineteenth-­century status reflects the intellectual tumult and uncertainties of the age. His trajectory also demonstrates the extent to which, even in an age of fast-­paced change, old preoccupations died hard. Three observations encapsulate the evolution of Locke’s status in the United States in the three decades after the Civil War. First, details of Locke’s life and character still found eager audiences, as evidenced by the warm re­­ ception of Englishman Henry Richard Fox Bourne’s 1876 biography of Locke. But (and this is the second point) the percentage of the population to whom Locke’s life mattered was shrinking, as Locke’s audience both narrowed and concentrated, coming to encompass chiefly those affiliated—­usually as students or teachers—­with the academy or academic-­adjacent professional societies. For those who did engage with Locke, moreover, their connection with the philosopher and his ideas became a feature of a particular moment from their (higher) education rather than a feature of their entire lives, as had been the case until this point. Finally, Locke’s role inside colleges and universities was changing, and in many respects receding as well. Thanks to a confluence of factors, which included the last stand of Scottish common sense philosophy and increasing sympathy toward German idealism among a new generation of professional philosophers, Locke’s empirical philosophy (contained primarily in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) faced increasingly sustained and widespread criticism. Meanwhile, his contributions to the area of government (particularly his Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and Two Treatises of Government) were relegated to a corpus of past political writings that were recognized as historically interesting

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but not considered to be particularly relevant for (or up to the standards of ) the rapidly professionalizing social-­scientific disciplines. Taken together, these developments circumscribed—­rather than expanded—­the scope of Locke’s authority in the subject areas of philosophy, psychology, history, and politics. Locke’s waning authority resulted, in part, from the changing historical circumstances in which Americans encountered him. They now faced the legacies of a man born during the reign of Charles I as they tried to come to terms with a world of electricity and railroads. In the first place, there was simply more time and space separating Locke from his interlocutors. What had seemed to Americans living in Locke’s shadow pioneering innovations in childrearing, commonplacing, and scriptural analysis now seemed not only old but also, having undergone more than a century and a half of revision and refiguring, tired and less compelling. The same was the case for his best-­known work, the Essay, which had cemented Locke’s reputation for earlier generations but now formed the intellectual foundations for schools of philosophy themselves no longer cutting-­edge. For philosophers such as Francis Bowen (now an old man) and William James, there were now not only Humean and Kantian challenges to Locke but also more recent ones that viewed these earlier challenges to Locke’s atomistic materialism through the lens of nineteenth-­century philosophers such as Sir William Hamilton.5 Meanwhile newer, and perhaps more relevant, authorities like Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, famous for his Democracy in America (1835, 1840), presented appealing alternatives to Locke as models that young men of the nineteenth century could utilize for self-­cultivation.6 The future historian Henry Adams, for example, exclaimed in a letter to his brother in the early 1860s, “I have learned to think De Tocqueville my model, and I study his life and works as the Gospel of my private religion.”7 Locke’s waning authority was also the result of developments—­both structural and intellectual—­in the history of higher education, transatlantic philosophy, and political science that will be familiar to students of postbellum intellectual history. Following the Civil War, older liberal arts colleges that focused on teaching undergraduates now found their status challenged by research universities under the leadership of administrators rather than ministers. These new universities increasingly trained students in doctoral research programs and professional schools. And they valued disciplinary specialization and knowledge production, rather than merely dissemination.8 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, students had generally followed a fixed curriculum that included, for example, classical languages,

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mathematics, theology, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. By the end of the nineteenth century, students were taking more specialized classes offered by professional practitioners with increasingly specific areas of expertise. For Locke’s place in American higher education, this meant that he was funneled into ever more specialized courses taught by ever more specialized instructors to an ever more particular subset of the student body. Consequently, unless they chose to enroll in a course on seventeenth-­century English philosophy, American university students in the 1880s would have found their predecessors’ intimate knowledge of Locke and his Essay both unfamiliar and perplexing. In the discipline of philosophy, a new generation of professional philosophers sought to move past “misleading dichotomies” separating, for example, the subject perceiving and the object being perceived, which had undergirded centuries of philosophical advancements. They developed new approaches to ways of knowing—­chief among them, Pragmatism—­that built on but moved far beyond Locke’s empiricism.9 For these philosophers, doing high-­stakes battle with Locke’s ontological and epistemological commitments was increasingly less central to making positive claims about the nature, scope, and limits of knowledge. Locke and his Essay had come to seem out of date, useful only to mark an important “epoch,” as the piece printed in Colman’s Rural World had put it, in the history of philosophy. Similar changes were underway in the emerging social-­scientific disciplines. Inside and outside the academy, historians and political scientists were developing new investigative tools to tackle important questions regarding politics, society, and the state. For these social scientists, Locke functioned primarily as an antimodel—­an example of antiquated approaches that were too prescriptive, insufficiently empirical, and lacking in methodological rigor. As part and parcel of a past identified as critical for their own understandings of these developments, however, Locke found a specific, if limited, historical role to play.

: : : In 1876, Harper & Brothers—­the now-­prominent New York publishing house whose inaugural publication, as readers may recall, had been the Essay—­pub­ lished a new biography of Locke by Henry Richard Fox Bourne, a Jamaican-­ born English newspaperman.10 Bourne’s two-­volume exegesis of the philos­ opher’s life satisfied demands on both sides of the Atlantic for a more carefully researched replacement for Lord King’s rather conjectural biography from 1829. Bourne strove for complete historical accuracy and documented

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Locke’s life in sometimes painstaking detail.11 Drawing from his extensive work in libraries at Oxford, the Public Record Office and British Museum in London, and the Remonstrants’ Library in Amsterdam, Bourne packed his footnotes with primary-­source citations and commentary that were lacking in both King’s account and earlier popular character sketches of the philos­ opher.12 Indeed, his interest in Locke—­which may have emerged while he was studying English literature with Henry Morley (a later editor of Locke’s writings) in London in the 1850s—­was decidedly archival.13 It led him to uncover previously unknown and unpublished materials including correspondence and Locke’s Essay Concerning Toleration (1667). His Life of John Locke offered readers a full compendium of all his research to date. In the United States, the prominent North American Review took note, and in 1877 its editors praised Bourne for his thorough research. A literary notice, published in the Connecticut Courant to announce the biography’s publication, alerted readers to the importance of Bourne’s extensive primary-­source-­based research. It pointed out that Bourne had “access to state papers, foreign and domestic, to the MSS in the libraries of Oxford and the British Museum to private letters and papers inherited by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and to important papers preserved at Amsterdam.” The result of his investigations, the piece observed, was an account of Locke’s life that, as a well-­researched history should, contained “all that could be desired.”14 Bourne’s research also interested Americans because it helped explain Locke’s intellectual development and made him more accessible. These points harkened back to a centuries-­long fascination with the abstentious bache­ lor philosopher, but also contained new late-­nineteenth-­century flourishes that shed a different light on Locke’s life. For example, the humorous account Locke gave of his weeklong attempt at obtaining a pair of gloves while abroad “could pass,” the Courant’s notice determined, “for a fair specimen of exaggerated ‘American humor.’”15 Locke, in other words, still struck Americans as someone they could relate to, even though the seventeenth-­century world he inhabited differed so substantially from their own. Furthermore, Bourne’s evidence—­both biographical and contextual—­ furnished readers with ammunition for pointed comparisons between Locke and other past thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant. The North American Review, for example, emphasized how the Essay emerged from Locke’s active involvement in the turmoil and events of his day in England, while Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason developed out of his retreat into “the solitudes of Königsberg.” A second difference, the Review pointed out, was that while Kant was a professional philosopher, Locke was first and foremost a doctor



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and adviser to his patron and employer, the Earl of Shaftesbury, which meant he produced his great philosophical masterpieces in only the “few leisure hours” available to him. For Americans interested in the life experiences and thoughts of great philosophers, Kant, through such comparisons, acted as effective foil. Bourne’s vivid depiction of Locke’s humble relationship with Shaftesbury served, moreover, to secure his image as down-­to-­earth. “We cannot,” exclaimed the North American Review, “conceal our mirth and astonishment when we look back to see Locke, the great philosopher, the author of the imperishable essay, running bareheaded by the side of Shaftesbury’s coach.” Locke was no longer—­and perhaps never really had been—­the philosopher in his lofty or ivory tower, but, rather, the unassuming man “running bareheaded” and hard at work. The silver lining in Locke’s having performed “these multifarious and sometimes degrading duties” was that they produced the intellect that allowed him to cultivate his philosophy of human understanding.16 In the United States, Bourne’s biography proved influential as well as popular.17 For example, it inspired Peleg Emory Aldrich, a prominent Massachusetts lawyer, politician, and educator, to conduct a survey and report on Locke’s place in American college classrooms across the eighteenth and first three-­quarters of the nineteenth centuries. Apparently not overburdened by his duties as an associate justice on the Superior Court of Massachusetts, Aldrich spent months writing to presidents and ex-­presidents of colleges along the eastern seaboard to ascertain Locke’s place in their curricula over the preceding century. The result of his research was clear: in 1879, Aldrich could confidently assert that in the United States, Locke’s “essay concerning human understanding is undoubtedly the best known of all his works, and is that upon which his fame as a philosopher and metaphysician mainly rests.”18 With his Essay, Aldrich declared, the English philosopher had done more than anyone else “to rectify prejudice, to undermine established error, to diffuse a just mode of thinking, to excite a fearless spirit of inquiry,” all the while adhering to “the boundaries which nature has prescribed to the human understanding.”19 Aldrich’s retrospective report captures the pervasive influence of Locke and his Essay on American intellectual life up until his own time. Even as he compiled it, however, change was in the air. Locke’s roles in both college curricula and American intellectual life more broadly were in a state of flux. And in the decades that followed, they would experience fundamental transformations. For late-­nineteenth-­ century Americans, Locke’s philosophy was becoming less and less relevant

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to questions about the present or future and more important for what it said about Locke’s place in the historical development of philosophy.

: : : Late-­nineteenth-­century universities often published notes for private circulation among their students. Intended to combat the perceived problem that, given “the bustle of the class-­room,” the specificity of professor’s ideas and their “accuracy of expression” may be lost to students trying to keep up, these notes offer historians today a useful window into faculty expectations regarding student learning outcomes.20 A set of notes published for Prince­ton University philosophy students in 1882 captures nineteenth-­century Amer­ icans’ ambivalence regarding Locke’s significance, particularly as it related to the philosophical ideas found in the Essay. What did Princeton’s philosophy faculty, led by the university’s president, James McCosh, want students studying Locke to know about him? In terms of volume, the answer was a lot. Students were expected to know a great deal about Locke’s upbringing and life—­far more than they were expected to know about other philosophers, such as Descartes or Hume. For example, they learned of the pleasures Locke derived simply from sitting under a mulberry tree as a student at Oxford; they came to know him as a man who recounted his life’s travails with a “good deal of humor”; and they learned that “he never had a profession, but applied himself to the study of the physical sciences, and especially of medicine.” Locke’s personal writings were, according to the notes, “exceedingly amusing, animated, and gay.”21 Locke’s involvement in the world outside the academy (as reviews of Bourne had also noted) was seen as noteworthy by those studying his contributions to philosophy. Locke, despite his Oxford education, was, it seemed, a product of his environment, not of the academy itself. This fact, students learned, was discernable from the very way in which Locke conveyed his ideas in writing: his style “was rather that of a man educated in and by the world; not that of a student, but plain and conversational.”22 Princeton undergraduates were also expected to take into account the “personal appearance and character” of a philosopher such as Locke before acquainting themselves with the philosophical ideas themselves. Like their peers at colleges and universities across the country, they filled their notebooks with doodles of facial profiles (complete with warts, in many cases) that demonstrate the nineteenth-­century obsession with physiognomy—­ especially the widespread practice of judging people’s character through examination of their facial features. In the case of Locke, students noted the

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“prominence of bones and features” and “an expression showing decision.” Such facial features, they learned, indicate honesty and that “he thinks for self ”—­inclination toward truth and self-­reliance being two of the most admirable qualities individuals could possess. Locke garnered high praise, as young scholars came to realize that “his personal character seems to have been one of those which approach perfection as nearly as can be expected from our fallible and imperfect nature.”23 As they digested this information concerning the philosopher’s life and character, students encountered the arguments put forward in his Essay. They learned to celebrate Locke’s “spirit of independence; his candor and love of truth,” to acknowledge that his method of observation was the correct one, and to remember that “he has important remarks on every metaphysical subject.”24 But students also learned that they could do better than Locke by critically engaging with his imperfections. With this goal in mind, the printed notes warned students that Locke’s specific epistemological shortcomings—­his disregard for “the feelings and moral power,” for example—­emerged because “he was a little too self-­dependent.”25 In short, Princeton undergraduates learned that despite his many “excellencies,” Locke had perhaps been “too confident in his own powers.”26 From such assessments of Locke’s character flaws—­overconfidence and self-­assuredness, in particular—­students discovered that Locke’s entire approach to human understanding was, in fact, backwards. “He begins with too resolute an intention to derive all our ideas from sensation and reflection,” the critique went, nearly accusing Locke of the kind of a priori beliefs his Essay had sought to banish. “He begins with his theory and tries to establish it by facts,” the department’s notes explained, “a faulty method of procedure” for those familiar with a more scientifically sound approach to knowledge acquisition in the nineteenth century.27 That details of Locke’s life and character could be used to a wide variety of ends was not new. Their application, however, to sustained and fundamental critiques of his epistemology (a nineteenth-­century neologism) was new. Put another way, Locke’s reputation as author of the “imperishable” Essay, as the North American Review had put it, was stable, but the authority it afforded him, at Princeton and across the sweep of American intellectual life, to serve as a relevant contemporary thinker was decidedly less so.

: : : One important bit of context for understanding Locke’s place in Prince­ ton’s philosophy department—­and others across the country—­was the

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proliferation of textbooks that, by the 1860s, had largely supplanted the original text of Locke’s Essay in the American college curriculum.28 This was the case at both older and newer institutions, including those established following the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. At one early land-­grant school, the University of Kentucky founded in 1865, for example, juniors and seniors studying philosophy learned about Locke’s ideas from lectures and textbooks, which included Amherst professor Joseph Haven’s often-­ reprinted Mental Philosophy, first published in 1857, and Princeton Theological Seminary Principal Archibald Alexander’s Outlines of Moral Science, originally published in 1852 but also reissued across the 1860s.29 Elsewhere, textbooks by Brown University philosopher Francis Wayland remained influential. At Princeton in the 1860s, for example, juniors were asked, based not—­or, at least, not necessarily—­on their reading of Locke’s Essay but on their study of Wayland’s Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (1854), to “state Locke’s doctrine in regard to a priori truths, and innate ideas” and “how far we have innate ideas,” and to extrapolate “the moral and religious consequences of his system,” which were, they had learned from Wayland, both wanting and problematic.30 Textbooks like these shaped how students encountered Locke’s theory of human understanding. And their widespread adoption meant that with increasing frequency students encountered Locke’s ideas in interpretive summaries, rather than by reading the Essay itself as they had been doing since the eighteenth century.31 To help us understand Locke’s trajectory in the teaching (as well as the practice and content) of professional philosophy, we need look no further than the works of Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, a follower of Scottish common sense school philosopher Thomas Reid. In his works, including the four-­volume Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1858/60), he sought to unite the arguments of Locke and Kant as a way to overcome problems of skepticism and nihilism that had been introduced in the eighteenth century by the philosopher David Hume. Hamilton’s work presented a new kind of philosophical realism that blended common sense epistemology with a Kantian theory of knowledge, and it quickly became popular in the United States.32 Within a decade, however, the kind of balance Hamilton had struck between Scottish realism and German idealism was disrupted by a publication from one of Britain’s leading minds: the philosopher John Stuart Mill. In a scathing critique of Hamilton, published as An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), Mill, in the words of historian James T. Kloppenberg, “brought down the curtain on Scottish realism.”33 Hamilton’s former student and fellow Scotsman James McCosh, who was soon to assume the presidency of Princeton University, tried to salvage



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his mentor’s argument in An Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy (1866), but his muddled efforts did little to reinvigorate common sense philosophy. In fact, McCosh himself would come to embrace German idealism by the end of his two-­decade tenure as Princeton’s president.34 As a convert from Scottish common sense philosophy to German idealism, McCosh exemplifies the Teutonic—­and tectonic—­shift in American philosophy during the late nineteenth century. He also provides a useful point of entry to discuss the gradual abandonment during this same period of Locke’s empiricism. For McCosh, who was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1811, Locke represented a moment in British—­taken to include English and Scottish—­phi­ losophy that needed to be overcome. In 1867, the year before he left Belfast, where he was professor of metaphysics and logic at Queen’s College, for Princeton, McCosh delivered a paper entitled “Present State of Moral Philos­ ophy in Great Britain in Relation to Theology” for the triennial Ecumenical Meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in Amsterdam. In it, he endeavored to show his audience that although there were a number of “false notions” circulating in Great Britain at the time, he was optimistic about the future of British thought. This optimism, he explained, stemmed from his observation that “the English mind has always been peculiarly sensitive as to the prac­tical tendency of every philosophic doctrine.” McCosh ended his speech with attention to the excellent corrections British thinkers had made to Locke’s doctrines—­particularly as a result of their concern for moral good. “It was in reference to its bearing on morals, that British thinkers . . . first saw the defects of the philosophy of Locke,” McCosh observed.35 After arriving at Princeton in 1868, McCosh oversaw the reorganization of philosophy into subdisciplines of ethics, logic, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and psychology. One in a long line of college presidents whose role was that of intellectual spokesman for their communities, McCosh was president for twenty years.36 During this time, he participated in many of the most heated debates and conversations of the day about the relationship between Christianity and Darwin’s work on evolution, most famously with Charles Hodge of the Princeton Theological Seminary.37 His job also entailed a great deal of undergraduate instruction. In courses on psychology and the history of philosophy, McCosh taught the content of Locke’s Essay but showed little fondness for Locke’s epistemology. In his classes, Princeton undergraduates encountered clear “refu­ tation[s] of Locke” everywhere they looked.38 When, for example, students read Locke’s account of how humans acquired knowledge about time in the Essay, McCosh made it clear to his charges that they should “refute this.”39

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At the crux of Locke’s philosophy, McCosh explained to his students, was the argument that “the mind derives all its knowledge from sensation . . . and reflection.” This meant, according to McCosh, that Locke “represents the soul as a dark closet, into which light is let by these two openings”—­a mistaken, even “erroneous” notion, McCosh argued.40 And as students quickly learned, Locke’s “mistake evidently [lay] in his failing to have an accurate idea of the amount of knowledge given by the two faculties, to which he eagerly attributes all our knowledge.” The consequences of this mistake, according to McCosh, were less than ideal; before long, any good student of Locke’s psychology would soon recognize “the insuperable difficulties which everywhere beset the follower of the Lockeian theory.”41 McCosh took issue with the notion that all human knowledge and feeling had to arise either from experience of an external idea (or object) or from internal reflection on an idea that already existed in one’s memory. Where, he worried, was there room in Locke’s empirical epistemology for real moral knowledge? Under McCosh’s leadership, other Princeton professors helped students determine where Locke had faltered by providing their own critiques of his epistemology. Professor Lyman Hotchkiss Atwater, for instance, alerted his metaphysics students to what he saw as the fundamental problem with Locke’s philosophy: that it was “meant to overthrow the doctrine of Innate Ideas.” Because, Atwater argued, “Locke held that we get all our ideas from Sensation and Reflection,” he misunderstood how people acquired knowledge about, e.g., time and space, which were, in fact, “intuitive ideas.” Locke’s opinion that initial knowledge derived only from experience was “plausible, but false.” Anything—­including Locke’s philosophy and its outcomes—­that could undermine Atwater’s contention that the “self is directly known” was to be avoided, as were “all theories which undermine the reality of our knowledge.”42 Atwater and his students understood that the stakes of tackling erroneous theories were far from trivial. In a world where there were no “intuitive ideas” and experience was the only way to gain knowledge of not only space and time, but also right and wrong, no moral absolutes were possible. Students learned that buying into Locke’s ideas would lead to a situation in which the person sitting down the row from them in the lecture hall might not perceive the world—­and the good and evil in it—­in the same way they did, thus making categories of good and evil relative rather than absolute.43 Locke’s position on innate moral knowledge proved particularly problematic for these nineteenth-­century interpreters. For Locke, there was no absolute or innate sense of right and wrong; there were no cardinal points

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on a Lockean moral compass. Together with the other instructors under his purview, McCosh made sure that his students would recognize that “the moral faculty, like all other powers of the mind, gives us a separate idea, the idea of moral good and evil.” This meant understanding, in his words, the “insufficiency . . . of Locke’s theory of sensation and reflection.”44 By the time McCosh retired in 1888, Scottish common sense philosophy was a spent force in the United States, and proponents of German idealism ruled the roost at universities nationwide.45 Locke’s place in the philosophy curriculum at Princeton reflected this shift, which further strengthened idealist critiques of his epistemology. In the 1890s, for example, Professor Alexander Thomas Ormond, who embraced a hybrid Kantian-­Hegelianism, lectured on Locke as “the propounder of the problem of knowledge in En­ glish philosophy” and illustrated for his students the ways in which Locke and Descartes differed in method or approach because the former’s was “psychogenetic or empirical.”46 Like his colleagues before him, Ormond did not want his pupils to leave the classroom at the end of term without recognizing without a doubt that man “has an intuitive knowledge of himself.” Not everything derived from experience with an external world, as Locke had suggested. One student, from the class of 1892, for instance, recorded in his notes from Ormond’s metaphysics lectures that Locke’s fundamental contribution to philosophy was his assertion that there are no a priori ideas before noting that “Locke’s solution” to “relations of cause and effect, identity, moral good, &c.” were, in the words of his professor, “very imperfect.” As students learned, Locke simply failed “to give a satisfactory theory of knowledge.”47

: : : At Harvard University, another institution central to understanding the development of American philosophy in the nineteenth century, Sir William Hamilton’s work had also warmed Francis Bowen—­previously, a particularly committed devotee of Scottish common sense realism—­to elements of German idealism. Over the course of his long career, Bowen grew increasingly disenchanted with Scottish common sense philosophy, finding, by the 1870s, that Kant’s arguments, in particular, had become more satisfying.48 This turn toward German idealism did not, however, mean that Bowen stopped teaching Locke. He still structured his courses on British philosophy—­some of which, notably, enrolled both “men and women” outside the student body—­around the philosopher.49 And until 1875, when he was well into his sixties and nearing retirement, Bowen regularly instructed a psychology class for juniors and seniors at the university in which they

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read selections from Locke’s Essay—­something that had become increasingly less common by this point.50 Following Bowen’s retirement, “English Philosophy: Locke, Berkeley, Hume” was taught sequentially by a new generation of professional philosophers, including George Herbert Palmer, Josiah Royce, and William James.51 As a fixture for the historical study of philosophy, properly situated against a seventeenth-­century intellectual landscape, Locke was not ignored at Harvard. But neither was he recognized as offering lessons relevant for navigating the stormy seas of a post-­Darwinian world. Harvard’s famous cohort of philosopher-­dynamos had drunk from the spring of German idealism, taking solace in its recognition of the “a priori powers of the understanding” and dismissal of what they agreed were false separations between static categories of subject and object.52 They did not, however, accept idealism whole cloth; they questioned the absolutism of its core hypothesis that the mind was the only real thing in existence. Unsatisfied with Locke’s epistemological brew yet wary of what has been termed “objective idealism,” these American philosophers set out to pave a new way forward themselves.53 Still emphasizing Locke’s shortcomings, this new cadre of philosophers—­ Pragmatists as they came to be known—­saw themselves as providing for their students and readers a substantive and normative paradigm for understanding the basis of the self, the relationship between mind and matter, and the sinews binding individuals together in states and societies. While it is an oversimplification to speak of Pragmatism as an entirely unified and always cohesive movement, key patterns in its concerns and goals are clear. Emerging from an informal “Metaphysical Club” organized in Cambridge in 1872, an evolving cohort of thinkers including William James, Charles S. Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and John Dewey reexamined, over the next four decades, old questions about the passivity of the mind, the role of external experiences in knowledge formation, and the subjectivity of a person’s individual experiences to produce a compelling framework of knowledge that allowed for a fusion of faith and empiricism. Although James and others paid tribute to Locke in lectures and written work, the emergence of Pragmatism signaled once and for all the complete relegation of Locke to the earlier epochs in philosophy’s history.54 Criticizing Locke and pointing to his shortcomings was now many steps removed from the forward-­looking, progressive work of making philosophical advancements. With the rise of American Pragmatism, Locke’s empiricist philosophy could be safely tucked away on its shelf, part of a library of past solutions to

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the concerns of an earlier age, not those of the dawning twentieth century. On this point, philosophers found themselves in agreement with their colleagues in the emerging disciplines of the social sciences.

: : : Beginning in the 1860s, the proliferation and professionalization of the social sciences as formal, academic disciplines took off in the United States.55 Intellectuals rallying under the flag of the social sciences formed new professional associations to promote their scholarly pursuits in the name of public betterment. One institution at the vanguard of such endeavors was the American Social Science Association (ASSA). Established in Boston in 1865, the association sought to collect and “diffuse” all available social-­ scientific knowledge “throughout and beyond” the United States.56 Its members were confident that the study of society and of people as “social being[s]” was “much more than food for curious speculation.”57 Quite to the contrary: as United States Supreme Court justice and ASSA branch president William Strong argued in the early 1870s, social science was “essential to the best interests of mankind.”58 In his efforts to explain how the lofty goals of the new social sciences could be achieved, Strong turned to Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which he interpreted as a failure and used as a negative example against which to situate the methodologies of his discipline. More specifically, he used Locke’s unsuccessful attempt at creating a set of laws for the seventeenth-­ century English colony to support arguments about the importance of accurate, scientific “facts” deduced from “careful and minute observation,” rather than abstract theorizing.59 “Nothing is more unsafe than theorizing without accurate knowledge of fact; nothing is more fruitless,” Strong argued. “Of this,” he wrote, “there can be no better illustration than Locke’s scheme of government for the Carolinas.” Because Locke did not have “any adequate knowledge of the social life and the circumstances of the community for which it was intended,” his plan, although “beautiful in theory” turned out to be “wholly impracticable” and in the end resulted in “almost remediless confusion.”60 In certain respects, Strong’s discussion of the Fundamental Constitutions echoed those of his early nineteenth-­century predecessors. But his attribution of Locke’s failure to lack of “adequate knowledge” of Carolinians’ “social life and circumstances” reflects key tenets of his new social-­scientific outlook. Other social scientists were making a similar case. When ASSA member and future United States president James A. Garfield, then a congressman from Ohio, rallied support for the federal census

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of 1870 in the association’s new periodical, the Journal of Social Science, he also relied on the negative example of “John Locke’s plan of government”—­ in this case to convey the payoffs of statistically informed knowledge acquisition.61 Garfield found comfort in knowing that the statistical and scientific knowledge gained by the census would protect against misguided political theorizing.62 “All the social and political forces of a nation,” Garfield explained, “must be examined with the same care that the man of science studies nature before we can frame wise and salutary laws for the government of its people.” Citing Locke’s plan alongside Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, he surmised that none of the three “would ever have been tolerated a day in any nation of the earth.” Together with Plato and More, Locke had formed “kingdoms in the realms of the imagination,” not in the realm of reality, and it did not require a degree in the social sciences to realize that such foibles were to be avoided at all cost. “All attempts of philosophers to form ideal theories of government have been utter failures,” the future president declared.63 As the examples of Strong and Garfield demonstrate, social scientists in the early postbellum United States still found value in using the negative example of Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions. Modifying slightly the arguments of their earlier nineteenth-­century predecessors, they used Locke as a tool for articulating important features of their own methodological approaches to obtaining accurate—­and therefore useful—­knowledge of people, states, and societies. At the same time, however, their accounts of Locke’s failure struck a notably new, matter-­of-­fact tone that showed less interest in drawing contrasts between Locke the thinker and Locke the practical politician.64 Accounts such as one published in the North American Review on the centennial of American independence still recognized Locke’s “genius” when explaining that his constitutional creation had been “utterly unable to stand the ordeal of practical operation.”65 And University of Rochester Professor of History and Political Science William Carey Morey still noted that Locke was a “great and good man” when he explained in the first issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1891) that Locke’s political project “was created out of nothing and it soon relapsed into nothing.”66 But these accounts and others increasingly failed to marvel or wonder at how such a wise and capable a philosopher could have failed when it came to putting theory into practice—­nor did they cue their audiences to do so. One reason for this change was that Locke was no longer so immediate a reference point as he had been earlier in the century. Accordingly, the

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shock value of his failure had decreased. Another reason had to do with the declining stakes of the increasingly distant Fundamental Constitutions for an increasingly northern cohort of social scientists following the Civil War.67 A third, and the most direct, reason was the rise of the historicized, historical Locke, who was becoming an important figure—­on both sides of the Atlantic—­for understanding how political thinking had developed in the past. Locke’s shortcomings were less instructively perplexing for the present than they were quite simply historical facts—­relics of a past beyond which nineteenth-­century social scientists could say with certainty they had passed. In ways similar to their colleagues in philosophy departments, American social scientists transformed Locke into an important object of study for understanding the intellectual trajectory of their disciplines. In doing so, they increasingly directed their attention to Locke’s Second Treatise, especially his theories of the state of nature and social contract (while not yet ignoring the lessons of the Fundamental Constitutions, as we have seen). Like earlier commentators, they understood Locke’s thought experiments to be deeply mistaken. In a significant departure from those earlier critiques, however, they increasingly emphasized that Locke’s theories (particularly on the origins of the state) represented a moment—­a phase—­in the history of political thinking that was integral for understanding the development and evolution of political thought over time. For this new cohort of social scientists, studying Locke, as a piece of the historical puzzle of the past, promoted Staatswissenschaft, that is, an understanding of the science of the state.

: : : An antecedent to this cohort, Francis Lieber, the Prussian-­born professor of history and political science is an important figure for understanding the shift toward studying Locke as a historical figure.68 Lieber also serves another important role in our story, because his career and legacies greatly influenced the development of the historical political sciences across the United States in the postbellum period. For a variety of reasons, Lieber was no fan of Locke. In his most famous work, Civil Liberty and Self-­Government (1853 and later editions), written while he was a professor at the College of South Carolina, he drew readers’ attention to Locke’s failed attempt at theoretical constitutional creation for the state in which he resided (but for which he harbored few warm feelings).69 Years later, at Columbia University in New York, he taught students that “constitutions [which emerge] out of the brain of some theorizer,” as

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did Locke’s constitution for Carolina, do not work and “are like stillborn children.”70 For both Lieber and his many students, Locke exemplified the kind of abstract theorizing in politics that was to be avoided.71 Lieber’s criticisms of Locke were not limited to the Fundamental Constitutions. From his reading of the Second Treatise early in his career, Lieber identified significant, fundamental problems in Locke’s political philosophy. Locke, he noted, “starts a blunder.”72 Over his career, he would go on to develop arguments, contra Locke, that people were naturally social beings who had never existed as lone individuals in a state of nature. Accordingly, natural rights, in his view, emerged not from the atomistic individual, but rather from a shared, sociable humanity.73 The point here is that, despite celebrating what he termed “Anglican liberty,” which he understood—­much as Edmund Burke had—­as standing in stark contrast to those abstractions that had provoked revolution in France, Lieber’s views on the origins of both individual rights and political society differed fundamentally from those of Locke.74 At Columbia in the 1860s and early 1870s, Lieber taught his students to understand Locke’s mistaken theories of government’s origins as he did. For Lieber, this meant balancing Locke the mistaken theorist with Locke the important figure in the development of historical thinking about the state. In an expansive course on political philosophy—­in lectures on social compact thinking and the origins of government, which began with Aristotle and continued through the eighteenth century—­Lieber arrived at Locke after a discussion of Thomas Hobbes and Robert Filmer. For his students, Lieber explained the ways in which Locke’s ideas of men joining together in civil society both resembled and differed from those of Hobbes (which were decidedly more absolutist).75 If student notes are any indication, Lieber’s objectives, vis-­à-­vis Locke, were fourfold: to situate Locke in the history of seventeenth-­century political thinking, to identify Locke as a proponent of social contract theorizing, to enumerate a list of major objections to the theory that governments originated in the social contract, and, accordingly, to persuade his students that while Locke’s theory was mistaken, studying it was nevertheless a vital component of their training.76 In Lieber’s classroom, Locke played two important roles. On one level, he served as a case study in the flaws of social contract theorizing; on another level, he was a central figure in the history of political thought. Lieber’s historical approach to studying politics exerted a huge influence beyond Columbia. Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey, for example, taught Lieber’s work in his own courses on political science until



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his retirement in 1871. After Lieber’s death in 1872, Woolsey issued new editions of Lieber’s Manual of Political Ethics and Civil Liberty and Self-­ Government to ensure their centrality for the study of political science in the United States going forward.77 And in his influential Political Science: or, The State Theoretically and Practically Considered (1877–­78), Woolsey drew on Lieber, alongside the Englishman Henry Hallam, to explain that, contra Locke, the state of nature never existed; that man was, as Aristotle had argued, a political animal; and that rights did not emanate from the individual, but “rest[ed] on the foundation of a common nature.”78 At the same time, Woolsey made sure his students and readers understood that Locke’s influence on the history of English political thought was more extensive “than either the want of originality in his views, or the amount of his writings on politics would lead us to expect” and that Locke was consequently worthy of their attention.79 Woolsey, in other words, embraced Lieber’s twofold approach wholeheartedly: he critiqued Locke’s approach but also recognized it as an important step in the development of political thought. Over the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Lieber’s historicist approach took hold in departments and faculties of the historical and political sciences across the country.80 As it did so, social scientists’ views of Locke changed in two important ways. While Lieber’s emphasis on the negative lessons of Locke’s theoretical failures became less pronounced, his emphasis on Locke’s role in the development of political thought and thus the importance of studying Locke as a historical figure grew in importance.81 From both Lieber’s own work and complementary texts, such as Sir Henry Maine’s influential Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861), practitioners of the new social sciences learned that “the doctrine of the social contract has long since been rejected by thinking minds,” as constitutional historian John A. Jameson put it in 1885.82 Consequently, they no longer needed to argue against Locke. Confident in the superiority of their own views, which stressed organic and progressive developments over what Maine described as a “Lockeian theory” of society’s origins in social compact, they saw value in studying the historical Locke, who was shelved somewhere between Hugo Grotius and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau in the library of political philosophy.83 They could, as the Harvard-­trained lawyer (and future Harvard professor of political science and university president) A. Lawrence Lowell did in his 1889 Essays on Government, devote entire chapters—­real or metaphorical—­ to the “theory of the social compact,” because doing so was understood as

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being “equivalent to a sketch of the history of modern political philosophy” through the end of the eighteenth century.84 The theory of the social contract was, as the prolific author and Harvard-­educated historian John Fiske put it in 1890, “still interesting in the same way that spinning-­wheels and wooden frigates and powdered wigs are interesting.”85 When in 1870 the Yale-­educated minister Elisha Mulford explained in The Nation: The Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States that “the proposition of Locke” regarding political society’s origins “retains only an historical interest,” his observation proved to be an astute diagnosis of Locke’s late-­nineteenth-­century legacies.86 Significantly, as we will see in the next chapter, this historical interest in studying Locke’s thought created space for thinking about Locke in a more positive way—­indeed as a key historical figure for an Anglo origin story for American political thought. However nascent this development was in the late nineteenth century, its later flourishing in the hands of a new generation of historians and political theorists would have a dramatic impact on Locke’s legacies in the twentieth-­ century United States.

5 Making Locke Relevant

A

t the dawn of the twentieth century, John Locke was the stuff of history. As author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he occupied a secure, if dusty, corner in the academic study of the history of philosophy, where students learned of his past significance to the development of the discipline alongside his many epistemological shortcomings.1 Meanwhile, the narrow subset of the American public who bothered to read or care about his political thought—­largely those affiliated with the academic disciplines of history and political science (specifically political theory)—­thought about Locke in deeply historical and historically contextualized terms: as a man whose writings emerged from and spoke to the concerns of past times and whose ideas were important to study but bore no immediate relevance or utility for the present. Locke’s “illogical, incoherent system of political philosophy,” prominent Columbia professor, historian, and political theorist William Archibald Dunning wrote in 1905, was what “England needed at the time” Locke was writing, not what Americans in the early twentieth century required.2 Over the next several decades, Locke’s role in American intellectual life would undergo four transformations that would make Locke—­so seemingly irrelevant to Dunning and his

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contemporaries—­important to Americans in surprising ways. First, between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s, Locke became increasingly associated with his political thought in general and the Second Treatise in particular—­to such a degree, in fact, that “Locke” could be conflated with and indeed subsumed by particular arguments from his increasingly well-­known work on civil government. Second, Locke’s political thought was increasingly understood by those who studied it (historians and political theorists alike) as having “a strange timeliness” to it.3 In other words, they increasingly recognized it as relevant to the present-­day questions with which they were struggling. Third, scholars writing about American history, politics, and government placed increasing emphasis on Locke’s perceived influence on the founding moment. This emphasis was not entirely new, but it was different in degree and volume. Fourth, and largely a result of these other transformations, Locke’s influence came to be understood, by the 1930s, as having been a continual presence in American political-­intellectual life, from the eighteenth century to the present day. No longer an example of ahistorical, unscientific theorizing that belonged to a past age, Locke became a bubbling spring for what both political theorists and historians were increasingly interpreting as a continuous stream of American political thought. Even among those who agreed on the basic fact of Locke’s (new) lasting significance, however, important disagreements persisted regarding the issues concerning which Locke was significant, the nature of his significance for any given topic, and the question of how to evaluate his influence(s) from a normative perspective. By the 1930s, consequently, Locke could be many things to many people: the intellectual fount of both the Marxist labor theory of value and Western capitalism, the wellspring of both liberalism as individualism and liberalism as interest in the common good, and both the patron saint and the infernal mastermind of laissez-­faire economics.4 No one recognized the (potential) power of Locke’s malleability along these lines better than Merle Curti, a hitherto little-­known historian who, in his 1937 essay “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–­1861,” anointed Locke “America’s Philosopher.”5 Himself the product of the political and intellectual milieu that spurred Locke’s early-­twentieth-­century refiguring, Curti saw that Locke was important in the United States insofar as his thought had work to do.

: : : Curti designated Locke “America’s Philosopher” while he was a research associate at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Printed in the



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Huntington Library Bulletin, Curti’s essay claimed a relevance for Locke’s ideas that transcended time and space. Perhaps better than anyone before him—­or anyone since—­Curti understood that Locke’s thought on everything, from religion to education to epistemology to politics to private property, had permeated American intellectual life.6 He emphasized the breadth and impact of Locke’s corpus, especially his epistemological commitment to thinking for oneself—­an “empirical, middle-­of-­the-­road, common-­sense position taken by Locke.”7 And he argued that Locke’s malleability had allowed Americans of all intellectual dispositions and political persuasions to use Locke’s ideas to their benefit. From Curti’s vantage point in 1937, however, it seemed that Locke’s political-­economic thought, particularly his commitment to “the sanctity of property rights,” was the leading candidate for both having “the longest history” and having done the most lasting work in the United States. “Those aspects of [Locke’s] philosophy which were functional to the needs of ascendant interests,” Curti explained, “were destined to have the longest history.”8 Born on September 15, 1897, in Papillion, Nebraska, to John Eugene Curti, an electrical salesman, and his wife, Alice Hunt, Merle Curti came of age as the Great War threatened to destroy Europe. But Curti’s teens and twenties were consumed more with books than with war. After attending high school in Omaha, where he discovered he had a knack for writing and historical research, he was accepted at Harvard in 1916 and won a competitive scholarship.9 Before graduating with his BA in 1920 and his MA in 1921, Curti excelled in history, English, philosophy, and economics, having studied with professors such as Edward Channing, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Bliss Perry. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner supervised Curti’s senior thesis and inspired him to pursue a doctorate in history at Harvard, which he completed under the supervision of Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1927.10 Curti’s time at Harvard provides important clues about when and where he first encountered Locke. During the decade he spent in Cambridge, Curti almost certainly encountered a range of Locke’s arguments, including some material from his Second Treatise—­likely in one of his philosophy courses, perhaps “Philosophy A” his freshman year.11 He also may have encountered Locke while studying with Channing, who taught courses in history and government that discussed Locke’s political thought.12 Curti’s years at Harvard also spanned the decade when, for the first time since 1773, American presses published Locke’s Two Treatises. In 1917, historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government 1690 appeared as part of his Old South Leaflets Series.13 Seven years later,

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William Seal Carpenter, a professor of politics at Princeton, penned the introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Locke’s Of Civil Government: Two Treatises (1924), which was printed in New York by E. P. Dutton. In his introduction, Carpenter explained that in the United States “Locke’s political doctrine has been overshadowed in the minds of educated readers by his other philosophic ideas.” This meant, according to Carpenter, that “The Second Treatise of Government” was “less well known” than Locke’s other works.14 Most immediately, however, Curti’s work on “The Great Mr. Locke” was inspired by his research and time at the Huntington. The Huntington Library and Art Gallery opened its doors to the public in 1919, while Curti was still finishing work on his senior thesis, “The Influence of the West on Emerson and Whitman,” at Harvard.15 Henry Edwards Huntington, nephew of the nineteenth-­century railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington, and his wife, Arabella, had built their home on this estate with a sense of purpose. Huntington’s vision, according to one historian, was “that Southern California would be the great world center of the future.”16 Under the direction of Huntington himself until his death in 1927, and thereafter under the directorship of the Princeton-­trained US constitutional historian Max Farrand, the library prided itself on a collection that highlighted Anglo-­American civili­ zation and provided scholars with a treasure trove of primary and secondary sources to write what its directors were sure would be the most comprehensive histories of England, America, and the relationship between the two nations.17 When Curti, on Turner’s earlier recommendation and Farrand’s invitation, arrived in Southern California in 1936, he knew what to expect. Some of his closest colleagues, including Turner, had spent time at the Huntington, and in addition to their insights, years of correspondence with Farrand had given him a good sense of the scope of the library’s collections and what would, in turn, be expected of him. Farrand, for his part, was excited to have someone in residence who had long been interested in, as Curti put it, conducting an investigation into the “development of American self-­ consciousness.”18 And Curti’s interest in big questions about American identity would align his research agenda perfectly with the Huntington’s aims to better document the foundations of a shared Anglo-­American identity. Farrand’s own understanding of the Huntington’s collections offers additional clues about the intellectual environment in which Curti found himself. To Farrand, it was “reasonably clear that . . . English Literature is one of the strongest points in the Library,” although he was equally confident



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“that our material for English economic and social history is also worthy of attention and development.” Farrand had even gone so far as to confide to Turner his dream that the Huntington would become a “‘Mecca’ for students in English economic history.”19 With such pride in the Huntington’s strengths as an institution where scholars could conduct research on topics related to all things English, Farrand must have been thrilled at having Curti in residence, given the promising young historian’s interest in one of England’s most notable philosophers, John Locke. That Farrand was enthusiastic about the results of Curti’s research while at the Huntington is amply demonstrated by Farrand’s efforts to keep Curti in California after his year as a research associate was up.20 With such positive and constant support from Farrand, Curti thrived: his research resulted in several articles published during and immediately following his residency. The one that consumed much of Curti’s attention was “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–­1861.” Working with incredible speed, Curti published the essay in the library’s bulletin in early 1937. Drawing on the Huntington’s extensive collection of nineteenth-­century published and ephemeral sources—­what he called “fugitive material”—­Curti traced what he saw as Locke’s role in American educational, philosophic, religious, and political life across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 While writing and revising “The Great Mr. Locke,” Curti received important advice from his colleague at Smith College, Dean and Professor of English Marjorie Nicolson, an authority on the influence of Locke’s epistemology in nineteenth-­century America.22 Nicolson’s “major suggestion” was that Curti should make clear how his study revolutionized existing scholarship and understanding of Locke’s influence in the United States by clearly indicating to his readers “on what basis you are going to reinterpret Locke.” More specifically, she urged him to state that by “having read hundreds of minor works which are usually neglected,” he could “prove that this generally accepted idea [of Locke’s influence in America] is sometimes true and sometimes not.”23 Curti took her advice to heart: he included lengthy discussions of his evidentiary source base of ephemeral material and signaled the interventions his work was making, saving the best for last—­his overview of Locke and American political and economic thought, which he discussed together. When it came to American political and economic thought during the period with which his essay was concerned, Curti was confident that “the ideas of Locke were of peculiar importance.”24 In fact, the numerous inconsistencies he identified in Locke’s thinking (e.g., that he disavowed innate

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ideas in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding but embraced natural rights in his Second Treatise) allowed entirely “divergent interests” to appeal to “contradictory doctrines and implications in Locke’s political thought.”25 In other words, no one group, party, or persuasion could claim Locke. He was not the philosopher of the Democrats, Republicans, reformers, or conservatives, but “America’s Philosopher”—­full stop. In contrast to earlier accounts that discussed Locke’s impact on only the American founders and framers between the 1760s and 1780s, Curti asserted that long after the Revolution was over, “Locke’s ideas continued to live because of their usefulness to developing interests” in the early United States.26 “There was,” he observed, “much work for them to do.”27 What accounted for Locke’s continuous “usefulness” in American thought was his malleability. What is so interesting about Curti’s approach is his desire to find and illuminate the “spirit” of Locke, which he saw as permeating Americans’ political and economic thinking across time and space.28 He freely acknowledged that what he saw were often parallels between Locke and American thought, rather than direct linkages based on references to or citations of Locke in his source base.29 This approach allowed Curti to speak of an abiding “orthodox Lockean fashion” of thinking, as he shepherded his readers through Locke’s arguments and opened their minds to a more amorphous concept of “Locke” that breathed life into America’s intellectual past. Crucially, Curti’s point was not that without Locke’s writings American political and economic thinking would have necessarily developed differently. He was not, for example, making a case that without the Second Treatise, Americans would have had no attachment to rights or the importance of private property. Nor was his study one of “reception,” in the sense used by contemporary political theorists and intellectual historians. Rather his point was that there was something fundamentally and essentially “Lockean” about Americans’ political and economic thinking, in the past as well as in the present, “long after the period” that had been the focus of his study.30 The climax of Curti’s analysis of Locke’s “peculiar” place in the history of American political and economic thinking came with his discussion of “Locke’s belief that the preservation of property was the chief end of government.”31 “Locke,” Curti argued, “laid the foundations of the concept of economic laissez faire as well as of the theory that property, being a crystallization of personal achievement, is never to be lightly dissociated from private ownership.” In the United States, Locke’s “doctrine,” to use Curti’s word, “became the gospel of liberty and property, in close association.”32

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And it was here, Curti concluded, in the marriage of private property to liberty, that the “continuing stream of thought” linking Locke to the United States in the past as well as the present was clearest.33 A progressive to the bone, Curti did not exactly admire what Americans had done with the “Lockean” connection between liberty and property, but he was careful not to blame Locke for how others had, in the intervening centuries, carried forward his spirit.34 Curti’s argument about Locke’s omnipresence and the “continuing stream of thought” that ran from Locke to the present day can be read as the historian’s answer to a question that had long bothered him, as it had so many others of his time: why had competing political-­economic ideologies (especially socialism) and alternative (that is third) parties found it so difficult to gain a foothold in the United States? Curti’s answer was a pervasive, if malleable, Lockean spirit that left little room for alternatives when it came to political or economic thinking in the United States. Curti’s correspondence across the 1930s reveals a man hopeful that the kind of laissez-­faire liberalism Locke presented would not be the only way forward.35 By contrast, the liberal Americans Curti celebrated belonged to the emerging group of progressives in the early twentieth century who placed increasing emphasis on governmental measures to ensure robust economic and social equality across society.36 Their more “humanitarian” concerns, in Curti’s eyes, meant that these “tru[e] American” liberals might no longer equate unfettered property acquisition with liberty or social justice.37 They might no longer need the Locke whom he had dubbed “America’s Philosopher” of earlier times, but rather might remake Locke into “America’s Philosopher” for the mid-­twentieth century, recognizing that he had new work to do. To appreciate Locke’s place in Curti’s world—­and how different Locke in the 1930s was from Locke only three decades earlier—­it will be helpful to rewind our story to the beginning of the twentieth century.

: : : In 1903, Charles E. Merriam, a recent Columbia PhD and soon-­to-­be prominent University of Chicago professor of political science, surveyed the development of American political thought in his influential A History of American Political Theories.38 The history of political thought, in Merriam’s eyes, had “received surprisingly little attention from students of American history” before him.39 A student of William A. Dunning, Merriam based his work on a seminar on American political philosophy he had taken with

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Dunning at Columbia in the late 1890s. His book reflected Dunning’s influence, especially his deep historicist commitments and his conviction that as far as political thinking was concerned, “no distinctively American” philosophy had yet appeared.40 At the same time, Merriam’s strikingly positive outlook on American political development was decidedly his own. A History of American Political Theories heralded the “democratic progress” of the nation—­past, present, and future—­while still acknowledging that “the development of a typical American theory is yet to come.”41 Locke played a critical role in Merriam’s understanding of the origins of American democratic tendencies in the eighteenth century. Most significantly, Merriam interpreted Locke as a theorist of revolution. More specifically, he argued that “the theory of revolution had received classic formulation in the treatise of John Locke” and that, for eighteenth-­century observers, Locke provided the best “epitome of the Revolutionary theory.” “There is little evidence,” Merriam announced, inserting himself into an ongoing conversation regarding the merits of an Anglo-­Teutonic origins story for the United States, “to show that the bent of the revolutionary theory in America was determined by the great apostle of the French Revolution,” Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. There was, however, “very much to prove that the theory of Locke and the English school was predominant.”42 For Merriam, consequently, Locke’s Second Treatise provided the theoretical justification for the “destructive democratic theory of the day”—­that is, the “philosophic formulae” that justified the tearing down of government, the exiting of the British Empire in the 1770s. Locke did not, however, supply the “constructive democratic theory”—­that is the formulae, philosophic or otherwise, that were, according to Merriam, a “product of new conditions” unique to American practices of state-­building.43 What did this mean for Locke’s place in Merriam’s story? The answer can be found in his discussion of Locke’s relationship to Thomas Jefferson. As Merriam saw it, Jefferson shared a great deal with Locke, as far as “the revolutionary character of his theory was concerned.” This meant that there was agreement in their “destructive” theories. But when it came to the “constructive program”—­their attitudes toward the creation and institution of new government—­Jefferson was worlds apart from Locke. Jefferson, Merriam, argued “went farther than Locke in his advocacy of democratization of the government.” To contrast Jefferson’s ideas regarding democratic government to Locke’s, Merriam went back to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Locke’s failed attempt at constructive, antidemocratic politics for the seventeenth-­century English colony of Carolina. “Between



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the Fundamental Constitutions of Locke and the Jeffersonian program,” Merriam observed, “there was a wide difference.” The Fundamental Constitutions made clear that “Locke’s attitude toward the organization of the government was wholly aristocratic, while that of Jefferson was essentially democratic.” From this analysis, Merriam could confidently assert, using the words of the Fundamental Constitutions itself, that “Locke feared, while Jefferson favored, the erection of a ‘numerous democracy.’”44 For Merriam, Locke stood as the fount of eighteenth-­century theories of revolution, but his work had little bearing on any constructive or continuing elements of American democratic thought or practice. In short, what characterized Jefferson’s constructive thought and his political program was separation from Locke’s ideas. And it was distance from Locke, however important he had been in providing the theoretical inspiration for the revolutionaries of 1776, that defined political thought in the United States past and present. Another early twentieth-­century scholar, Cornell historian Carl Becker, is well-­known for his attention to Locke in his monumental The Declaration of Independence (1922). When it came to the Declaration, Becker argued, there was no doubt that “Jefferson copied Locke.” Counterintuitively, however, he was equally keen to show that Locke’s intellectual impact on Jefferson and his contemporaries was beside the point. “Locke did not need to convince the colonists,” Becker asserted, “because they were already convinced” of the ideas contained in his Second Treatise. In fact, their adherence to Locke was not due to the force or clarity of his arguments, which Becker characterized as “not particularly cogent . . . lumbering, involved, obscured by innumerable and conflicting qualifications.”45 Rather, their adherence to Locke had everything to do with the symbolic essence of the Second Treatise—­the fact that it embodied the principles of the Revolution of 1688 and the English constitutionalism that coursed through their veins.46 Becker’s overwhelming emphasis on Locke, despite his downplaying the intellectual impact of Locke’s work on the American founders, was part of a blunt argument about intellectual “lineage” in the eighteenth century—­ whether it was Anglo-­Saxon or French. For Becker, this meant arguing that neither Jefferson nor “any American,” for that matter, “read many French books.” Instead, “so far as the ‘Fathers’ were, before 1776, directly influenced by particular writers, the writers were English, and notably Locke.”47 Becker’s chief aim in The Declaration of Independence was to prove the En­ glish rather than French origins of Jefferson’s political thinking and thus the Declaration itself.

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Merriam and Becker capture the broad contours of Locke’s story in the early decades of the twentieth century: continuity, for the most part, with small but significant changes. Historians and political theorists continued, for example, to recognize Locke as an important figure in the development of political thought; to emphasize both the chronological and the conceptual distance between Locke and themselves; and to eschew discussion of his relevance to present-­day questions. At the same time, they gave Locke a prominent role in their accounts of the founding moment. Significantly for our story here, however, Locke’s increased prominence should be attributed not to the perceived merits of his political writings—­at least not primarily—­but rather to his association with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which positioned him to serve an important role in the intensifying debate regarding the sources of American political thought.48 More specifically, it made Locke the ideal candidate to represent an Anglo, rather than French, source—­to stand in opposition to Rousseau, “great apostle of the French Revolution,” and serve as an English source for the ideas of Montesquieu, which commentators almost uniformly recognized as a “political gospel” for the American founders and constitutional framers.49 Alongside these dominant trends of continued historicization and An­ glicization, there also emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century a new and different way of understanding Locke and his political writings—­ an approach that construed Locke as relevant to questions and concerns of the day.

: : : In 1913, the year political scientist Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States, Westel Woodbury Willoughby addressed the American Political Science Association as its president, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary.50 Willoughby, a professor at Johns Hopkins, used his address to discuss a topic that was far from new but that had, as a result of decades of political, judicial, and social changes during what would come to be known as the Progressive Era, assumed new significance and urgency: the relationship between the state and individuals. A committed progressive, Willoughby believed that the state could and should play an active role in promoting individual well-­being and the public good. “It is a proper province of the state,” he explained, “to secure the realization of a general scheme of distributive justice” and provide a robust social safety net through “socially expedient” legislation, such as workers’ compensation in case of accidents. As Willoughby saw it, any “political or constitutional theory which considered the rights of the individual to life,



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liberty, and property as wholly removed, upon their substantive side, from regulation by ordinary legislative act would . . . be destructive of efficient government, if not of political authority itself.” And locating an individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property outside any sort of legislative purview “would predicate a régime of individualism that would scarcely be distinguishable from anarchy.” Having thoroughly rejected what he saw as the pernicious individualism afflicting twentieth-­century America, Willoughby concluded by embracing the “development of the doctrine of what is known as the ‘police power’ of the State.”51 In the course of Willoughby’s address, Locke appeared only once, and not as an apostle of commitments to life, liberty, and property, as might be expected by modern readers. Rather, he served as an example of the flaws inherent in social compact theory. The “fundamental defect,” Willoughby asserted, of the compact theory articulated by Locke (and Rousseau) was that starting “from the conception that man, as an individual, and as apart from society or the state, is the possessor of rights,” it implied the very philosophy of individualism he was arguing against.52 In fact, and very much in opposition to the individualism inherent in all social contract theories of government, “the practice of modern states” reveals “that the state and its government are made for man and not man for the state, and that all political agencies exist as means to an end and not as ends in themselves.”53 In some respects, Willoughby’s invocation of Locke recalls those of his nineteenth-­century predecessors. His distaste for and rejection of social contract theories would have been familiar to Francis Lieber, for example. By focusing his critique on Locke’s individualism, however, rather than the defects of his (abstract, ahistorical) methodology, Willoughby was breaking new ground. And the context in which he invoked Locke—­a speech advocating a progressive interpretation of the state—­heralded a different sort of future for the philosopher. Willoughby’s address also reveals a fissure in the wall separating Locke from the present. It was a crack that would soon break wide open. In the years following Willoughby’s address, Locke’s academic interpreters began to recognize the possibility of applying his ideas to present political questions. To a large degree, making Locke relevant involved shifting attention to—­and honing in on—­Locke’s apparent emphasis on the sanctity of private property and, as a result, refiguring Locke’s relationship to economic and political traditions of individualism, capitalism, and laissez-­ faire.54 It involved reinventing Locke, even when viewed in his seventeenth-­ century context, as a philosopher for the middle class.55 These renderings of Locke as a (and perhaps the) source of capitalism’s emphasis on individualism

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and laissez-­faire theories of private property accumulation were new developments. And they provided a stark contrast to a school of thought that had developed across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among socialists, Fabians, and others on the economic left—­especially in Great Britain. Highly influential in certain circles but not exactly mainstream, this school of thought infused Locke’s discussion of land use with a Marxist labor theory of value and argued that Locke’s theories of property acquisition had informed and influenced Marx’s ideas on the subject.56 Locke, as English historian G. P. Gooch summarized in 1898, “provides the theoretic basis of socialism.”57 As we will see, however, Locke’s twentieth-­century American interpreters would come to see things differently.

: : : Historian Charles A. Beard did not particularly like either the contents or the methodologies of Locke’s political writings. Nevertheless, he played a central role in the Progressive Era transformation of Locke into a thinker whose writings spoke to present-­day concerns. He did so not by focusing on the individualism of social contract theory but by reducing Locke’s political philosophy to a defense of private property rights. This move opened the door for Locke to be understood, for the first time, in terms not only of economic individualism but also of capitalism, a subject of great interest to Americans at the time. Beard debuted what would become his standard portrayal of Locke in a series of lectures delivered at Amherst College in 1916 (later published as The Economic Basis of Politics in 1922). Intended to clarify and correct misrenderings of his commanding An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)—­which, it bears mention, contains no reference to Locke or his political writings—­the lectures explored the relationship between economic motivations and politics more generally. Some of Beard’s discussion of Locke—­for example, his claims that Locke was “the forerunner of the American and French revolutions as well as the supreme apologist for the English revolution of 1688” and that eighteenth-­century American colonists knew Locke as the “philosopher of the Glorious Re­ volution”—­covered well-­worn topics.58 But his hyperfocused attention on Locke’s theory of property was distinctive—­a product of his obsession with revealing the economic foundations of political concerns. Locke, Beard explained, found “both the origin and end of the state . . . in the roots of property.” “As the origin of the state is to be found in the requirements of property owners,” he clarified, “so is the end of the state to be sought in the



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same source.” Locke’s political philosophy, which tied the origins and ends of the state to property, was critical for understanding eighteenth-­century American theories of revolution, whose justifications for revolutionary actions were fundamentally connected to property. “As the preservation of property is the origin and end of the state, so it gives the right of revolution against any government or authority that invades property,” Beard declared in reference to Locke’s influence in the eighteenth-­century American colonies.59 The Economic Basis of Politics was a wildly popular text across the 1920s and 1930s, and it was soon joined by an ever-­growing body of work on American history produced by Beard and his co-­author, wife, and fellow historian, Mary Ritter Beard.60 Beard’s equation—­and reduction—­of Locke to a defense of private property was a theme of his and Mary’s later writings as well. When the time came to summarize Locke and his significance for their popular textbook, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), the Beards were succinct. “In Locke’s hands the catechism of politics was short indeed: the aim of government is to protect property and when any government invades the privileges of property, the people have a right to alter or abolish the government and establish a new one.”61 Rights and liberties not tied to property—­or understood in terms of property, for one might be said to have property in and ownership of one’s self—­were not, as far the Beards were concerned, integral to Locke and his legacies.62 Within a few years, these arguments found widespread acceptance. In his History of American Political Thought, published only a year after The Rise of American Civilization, political theorist Raymond G. Gettell, for example, told readers that “the colonists had textbooks of revolution in the writings of seventeenth-­century Englishmen, especially John Locke, which sustained the right of citizens to overthrow governments that took their property without their consent.” Looking ahead to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he confidently asserted, “as to the ends of the state, the framers of the Constitution laid great emphasis, as did Locke, on the protection of property.”63 The lasting and dramatic implications of the Beards’ reinterpretation of Locke became clear in the hands of historian Vernon L. Parrington, who transformed Locke into a philosopher of capitalism and what he termed “new liberalism,” which stood in stark contrast to the “staunch and kindly liberalism” he preferred.64 Like many of those responsible for tying Locke to (laissez-­faire) liberalism and/or capitalism, Parrington disliked all of the above.65 In his Pulitzer Prize-­winning Main Currents in American Thought (1927–­30), he argued that Locke had played a central role in the rise of

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capitalism. By “asserting the sacredness of property,” he explained, “Locke laid the foundation of the new philosophy of capitalism” in the seventeenth century.66 Parrington also identified Locke as the wellspring of a distinctively English liberalism and a distinctively English individualism that “was self-­seeking, founded on the right of exploitation, and looking forward to capitalism.” Transported to eighteenth-­century America, this “English doctrine of economic individualism” became universally appealing, given the unique abundance of “unpreëmpted resources” and land available to claim. In America, Parrington argued, “the right of every man”—­that is, every white man—­“to preëmpt and exploit what he would, was synonymous with individual liberty.” Accordingly, the “influence of old-­world liberalism” on the early United States was “favorable to capitalist development and hostile to social democracy.”67 Parrington used the connections he had drawn between Locke and liberalism to define and demarcate a particular strain of liberalism that was carried forward from Locke through the writings of Adam Smith and that “in the pursuit of commercial freedom found it desirable to limit the powers of the state.”68 But Parrington held out hope that rejecting rather than embracing this liberalism-­as-­laissez-­faire-­capitalism was the defining characteristic of the American political experience. For Parrington, the key to understanding the Declaration of Independence, for example, lay in its invocation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rather than property. “It was this substitution”—­pursuit of happiness for property—­“that gave to the document the note of idealism” that made the Declaration’s “appeal so perennially human and vital.” And it signaled “a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that Locke had bequeathed to the English middle class.”69 Though many of Parrington’s arguments proved highly influential, the connection he drew between Locke and liberalism was decidedly less so. Indeed, it floated into the ether. The emergence of “Lockean liberalism” would have to wait.70 By the early 1930s, Locke’s ability to speak to present-­day concerns was widely accepted. So too were his associations with economic individualism, private property, and capitalism. At the University of London, for example, a doctoral student named Paschal Larkin observed, based on a broad survey of recently published works, that “Locke’s individualism, his glorification of property right and his love of commerce, have been interwoven into the economic and social texture of American life.”71 Larkin was critical of “Locke’s individualistic conception of property” and asked his readers to imagine how different the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might have been had Locke not written what he had in the seventeenth century.72



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Larkin’s work drew the attention of scholars across the Atlantic, including the economist and professor of law Walton Hamilton, who used the book as a springboard for an article entitled “Property—­According to Locke” that appeared in the Yale Law Journal in 1932. Hamilton’s article brought Locke into the present in a flash. As Hamilton understood it, there was an underappreciated connection between Locke’s political philosophy, particularly his writings on property, and the contemporary Supreme Court. For decades, men and women who proudly labeled themselves progressives had been fighting on local and national levels for legislative reforms ranging from economic security for widowed mothers to pension reform to laws stipulating maximum working hours and minimum wages for workers. In response, the Supreme Court, in the spirit of its majority’s conservative, laissez-­faire commitments, repeatedly struck down such legislation. In doing so, the Court often relied on interpretations of “liberty of contract” as guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which stipulated that no “state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”73 Fixing his gaze on Justice George Sutherland’s opinion in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), which had declared a minimum wage law enacted by Congress in 1918 unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated people’s liberty of contract, Hamilton linked Sutherland and Locke.74 He did not, however, claim that Locke exercised any direct influence on Sutherland. “The connection lies rather,” Hamilton explained, in something more abstract—­“a continuing stream of thought, comprehending both utterances [those of Locke in the Second Treatise and of Sutherland in Adkins] in which the principles of Locke and the dicta of Mr. Justice Sutherland are alike symbols.”75 As Hamilton saw it, this “continuing stream of thought” carrying Locke forward into present-­day America was worthy of celebrating, not rejecting or minimizing. It was “thanks to John Locke,” he concluded with a dramatic gesture to seventeenth-­century absolutism, that “we have adequate safeguards against the resort by any state to the kind of stuff the Stuart kings used to pull.”76 In his 1936 History of Political Philosophy from Plato to Burke, political theorist Thomas I. Cook spoke directly to the ironies, as he termed them, of Locke’s recent malleability. In a section entitled “Locke’s Influence: Capitalism and Communism,” he observed that it was “by a quaint irony” that “the Lockeian theory of property as dependent on labor led indirectly through [David] Ricardo to the Marxian labor theory of value and thus became the basis for a denial of individualism and the proclamation of the right of the community to own the instruments of production.” “Both bourgeois defense and communist attack have thus a common source.” “Their ends,” Cook

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explained, “are indeed fundamentally opposed in terms of interest, but both share a greater degree of agreement on what phenomena are significant than is generally acknowledged.” This meant, according to Cook, that “our current quarrels are largely to determine the beneficiaries of the now long-­ accepted faith” in “Lockeian” theories.77 In his assessment of Locke’s “in­­ fluence” and Americans’ “now long-­accepted faith” in him, Cook stood leagues away from his predecessors only a generation earlier. And in the coming decades, it would be hard to remember or fathom any quarrels over how best to understand Locke’s legacy.

: : : Against this political and intellectual backdrop, we can better appreciate and understand the warm reception of Merle Curti’s article, with which this chapter began. His emphasis on Locke’s lasting political and economic importance “without,” in Curti’s words, “attempting to establish any personal influence of Locke” was inspired by Walton Hamilton’s emphasis on the “continuing stream of thought” linking Locke to the Progressive Era Supreme Court. And his emphasis on the legacies of Locke’s thought in laissez-­faire economic theories would have seemed familiar to Vernon L. Parrington. In many ways, Curti did not so much find Locke at the Huntington as breathe life into a version of Locke that had been gaining increasing traction in the United States. The reception of Curti’s piece makes clear that the claims he advanced about Locke resonated deeply for his contemporaries. Curti’s work made its way quickly into college classrooms. By 1940, “The Great Mr. Locke” was included on a bibliographical reading list for a course at Harvard on American philosophy.78 Two years later, at Yale, in a graduate-­level historiography course, the American intellectual historian Ralph Henry Gabriel also devoted considerable attention to Curti’s essay. Thanks in large part to Nicolson’s methodological suggestions that Curti foreground his broad reading of more ephemeral materials, Gabriel could use Curti’s essay as an example of new, cutting-­edge intellectual history. As one student, future historian Rollin G. Osterweis, noted, Gabriel told his students that “men of property [and] proletariat could both quote Locke to [some] advantage” and interpreted this as a particularly important feature of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century American engagement with Locke. In other words it was the malleability of Locke’s political/economic thought that ensured it had broad appeal.79 Although largely forgotten today, “The Great Mr. Locke” also reached



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a wide international and interdisciplinary audience. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Curti sent personal copies to his ever-­growing network of colleagues and friends. Recipients of offprints of his article as well as those who encountered it in the Huntington Library Bulletin itself wrote to Curti expressing their gratitude for his work on Locke. And in 1955, when Curti published a compilation of his essays in a volume entitled Probing Our Past, he included “The Great Mr. Locke” as the first article in a section called “The Transmission and Context of Ideas.”80 Upon receiving a personal copy of “The Great Mr. Locke” directly from the author, political theorist Harold Laski noted that he found Curti’s portrayal of Locke’s significance so “extraordinarily illuminating” that he wished he “knew more of what happened after 1861”—­the endpoint of Curti’s essay.81 Another of Curti’s correspondents, Curtis P. Nettels, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin (where Curti would join him in 1942), was similarly impressed by the novelty and salience of his argument. “It seems to me,” Nettels wrote to Curti in 1939, “that you have discovered a[n] important factor in your essay on Locke (at least [it] is new to me).” Nettels was, as he told Curti, “impressed more than ever that Locke’s ideas are basic in the American political sphere—­not only in the revolutionary period—­but for the later periods as well.” Wondering aloud “if a study of Locke” offered as good a “clue” about “American ideas as any other source,” Nettels ventured a conjecture that would become a matter of accepted fact over the following decade, as Locke’s status as “America’s Philosopher” secured for the seventeenth-­century Englishman the starring role in an origins story of the American Political Tradition.82 By many measures, 1937 was a bad year in the United States. But for Locke, it was a banner one. Thanks in large part to Curti’s article, one thing was clear: Locke’s political thought would no longer be neglected.83 Ac­ ademics, at least, understood it as speaking to present-­day questions and concerns in ways that would have been difficult to imagine half a century before. Less clear were the stakes of Locke’s perceived relevance and the question of whether it was something to celebrate or mourn. To some extent, uncertainty regarding the stakes of Locke’s relevance boiled down to questions of what Locke’s relationship was to a newly important term—­liberalism—­and how to evaluate any associations along these lines.84 To be sure, associations between Locke and liberalism (or “L” liberalism) were still rare in the 1930s, as they had been in the 1910s and 1920s. In his hugely influential 1937 A History of Political Theory, for example, political theorist George H. Sabine did not classify Locke as a liberal or use

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liberalism to characterize Locke’s political thought, but instead asserted that it contributed in vital ways to what he termed “the democratic creed.”85 In this respect, Sabine was echoing earlier invocations of Locke’s democratic “spirit” and of Locke himself as “one of the fathers of the democratic credo.”86 But associations between Locke and liberalism were growing, if unsteady in their implications. Was Locke’s individualism the basis of a sort of small “l” liberalism, which has proven “defective chiefly because it . . . tended to cultivate the pernicious notion that rights can exist without correlative duties,” as William Seal Carpenter put it in 1937?87 Or was Locke’s role in the development of liberalism (sometimes spelled with a capital “L”) decidedly a positive? In 1937, a new American edition of Locke’s writings that paired his Second Treatise with his Letter Concerning Toleration provided an important, positive answer to questions like these. In his introduction to the edition, Amherst professor Charles Sherman drew a direct and positive association between Locke and what Sherman ultimately designated as capital-­“L” liberalism. Locke’s work, Sherman began, “has been the quarry of liberal doctrines” in the United States.88 For Sherman, Locke’s liberalism amounted to a kind of all-­around moderation, a middle ground between economic and political extremes. Locke, Sherman argued, for example, steered “a middle course” through two extreme attitudes toward consent when it came to economic matters: “the one claiming that consent cannot be free when there is economic constraint, the other that consent must yield again to authority if the advances of civilization are to be maintained and continued.”89 Locke, in other words, forged a compromise between socialism and laissez-­faire, between concern for communal good and individual rights, that resulted in the Liberalism Sherman found so vital for humanity’s future. Sherman’s Liberalism was more than economic, however. It was political, religious, symbolic, and moral as well. Amidst the domestic and international turmoil of the 1930s, Sherman concluded that “Liberalism becomes a necessity if society is to endure.” And he was optimistic, even confident, that in the end, “the reasonable humanity of a courageous liberal like Locke will appeal to the common sense of disillusioned fanatics.”90 A beacon of light in the darkness, a symbol of moderation in an age of extremes, Sherman’s Locke, the “courageous liberal,” was poised to escape his seventeenth-­century corporal existence, embody concerns of the present, and live on into the future. And what a future awaited Locke!

6 Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition

I

n 1950, Life Magazine quizzed its readers: “Are you educated?” Readers of the popular periodical were told that if they could correctly interpret a series of drawings, they were well on their way to achieving a “really well-­rounded liberal education.” And, at the time, it seemed there was nothing more important than a liberal education for the well-­being of democracy.1 “Liberal education is not a luxury item which a free society can well afford to surrender, or even much dilute,” particularly “in times such as ours,” declared Princeton’s thirty-­eight-­year-­old president, Robert F. Goheen, later that decade.2 For Life Magazine and its readers, having such an education meant being able to correctly identify the following illustration as “John Locke, political philosopher.” In other words, the ability to identify an animated, waistcoat-­clad political philosopher in front of a blackboard with the words “life, liberty, and property” across it as John Locke could serve, quite literally, as a test of one’s education in the 1950s United States.3 In the postwar era, the stakes of knowing Locke’s political philosophy—­and Locke, as political philosopher—­were high. The transformations Locke underwent in the first three decades of the twentieth century positioned him well for reinvention

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Figure 6.1 Cartoon sketch of John Locke. “Are You Educated?,” Life Magazine, October 16, 1950.

in the 1940s and 1950s. On the eve of World War II, Locke was understood as an important, highly relevant political philosopher and as a figure in a “continuing stream of thought” linking past and present.4 But the nature of his relevance and importance was up for grabs, associated with a variety of concepts and terms including democracy, liberalism, and capitalism. Between the Second World War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a generation of Americans—­among them academics, journalists, politicians, and other public figures—­pitched in to clarify Locke’s place in this new age. Undaunted by the difficulty of their task, they combined the known versions of Locke—­the democratic Locke, the pro(to)-­capitalist Locke, the liberal Locke—­and concocted a powerful antidote to authoritarian political movements sweeping the globe. They seized on Locke’s Second Treatise as a “great book” of Western civilization and deployed it as a bulwark against fascism, totalitarianism, and communism. In the early 1940s, America’s perceived position and place in the world were changing rapidly. Both private citizens and public figures began to see the United States as the guardian of liberal democracy, a role earlier held by European powers such as Great Britain and France, and they were quick to embrace Henry Luce’s famous pronouncement that theirs was “the American Century.”5 At this moment of geopolitical crisis, Americans claimed Locke for themselves. By emphasizing the ways in which their political and intellectual tradition flowed from Locke through the Founding Fathers—­in particular, Thomas Jefferson—­to the present day, they Americanized the



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(formerly) English philosopher. And they used their unique relationship with Locke to both explain and encapsulate America’s new role in the world.6 At the same time, they took Locke, previously recognized as one of several important influences on the development of political thought in America, and transformed him into the source and symbolic essence of what was beginning to be called the American Political Tradition—­a perfect alchemy, or so it seemed, of democracy and liberalism. Thanks to widespread certainty that a well-­rounded liberal education was integral to the success and vitality of liberal democracy at home and abroad, a broad swath of the American public soon found themselves active participants in this project, as students and lifelong learners. And they were confident that against their unique political tradition neither fascism nor communism stood a chance.

: : : As the United States weighed entry into the Second World War, Locke found he had a large role to play in the deliberations. For some, he was a symbol of ideals—­among them liberty, equality, and democracy—­that tied Americans to their English counterparts. When New York Representative William Irving Sirovich, for example, stood before the US House of Representatives on October 31, 1939, to make his case for providing aid to Great Britain and France by lifting the ongoing arms embargo, he used Locke and the Second Treatise as exhibit A. With Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September of that year, American public opinion polls revealed 84 percent support for the Allies (and only 2 percent for the Germans), but the questions of whether and how to express that support remained.7 For Sirovich, there was no question about America’s obligation to lend aid: the very ideals of the United States had been inspired by Locke’s Second Treatise and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. Even if Americans themselves should not be sent off to shed blood on the battlefields of Europe, their political-­intellectual heritage linked them—­and the future success of their ideals—­to the triumph of democratic values across the world. Accordingly, aid to Great Britain and France, the birthplaces of the Second Treatise and the Social Contract—­both, notably, declared sources for the Declaration and the Constitution—­was an absolute necessity. This was not the time to ponder the relative merits of French versus English influences, as an earlier generation had. There was no time to waste. “The Nazi’s bible is Hitler’s Mein Kampf; the Frenchman’s bible, Rousseau’s Social Contract; the Englishman’s political bible, Locke’s Treatise on Government,” Sirovich declared. It followed, therefore, that “a Hitler victory in

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the European war must spell victory for Hitler’s bible Mein Kampf in virtually every civilized land on earth, and disaster to the pattern of life represented by the Social Contract and the Treatise on Government that confirm the supreme sovereignty of the people.” “Accordingly,” he concluded, “the victory of Mein Kampf would cast a heavy shadow over . . . the American ideals of liberty, democracy, and equality for which Jefferson struggled, Jackson suffered, and Lincoln perished.”8 Sirovich identified Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frie­ drich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Niccolò Machiavelli as sources of inspiration for Communists, Fascists, and Nazis and asserted that “when we come to the French and English states, we discover that their political inspiration pours from a different fountainhead altogether than do Germany’s, Italy’s, and Russia’s.” For France, it was Rousseau. For England, it was twofold: Hobbes (in a bad way) and Locke (in a good way). “Thomas Hobbes,” Sirovich declared, “has grown to be the spoiled darling of the power-­politics practitioners, while John Locke has proven a running river of inspiration to the devotees of democracy and self-­government who rank the rights of man above the rights of the state.” He then attributed the greed of the British Empire and the greatness of British democracy to Hobbes and Locke, respectively. “The ruthless imperialistic policy which Great Britain pursued until the opening of the twentieth century,” Sirovich explained, “was consummated under the impulse of Hobbes’ Leviathan and his notion that man is a wolf to his fellowman.” By contrast, “the democratic design that it has carried out in its internal affairs during the last century, which has made Great Britain’s social and economic legislation a source of inspiration and a very model to its sister democracies, was accomplished under the influence of John Locke and his notion that man is essentially good by nature.” En­ gland’s “deeply rooted spirit of humanitarianism,” he noted, “this persistent striving after democracy within its country and afterward within its empire which have served to make her a source of inspiration to the liberal world is her intellectual and spiritual legacy of John Locke.”9 To support his rendering of the two philosophers’ divergent influences on British politics and policy, Sirovich turned to recent history. The 1931 Statute of Westminster that afforded independence to many Commonwealth states indicated, he insisted, that the British Government had “arrived at a historic decision, and for the first time in her long history [was] prepared to deal with her subjects in the Empire in the spirit of John Locke, and not of Thomas Hobbes.”10 Locke was, Sirovich proclaimed to his fellow Representatives, “the intellectual powerhouse of modern democracy,” as demonstrated by Britain’s recent actions for the betterment of humankind.11



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When considering the merits of United States entry into the war, others were not so sure. Senator William Langer from North Dakota, for example, agreed with Sirovich’s characterization of a bad and a good Britain—­that of “Oliver Cromwell and John Milton and that great philosopher, John Locke, whose ideas impregnated the mind of Thomas Jefferson and found their immortal expression in the Declaration of Independence.” But from his vantage point in March 1941, Britain’s dominance as an undemocratic empire meant that the United States could justifiably proceed without providing arms or other military or economic support for the war.12 Following United States entry into the war after the Pearl Harbor bombings on December 7, 1941, references to Locke as “a running river of inspiration to the devotees of democracy and self-­government” still flowed. But Americans increasingly recognized themselves, rather than Locke’s countrymen across the water, as the true “devotees.” And they remade Locke into a distinctively American symbol and spokesman for American democracy in particular. This meant reassessing Locke’s relationship to the Founding Fathers, and Thomas Jefferson in particular, injecting new life into that perceived relationship, and then arguing that Americans embraced Locke and everything he stood for even more than the British themselves. As Life would put it in 1950, at the very moment “Europe was tragically rejecting the legacy” of the past, and with it the works of Montesquieu and Locke, “America was busily adapting and deepening that legacy.”13 Key to the process of Americanizing Locke was reworking his relationship to Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence so that Locke could serve as a source of inspiration for not only Jefferson himself, but also a steady-­state current that flowed through Jefferson to the present day. In The Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today (1950), lawyer Edward Dumbauld, for example, found occasion to mention Locke more than two dozen times. By comparison, Algernon Sidney received two mentions; James Harrington, none at all.14 Historian Carl Becker’s 1922 rendering of Locke as an English—­rather than French—­influence on Jefferson was no longer sufficient.15 While the Anglo connection remained important, during and after World War II, Americans focused more on what Jefferson had done with Locke and what the future, twentieth-­century, implications were of his adapting Locke for an American context. From the Second World War onward, the standard narrative of Locke’s importance for the United States went something like this: American founders (mostly Jefferson) made Locke into the perfect fit for America’s needs in the eighteenth century when they declared independence from Britain and embraced “self-­evident truths” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit

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of happiness,” and it was these same commitments to freedom and equality (transmitted from Locke through Jefferson) that continued to animate Americans’ political convictions. Not only that, but the protection of life, liberty, and property were coming to be seen as the building blocks of democracy itself. It seems not to have mattered that Locke was no democrat himself, nor that the Founding Fathers who kept his ideas alive were not particularly sympathetic to democracy either. In the eyes of prominent journalist John Chamberlain, Americans’ embrace of Locke had made them hungrier for freedom, liberty, and democracy than their British forebears (or anyone else for that matter). In 1943, Chamberlain offered an interpretation of eighteenth-­century history that would soon become familiar. “The real reason for the Revolution,” he argued, “resided in the fact that Americans had remained men of the seventeenth century while Englishmen in the British Isles had turned their backs on Cromwell and all that he represented.” “To the colonists,” he continued, “John Locke, the seventeenth-­century philosopher of natural rights, remained a living force.” This contrasted sharply with what had played out on the other side of the Atlantic. For the “British, who had stayed at home in England,” Chamberlain argued, “Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ was just a museum piece.”16 Americans, in other words, both had recognized and were continuing to recognize the transcendent philosophical and ideological power of Locke’s political philosophy long after their British counterparts had forgotten them. Chamberlain was one of the country’s most prolific and influential journalists. In addition to his long-­standing position at the New York Times, he served on the editorial staff of Fortune, Life, and the Wall Street Journal, and wrote numerous works, including the foreword to economist Friedrich A. von Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom, the fountainhead of modern libertarianism. During the 1940s, Chamberlain sounded a lot like Locke’s press agent, touting the significance of Locke’s political thought to a broad American audience. A prolific book reviewer, Chamberlain lambasted authors whom he saw as minimizing Locke’s influence on “American political theory.” Chamberlain came down hard, for example, on anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer for reading Locke out of his story of the American “national character.” “Mr. Go­ rer,” Chamberlain explained, “uses his theory of the rejected father” as an explanation for many American qualities. Yet, Chamberlain pointed out, as if distantly echoing arguments from an earlier time about Locke’s character, “the man behind American political theory, if any one man can be said to be behind it, is John Locke, an Englishman who had particularly amicable



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relations with his father.” Locke’s centrality to American political thought meant that his good relationship with his father was sufficient in and of itself to disprove Gorer’s theory and that Gorer, in ignoring Locke, had missed the essence of American political thought more generally. “The American story,” Chamberlain concluded, “is part of a western story, and its unique aspects derive from sources, which Mr. Gorer skimps or completely overlooks.”17 Chamberlain understood Locke as particularly important for Americans because his political philosophy was fundamentally grounded in the protection of private property. Without any of Merle Curti’s or Vernon Parrington’s leftist skepticism, Chamberlain was confident that “to the true American, property is to be desired in so far as it conduces to freedom and to happiness.”18 “No one,” Chamberlain implored his readers to recollect, “has ever yet been able to point to a State in which communal ownership of the means and materials of production has served as the base for political democracy and freedom.”19 That Locke was an advocate for private property ownership meant that his philosophy could serve as a solid grounding for free government and democracy itself. Locke’s commitment to life, liberty, and property was a commitment to the “democratic triad,” according to Chamberlain. When Jefferson added “the pursuit of happiness” to the Declaration, he was, according to Chamberlain, “merely restating the principles of John Locke in American terms.”20 So interchangeable were Locke and Jefferson that occasionally Chamberlain even confused the two and attributed Jefferson’s addition of “happiness” in the Declaration to Locke, writing, for example, that “the ideas of John Locke, which stressed the inviolability of the individual’s property and right to pursue happiness,” seemed the perfect counterweight to Nazism. His point was clear, however: Locke, and by extension, American democracy, “never managed to become interfused with German nationalism.”21

: : : At the end of the Second World War, it was clear that Locke’s work for America was just beginning. Having defeated fascism, it was now up to the United States, or so many Americans believed, to save itself and the world from communism as well. Democracy, free markets, and individual liberties—­especially the right to private property—­were under threat. And when sustained conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed almost inevitable after 1947, Locke, distilled into a few choice passages from his Second Treatise with occasional reference to his work on religious toleration within a Christian framework, became a mighty ideological

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weapon for the United States in the Cold War. “Life, Liberty, and Property” became watchwords of the liberal democratic defense against communism, and Locke was celebrated as their author time and again. “Locke Philosophized on Freedom,” read one headline in Life from 1948.22 Particularly problematic for America’s Cold War warriors was the fact that the communists had a clearly defined textual, philosophical, and intellectual foundation for their cause: Karl Marx and Das Kapital. But who and what did Americans have? As an answer to this pressing question, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution did not seem sufficient. As the editors at Life put it in 1949: In their struggle for the world the Communists have one great advantage over the West and that is the power to generalize their position and their aims. They have their book (Das Kapital) and the commentaries thereon by Lenin and Stalin . . . The West, too, has its basic books and commentaries, but it has forgotten how to read them. John Locke, the father of the American Constitution, moulders in the libraries; Jefferson is a series of Fourth of July catchwords; Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, is an excuse for economic barbarism, not the Scottish moralist who attacked the monopolistic businessman. We have only the dimmest idea of where we came from, and hence it is impossible to know precisely where we are or to what destination we are bound.23

Not having a clear idea of their country’s intellectual, philosophical, or textual foundations, Life argued, weakened Americans in their fight against communism. Identifying and returning to their “basic books,” the magazine suggested, was absolutely necessary. More than the specter of Marx haunted America during the Cold War. His was a corporeal presence as the author of specific works—­The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, and others—­ that ran counter to “American” values of democracy, liberalism, capitalism, laissez-­faire economics, and religious toleration. The more they learned about the nature of both Soviet-­style Leninism and Marxism in Western Europe and the United States, the more confident many became that, as political theorist George H. Sabine put it in his popular college textbook, “no democratic movement can expect anything but disaster from an alliance with communism.”24 But what was the United States to do? To which book could Americans turn? For its readers and citizens across the country, Life’s lament was hardly novel. And students in their classrooms were being primed to think in these



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terms. At Princeton, for example, graduate students in early 1948 found themselves called upon to help canonize, through texts, a liberal democratic political tradition that had begun to emerge that decade in the writings of historians and political theorists. For their final paper in Politics 503, graduate students were asked to respond to a prompt that “‘the National Association of Manufacturers has spent thousands of dollars in an effort to . . . prepare a primer embodying the essence of our political tradition . . . but without being able to produce anything.’” With this prompt in mind, they were asked to supply a list of books that could do for American—­and, by extension, Western—­civilization the equivalent of what Marx’s Das Kapital had done for communists. All in all, the project would amount to a summary of “what seems to you the essence of our politics.”25 Like other students in classrooms across the country, these young men at Princeton were engaged in an active effort to construct an American ideology to combat the communist one.26 It was not enough to have American ideas; these ideas also had to be made coherent, and their origins had to be clearly identified. In this situation, Locke became essential—­a vital element for the alchemy of turning American political ideas into a “tradition.” In the 1940s, historians and political theorists began to speak confidently of the American Political Tradition and the Liberal Tradition (often interchangeably) as embodiments of the political and intellectual commitments at the heart of American liberal democracy.27 By 1949, University of Illinois professor of political science Francis G. Wilson could declare, “every teacher of political theory in the United States is concerned with the interpretation of the American tradition.”28 In 1948, Richard Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, proposed a thesis of consensus for America’s past in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. “Above and beyond temporary and local conflicts,” he argued, in a direct counter to historians Charles and Mary Beard, who stressed conflict and disunity, “there has been a common ground, a unity of cultural and political tradition, upon which American civilization has stood.”29 While Hofstadter found consensus in American political culture and defined it as “The American Political Tradition,” Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. found consensus in American liberalism as a political ideology.30 In 1949, he argued in The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom that the “great tradition of liberalism”—­defined as “the tradition of a reasonable responsibility about politics and a moderate pessimism about man”—­had provided and should continue to provide a middle way or center between authoritarian extremism on the left and right.31

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Several years before he published The Vital Center, Schlesinger had lamented the fact that contemporary understandings of liberalism were “ambiguous, cloudy, confused.” “Too bad,” he remarked, “that the word liberalism has survived with its present emotional power.” In the United States, “everyone claims to be a liberal and denounces every one else in the name of liberalism.” The term, he concluded, was both misused and overused. “But we are stuck with [it].”32 Schlesinger was not alone in his frustration. Others also recognized the “crying need,” in the words of William Aylott Orton, for a clearer understanding of liberalism’s meaning(s). In The Liberal Tradition (1945), Orton found the answer to his quest in the transcendence of Locke’s ideas as presented in the Second Treatise. Echoing more than a century’s worth of criticisms, Orton acknowledged that it might seem tempting to dismiss Locke, as earlier generations had, on the grounds that “almost every element in [Locke’s] theoretical structure has been refuted” and that “he had neither the persuasiveness of Hooker, the power of Hobbes, nor the sagacity of Hume.” But what Locke lacked on initial assessment, he made up for in lasting impact—­in spades. “So much alive is he that the valuation of Locke provides even today a good criterion for the classification of political thought,” and his writings had, without a doubt, “significance for our time also.” Locke, Orton concluded, “cleared the foundation on which liberals of all shades have continued to build.”33 This was, in part, the utility of a tradition: that it could build bridges from Locke—­or at least an idea of “Locke”—­to the present. Wilson demonstrated this point clearly in his 1949 textbook The American Political Mind. Against the modern tendency to criticize the founders for accepting Locke’s flawed theory of the social contract, he argued that “we must remember that today, in transformed dress, many of these ideas are part of our ‘commonsense’ and everyday political thinking.” Putting a finer point on the matter, he observed that, in fact, “there are lasting, universal, and fundamental aspects to our Revolutionary thought,” as bequeathed by Locke to the founders and framers, that are “moved today in our defense of the American way.” For Wilson, at least, standing in defense of the “American way” meant recognizing the present-­day relevance of Locke’s ideas as conveyed and reworked in the American founding documents.34 As Americans turned their attention from combatting fascism to fighting communism and socialism both at home and abroad, historians and political scientists continued to play enthusiastic offense, honing in on the concept of an American political tradition, a concept that spread rapidly both within and beyond America’s colleges and universities.35 Imagining



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and writing social, economic, and political conflict out of American history, these white men—­for they were, still, mostly white men—­offered renderings of an American past and present defined by consensus, continuity, and stability, and of a country and people immune to and stronger than communism and socialist forces. When London School of Economics professor Bernard Crick presented his assessment, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (1959), he concluded that, to neither’s benefit, “both American and Lockean political thought are remarkably” unbothered by either “dilemma” or “crisis.”36 Not everyone was swayed by these projects of tradition-­as-­ideology building—­or, as University of Chicago historian Daniel Boorstin put it, the push “to make a ‘philosophy’” out of seemingly unique or extraordinary American “virtues.” Rather than countering Marx and Marxism with Locke and a theory of liberalism, he asked, why not celebrate Americans’ “lack of interest in political theory”?37 In some important respects, Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953), in which he argued that American exceptionalism was defined by “the belief that an explicit political theory is superfluous,” suggested the possibility of an alternative path forward, a road not taken.38 Rather than taking Boorstin’s “givenness”—­or the seeming certainty that timeless realities of geography, historical disposition, and values unique to America defined the American way of life—­as the “theory [that] has made a theory superfluous,” many instead saddled Locke and his Second Treatise with the task of countering political, economic, and cultural threats at home and abroad. For Americans seeking a consensus around shared American values as a bulwark against communism, Locke, now considered without irony or nuance as “America’s Philosopher,” certainly fit the bill. In his 1952 introduction to the Library of the Liberal Arts edition of the Second Treatise, for instance, Thomas P. Peardon, professor of government at Barnard College, had no need to discuss the lack of attention to Locke’s political writings, as his predecessors William Seal Carpenter and Charles Sherman had in 1924 and 1937. Instead, he could take for granted that Locke was a central figure for a political tradition that America shared with its English-­speaking ally, Great Britain. As Peardon proclaimed, Locke was “probably the most representative thinker in the whole Anglo-­American political tradition.”39

: : : This reinvention of Locke as the symbolic—­and ideological—­essence of the American Political Tradition happened as colleges and universities were

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assuming a new, more prominent role in American society. Higher education was democratizing and becoming increasingly widespread, especially for white men. When a generation of young men arrived home following World War II, they found themselves with greater prospects for economic prosperity and educational opportunity than Americans at any time in the past. The GI Bill helped more than twelve million veterans attend college and buy homes.40 Both secondary and postsecondary education rates steadily increased over the postwar years. Between 1900 and 1960, illiteracy rates nationwide dropped from around 12 to less than 3 percent.41 Many educators wholeheartedly believed that classrooms were the best incubators for political, economic, cultural, and social solutions to the challenges facing liberal democracy. “There scarcely can have been a time in the past when society stood in greater need of all that a university has to offer,” thundered Columbia’s new president, Grayson Kirk, in his inaugural address in January 1953. “The basic beliefs of our western way of life,” he continued, “are today under a greater and more sustained attack than any which they have faced for centuries.”42 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, American college classrooms evolved into important sites for building, sustaining, and fostering this newfound “political tradition,” and educators eagerly deployed Locke and his Second Treatise in their efforts. Indeed, an education—­especially an education in Locke’s political thinking—­was more than an end in itself. Between the two world wars, colleges and universities across the country had begun implementing curricular changes aimed at ensuring the education of students-­as-­democratic-­citizens. Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course, Chicago’s Great Books Program, and Harvard’s plan for “General Education in a Free Society,” for example, all sought to educate democratic citizens who would carry their broad liberal education out into the world.43 These new programs aimed to fix the “crisis in liberal education,” which observers saw as a product of curricular overspecialization, which meant that students studied only a narrow set of electives related to their own particular interests.44 Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, proponents trotted out argument after argument that courses in Western Civilization and the “Great Books” would contribute to a well-­ rounded liberal education—­an “education for freedom,” “for our responsibilities as members of a democratic society,” as Robert Maynard Hutchins, University of Chicago president and fierce advocate for lifelong engagement with the Great Books, put it.45 The development and evolution of courses and programs of study in Western Civilization and the Great Books demonstrate the extent to which,



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beginning in the 1940s, Locke’s authority had become inseparable from his Second Treatise and how it only strengthened during the early postwar and Cold War period. In the 1940s and beyond, to study Western Civilization and the Great Books—­to receive a liberal education, as its spokesmen portrayed it—­meant knowing Locke as a political philosopher and author of the Second Treatise. The case of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, is illuminating. In the autumn semester of 1937, St. John’s debuted its “New Program,” an entirely revamped curriculum structured around four years of reading in the Great Books. In an overview of the program’s lofty goals, Scott Buchanan, Dean of the College, explained that “it is the purpose of the new program at St. John’s College to recover the great liberal tradition of Europe and America, which for a period of two thousand years has kept watch over and guided all the other Occidental [i.e., Western] traditions.”46 In 1937, listed among the hundred or so “Great Books” in which St. John’s students would immerse themselves, was Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Just three years later, in time for the 1940–­41 academic year, Locke’s Essay vanished from the list and in its place appeared the Second Treatise, which has remained a feature of the St. John’s reading list ever since.47 When the university published its famous “St. John’s List: Books That Have Helped Shape Western Civilization” in the 1980s, no trace of Locke’s initial appearance in the New Program (in the form of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding) was visible. Instead, he was identified only as “the philosopher associated with Anglo-­American political principles,” chief among them the rights to the preservation of one’s private property.48 One fierce proponent of the revolution in liberal education underway at St. John’s was Mortimer J. Adler.49 Adler, a philosopher by training, had arrived at the University of Chicago from Columbia in 1930 at the invitation of the university’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins.50 Together with Hutchins, Adler spearheaded the ambitious Great Books Program, which through its discussion groups, publications, and foundation soon reached hundreds of thousands of adults far outside the ivy-­clad classrooms of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus.51 Thanks to Adler’s efforts and his popular and accessible writings—­which included works such as How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940)—­a generation of Americans became familiar with the “classic,” “great,” and “most important” books, ideas, and thinkers at the foundation of the Western world. From the shores of Lake Michigan, the Great Books Program extended liberal arts education to adult professionals, and it soon spread to smaller towns and cities across

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the United States. In 1948, the St. Louis Star-­Times proudly declared that a thousand adults from all professions—­“truck drivers . . . bankers . . . [t]eachers . . . theater ushers . . . [c]lerks, secretaries, and psychologists”—­would begin meeting at local churches, schools, and community centers to read together great works of politics, literature, and philosophy to become better educated citizens of a democracy.52 In 1952, Encyclopaedia Britannica published a fifty-­four-­volume set, The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Adler with Hutchins’s input. Aimed at fostering a “great conversation” about the Great Books from the works of Homer to those of Freud, it included a multivolume “syntopicon,” a kind of index where 102 “Great Ideas” were cross-­referenced with every author and text covered by the publication. Locke appeared in 98 of the 102 entries, behind only Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.53 The men and women who pursued the reading plans of Adler, Hutchins, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica read selections from three works by Locke—­A Letter Concerning Toleration, the Second Treatise, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.54 Over the course of the 1950s, Adler—­now at his newly founded Institute for Philosophical Research—­and Hutchins only increased their efforts to promote the Great Books as an integral component of an adult’s liberal education. “You have to have this education”—­a liberal education, that is—­ Hutchins declared in 1959, “if you are going to be an effective citizen of a democracy.”55 When their thriving Great Books Program produced A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education in 1959, it seemed obvious which of Locke’s works Americans needed to read.56 “In the history of human liberty,” co-­editors Adler and Peter Wolff explained, “Locke’s essay Concerning Civil Government stands out not only as a great contribution to political theory, but also as an effective instigator of political action.” America, they claimed, with its ideals of government and certainty that “all our political liberties are rooted in the rule of law,” embodied Locke’s “ideal of government.” A government based on laws is what “makes constitutional government ‘free government.’” “No American can ever afford to forget this basic truth,” the editors asserted. “The reading of Locke’s essay” on civil government, they concluded, “will never permit him to.”57 In the 1940s and 1950s, Locke’s Second Treatise also formed a key pillar of Columbia University’s famous core curriculum, where freshmen enrolled in Contemporary Civilization in the West read selections from it, alongside selections from the Magna Carta and Napoleon Bonaparte.58 The freshman course, “An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” had



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been implemented in 1919 and, beginning in 1928, comprised a two-­year set of seminars covering, in the first year, questions related to Western society’s origins and, in the second year, those more specifically related to pressing concerns of the twentieth-­century United States. It was not, as its proponents made every effort to highlight, a program in the Great Books, but there were similarities. Beginning in 1941, organizers introduced original source material (rather than secondary syntheses) as the basis of the course. When, in 1946, the program staff compiled and published a source book, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, they captured Locke’s present importance for students as a critical influence on American political life, with his “middle-­class and individualistic bias.” “The thinker who has been, perhaps, most frequently quoted by spokesmen for democracy,” the preface announced, “is John Locke (1632–­1704).” To be sure, his “epoch-­making work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” did not go unmentioned, but it was clear where students should direct their attention. “It was not,” they learned from the preface, “in this work but in his Of Civil Government that Locke’s political philosophy was most fully developed.”59 When the program staff revised the source book for Contemporary Civilization for a second edition in 1954, they made a few additions, which included more material from the Second Treatise.60 When it came to a liberal education in Western Civilization or the Great Books, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was not on the same level as the Second Treatise. Nor were any of Locke’s other works. But they were not altogether forgotten or set aside. As we saw above, Adler’s Great Books of the Western World, for example, contained excerpts from the Essay as well as from the Letter Concerning Toleration. When Adler and Hutchins compiled a list of “authors and works unanimously agreed upon as of unquestionable merit” in 1944, both the Essay and Second Treatise made the cut.61 And the third edition of Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (1960) actually added the Essay to its selection of readings on “The Enlightenment: Background and Ideals.” The selections from the Essay did not, however, replace selections from the Second Treatise. Nor did they come anywhere close to rivaling them in length.62

: : : Outside of core courses on Western Civilization or the Great Books, students studying politics, government, and history more generally also encountered Locke’s Second Treatise as a work that was both important and

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relevant to present-­day concerns. In their college classes, young men (primarily) learned that Locke had set in motion a particular strain of natural rights theory that motivated American commitments to the rights to life, liberty, and property. Moreover, they increasingly encountered Locke as an important source on political structures and governmental institutions and practices, rather than merely a historical figure. Locke had, in other words, bridged the chasm that formerly separated him from the modern world and become a useful resource for addressing present-­day issues. At Princeton, for example, which had no core curriculum of the sort offered at Columbia, Locke’s Second Treatise permeated the curriculum of the Department of Politics.63 Locke’s arguments received significant attention in a broad range of courses, such as “American Government, the History of Political Theories,” and “American Political Thought.” Professor Alpheus Thomas Mason, for example, began his undergraduate course “American Political Thought” in the fall term of 1947 with a lecture entitled “The American Political Tradition,” followed by two lectures entitled “Sources of American Political Thought,” both of which were devoted to Locke.64 In Politics 101, a course on American government, Locke’s Treatise of Civil Government (either the edition from 1924, edited by Princeton’s own William Seal Carpenter, or the 1937 New York Appleton Century edition) was one of only four books students were expected to purchase for the class and, aside from The Federalist, the only original, primary-­source material. Under the guidance of their guest lecturer, Adams scholar L. H. Butterfield, they read Locke alongside copies—­which were “to be provided”—­of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address.65 Nor was it uncommon for Locke to receive more attention than other past political thinkers. For the Department of Politics senior year comprehensive exams at the end of fall term 1946, for example, students on the first day of testing for “Modern Political Theory” divided their time and attention among Burke, Rousseau, and Mill. On the second day, they were expected to give Locke their undivided attention and answer only one—­albeit, three-­part—­ question. Specifically, graduating seniors were asked to “discuss the polit­ ical philosophy of John Locke in relation to: (a) property; (b) revolution; (c) purpose of government.”66 During the postwar era, students taking a course in the Department of Politics would have been hard-­pressed to miss Locke. And they would have been hard-­pressed to miss the present-­day implications of Locke’s arguments—­especially his defense of private property. Syllabi and course examinations from politics classes across the late 1940s and 1950s heavily emphasize Locke’s theory of property, in particular.67 As they read for their



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classes and studied for exams, students devoted long hours to understanding Locke’s relevance to their early Cold War world. They studied Locke in opposition to both totalitarianism and communism, and the stakes of their studies were often made explicit. In the fall of 1949, for example, students taking “Modern Political Theory” were expected to have something to say about questions such as these: “In what way is the defense of property related to the evolution of free government?” “Are Herbert Spencer and F. A. Hayek the true heirs of Locke?” “What are the main points of defense of the capitalist system today?”68 Having mastered this material, they then turned their attention to communism and Marxism. Two years later, students taking the same class were asked, in the first part of their midterm examination, to consider the relationship between the ideas of the German philosopher Hegel and the writings of the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini. In the second part of the exam, they were asked to analyze aspects of Locke’s political thought before discussing “briefly to what extent the political theory of Locke still meets the needs of our own time, and to what extent it fails to do so.”69 Linkages between Locke’s political thought and contemporary questions and issues were explicit and important. Princeton was hardly alone in its desire for students to think seriously about Locke’s relevance for Cold War American efforts to battle communism, especially through comparisons between his work and that of Karl Marx. At Harvard in the 1950s, for example, Humanities students were asked to compare Locke and Marx on questions of revolution, labor, and property.70 And any students who read Harvard professor Louis Hartz’s instantly famous The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (1955) would have learned that a pervasive “Lockian” spirit in America explained how Marx and Engels could have been so wrong to predict socialism’s eventual, and inevitable, success.71 Particularly careful readers of The Liberal Tradition would have realized that Marx’s name appears third most often, behind only that of Locke and Jefferson. Locke was secured as America’s antidote to Marx—­both inside and outside college classrooms—­in large part owing to the swift popularity of Hartz’s work. The Liberal Tradition was an immediate best seller and was listed as one of the “outstanding books of the year” by the New York Times.72 A quiet, reserved professor of government at Harvard, Hartz came alive in the classroom, delivering passionate lectures on American political history that sought to reveal long-­standing patterns of American liberalism and situate America’s political past and present alongside that of other Western countries.73 For Hartz, Locke was more of a transcendent spirit or numinous abstraction than a concrete influence measurable by readership, citation, or

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invocation. In The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz argued that America’s unique experience of an absence of European-­style feudalism allowed for the continued presence of what he called an “irrational Lockianism”—­an abiding commitment to a package of ideals, among them the sanctity of individual rights, private property ownership, and equality of opportunity. Taken together, these phenomena ensured that socialism neither had taken nor would take hold in the United States. Like Curti nearly two decades earlier, Hartz conceptualized these “Lockean” ideals not as the direct, measurable, or concrete influence of Locke’s arguments, but rather as the continual presence of an essentialized “Locke” in American political and intellectual life.74 Locke was so omnipresent, Hartz argued, that he “dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation.”75 When he explained how he used the term liberalism, in the introduction to The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz turned not to Locke, but to the adjective Lockean, writing that he deployed liberalism “in the classic Lockian sense.”76 By merging the adjective Lockean and liberalism, Hartz exemplified the murkiness—­and malleability—­of the concept of Lockean liberalism, which he was among the first to put into words.77 In an influential review for the New York Times in 1955, Richard Hofstadter told readers that Hartz had “written a brilliant book that will have to be reckoned with by all informed students of American society.”78 He was right. Hartz’s colleague Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example, quickly built Hartz’s arguments into his own teaching and scholarship. Because of Americans’ uniquely nonfeudal past, Schlesinger explained in 1959–­60, they had remade Locke from the start. “In accepting Locke,” they “restated his emphasis to conform to American needs and Am[erican] experiences.”79 By 1969, New York Times columnist John Leo could describe Hartz as one of the “leading consensus historians”—­one “who argued that all Americans shared the basic liberal ideology of John Locke.”80 And Rutgers political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams could write in 1968 that “the tradition of liberal individualism, the ‘irrational Lockeanism’ Louis Hartz described in ‘The Liberal Tradition in America,’ still dominates our formal political thought.”81

: : : Against the backdrop of Locke’s Americanization in the postwar era, a new and different Locke emerged. Immediately following the Second World War, scholars and the general public on both sides of the Atlantic knew a great deal more about Locke than they had at any point prior. In 1947, the



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doors to Locke’s life were thrown open when a treasure trove of his personal papers was made available to researchers at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Deposited in the midst of World War II by the Earl of Lovelace, a living descendent of Locke’s cousin Peter King (to whom Locke had bequeathed his papers), the papers came to be known as the Lovelace Collection.82 They included Locke’s journals and personal correspondence and enabled countless essays, books, articles, and new editions in the immediate aftermath of their appearance. They also made possible, in 1957, a new biography of Locke, by Maurice Cranston. Cranston, then a relatively young and inexperienced biographer, dove into the unpublished manuscripts in the Lovelace Collection with zeal and the eye of a mystery writer—­which, in fact, he was.83 When Cranston began work on John Locke: A Biography in the late 1940s, he discovered that his skillset was well suited to the job. Early into his research on Locke, he confessed that “sometimes, as I find out more about him, I become only more puzzled and mystified.” A man of good humor, Cranston shared with an audience sometime around 1950 that “I have been going to the places Locke lived in like those comic detectives in fiction who always arrive on the scene absurdly late.”84 Cranston’s approach was to immerse himself in Locke’s world, life, and thought to get to the heart of who Locke was as a person—­a full human being, rather than a dry and dusty thinker from the past. In this respect, Cranston’s interventions were numerous. They included significant, and to some, troubling, revelations of Locke’s early Royalist sympathies and rejections of religious toleration.85 To the delight of many readers, Cranston included ample discussion of Locke’s (rather limited) romantic forays, complete with analysis of pseu­ donymous love letters between Locke and various female correspondents. Nevertheless, some commentators remained unconvinced that Locke was anything other than “cold as a fish,” as the British novelist C. P. Snow put it.86 “Though Locke . . . lived in exciting times,” the British Huddersfield Examiner declared, “he was not an exciting person.”87 While reviews of Cranston’s biography were mostly positive, on both sides of the Atlantic, a distinctive pattern emerged among his American reviewers in particular. They berated Cranston for neglecting Locke’s centrality to the American story, which they saw as integral to Locke’s importance, past and present.88 Max Freedman’s review in the Washington Post was particularly pointed. “An American reader,” Freedman wrote, “will regret Cranston’s inadequate knowledge of America, a defect not without significance if one wants to treat Locke’s ideas as living influence on world

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thought and not merely as a philosophy shaped by a vanished age in En­ gland.”89 In the 1950s, what made Locke worthy of American attention were not the details of his life that had so captivated centuries’ worth of readers but rather—­or, at least, primarily—­his American “influence,” that is, the place of his Second Treatise in the story of the American Political Tradition. In his review of Cranston’s biography for the Dallas Mercury News entitled “Of Locke, Jefferson’s Mentor,” journalist Sam Acheson captured what he saw as the crux of Locke’s importance for Americans. Acknowledging that “the life of this placid old bachelor . . . was singularly uneventful” and might, therefore, seem uninteresting to his readers at first glance, he drove home the fact that Locke’s views on government, particularly his defense of private property, were singularly significant for Americans in the late 1950s. “If Locke’s views on government are anathema to present-­day advocates of the welfare state, they are even more abhorrent to extreme left-­wingers among them,” Acheson declared. What made Locke “abhorrent” to “extreme left-­wingers” was “Locke’s emphasis on the sanctity of private property.” Acheson was willing to give Cranston the benefit of the doubt, noting that the “debt” Americans owed to Locke was “implied if not spelled out in this biography.”90 But this left unaddressed the matter of whether or not the biography itself was truly worth their time. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Standard Times took it upon itself to offer a suggestion that in future editions of his biography of Locke Cranston include “a chapter dealing with Locke’s influence on American Revolutionary War leaders.” Given that Locke died more than seven decades before the Revolutionary War, “this would be admittedly a bit of an ‘extra,’” the newspaper acknowledged, but it “would expand the usefulness and sales of the book even further.”91 When Cranston publicized the 1985 paperback edition of John Locke: A Biography, he took reviewers’ suggestions along these lines to heart. Among all “the philosophers of the modern world,” Cranston wrote in a piece, “Locke and Liberty,” for the Wilson Quarterly, “John Locke has always been held in especially high regard in America.”92

: : : By the 1960s, Locke was so centrally embedded in the American Political Tradition that politicians across the political spectrum regularly used him to advance their increasingly partisan agendas. Some conservatives, for example, heralded Locke as a Christian influence on the founders and used their interpretations to argue that the United States was a fundamentally Christian nation. Republican congressman J. Arthur Younger of California,



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for one, placed in the Congressional Record a speech delivered by Lucile Hosmer—­president of the California Federation of Republican Women, Northern Division, and later legislative chair of the National Federation of Republican Women—­that used Locke to Christianize the United States Constitution. Partway into her speech, “The Nature of Our Constitution,” Hosmer articulated her three central arguments: that “the very basis of our Constitution is our Ten Commandments and its fundamental structure is derived from Christian principles”; that this blending of human and divine law was distinctively American; and that the distinctively Christian origins of the Constitution were “readily apparent to those who have made a study of the historic origin of our constitution.” Then, of course, she turned immediately to Locke, construed as “the authority to whom our leaders of the American Revolution looked for guidance.” In the paragraphs that follow, Hosmer repeatedly characterized the Founding Fathers as “disciples,” “students,” and “followers” of Locke; their words as Lockean quotations and “echoes”; and the Second Treatise as the “Political Bible” of the American Revolution. For Hosmer, however, Locke was important not only for his perceived influence, but also—­indeed, primarily—­because he could be construed as a specifically Christian influence. With that in mind, Hosmer quoted Locke’s declaration, in the Second Treatise, that “no law could be held valid unless it was in harmony with the laws of nature or Divine Law,” reminded her audience that Locke also wrote the Reasonableness of Christianity and the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, and argued, against what she characterized as modern misinterpretations, that Locke “was a sincere and devout Christian.”93 In Washington, politically driven invocations of Locke were particularly important to debates over civil and voting rights legislation. Broadly speaking, supporters of civil rights legislation, such as Congressmen Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Paul Douglas, focused more on the Declaration of Independence and its emphasis on happiness (rather than property). They generally sought to show how the Founding Fathers adapted Locke, by substituting the pursuit of happiness for property.94 And they invoked Locke as support for their arguments about the “fundamental rights” of mankind.95 Meanwhile, opponents of civil rights legislation sought to retain property rights as an integral component of the political founding and so interpreted Jefferson and the framers of the Constitution as building on Locke rather than changing him. Locke’s defense of private property rather than his discussion of natural rights became the mainstay of their argument. Consequently, the extent to which one emphasized Locke’s defense

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of private property, as opposed to other aspects of his thought, would come to serve as a sound indicator of one’s conservatism. On February 15, 1960, the United States Senate began to debate new legislation that would substantially expand President Dwight Eisenhower’s initial Civil Rights Act of 1957. Led by then majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, these debates and conversations would culminate in the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in July 1964, and the Voting Rights Act, in August 1965. Confronting fierce opposition from his Southern colleagues, Humphrey articulated clearly the domestic as well as the international stakes of civil rights legislation. Civil rights were human rights, he argued, and America’s attention to citizens of all races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures at home would make the country stronger in its fight against communist repression abroad. The world was watching, Humphrey proclaimed. “Let us never forget that the difference between the Communist world and the free world is essentially one of human rights.” Apparently unperturbed by Locke’s and Jefferson’s problematic relationship to other pieces of the puzzle—­for example, race and slavery—­Humphrey cited Locke and Jefferson, alongside Thomas Aquinas, as the philosophical spokesmen for the sanctity of natural rights or human rights. “When we speak of civil rights,” he proposed, “while it is a fact that these are constitutional rights, I remind my colleagues that these rights go far deeper, that they are rights which were here even before the Constitution was written. They are, indeed, the inalienable rights that our Founding Fathers spoke of in the Declaration of Independence.”96 Humphrey’s opponents drew from another aspect of Locke’s political philosophy: his defense of private property. They positioned themselves as defenders of property rights—­which, using Locke, they construed as natural and fundamental. In his tirade against the core features of the Civil Rights Act of 1963, Senator Olin D. Johnston of South Carolina argued that the proposed legislation would directly violate the United States Constitution and the interstate commerce clause, and he used Locke to help make his case. “Under this mystical and paranoid standard [the Civil Rights Act], there would be established a legal climate in which no phase of American life would escape some sort of continuing Federal control. The right to use one’s private property as one sees fit is as necessary,” Johnston opined, “as is the right of one to select his customers and to do business with whom he desires.” “The principle of the free enjoyment of one’s property is woven as a necessary thread throughout the framework of our entire system of laws.”97 In support of this argument, Johnston invoked Locke as the “great En­ glish philosopher” who was the “ideological father of both the Declaration of



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Independence and the Bill of Rights” and reminded his fellow senators that Locke “believed that the fundamental right of property existed in the state of nature and that, indeed, one of the major reasons that man abandoned the state of nature and accepted the limitations imposed by governments was that he had reached a stage in his development where government was necessary for the protection of property.” The contrasting perspective to Locke’s, Johnston warned his colleagues, was that of Karl Marx and Frie­ drich Engels in the Communist Manifesto.98 Civil rights legislation, Johnston believed, threatened private property rights that he evidently deemed more important than individual rights to human dignity and equality. Johnston’s emphasis on property rights over civil rights was shared by many of his allies both inside and outside the Senate. In a 1963 special episode called “Right of Private Property,” James Dobbs, host of the popular radio program Life Line, argued that the right to protection of property was the one “personal right” that “Americans stood in the greatest danger of losing.” In a discussion of the logic underlying Jefferson’s decision to change Locke’s triad of life, liberty, and property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Dobbs argued that “by this change Jefferson probably meant to include an even greater range of human freedom than was covered by the term ‘property.’ He certainly did not mean to downgrade property as a personal right.” To the contrary, “as Jefferson’s use of the term ‘pursuit of happiness’ makes especially clear, the three right[s] cannot be separated.” In short, Jefferson was building upon, not changing, Locke’s ideas. Georgia senator Herman E. Talmadge agreed wholeheartedly, observing, as he introduced Dobbs’s radio program into the Congressional Record, that “the right to private property is so much a part of the personal liberty enjoyed by the people of the United States that it must be kept inviolate.”99 And Talmadge was not alone in his enthusiasm for this point of view; just a few weeks later, Democratic senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina asked that the same episode of Life Line be included in the Record for a second time.100 When he famously helped filibuster the Civil Rights Act from the even­ ing of June 9 to the morning of June 10, 1964, Robert C. Byrd, Democratic senator from West Virginia, relied heavily on Locke in his last-­ditch effort to stall this historic legislation. Much to the chagrin of many of his Democratic colleagues, Byrd palavered for hours in excruciating detail, outlining how the “lost . . . sense for the propriety of property,” as a fundamental feature of human freedom and rights, was the key problem facing Western democra­ cies.101 Shortly before Byrd had explained that “property rights are so very important in my judgment, as to warrant the taking of some considerable

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time in reference to the historical debate regarding this important human right,” Hubert Humphrey, who had used Locke to argue for civil rights legislation only a few years earlier, needled Byrd and asked if he was “able to give [them] any idea as to the hour that he might conclude his address.”102 Byrd, however, was in no hurry to end his disquisition, and he continued with his argument that property rights were integral rather than subordinate to individual liberties and democracy itself. As Byrd saw it, the Civil Rights Act was a threat to the sanctity of private property and thus, in his eyes, to democracy, human rights, and individual liberty as well. “The history of mankind would appear to support the belief that the individual’s right to own, manage, and control the use of property [in this instance even control who would enter and support one’s place of business] is a ‘human right’ in every sense of the term,” he declared.103 Even after Humphrey left the Senate floor to catch some sleep, leaving Byrd, as Humphrey put it, to “continue with his dissertation,” and South Dakota senator George McGovern left to celebrate his daughter’s birthday, Byrd continued his disquisition on English and European history. Drawing on recent works by Gottfried Dietze, In Defense of Property (1963), and Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (1951), he spoke at great length on the historical and philosophical justifications of the defense of private property from Aristotle and Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, Sir John Fortescue, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel von Pufendorf. These thinkers’ ideas, however foundational, served as prelude, because, as Byrd explained, “it remained for John Locke to express the standard bourgeois theory of property.” Citing Schlatter and quoting Locke at length, Byrd argued that “Locke maintained that private property is an institution of nature rather than an institution of men,” which made it above and prior to (though causal for) the creation of government. Property for Locke was “one of the sacred trinity of natural rights.”104

: : : By the mid-­1960s, Locke’s importance for America’s democratic, rights-­ conscious political identity was crystal clear to everyone, no matter where they fell on the political spectrum. It was not yet clear, however, whether those who sought to make Locke the voice of progressive politics, civil rights, and equality would win out over conservatives who emphasized his commitment to limited government and property rights. When in 1969, Shirley Chisholm, Democratic congresswoman from New York and the first African American woman elected to Congress, rose



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to address the House on the matter of civil disobedience in the wake of Vietnam War protests, she turned to Locke. Celebrating “the youth of this Nation . . . in all their protest and moral exuberance,” Chisholm portrayed protesters’ demands as carrying forward the battles and intellectual lineage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In words that transcended time and space, Chisholm expressed the fears of her constituents and of young Americans across the nation, who saw that “this system is not worth saving unless it can work; unless it can end injustice, and poverty, and racism, and war; unless it can reform itself to meet the just demands and expectations of the people.” As Chisholm reminded her listeners, the protesters’ perspectives were not all that different from “what our forefathers believed when they fought a revolution with England.”105 Drawing a parallel between the unrest of the late 1960s and that of the revolutionary period two centuries earlier, Chisholm asserted that “it is the old compact theory of government all over again; the same compact theory we learned when we were in school enunciated by John Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’ and incorporated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.”106 Locke, his compact theory, and its recapitulation by Jefferson were no longer the stuff of history. Nor did they belong only in the pages of dry academic tracts. For Chisholm, Locke belonged on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And his universally acknowledged importance to the American story made him a valuable ally. For her, echoing the point made by Merle Curti thirty years before, the author of the Second Treatise still had work to do.

: : : On the eve of the Second World War, the precise nature of Locke’s significance in the United States was still far from certain. In the decades that followed, however, Locke’s centrality for America’s political identity—­both past and present—­would become nothing short of obvious. And Locke—­or, rather, an idea of the symbolic “Locke,” and certain phrases, terms, and elements of his Second Treatise, in particular—­would come to play the starring role in an increasingly discernable American Political Tradition of liberalism and democracy. By 1961, Locke’s Second Treatise, edited by Thomas Peardon, was part of the new “Classics of American Democracy program.” Pioneered by Representative Barratt O’Hara, the program was meant, through the publication and distribution of now-­classic texts, to spread democratic ideals throughout the world. In its review of the program in the early 1960s, the

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Committee on Foreign Affairs suggested that “perhaps no [other] program has been more successful in winning the hearts and the minds of the peoples of the new emerging nations.”107 But as some Americans were sending Locke to fight communism overseas, his trajectory at home was facing new challenges.

7 Lockean “-­isms”

L

“‘

ocke the liberal,’” wrote Leo Strauss in 1960 to his friend and fellow political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, “is the chief or perhaps the sole idol in the temple of liberalism and whoever questions that idol is guilty of what the liberals themselves call ‘unorthodoxy.’”1 Strauss’s aggrieved words capture the essence of Locke’s place in 1960s America. To question “Locke the liberal” was akin to questioning a deity. But some, like Strauss and Kendall, would have none of it. In the decades following World War II, this cantankerous duo emerged to challenge the ever-­ growing “liberal consensus” interpretation of Locke and refute what they saw as a liberal myth of Locke’s magnificence.2 They questioned whether Locke should be heralded as a defender of natural or individual rights and whether his rendering of such rights should be celebrated at all. In a broader culture enamored of the liberal Locke, they offered an alternative perspective that differed markedly in its evaluation of Locke himself, his political philosophy, and his supposed importance for both the discipline of political science and American culture as a whole. From the country’s intellectual and political right, Kendall and Strauss (sometimes joined by others, such as historian Russell Kirk) mounted a sustained challenge to a liberal worldview

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they abhorred and thought was still too soft on communism.3 They sought to dismantle the Lockean genealogy they saw being assembled before their very eyes to uphold that worldview. In the echo chamber of the liberal consensus—­“the prevailing climate,” as Strauss called it—­his and Kendall’s thinking confronted serious obstacles.4 They faced the rise of behavioral, quantitative political science increasingly resistant to political theory in general.5 And they faced the intense, active, and largely successful construction of Locke as the “idol,” to use Strauss’s word, of the liberal political consensus that had come to undergird the American Political Tradition. “The Lockeans in America,” Kendall proclaimed in 1963, “are the Liberals; and the Conservatives, who disagree with the Liberals . . . in all the crucial points, must learn to understand themselves as the anti-­Lockeans.”6 To a large degree, they were unsuccessful in surmounting those obstacles. Their biting critique of behaviorialism failed, for the most part, to persuade their colleagues in political science departments. And not all conservatives saw themselves as anti-­Lockeans. Far from it. Even as schools of “Straussian” political philosophy were taking off in the 1970s, a very different set of conservative political thinkers—­libertarians—­found a new purpose for Locke, yoking him (and the adjective “Lockean”) to an ideology of libertarianism.7 With the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick played the starring role in this story. In part a response to his liberal colleague John Rawls’s powerful defense of egalitarianism and a robust welfare state in A Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick’s arguments in favor of a minimal state, which relied heavily on the Second Treatise, cemented Locke as a pillar of libertarian thinking in the United States. Nozick’s work ushered in the rise of “Lockean libertarianism,” a more circumscribed, more divisive, but perhaps more potent version of the Lockean “-­ism” Strauss and Kendall had been so keen to dismantle. Meanwhile, Locke’s historical significance was coming under attack. Across the 1960s and 1970s, an influential cohort of historians—­including Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood—­challenged the consensus view of Locke’s centrality to the American Political Tradition. In so doing, they destabilized the very notion of such a tradition, in the singular. Somewhat ironically, however, they also consolidated Locke’s place in American political history by strengthening his presumed ties to both the founding moment and the liberal tradition.

: : : Willmoore Kendall was a precocious youth but always somewhat of an outsider. Reading by the age of two, he had four degrees from four different universities by the time he was thirty.8 A political theorist by training



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and profession, he had little patience as an adult for conformity or fitting in. Known for his bombastic personality and in-­your-­face teaching style—­ captured beautifully in preserved transcripts of his lectures—­Kendall had a rocky academic career.9 Students in his university courses were often told that their questions were terrible and that he was aghast at their poor performance.10 In the Yale Department of Politics, where Kendall taught on and off between 1947 and 1961, his conservative politics put him at odds with most of the faculty and may have contributed to the fact that he was refused promotion and forced to resign.11 During a brief stint at Stanford University, his well-­known penchant for buttered rum did little to help the forward progress of his academic career.12 “Contra Mundum”—­against the world, against it all—­became Kendall’s lifelong mantra.13 At one time left-­leaning and sympathetic to the republican side during the Spanish Civil War, Kendall, during the 1940s and 1950s, followed other former leftists like philosopher Sidney Hook and historian Daniel J. Boorstin in becoming staunchly and unremittingly anticommunist. If, however, Kendall’s taste and sympathy for liberalism or liberal politics vanished—­and he came to loathe liberals and liberal values, regarding them as essentially untrue to America’s founding intentions—­his shift rightward found him marching to a different drummer than his fellow American conservatives. He rejected both John Chamberlain’s antipathy toward the supposed vices of “big government” and his belief in the unqualified good of free markets. Instead, Kendall advocated a strong federalism. More remarkably, as historian George H. Nash has observed, he “even attacked the widespread conservative belief that political freedom and free enterprise were inseparable.”14 If Chamberlain’s libertarian-­style conservatism was anathema to Kendall, so too was Russell Kirk’s traditionalist, “self-­styled Burkean” conservatism, which he found downright un-­American.15 If few conservatives found favor with Kendall, Leo Strauss was an exception. In Strauss, a German-­Jewish émigré, former student of the eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and professor of political science at the University of Chicago, he found a kindred spirit. The two men began corresponding in June 1949 and exchanged letters regularly until Kendall’s death in the summer of 1967. Their communications ranged widely covering everything from William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review (to which Kendall was an early contributor) and its stances toward the state of Israel to Kendall’s long-­term struggles with alcoholism. At one point, Kendall noted, without any apparent irony, that he was “quite drunk” on Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, which he was reviewing for the Philosophical Review in 1959.16 It was already clear in Kendall’s first letter to Strauss how deeply the former had been affected by

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the latter’s work. Reading Strauss’s “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Kendall noted, had given him “quite the jolt.”17 But this jolt was soon followed by a happy recognition of shared political and academic commitments. The early years of their correspondence were marred by a brief spat (exacerbated by slow mail overseas) about how to address one another—­by first names or by “Professor”—­but the two eventually became close.18 Years later, after Kendall’s death, his wife, Nellie, recounted her late husband’s “happy discovery of Strauss.”19 And, by 1955, Kendall could express openly to Strauss “how deeply indebted I am to your books.”20 In February 1959, much to Kendall’s delight, Strauss suggested that they should meet in person, which they did at Chicago that April.21 The two men found they had a lot in common. For one, they agreed on the sorry state of political theory in the United States at the time. As they saw it, most political science departments—­including Yale’s, where Kendall was teaching at the time—­had by the 1950s fallen into the hands of behavioralists and adherents of the view that political outcomes and decisions could be objectively quantified. And they lamented what they saw as their colleagues’ shortsighted focus on individuals rather than on institutions, organizations, or societies, which they believed to be the more important loci of political values. When Kendall left Yale, Strauss combined personal regrets with sorrow for their shared academic field. Kendall’s departure from Yale, Strauss told him, “made me very sad, not only for you but above all for the future of political theory in this country.” “I am mortified,” he lamented, “by the fact that I, a fairly recent immigrant, could get a job as a full professor of theory whereas you, the best native theorist of your generation, have the fate of a political refugee without the consolations of a political refugee.” Strauss did not hold back his anger about Kendall’s apparent mistreatment. Even with knowledge of Kendall’s fondness for stiff drink and conservative politics, which surely could not have helped departmental relations, Strauss attributed “the root of [Kendall’s] troubles” to “the enmity of the department at Yale to anything which is not ‘behavioralistic.’”22 With respect to Locke, their shared worldview translated into an agreement that the political philosopher’s influence on the American political culture was detrimental to the political science profession and, more important, to the country itself. Accordingly, they worked industriously to undermine “Locke the liberal” as the basis for the American Political Tradition.

: : : Kendall’s dissertation, which he completed at the University of Illinois in 1941, was, in the words of a later admirer, historian George H. Nash, “true



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to his temperament: daring, relentlessly argued, and unorthodox.”23 Published as John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule, it argued boldly that rather than being the saint of the individual and individual rights, Locke was in fact a fierce adherent of the “doctrine of majority-rule.” Indeed, Kendall asserted that, rather than recognize individual rights as absolute, Locke “entrust[ed] to the majority the power of defining individual rights.” As Kendall was well aware, this interpretation forced him to confront a thorny question: if individual rights are defined by the majority, are they really rights at all? To resolve the dilemma, he read into the Second Treatise a “latent premise,” as he called it, that the majority “would never withdraw a right which the individual ought to have.”24 Kendall framed his work as a contribution more to majoritarian studies than to scholarship on Locke.25 In 1941, after all, there was not much American scholarship devoted to Locke’s political philosophy or his Second Treatise. In fact, Kendall’s book was the first full-­length study by an American scholar published in the United States that focused specifically on Locke’s political arguments as advanced in his Second Treatise. “You are the only expert on Locke I know in this country,” wrote political scientist and recent German émigré Eric Voegelin, who would soon become a major influence on Kendall.26 Few scholars paid much attention to Kendall’s work, aside from the standard reviews, which were hardly positive. Political theorist Thomas I. Cook, for instance, concluded that Kendall’s book was “neither a complete nor an entirely fair assessment of Locke’s position,” as Kendall’s “over-­all vision” was lacking.27 Much later, Kendall himself would observe that his book had received little notice.28 In the decades that followed, as Kendall’s own politics moved right, he expressed growing “hostility” to a philosophy of natural, individual rights, exemplified by Locke and another English philosopher, John Stuart Mill. Liberals, Kendall argued, too heartily embraced this philosophy, which led to an “anything goes” outlook. What made governments strong was not the embrace of individualism and diversity but rather strong commitment to a set of shared values. Indeed, as one later observer put it, Kendall “insisted that all societies (including democracies) do have, ought to have, must have an orthodoxy, a consensus, a will-­to-­survive that they may rightfully defend against those who fundamentally challenge the very core of what they hold dear.”29 Kendall desired a robust, society-­level (not simple majority) “orthodoxy” because he thought that strict anticommunism, not a fuzzy liberal tradition, was essential for withstanding the assault by communists on American values.30 Rejecting individual, natural rights philosophy was not Kendall’s only break from what might have been called another sort of orthodoxy. He

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also spurned what he saw as the liberal obsession with the Declaration of Independence. Americans were wrong, Kendall believed, to follow Abraham Lincoln in taking the Declaration as the country’s true founding document.31 Overemphasis on the Declaration led inexorably to overemphasis on equality, an ideal Kendall thought did not actually undergird American political values.32 The fact that the Constitution, the real founding document according to Kendall, eschewed the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” indicated that the founders’ understanding of equality was narrower than his contemporaries on the left made it out to be. Consequently, Kendall argued, the liberal notion of equal individual rights was off the mark. The idea that men should be “equal in a material way” rather than with respect to justice, government, and law was a much later invention of Lincoln’s, who had mistakenly given “constitutional status” to the Declaration in a misreading of the founders’ attitudes toward natural rights.33 Kendall’s dissertation adviser, Francis G. Wilson, also considered an attack on the Declaration crucial to Kendall’s argument against the key tenets of egalitarian liberalism. “As a problem in political theory,” Wilson reflected following his student’s early death at fifty-­eight, “Kendall saw much more clearly than others that the central premise of liberalism was an insistence that our tradition stood first and always for equality.” Furthermore, Wilson continued, Kendall had shown that this liberal concept of equality “was supported, not by a history of the idea of equality from the Greeks on through European ideas of equality, so clearly understood by Alexis de Tocqueville, but on the Declaration of Independence.”34 In lectures delivered in the late 1950s and 1960s, Kendall’s attitude toward the liberal notion of equality did not waver; he delivered a steady stream of criticism exposing what he saw as a mistaken emphasis on the Declaration and misreadings of the founders’ intentions.35 Kendall’s conservative rewriting of the American political tradition to exclude liberals who relied on the Declaration and whose definitions of individual rights required an expansive notion of equality—­not just in access, but in material outcome—­meant minimizing Locke’s importance. Notably, Kendall’s anticommunism, which was a key component of his conservatism, did not rely on an invocation of Locke’s contribution to the country’s founding. This, it bears mention here, set him apart from the mainstream of conservative thought.36 Kendall’s position on the status of the Declaration and thus on Locke’s influence on the founders met with substantial pushback, even from within his close circle. Political scientist Harry Jaffa, for example, wrote in a November 1959 letter to Kendall that he thought the

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founders “were under the influence of Locke all right, about as much as Lenin was under the influence of Karl Marx (with all respect!).”37 Kendall’s effort to separate Locke, the Declaration of Independence, and their shared emphasis on equality from American ideals did not mean that Kendall was in any way disparaging of America’s founding moment or its political leaders. Far from it. By the 1950s, in fact, his attachment to the eighteenth-­century founding moment was so strong that it led him to reject many potential allies. One should-­be ally who ran afoul of Kendall was historian Russell Kirk, whose commitment to the eighteenth-­century Irish-­ British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke—­rather than American alternatives such as the framers and The Federalist—­marked him for Ken­ dall’s wrath.38

: : : Like Kendall, Kirk was a self-­professed conservative. Also like Kendall, he found plenty to dislike in Locke’s political philosophy. His “conservative” take on Locke’s role in the American Political Tradition was, however, rather more complex. In 1955, Kirk penned an ambivalent introduction to the Gateway edition of Locke’s Second Treatise, in which he expressed lukewarm enthusiasm for Locke’s ideas. On the one hand, Kirk could celebrate Locke’s appreciation for private property. “Nearly the whole of Locke’s reasoning is concerned with the right of property,” he exulted before reminding readers just how important that right was. When it came to Locke’s brand of individualism, on the other hand, Kirk’s enthusiasm was more circumscribed. While he could assert that “Locke is the philosopher of individualism,” the nature of that individualism troubled him. In fact, Kirk considered Locke’s explanation of the basis for individual rights weak at best, referring to it as a “passable explanation—­perhaps we may call it a myth—­to account for the existence of individual rights.”39 Locke’s version of individualism troubled Kirk because it tended, in his eyes, toward “social atomism.” And he worried that Locke’s conception of society and the bonds that tied individuals to one another was not sufficiently Christian. Locke, Kirk told readers about to encounter the Second Treatise, “has little to say about the Christian view of society as a bond between God and man.” Locke was too cold in his outlook, and “his social compact” was “a far cry from the words in Genesis.” For readers interested in alternatives, he suggested Edmund Burke. Burke, after all, “described the true moral nature of the social compact with a splendor which still puts warmth into the conservatism of our day.”40

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While Locke’s Second Treatise, Kirk argued, contained much that would please a midcentury conservative (a commitment to checks on government and the protection of property, for instance), its contribution to American values could not be endorsed without qualification. He cautioned readers that Locke’s vision of society as merely an aggregation of individuals (all following their own appetites and fancies) meant that “one will not find in Locke’s pages the living consciousness that we are part of some great continuity and essence—­the sense of love and duty” that another Whig, Burke, would celebrate.41 In certain respects—­though not all—­Kirk’s rendering of Locke’s areligiosity and atomistic coldness struck a tone similar to that of Leo Strauss.

: : : In his Natural Right and History (1953), Leo Strauss offered a blistering—­ and highly influential—­ rebuke of what by the 1950s had become the consensus reading of Locke’s political philosophy. Broadly speaking, he identified a lack of shared knowledge of “natural right” (note the singular, as opposed to the plural natural rights), which resulted in “unqualified relativism” as the key plight and failing of modern society.42 To tackle this issue, Strauss turned to the past—­to the writing of ancient and premodern men like Socrates, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas. He did not, however, do so like a twentieth-­century social scientist. Rather, he identified contemporary social science as an important site where the rejection of natural right and embrace of relativism were taking place.43 Strauss’s decidedly unorthodox and nonhistoricist investigations into the past led him to demarcate a break, as he so often did, between ancient (laudable) and modern (problematic) worldviews. And this led him to Locke. For it was Locke, following in the steps of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who struck the mortal blow against the ancient conception of political society. With his all-­consuming emphasis on individual “natural rights” (note the plural), Locke departed radically from a previous “biblical” as well as “philosophic” tradition that instead emphasized “natural duties or obligations” as the glue of society. For Strauss, Locke’s discussion of property—­and specifically property accumulation and acquisition—­in the Second Treatise encapsulated the radicalism of his departure and the very crux of his modernity. By emphasizing the right of property and, from it, the right of self-­preservation (because one had property in oneself ), Locke set the atomistic individual person at the “center and origin of the moral world.” With Locke, “man—­as distinguished from man’s end,” man as “effectively emancipated from the bonds of nature,” occupied the center of the modern, moral universe.44

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Strauss’s reading of Locke rejected all earlier efforts to historicize or contextualize the philosopher—­to understand what Locke wrote given the specific concerns of his seventeenth-­century world. It also rejected earlier attempts to reconcile competing—­and even conflicting—­elements in Locke’s writing. Instead, Strauss read the Second Treatise as the work of a clever deceiver. Talking the talk, so to speak, of natural law and a long-­ standing natural law tradition (grounded in duty and obligation, not atomistic “rights”) allowed Locke to conceal the extent to which he was actually rejecting it and, instead, making the right of individual self-­preservation the center of his moral universe, the very telos of man. No chapter in Natural Right and History caused Strauss more grief than his chapter on Locke. Accordingly, Willmoore Kendall’s particular attention to it flattered Strauss to no end. “What you said about certain of my writings and especially of my chapter in Natural Right and History on Locke pleased me very much,” Strauss admitted. And he went on to confide that, over the years, he had been “exposed to both stupid and indecent attacks on account of that chapter more than on account of anything else” he had written. The reason, Strauss declared, was Locke’s status as the “idol” in the “temple of liberalism.”45 Because Strauss’s entire program for the study of political philosophy was controversial, the fact that he singled out his interpretation of Locke as the most controversial is noteworthy.

: : : As it was and would be for so many inside and outside the academy, Strauss’s influence on Kendall was overwhelming. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kendall’s 1966 “John Locke Revisited.” The essay, published in the Intercollegiate Review, summarized his new reading of Locke, after his crucial encounter with Strauss’s work. In the article, Kendall maintained that Locke was a “majority rule authoritarian” through and through; he provided “no limit on the power of the majority to set up any form of government that meets its fancy, and thereby to withdraw any and every supposed individual right.”46 Kendall also doubled down on his earlier assessment of Locke as an elaborator and embroiderer of Hobbes. He sought to show, in ways he had only hinted in 1941, where Locke, like Machiavelli and Hobbes before him, had, by putting his faith in the interests, passions, and appetites of individuals, strayed from laudable commitments to honor, duty, and mutual obligation as the glue of society. Furthermore, Strauss’s work led Kendall to reject his own previous reading into the Second Treatise of a “latent premise” that had allowed him to

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reconcile apparent inconsistencies in Locke’s arguments regarding individual  rights and majority rule. Strauss’s interpretation of Locke as a practi­ tioner of philosophical “hanky-­panky”—­for example, purposefully deceptive statements regarding the “law of nature”—­allowed Kendall to see similar acts of deception at play in Locke’s majoritarianism. Simply put, Strauss inspired Kendall to read Locke’s Second Treatise in an entirely new way: “Strauss’ Locke,” Kendall explained, “is ‘superior’ to all previous Lockes and to all future Lockes that may be put forward by critics who refuse to treat the Second Treatise as other than a venture in ‘secret writing.’” The arguments Locke made in the Second Treatise had to be read as strategically motivated statements “put there for a strategic purpose, and by a strategist who is quite willing to employ, inter alia, deception.”47 Strauss’s impact on Kendall was evident to others as well. In a complimentary letter to Kendall on his “John Locke Revisited,” Gerhart Niemeyer, professor of government at Notre Dame, praised him for his points of agreement with Strauss.48 And in his overview of Kendall’s works in “The Political Thought of  Willmo[o]re Kendall,” John P. East, political scientist and later Republican senator from North Carolina, agreed. “The Kendall of 1966,” East explained, “expressly put Locke in the camp of the enemies of the great tradition of politics—­in the camp of Machiavelli and Hobbes.” Following Strauss, Kendall recognized “that Locke is a progenitor of modern ideology” rather than a part of “the enduring,” that is, noble, “tradition of political philosophy.”49 Strauss reciprocated Kendall’s admiration. “You are much too modest regarding your own achievement regarding the proper interpretation of Locke,” he wrote Kendall. If Strauss’s respect for Kendall’s work was great, however, it was also largely private. “I never had a suitable occasion to state this in public,” he explained, “but I am anxious to state it now, that I do not know of any other theoretical study by a man born and trained in the U.S., in your or my generation which equals in value your work on Locke.”50 Not surprisingly, Strauss was thrilled with Kendall’s refiguring of Locke along Straussian lines. And Kendall’s assessment of Locke’s shortcomings and detrimental effects on the practice and theory of politics proved him an ally in the fight to rescue modern political science and theory from its rejection of deeper societal bonds (such as religion). After reading “Locke Revisited,” Strauss noted that Kendall had “succeeded perfectly” and told him, “you are the only man who vindicates the honor of our profession.”51 It is noteworthy that the last letter Strauss wrote to Kendall just before the latter’s death in 1967 focused on praise for Kendall’s “forceful and noble” work on Locke.52

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In 1973, the year of Strauss’s death, East, then still a professor of political science, underscored the challenges that faced Kendall’s and Strauss’s iconoclastic views on Locke. An ally and sympathetic reader, East shared Strauss’s and Kendall’s opinion of what he termed “the ‘Lockean tradition’ or the ‘Lockean heritage.’” “Invariably,” East lamented, “John Locke is considered the central figure of the American political tradition.” More specifically, he observed, “Locke is the ideological symbol of individualism and abstract natural rights,” two sacrosanct features of this tradition.53 As cemented in the American Political Tradition as they seemed by the 1970s, Locke’s legacies nevertheless proved open to challenge, and with them, the very notion of an American political tradition in the singular.

: : : A cohort of historians helped lead the charge. It was Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock, together with others such as Caroline Robbins and H. Trevor Colbourn, who challenged half a century of scholarship—­dating back to Carl Becker’s still famous The Declaration of Independence (1922)—­that emphasized Locke’s singular importance for the American founding moment and eighteenth-­century political thinking.54 They churned out prize-­winning monographs and articles, reviewed countless books for publications such as the New York Review of Books, and as professors taught thousands of students, dramatically altering not only the popular field of Revolutionary-­era American history but also broader thinking about the existence of a singular American political tradition.55 Taken together, they reoriented attention away from Louis Hartz’s monomaniacal focus on Locke and the “liberal” values he symbolized. Instead, they took seriously their subjects’ concerns about the deleterious effects of luxury and corruption. And they emphasized those subjects’ engagement with other writers such as Cicero and James Harrington and other traditions, especially republicanism. As a result, their work ushered in what soon came to be known as the “republican turn” in historiography on early America. By 1977, historian Robert Kelley could declare without reservation that “republicanism was the distinctive political consciousness of the Revolutionary generation.”56 A decade earlier, a statement like this would have seemed ludicrous.57 In many respects, the rapid rise of republicanism represented a Kuhn­ ian paradigm shift “born,” as historian Daniel T. Rodgers put it, “in rivalry” with “and negation” of the interpretive lenses it superseded—­especially that of Lockean liberalism. As Rodgers has shown, republicanism as a paradigm

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for understanding eighteenth-­century American thought, politics, and culture, was—­and is—­best seen “in a complex mirror of what it was not”: the Lockean liberal “consensus” of the mid-­twentieth century, articulated most sweepingly by Hartz.58 When another historian, Robert E. Shalhope, declared his field’s move “toward a republican synthesis” in a 1972 William and Mary Quarterly article, he defined republicanism first by its rejection of the “symbolic statement, Locke et praeterea nihil”—­Locke, and nothing else.59 But rather than destabilizing Locke’s place in accounts of early American history or his status within an American political tradition, the rise of republicanism as an interpretive framework had two unintended consequences for Locke’s legacies. First, the republican turn actually strengthened the presumed connection between Locke and liberalism—­against which it defined itself. Swimming against the “Lockean mainstream” meant identifying it as such.60 Accordingly, the clash between competing interpretations of early American political-­intellectual history—­one that privileged Locke and liberalism and one that deemphasized Locke and privileged republicanism—­reified Lockean liberalism.61 Second, the republican turn cemented Locke’s ideas to the American founding moment more securely than even Hartz’s work, with its attention to a “spirit” of Locke and “Lockean” commitments more than Locke himself. As Rodgers has summarized, “those who had dismissed Locke soon found themselves taking the Locke question more seriously than ever.”62 To put this in slightly different terms, the urgency of disproving Locke’s singularity, or decentering his place in an origins story of American political thinking, actually served to increase the attention scholars paid to Locke. Both those committed to arguments for his preeminence and those committed to proving such arguments wrong now found themselves looking for Locke—­by, for example, counting citations of his Second Treatise or the number of times his works appeared on library shelves and in newspaper advertisements—­in ways their predecessors would never have imagined. Ultimately, even as they exposed the constructedness of a singular American political tradition, these debates of the 1970s and 1980s—­which, by the 1990s, could only be characterized as “increasingly sterile”—­did little to undermine Locke’s perceived connection to liberalism as (one of ) America’s political tradition(s).63 Indeed, they solidified it. Many of Strauss’s students eagerly joined the fray.64 University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom was one of them. Best remembered for his provocative critique of American higher education in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom renewed the Straussian appraisal of Locke,

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extending his mentor’s concerns about the erosion of society’s core values to the specific locus of the American university system, where, according to Bloom, the tradition of the Great Books had been allowed to wither and die. For Bloom, Locke and his Second Treatise represented an origin point for the modern, atomistic, individualist, relativist, anything-­goes current flowing out from the Enlightenment to the present day. And the societal malaise of post-­1960s America was a product of the country’s foundations in Lockean (and Hobbesian) ideals of, for example, individual rationality, liberty, and self-­sufficiency.65 Bloom’s critique of what he saw as Locke’s role in the American story, past and present, was stark and pointed. “Americans are Lockeans,” he declared in The Closing of the American Mind, which became a surprise literary sensation. Conducting oneself with moderation, seeking balance, “obeying the law because they made it in their own interest”: these were core elements of what Bloom took being Lockean to mean. “The crisp, positive, efficient, no-­nonsense economist is the Lockean,” he wrote, providing a polaroid portrait of a Yuppie that damned its subject with faint praise. None of this, he lamented, was “very inspiring,” but it was, he conceded, in the words of his teacher Leo Strauss, “solid ground,” offering the “promise of salvation” to the most ordinary of citizens, who were drawn to its slogans. Locke’s philosophy was “responsible for our institutions” and “justifies our absorption with private property and the free market”; it was Locke, a mere mortal Englishman, whose ideas gave “us our sense of right.”66 While Bloom’s critique of the Lockean liberal consensus was altogether different from that of his historian colleagues, both had the same effect: to make Locke’s position in the American consciousness—­and with it the adjective “Lockean”—­even more secure, even as the singularity or fixedness of the political tradition(s) Locke undergirded seemed less certain.

: : : In the midst of the ongoing debate about Locke’s importance for an American political tradition and the meaning of Lockean liberalism, the adjective “Lockean” acquired a new association. This was due in large part to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Reviewers, both skeptical and laudatory, were quick to identify the book as “an official text of libertarian political theory.” As defined by Thomas Nagel in his famously critical review for the Yale Law Journal in 1975, libertarianism of the sort defended by Nozick “exalts the claim of individual freedom of action, and asks why state power should be permitted even the interference represented by

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progressive taxation and public provision of health care, education, and a minimum standard of living.” It did all this, he wrote, “instead of embracing the ideal of equality and the general welfare.”67 In their responses to Nozick’s work, critics and proponents alike invented a new phrase, “Lockean libertarianism,” and refashioned Locke’s commitment to prepolitical individual rights as support for a minimal state and a libertarian political philosophy.68 Prepolitical rights were the essence of Nozick’s political philosophy. And ensuring that an individual’s rights were not violated by utilitarian schemes in the name of society or the greater good was at the core of his libertarianism. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he irrevocably yoked these rights to the philosophy of Locke and the adjective Lockean. It was these “‘Lockean’ rights,” he wrote, “against force, fraud, and so on, which are to be recognized in the minimal [and only justifiable] state.”69 Nozick did not make a case for the existence—­or the importance—­of these rights. His claim that “individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating [them])” was what Nagel termed his “unargued premise.”70 What Nozick’s rights lacked in justification or argumentation, however, they made up for in ex post facto attention, coverage, and impact. In the half-­century since the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it has become commonplace to speak of “Lockean rights” as shorthand for libertarianism and to provide analysis of “Lockean libertarian rights.”71 For Nozick, however, Locke was more than the root of a weighty adjective. He was a philosopher—­a thinker, with whom one could think. Nozick began Anarchy, State, and Utopia with Locke’s theory of the state of nature—­or, rather, as he clarified, “with individuals in something sufficiently similar to Locke’s state of nature” that his political philosophy could proceed from it, without getting bogged down by analysis or discussion of it.72 Over the following 300-­plus pages it took to arrive at his central claim that “the minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified,” Nozick returned time and again to think through—­and think with—­Locke’s Second Treatise.73 Most substantially, Nozick identified, examined, and deployed what he termed the “Lockean proviso” to refute one possible objection to his minimal state argument: that a more robust state would better facilitate “distributive justice.”74 In the Second Treatise, Locke argues, regarding property acquisition, that individuals are free to appropriate resources and goods so long as there is “enough, and as good left in common for others.”75 This was, as Nozick put it, “Locke’s attempt to specify a principle of justice in acquisition.”76 Precisely what this meant was far from certain. And that



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was precisely the point. Puzzling through the ambiguities and implications provided Nozick with an opportunity to develop and justify his conception of the minimalist state. More specifically, it allowed him to consider and reject all of the many ways in which the proviso might seem, at first glance, to justify the expansion of state power beyond the limits for which he was advocating, and then to declare, on the basis of this examination, that “the free operation of a market system will not actually run afoul of the Lockean proviso.”77 The ultimate goal of Nozick’s (Lockean) thought experiment was to demonstrate that strict limitations on state power need not necessarily result in anyone’s being worse off as a direct result of another’s appropriation—­that, in other words, his minimalist state was not incompatible with distributive justice. Anarchy, State, and Utopia was, in large part, Nozick’s response to his Harvard colleague John Rawls’s powerful and field-­altering A Theory of Justice. Published three years earlier, Rawls’s work instantaneously became “the major text of contemporary liberal political philosophy.”78 It was at once popular and provocative, capturing widespread attention, inside and outside the academy, and garnering countless reviews. A heavy and profound philosophical work weighing in at more than five hundred pages, A Theory of Justice nonetheless earned a coveted “best book of the year” endorsement from the New York Times.79 In one fell swoop, Rawls dismantled a utilitarian conception of justice, which did not satisfy his commitments to personal freedom, equality, and the moral responsibilities of government. In its place, he offered up both a theory of justice as fairness and a robust philosophical defense of liberalism that was at once egalitarian and pluralist. In what was “a book about rights,” as political theorist Alan Ryan has summarized, Rawls put forward “the view that governments must open up to their citizens the widest possible range of civil rights and economic opportunities.”80 In the political climate of the early 1970s, readers understood A Theory of Justice as providing a philosopher’s guide to what might be called “welfare state liberalism,” justifying a state that was committed to economic redistribution as a way to guarantee the well-­being of its least well-­off citizens.81 To arrive at his theory of justice as fairness, Rawls conducted a kind of thought experiment that proposed to examine what sorts of institutional ar­ rangements individuals would choose without knowledge of their own position or status in society. This absence of knowledge was what Rawls referred to as a “veil of ignorance.”82 His thought experiment emerged from a version of the social contract, of the sort undergirding Locke’s political philosophy,

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“generaliz[ed] and carri[ed] to a higher level.”83 In Rawls’s formulation, individuals entered an “original position,” what he called the “appropriate status quo,” from which they agreed what institutional arrangements would structure their society going forward.84 Agreement on this social contract could be unanimous because in Rawls’s thought experiment, all individuals were under the same veil of ignorance in the original position. By contrast, in the state of nature at the foundation of Locke’s social contract, individuals, knowing their place and status in society, could be expected to use their powers of persuasion to convince those less privileged “to give up the equal political status all originally have in exchange for enjoying the benefits of political society.”85 In this way, Locke was important for Rawls as he would be for Nozick: as a thinker one could think with to arrive at a theory of justice, a defense of individual rights, and a moral, ethical argument for the scope of the state.

: : : To the extent that thinking with and through Locke’s arguments designated one a Lockean, both Nozick and Rawls fit the bill, no matter how different their conclusions were, and no matter that Rawlsian liberalism was—­and is—­not deemed Lockean in the ways Nozickian libertarianism was and is.86 In a way, their mutual embrace of Lockean thought experiments brings our story back full circle to the eighteenth-­century Americans with whom this book began: people who saw value in thinking with Locke, in taking Locke as a guide and model—­albeit for purposes that were often more personal and mundane than the development of political philosophies.

Epilogue

O

ver the years, as I have told both strangers and friends that I was writing a book about John Locke in America, I have come to expect some variation of the following response: Oh, I know Locke! I think we read his Second Treatise in school. He’s the small government, life, liberty, property guy, right? As readers of this book know, the answer to this question, historically speaking, is not yes. Nor, however, is it a simple no. Whether we like it or not, and whether or not such has always been the case, this is precisely who Locke is for most people in the United States today. Nowhere has this current instantiation of Locke—­powerful, but often just beneath the surface—­been clearer to me than on a recent cross-­country move. After a long day on the road, I parked my car outside an Airbnb rental in a small city in western Montana. On the front porch, a big yellow flag with the words “dont tread on me” announced the politics of my hosts as I carried my luggage inside. Like many readers of this book, I suspect, I am generally curious to see what people have on their bookshelves, especially those bookshelves they expect some part of the world to see— the shelves that appear behind them on video calls or in rooms

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they rent out to strangers. Usually, and especially in the latter scenario, the results of my investigations are disappointing: back issues of National Geographic or thumb-­worn guidebooks with cheery recommendations for making the most of my stay. The Don’t Tread on Me house was different. Its small library had shelves of real books, in hardback, to boot. As I set down my luggage and stared at those shelves, I knew immediately that I was looking at a perfect encapsulation of Locke in the twenty-­ first-­century United States. At eye level, in the center of the bookcase, sandwiched between volumes on the history of the pistol and the US Constitution, stood John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Here was the Locke my interlocuters had expected: the Locke of the libertarian right, wrapped, metaphorically, in the colors of the American flag and embodying the “Don’t Tread on Me” spirit of limited government, private property, and gun rights announced by the other flag outside. This version of Locke took shape across the second half of the twentieth century as the philosopher—­and especially the second of his Two Treatises—­became first a weapon of liberal democracy and capitalism in the ideological battles of the Cold War and then a partisan pawn in debates over the political heritage of the United States and its commitment (or not) to minimal government and individual rights. However unfamiliar this version of Locke would have been to Americans of centuries past—­those present at the Constitutional Convention, for example—­it is the best-­known version in America today. When the writers of the popular television sitcom Parks and Recreation identified Locke as the inspiration for character Ron Swanson’s exaggerated libertarianism, they expected their audience to get the joke.1 This Locke—­mainstream America’s Locke—­is the one so many on the progressive left today know and find reprehensible, perhaps unworthy even of the attention this book has given him.2 Increasingly troubled by his involvement in English colonialism, his apparent toleration of slavery, and his endorsement of what political theorist Carole Pateman called in 1988 a “sexual contract” that subordinated women to patriarchal authority, many left-­leaning thinkers today are happy giving up (on) Locke, relinquishing him to those whose worldviews stand in opposition to theirs—­people who might, for example, have a hard-­bound copy of the Two Treatises prominently displayed on the bookshelf of their rental property.3 Indeed, following what one historian has termed a “postcolonial turn” in attitudes toward Locke since the 1990s, many on the left have turned away from Locke, eager for new icons to embody a liberal tradition defined by its commitments to equality and the public good as much as personal



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liberty and individual rights.4 The nineteenth-­century British philosopher John Stuart Mill has become one popular alternative.5 These recent renderings of Locke as a contrast to more progressive liberals such as Mill and a more progressive liberal tradition remind us that there is much to disagree with, dislike, and debate about Locke and his legacies. They also remind us—­much as the Don’t Tread on Me house does—­that the conversation about Locke’s relevance is ongoing; the story of Locke in America is still unfinished. Today it is easy, and perhaps comforting, to interpret Locke in accordance with one’s own worldview and political persuasion. The John Locke Foundation, based in North Carolina, for example, celebrates the “conservative” bona fides of its namesake.6 In the twenty-­first-­century United States, it has become commonplace to condemn or celebrate thinkers from long—­or not so long—­ago, to tear down statues or build monuments, metaphorical or real. But is our only option to celebrate or condemn Locke—­or, worse still, neglect him and forget his changing influence in American thought and culture? The story of Locke in America suggests the promise of a different approach to making meaning of the relationship between past and present. It shows us that there is value in interrogating the past—­in asking historical questions about even those figures whose legacies seem the most obvious today. It offers a lesson in being curious about the ever-­changing influences of thinkers such as Locke, a lesson in being open to discovering that, at moments in the past, these thinkers may have meant something very different from what they mean to any of us, no matter our politics, today. In the end, the story of America’s Locke suggests this quiet truth. If we project our present-­day reading of Locke back onto the past, we stand to lose not only past iterations of Locke’s relevance but also the very texture, richness, and relevance of this more distant past itself.

Acknowledgments

I

t is a pleasure to thank the individuals and institutions who helped me write this book. This project started more than a decade ago at Stanford University. My greatest debt is to Caroline Winterer, who supervised my doctoral research and has been a steady source of inspiration and good advice. Over the years, she has read multiple drafts of every chapter and improved them all immeasurably. Jennifer Burns, Jonathan Gienapp, Alison McQueen, Josh Ober, Jack Rakove, Richard White, and my steadfast US History Cohort also provided essential input and encouragement when this project was just beginning. While at Stanford, I was fortunate to hold a Geballe Dissertation Fellowship, which allowed me to spend an idyllic year at the Stanford Humanities Center. I would not have been able to complete this project without yearlong fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education/ Spen­cer Foundation. I am also grateful for the invaluable support I re­­ceived from the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University, the Huntington Library (Dr. and Mrs. James C. Caillouette Fellowship), the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the University

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of Montana. My colleagues in the History Department at the University of Montana have provided critical support and inspiration for my research and writing in ways both big and small. I am grateful to Richard Drake, John Eglin, Gillian Glaes, the late Robert H. Greene, Anya Jabour, Nathaniel Levtow, Michael Mayer, Jody Pavilack, Tobin Miller Shearer, Jeff Wiltse, and participants in the Lockridge Seminar for their comments on earlier drafts of my work. Thanks especially to my department chair, and friend, Kyle G. Volk. I am indebted to the staff at the Columbia University Archives, Dartmouth College Library, Harry Ransom Research Center, Harvard Univer­sity Archives, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Hoover Institution Archives, Huntington Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, New York Public Library, Princeton University Archives, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, University of Montana Mansfield Library, University of Virginia Library, and Yale University Archives for their heroic assistance. At the University of Chicago Press, the late Doug Mitchell saw promise in this book before it was written, and Tim Mennel shepherded it to completion. I am especially grateful to Tim for his sharp eye, patience, and steadfast encouragement. My sincere thanks also to Elizabeth Ellingboe, Susannah Engstrom, Tyler McGaughey, and Susan Tarcov. Over the years, I have presented portions of this project to audiences across the United States and UK. I would like to thank participants and respondents at the Bay Area Consortium for the History of Ideas in America, Florida Atlantic University, Manchester University, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the National Academy of Education, the Newberry Library, Oxford University, Stanford University, the Society for US Intellectual History, the University of Chicago, and the University of Montana Humanities Institute. I am grateful to Georgios Varouxakis for facilitating my participation in the London School in Intellectual History in the summer of 2014. At critical moments, I have benefitted tremendously from conversations with David Armitage, Duncan Bell, Casey Nelson Blake, Holly Brewer, Giovanna Ceserani, George Cotkin, John Dunn, Brett Gary, Andrew Hartman, David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, James T. Kloppenberg, Emily Levine, James Livingston, Suzanne L. Marchand, George Nash, Dorothy Ross, Quentin Skinner, Jeffrey Sklansky, and Amy Dru Stanley. On fast walks, bike rides, and culinary adventures, Ian P. Beacock, Jon Connolly, Glory M. Liu, and Hannah Marcus provided inspiration and soul-­nourishing friendship. For reading parts of my manuscript and commenting on drafts of chapters, I am grateful to Angus Burgin, Leslie Butler, Nicholas Cole,



Acknowledgments 169

Grace Mallon, Reviel Netz, Steve Pincus, Jennifer Pitts, Jennifer Ratner-­ Rosenhagen, Daniel K. Richter, Daniel T. Rodgers, Jessica Roney, Helena Rosenblatt, Helen Small, Stephen Symchych, Peter Thompson, and Stephen Tuck. I would like to thank Dan Rodgers, in particular, for reading and commenting on my full manuscript. His suggestions and guidance improved my work immensely. My final and deepest thanks are reserved for my family. From all corners of the world, the Arcenas, Held, Klinge, Lawrence, Leigh, McCardell, Rydell, and Utley crews have cheered me on. My parents have read every word I have written, and their love and good humor sustain me day in and day out. Without Scott, there would be, quite simply, no book at all. When I was mired in half-­baked ideas, he helped me forward; when I had no words left in me, he helped me find my voice; and when I had written what I wanted to, he was there, ready to read it, as many times as it took to get it right. My gratitude for him, and for our life together, is infinite.

Abbreviations

AAS

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, 1691–­1876 (EBSCO).

AFC

L. H. Butterfield et al., eds. Adams Family Correspon­ dence. 15 vols. to date. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963–­.

DHRC

John P. Kaminski et al., eds. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–­.

HIA

Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford, CA.

HL

The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

HRC

Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

HSP

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

HUA

Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA.

HUC

The Harvard University Catalog. Cambridge, MA.

JA Diary

L. H. Butterfield et al., eds. The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961.

172

L i s t o f A b b r e v i at i o n s

JA Diary Earliest

L. H. Butterfield et al., eds. The Earliest Diary of John Adams. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.

JQA Diary

Robert J. Taylor, Marc Friedlaender, et al., eds. Diary of John Quincy Adams. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.

KSC

John A. Murley and John E. Alvis, eds. “Kendall-­Strauss Correspondence.” In Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of Amer­ ican Conservatives. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002.

LPJA

L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds. Legal Papers of John Adams. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965.

PBF

Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 43 vols. to date. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–­.

PELP

Constance Schulz, ed. The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012.

PJA

Robert J. Taylor et al., eds. Papers of John Adams. 20 vols. to date. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–­.

PJMCS

William T. Hutchinson et al., eds. The Papers of James Madison: Congressional Series, 17 vols. Chicago and Charlottesville: University of Chicago Press and University of Virginia Press, 1962–­91.

PTJ

Julian P. Boyd et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 45 vols. to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–­.

PTJ Ret

J. Jefferson Looney et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. 17 vols. to date. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004–­.

PUA

Princeton University Archives, Princeton, NJ.

SHSW

State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

Wood Pamphlets

Gordon S. Wood, ed. The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate. 2 vols. New York: Library of America, 2015.

Notes

Preface 1. I derive the term America’s Philosopher from Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–­1861.” Given the chronological scope of the book that follows, I use America as shorthand for both the British North American colonies and for the later United States of America, which I also reference as the United States. I use American as shorthand for these colonies-­turned-­country’s inhabitants, fully recognizing the shortcomings of such usage. 2. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 15. Both the 1773 and 1917 editions, moreover, included only selections. Following Laslett, I do not count an 1884 New York printing of the London Everyman’s edition as an American edition. As will become clear, this book does not use publication information as a measure for influence, impact, or even readership but as one small piece of a much larger puzzle. After all, American readers had easy access to Locke’s ideas and writings from editions of Locke’s works published outside the United States as well as from other sources. Publication information is, however, useful alongside other kinds of evidence and as a springboard for further investigation of puzzling trends. 3. The first American edition of the Essay was an abridgment: Locke, An Abridgment of Mr. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Boston, 1794). The first full edition appeared soon thereafter: Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, To Which Is Prefixed the Life of the Author (Boston, 1803). American presses would publish it regularly across the nineteenth century. For the lone 1806 proposal to publish Locke’s Two Treatises by subscription going nowhere, see Locke, Two Treatises, 15. 4. Aldrich, “Report of the Council,” 28. 5. San Francisco Bulletin, published as Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco, CA), June 11, 1870.

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6. Norton, Locke’s Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles; and Le Clerc on Inspiration, iii. Note that A Paraphrase and Notes was first published posthumously. 7. Bancroft, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 2:379. 8. E.g., Turell, The Life and Character of the Reverend Benjamin Colman, D.D. . . . (Boston, 1749), 225. 9. The adjective Lockean has been used to describe a broad range of concepts, including private property ownership, individual rights, and limited government. It is most commonly associated with liberalism and libertarianism. While these applications and their frequency are new, the adjective is old. The term “Lockian” was coined in 1702/3 by Tory Humfrey Michel, who used it decidedly negatively in a sermon commemorating the “martyrdom” of King Charles I. See Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 1:356. On Locke becoming liberal in the twentieth century, see esp. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 62–­90; Gunnell, “The Archaeology of American Liberalism”; and Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity, 230. For discussion of Locke’s close association with (varieties of ) liberalism past and present, see, e.g., Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism; Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint, 15; Pocock, “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,” in John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, 3–­24; Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, 2; Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, 21; Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 263; David Wootton, “Locke’s Liberalism,” in Locke, Political Writings, ed. Wootton, 7–­16. On Lockean libertarianism, see chapter 7’s discussion of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. 10. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 140. 11. My approach to understanding Locke’s past influence is inspired in important ways by Skinner, Meaning and Context, esp. 29–­67 and 231–­88. 12. Milton, “Dating Locke’s Second Treatise,” and Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 605–­6. 13. Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government”; Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’”; and Farr, “‘Absolute Power and Authority.’” 14. Walmsley and Waldmann, “John Locke and the Toleration of Catholics.” 15. On Locke’s life, see Cranston,  John Locke, and Woolhouse, Locke. 16. Mark Goldie, “Locke’s Life,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 27. 17. At the time, Descartes would have been “extracurricular reading” for Locke. Goldie, “Locke’s Life,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 30. 18. For succinct summaries of Locke’s work, see The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Chappell, and A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart. Guides to Locke’s writings and Locke scholarship include Christophersen, A Bibliographical Introduction to the Study of John Locke; Jean S. Yolton,  John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography; Eighty Years of Locke Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Roland Hall and Roger Woolhouse; and “John Locke Bibliography: A Comprehensive Listing of Publications by and about John Locke,” https://openpublishing.psu.edu/locke/bib/index.html. 19. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, 350. 20. For publication details of Locke’s works, see esp. Jean S. Yolton,  John Locke.



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21. The literature on America’s impact on Locke is extensive. See esp. Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government”; Arneil,  John Locke and America; Goldie, “Locke and America,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 546–­63; James Tully, “Rediscovering America,” in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 137–­77; and Jack Turner, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America.” Locke’s library was filled with writings about the Americas. See Harrison and Laslett, The Library of John Locke. 22. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, 301.

Chapter 1 1. My use of the term “debut” acknowledges that while William Penn’s order is the first known arrival of Locke’s writings in North America en masse, it is difficult to ascertain when and where precisely single copies of Locke’s individual works made their first American appearances and whether some may have been present in the colonies before 1700. Members of the colonial elite purchased books on trips to London and brought them to the colonies, leaving behind few records of particular arrivals. The enormous library of  Virginia planter William Byrd II, e.g., held many works by Locke—­including several that he appears to have acquired during visits to the metropole around the turn of the eighteenth century. For a catalog of Byrd’s library see Hayes, The Library of  William Byrd of  Westover. For discussion, see Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of  William Byrd II of Virginia, 20. Similarly, the Virginia planter Ralph Wormeley’s library in 1701 contained the Two Treatises, a rare and the earliest—­by several decades—­known appearance of it in a colonial library. The text is listed as “two treaties of Governmt.” See “Libraries in Colonial Virginia,” 172. It is not clear when and from where Wormeley acquired his text. Note that in the text I silently change old-­style dates from before 1752 to read as new style. 2. Wolf, “A Parcel of Books for the Province in 1700,” 432–­33. This story reminds us that in early America as today, commercial and economic decisions, as much as intellectual ones, were at the foundation of book sales and distribution. As far as we can tell, Penn did not select individual titles or authors himself. Rather, these decisions were left to the booksellers—­who, significantly, were the publishers of Locke’s works, as well as many of the other books they selected for distribution. Accordingly, we have to attribute the large number of works by Locke to the Churchills’ desire for profit, rather than Penn’s attachment to the ideas contained therein—­or, for that matter, to his own relationship with Locke. On Locke’s relationship to William Penn, see Cranston,  John Locke, 260–­62, and Woolhouse, Locke, 251–­52 and 258–­60. 3. “To the Honble W m: Penn Esq. Febry: 1: 1699 [1700],” vol. 16, no. 3309, Jacob and Isaac Taylor Papers (Collection 651), HSP. At the time, Locke’s Two Treatises, essays on the reasonableness of Christianity, and letters concerning toleration were published anonymously. Also included was A Common-­place Book to the Holy Bible (London, 1697), a collection of biblical quotations that was often attributed to Locke. See Jean S. Yolton, John Locke, 434. 4. James Logan to William Penn, December 1, 1702, Letterbook, vol. 1, 1701–­1726, vol. 4 of the Logan Family Papers (Collection 379), 61, HSP. 5. James Logan to Awnsham and John Churchill, August 16, 1706, box 1, folder 59, Logan Family Papers (Collection 379) and in Letterbook, vol. 2, 1702–­1720, 1724–­1726, vol. 5 of the Logan Family Papers (Collection 379), 82, HSP.

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6. William Penn to James Logan, May 18, 1708, folder 10, box NB-­006, Penn Family Papers (Collection 485A), HSP. 7. This claim emerges from the discussion that follows. For a quantitative rendering of the popularity of these works on the basis of library collections, see Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader in America.” This work followed on Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, 245–­86. For a forceful critique of Lundberg and May’s study, regarding David Hume’s works, see Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-­Century America, 13–­16. For the problems more generally associated with relying on quantitative studies of libraries, book advertisements, and catalogs, see also Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine, 41. 8. For Locke and eighteenth-­century education, childrearing, and family life, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. Fliegelman shows how popular genres such as the novel conveyed important aspects of Locke’s philosophy of education and human understanding to a wide audience. Huyler, Locke in America, 175–­208, devotes a chapter to the deeper “eighteenth-­century background” of Locke’s founding-­era influence. For a classic account of the relative unimportance of Locke’s Two Treatises in colonial America, see Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America,” 45–­80. Dunn’s arguments have faced criticism. See, for example, Jeffrey M. Nelson, “Unlocking Locke’s Legacy,” and Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, 18–­25. Two recent works on the importance of Locke’s Second Treatise in arguments about rights in America pre-­1760 are Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire, and Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights, esp. 143–­57. For an overview of Locke’s political writings in the eighteenth century more generally, see Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 1: xvii–­lxxi. 9. On the subject of currency stabilization, one writer pointed out that “The judicious Mr. LOCKE has irresistibly prov’d, that Silver is the Measure of Commerce by its Quantity, by which its intrinsic Value is to be measured; and that this Quantity is the Measure of the Value of all other Things.” Letter to the publisher, New England Weekly Journal (Boston), February 4, 1734. Newspapers also reprinted excerpts from Locke’s own writings—­e.g., “From a Discourse on Money and Trade, written by Mr. JOHN LOCKE,” Boston Evening-­Post, March 28, 1748. For an example of references to Locke’s Second Treatise, see the oft-­cited contribution of Americano-­Britannus to the debate about taxation, rights, and legislative power in the Maryland Gazette, June 4, 1748. See also Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, 60, and Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire, 212–­14. On education in Philadelphia, see below. 10. City Gazette (Charleston, SC), July 17, 1793. 11. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Thomas Lucas, May 22, 1742, and Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Elizabeth Lamb Pinckney [1741], PELP. 12. Locke, Essay, 342. For an overview of Locke’s chapter “Of identity and diversity,” which he included after the Essay’s initial 1690 publication, see Woolhouse, Locke, 329–­ 31. The difficulties commentators have noted with Locke’s account of personal identity (namely, as Woolhouse puts it, its vagueness and weakness) did not bother Eliza. 13. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Elizabeth Lamb Pinckney [1741], PELP. 14. By some accounts its presence in the historical record is more than twice as common as that of Locke’s Two Treatises. See Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” 273. The numbers are even starker for the entire period of their study. Between 1700 and 1813, 45 percent of libraries had the Essay compared with only



N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 0 – 1 2 177

9 percent that had the Two Treatises (note, however, that 17 percent of libraries held Locke’s Works, which included both the Essay and the Two Treatises). 15. Locke, Essay, 646. 16. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Mary Bartlett [1742], PELP. On Eliza’s reading and comments on Richardson, see Fryer, “The Mind of Eliza Pinckney,” 228. On Pamela’s endorsement of Locke, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 27. The second part is also known as Pamela, in Her Exalted Condition. 17. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Mary Steer (Mrs. Richard) Boddicott, May 20 [1746], PELP. 18. See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 12–­39. Of Locke’s works, Some Thoughts Concerning Education was second only to the Essay in popularity in the British North American colonies. By Lundberg and May’s survey of libraries between 1700 to 1776, a quarter of them had Locke’s treatise on education. Lundberg and May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” 273. And popular publications, in addition to Richardson’s novel, such as Richard Steele’s Ladies Library published in London in 1714 and soon well-­known in the colonies, touted its virtues to readers of both sexes. The Ladies Library: Written by a Lady, Published by Mr. Steele, 3 vols. (London, 1714). 19. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 213, 209. On Locke’s rejection of the “ordinary Road,” see Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 304. For Locke’s educational views generally, see Lorraine S. Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty, 54–­72, and Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty. 20. Eliza Lucas Pinckney to Mary Steer (Mrs. Richard) Boddicott, May 20 [1746], PELP. 21. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 209. 22. On Eliza’s successes in implementing what she knew of Locke, see Pickett, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 65. 23. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 13. 24. Franklin describes the joys of gaining access to one such library in his Autobiography, 10. After Franklin’s Autobiography was published (posthumously), newspapers reprinted bits of it, which sometimes included Franklin’s description of his discovery of Locke. See, e.g., “Extract from Franklin’s Life,” Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, GA), November 11, 1809. 25. Few biographies of Franklin omit mention of Locke. On Franklin’s encounter with Locke’s Essay and its subsequent influence on him, see Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, 30–­35, and Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London, 13. 26. Franklin, Autobiography, 41. For the “Plan of Conduct” (1726), see PBF, 1:99–­ 100. It is not inconceivable that Franklin was also familiar with Locke’s posthumously published Of the Conduct of the Understanding, which Locke originally envisioned as a new chapter for the fourth edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 27. Franklin, Autobiography, 68. On these moral reforms and Locke’s influence on them, see Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of  Improvement, 33–­34. 28. Locke, Essay, book 2, chaps. 20–­21. As Houston has pointed out, Franklin’s pursuit of “the psychological bases of moral action” ended up differing from Locke’s

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more theological interest in “the stability and justification of moral claims.” Franklin, Autobiography, xix. 29. Locke had also written at length on virtue in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, e.g., 194–­95. 30. See, e.g., the list of books included in an advertisement run in the Pennsylvania Gazette, June 1–­8, 1738. 31. Advertisement for Poor Richard Improved, New-­York Gazette, November 16, 1747. On October 28, 1748, Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack paid homage to Locke, marking that on this day in 1704 “died the famous John Locke, Esq; the Newton of the Microcosm,” further clarifying the metaphor by explaining that, as Scottish poet James Thomson had declared, Locke “made the whole internal world his own. His book on the Human Understanding, shows it.” Citing Thomson’s assessment of Locke in his 1727 poem “Summer,” Poor Richard praised Locke’s grasp of the internal workings of man as comparable to what Isaac Newton had done for the physical, external world. Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard Improved, 1748,” in PBF, 3:259. 32. A Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1741), 30. 33. Benjamin Franklin, “Rules for a Club Formerly Established at Philadelphia” (1732), in Autobiography, 165–­66. For discussion, see Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London, 46–­47, and Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, 51. Houston also suggests that Cotton Mather’s neighborhood “Religious Societies” provided inspiration for Franklin. Today Locke’s authorship of “Rules of a Society” is lightly debated, but eighteenth-­century readers such as Franklin had no reason to question it: it was printed under Locke’s name in popular compilations of his works, including both A Collection of Several Pieces (1720), which Franklin knew, and editions of his collected Works beginning with the fifth edition in 1751. For a note casting doubt on Locke’s authorship, see Jean S. Yolton,  John Locke, 366. For a convincing case for Locke’s authorship, see the introduction to Locke, Literary and Historical Writings, ed. Milton, 61–­63. 34. Locke, “Rules of a Society,” in A Collection of Several Pieces, 359. 35. For Franklin’s discussion of the formation of the Junto, see Autobiography, 48. 36. Wolf, At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin, 6. 37. Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), in PBF, 3:397–­421. For a discussion of Franklin’s particular curricular ideas, see Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 200. For Locke’s influence on Franklin’s plans as well as for important differences between them, see Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty, 75–­90, and Cremin, American Education, 371–­78. 38. Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), PBF, 3:398. Here, Franklin also drew extensively from John Milton. 39. Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), PBF, 3:408 and note. 40. For Locke’s discussion and assessment of Grotius and Pufendorf, see Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman,” in A Collection of Several Pieces, 237. For Franklin’s recommendation, see Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (1749), PBF, 3:413n.



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41. Benjamin Franklin, “Idea of the English School, Sketch’d out for the Consideration of the Trustees of the Philadelphia Academy,” in PBF, 4:101–­8. 42. On the origins and uses of the thinker-­adjective Lockean, see Claire Rydell Arcenas, “The Problem of the Thinker-­Adjective in Intellectual History,” paper in possession of author. 43. Scholars have long weighed the proposition that Franklin was a true “Lockean liberal.” Two assessments of the ways in which Franklin charted his own course are Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, esp. 5–­7, and Carla J. Mulford, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. 44. On Franklin and conceptions of improving self and society, see Howe, Making the American Self, 21–­47. 45. Isaac Watts, Logick: or, The Right Use of Reason, 74, and Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 1:276. For the irony that an admiring Watts appears not to have fully understood Locke’s method, see the introduction to Locke, Literary and Historical Writings, 53. On Chambers, see Yeo, “Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728) and the Tradition of Commonplaces.” 46. On Locke’s method, see, esp., the introduction to Locke, Literary and Historical Writings, 27–­56. Locke’s initial instructions on commonplacing took the form of a letter to his friend Nicolas Toinard and appeared in French in 1686. It was translated into English as A New Method of a Common-­Place-­Book for the Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London, 1706) and for a stand-­alone edition, A New Method of Making Common-­ Place-­Books (London, 1706). A New Method was subsequently published regularly across the eighteenth century as part of volume 3 of Locke’s Works. 47. On commonplace books and self-­cultivation, see Byrd, The Commonplace Book of  William Byrd II of  Westover, ed. Kevin Berland, Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth A. Lockridge, 79–­89. 48. Samuel Locke, Commonplace book, 2, seq. 8, Papers of Samuel Locke, UAI 15.872, box 1, HUA, https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.ARCH:3333156. 49. Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 1:276. Coste, “The Character of Mr. Locke,” in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, xvi. 50. Samuel Locke, Commonplace book, iv, seq. 6. Locke explained that “I leave a Margin in all the other [non-­index] Pages of the Book, of about the largeness of an Inch” depending on the paper size (i.e., folio, octavo, etc.) of the book. John Locke, A New Method of a Common-­Place-­Book, 286. Samuel preferred to divide his pages into two columns of equal width, generally filling both with text. 51. Samuel Locke, Commonplace book, 12, seq. 28. 52. Consider, e.g., the popularity of anecdotes such as “An Account of the Life of John Locke, Esq; Extracted from Mr. BAYLE’S Historical and Critical Dictionary,” American Magazine & Historical Chronicle, September 1, 1744, 540–­44, AAS. The American Magazine & Historical Chronicle was the first intercolonial publication, and it was distributed widely across cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, New Haven, and Newport. Hugh Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Amory and Hall, 43. 53. Jean Le Clerc, “The Life of the Author,” v–­xv. Coste, “The Character of Mr. Locke,” in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, iv–­xxiv.

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54. Coste, “The Character of Mr. Locke,” in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, vi. 55. Coste, “The Character of Mr. Locke,” in Locke, A Collection of Several Pieces, vi. 56. James N. Green, “English Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” in The Co­ lonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Amory and Hall, 254. See also James Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, Printer of the New-­York Weekly Journal, 8. 57. New-­York Weekly Journal, July 8, 1734. 58. New-­York Weekly Journal, July 15, 1734. 59. Le Clerc, “The Life of the Author,” ix–­x. Le Clerc’s life of Locke had been published previously in various forms, beginning in 1706. When Locke appeared by name in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator essays, which debuted in London in 1711 and were extraordinarily popular in the colonies, he did so most frequently with reference to his Essay. 60. James Logan, “Answer to Lock,” 1, in notes for chapter 5 of “Of the Duties of Man as they may be deduced from Nature,” in James Logan Papers (Collection 2011), HSP. In 1735, Logan wrote to the famous natural philosopher and fellow of the Royal Society Peter Collinson about how people perceived the light of the stars, citing as support “what that great man J Lock” wrote. James Logan to Peter Collinson [October, 1735], James Logan Papers (Collection 2011), HSP. 61. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, there were three colleges in the British North American colonies: Harvard, founded in 1636 in Massachusetts; Virginia’s College of  William and Mary, chartered in 1693; and what would become Yale, founded in 1701, in Connecticut. 62. Miller, The New England Mind, esp.105–­8, and Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-­Century Harvard, 36–­38. 63. Standard overviews of the early Harvard curriculum include Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century; Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-­Century Harvard; Miller, The New England Mind, esp. 111–­235; Rick Kennedy, Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard; and Thomas Jay Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century.” 64. The prominence of Cartesian philosophy in Harvard’s logic curriculum was stoked and sustained by a number of textbooks composed by Harvard tutors, such as the Reverend William Brattle, that were based on Descartes’s “new” logic. Less popular was tutor Charles Morton’s A Logick System. See Miller, The New England Mind, 121–­23. 65. Locke, Essay, 48. On Locke and Descartes, see Lisa Downing, “Locke and Descartes,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 100–­120. 66. For Locke’s discussion of the idea of God and knowledge of God, see Locke, Essay, esp. book 1, chap. 4, sections 7–­17, and book 4, chap. 10. Also troublesome for early critics were Locke’s views on revelation and the immortality and immateriality of the soul. For an overview of Locke’s thought, see Nicholas Jolley, “Locke on Faith and Reason,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Newman, 436–­55. 67. Locke, Essay, 95. 68. Locke, Essay, 104.



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69. Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century,” 381. 70. Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked, in the Next World, 125, 99. 71. For Locke’s reactions to Sherlock’s attacks, see Woolhouse, Locke, 371, 453–­54. 72. Locke, “The Epistle to the Reader,” Essay, 7. For Locke’s drafting process, see J. R. Milton, “The Genesis and Composition of the Essay,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 123–­39. 73. For a list of abridged versions, see Christophersen, A Bibliographical Introduction to the Study of John Locke, 28–­29 and 95–­96. 74. See Fiering, “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters,” 650–­51. 75. For Dunton’s Massachusetts connections, see Fiering “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters,” 650–­51, and Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College,” 166n5. 76. “The 1723 Catalogue,” [1725 Supplement] A106, in The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723–­1790, ed. Bond and Amory, 112. 77. It appears that in his Logicae theses, Harvard tutor Henry Flynt drew on Locke’s Essay on and off between 1719 and 1726. On this and the faculty’s decision in 1743, see Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century,” 329, 97–98, and Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–­1936, 89. 78. THESES METAPHYSICAE, no. 3, Harvard University, Commencement Theses, Quaestiones, and Orders of Exercises, 1642–­1818. 1755, original. HUC 6642, box 3, folder 19, HUA, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-­3:HUL.ARCH:29087218. 79. In 1718, the Collegiate School relocated to New Haven and was renamed Yale College after Elihu Yale, the prominent East India Company official, slave trader, merchant, and college benefactor. 80. Samuel Johnson, ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider, 1:8. For Johnson’s engagement with Locke’s ideas as well as for the content of Yale’s commencement theses, see Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition, 34–­45. See also Huyler, Locke in America, 199. Johnson appears to have read Locke’s Essay as early as 1716. See Samuel Johnson to Daniel Brown, August 27, 1716, in Samuel Johnson, ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider, 2:197. On Johnson’s readings of other works by or about Locke, see “A Catalog of Books Read by Samuel Johnson,” in Samuel Johnson, ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider, 1:511, 517, 526. 81. For the celebration of Locke and his impact on logic at Yale, see John Hubbard, “The Benefactors of  Yale College, A Poetical Attempt” (Boston, 1733), in Dexter, A Documentary History of Yale University, 1701–­1745, 301. 82. A catalogue of the library of Yale-­College in New-­Haven (New London, CT, 1743), in Mooney, Eighteenth-­Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library, A5. 83. Yale’s president, Thomas Clap, did list other works by early modern political writers Hugo Grotius, William Temple, and Thomas Hobbes. A catalogue of the library of Yale-­College in New-­Haven, in Mooney, Eighteenth-­Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library, A43–­44. This remained the same for 1755 (B38–­39) and 1791 (C44–­46), even as Locke was included under “Metaphysics” (C12) and “Annotations on the Bible” (C19) in 1791.

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84. On the Essay at the College of  William and Mary and Locke’s personal relationship with its founder, James Blair, see Morpurgo, Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge, 42–­43 and 82–­83. Significantly less is known about the early curriculum at William and Mary owing to a series of devasting fires across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which destroyed many of its records. 85. Beginning in 1756, third-­year students at the newly founded and more “practical” College of Philadelphia were expected to read, alongside the Essay, Locke’s writ­ ings on government and money, although these were meant for study in their “private hours.” See William Smith, The Works of  William Smith, 1:239. See also Robson, Edu­ cating Republicans, 85. Smith based his plans on the recommendations outlined by the Englishman Robert Dodsley’s popular educational work, the Preceptor (2 vols., London, 1748). See Hornberger, “A Note on the Probable Source of Provost Smith’s Famous Curriculum for the College of Philadelphia,” 370–­77. 86. Myers, “A Source for Eighteenth-­Century Harvard Master’s Questions,” 261–­67. Yet the extent of students’ familiarity with Locke’s arguments and the text of the Two Treatises itself is difficult to ascertain. On eighteenth-­century commencement theses and quaestiones on political topics, see also Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 90–­91. 87. Harvard graduate and Massachusetts royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, for example, remembered—­many years after the fact—­having encountered Locke on toleration while in college in the late 1720s. See Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 22n36. Perhaps Jonathan Mayhew had, too; see The Snare Broken (Boston, 1766), where he reflects on having encountered Locke in his youth. I read it as possible that Mayhew was referencing Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration together with—­or even rather than—­Locke’s Second Treatise. Either way, it seems certain he was referring not only to the Essay. At the College of Philadelphia, Vice Provost Francis Alison was recommending Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration to his students soon after its founding in 1755. See Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind, 170. Texts through which undergraduates at Harvard would have encountered Locke’s political ideas from the Two Treatises included Henry Grove, A System of Moral Philosophy (1749), and David Fordyce, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (1754). 88. For Watts’s works at Harvard, see Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century,” 410. For Watts’s gifts, see Pratt, Isaac Watts and His Gifts of Books to Yale College. 89. Hubbard, “The Benefactors of Yale College, A Poetical Attempt” (Boston, 1733), in Dexter, A Documentary History of Yale University, 301. 90. Cremin, American Education, 368–­70, and Siegel, “Governance and Curriculum at Harvard College in the 18th Century,” 385–­86 and 396–­97. 91. Mather, Manuductio ad ministerium, 36. 92. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 19. 93. Berkeley and Johnson corresponded at length about Locke’s opinions on the nature of the human soul and abstract ideas. See Samuel Johnson to George Berkeley, February 5, 1730, in Samuel Johnson, ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider, 2:279, 281; and Berkeley to Johnson, March 24, 1730, 2:283. On Berkeley and Johnson’s relationship, see Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind, 144–­47, and Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition, esp. 148–­52.



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94. On Berkeley in early eighteenth-­century American thought, see Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 17–­18, and Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition, 152–­65. 95. Samuel Johnson to Cadwallader Colden, April 18, 1744, in Samuel Johnson: His Career and Writings, ed. Herbert Schneider and Carol Schneider, 2:288–­89. 96. For the donation of Locke’s Works in 1733, see Shores, Origins of the American College Library, 261. 97. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, esp. 47–­49 and 59–­61. 98. Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 18. Dennis F. Thompson, “The Education of a Founding Father,” 523–­29. According to Thompson, Hutcheson was the author most cited by Witherspoon. 99. The literature on Edwards and his importance in eighteenth-­century intellectual and religious history is vast. In the following discussion, I have relied most heavily on Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 15–­42, and Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, chap. 6. 100. Wallace E. Anderson, “Biographical Background,” in Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Anderson, 28. He was not alone. Massachusetts reverend Christopher Sargeant, e.g., kept a commonplace book from 1727 to 1788 in which he recorded his ownership of a copy of Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Christopher Sargeant commonplace-­book, MS S-­40, 1727–­1788, Massachusetts Historical Society. 101. Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, President of the College at New-­Jersey (Boston, 1765), 3. The matter of when, where, and how Edwards first encountered Locke’s Essay is debated. See, e.g., Anderson, “Biographical Background,” in Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Anderson, 24–­26, and Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition, 44n32. 102. Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards, 4. Hopkins’s account has generally been interpreted as evidence that Edwards read Locke’s Essay at Yale. I believe it can be read fruitfully as evidence of Edwards’s later assessments of Locke’s importance over the course of his life. 103. Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 33. 104. On this, see Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, 314–­15, which contends: “The genre of the sermon series itself formally resolves the problem set forth by Locke. The idea of the infinite—­dually expressed in scriptural verse and doctrine of the sermon—­does not have the chance to congeal into a finite idea, for Edwards continues to perform its meaning” (315). 105. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in Religious Affections, 392. 106. Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England, 343. See pp. 343–­44 for an astute discussion of the alternative solutions and responses to Locke provided by Edwards and Hume. 107. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Boston, 1743). Americans had access to the Letter as well as Locke’s other, less-­well-­remembered letters on toleration from the 1690s, before this American printing. E.g., Locke’s letters on toleration were part of Penn’s 1700 shipment, and Jonathan Edwards noted Locke’s letters on toleration as among the works he wanted to study in the 1720s.

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108. The Boston Gazette or Weekly Journal, July 12, 1743, and Boston Weekly Newsletter, July 21, 1743. 109. For two differing assessments of the “Great Awakening” as an after-­the-­fact construct, see Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried,” and Lambert, Inventing the ‘Great Awakening.’ 110. Americans generally read the English version. On Popple’s translation, see Bejan, Mere Civility, 114. 111. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), in Political Writings, 396, 411. 112. For further discussion of Locke’s ideas, their context, and significance, see Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility; Marshall,  John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture; Bejan, Mere Civility, 112–­43; and Rakove, Beyond Belief, beyond Conscience, 33–­40. 113. On Williams, see Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights, esp. 143, 149–­50. See also Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 5:282. 114. [Elisha Williams], The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, 5, 13. It bears mention here that in one important respect, Williams’s inclusion of the Second Treatise in his discussion of “the essential rights and liberties of Protestants” may strike us as odd. Locke, after all, devoted chapter 9 in the Second Treatise, from which Williams quoted, to discussing the rights that men relinquished when they entered together into civil society. By contrast, Williams was interested in crafting a defense of preserving or retaining certain rights—­in this case, those specifically having to do with freedom of religion—­in civil society. Indeed, on the surface, Locke’s discussion of natural rights was ill suited for the job at hand, and it required significant modification to serve Williams’s goals. For this point, see Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights, esp. 149–­50, 153. 115. The full title was The Reasonableness of Christianity As Delivered in the Scriptures. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 5. My discussion here draws from John C. Higgins-­Biddle, “Introduction,” in Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, xv–­cxv, and Victor Nuovo, “General Introduction,” in Locke, Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, xix–­lxxvii. 116. Nuovo, “General Introduction” to Locke, Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, xx. It is important to remember that much remains unknown about Locke’s own beliefs, including even his views on the Trinity. See, esp., Higgins-­Biddle, “Introduction,” in Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, lxxiii. 117. Stith, The Nature and Extent of Christ’s Redemption, vii. He attributed his decision to read The Reasonableness of Christianity at the time he did to having just “reexamine[d]” a letter from Monsieur Limborch to Locke. Philip van Limborch, a professor and theologian, was a lifelong friend of Locke. 118. Stith, The Nature and Extent of Christ’s Redemption, viii. 119. Owing to its multiple parts, which were initially printed separately between 1705 and 1707, the early publication history of the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul is complex. For a good summary, see the introduction to Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, 1:8–­10. On the origins and content of the Paraphrase and Notes, see esp. 1:1–­3. 120. For example, as one anonymous writer in the 1740s demonstrated, Locke’s work could be used to support greater public participation among women. [Sophia Hume?],



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An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South-­Carolina, To bring their Deeds to the Light of Christ, in Their Own Consciences (Philadelphia, [1748]), 16. Quaker Josiah Martin made a similar point in A Letter to the Author of Some Brief Observations on the Paraphrase and Notes of the Judicious John Locke, Relating to the Women Exercising Their Spiritual Gifts in the Church (1716), in The Reception of Locke’s Politics, ed. Goldie, 5:129–­42. 121. Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D. L.L.D., 1:556, 557. 122. Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union: The Substance of Which Was Delivered Before The Reverend Convention of the Congregational Clergy in The Colony of Rhode-­ Island; Assembled at Bristol April 23, 1760 (Boston, 1761), 11. 123. Backus, A Seasonable Plea for Liberty of Conscience, Against Some Late Oppressive Proceedings . . . (Boston, 1770), 11. 124. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 159.

Chapter 2 1. Locke, Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives: The Production of Silk: The Preservation of Fruits . . . (London, 1766), ix, and “Extract from Observations upon the Growth and Culture of  Vines and Olives: The Production of Silk: The Preservation of Fruits . . . ,” London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, May 1, 1766, 239, AAS. See also “List of Books published; with Remarks,” Gentleman’s Magazine (London), March 1, 1766, 142, AAS. 2. “Extract from Observations upon the Growth and Culture of  Vines and Olives . . . ,” 239. 3. For the concept of an age of revolution, see Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–­1800. 4. Thomas Hutchinson, Boston Evening-­Post, December 14, 1761. Currency problems had long plagued Massachusetts and been of interest to Hutchinson. For an overview, see Sklansky, Sovereign of the Market, esp. 21–­90. 5. Locke wrote several pamphlets on money in the 1690s. For Locke’s assessment of silver’s role as the measure (basis) of a country’s commerce, see especially Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (1692), 1:326–­28. 6. James Otis Jr., in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, December 28, 1761. (A continuation from the last, December 21, 1761.) 7. James Otis Jr., in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, December 28, 1761. (A continuation from the last, December 21, 1761.) 8. James Otis Jr., in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, December 28, 1761. (A continuation from the last, December 21, 1761.) 9. Thomas Hutchinson, in The Boston Evening-­Post, January 4, 1762, (continued) January 11, 1762. 10. James Otis Jr., in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, January 11, 1762. The second part of Hutchinson’s piece appeared the same day. 11. Otis associated this most closely with the great jurist Edward Coke (1552–­1634). 12. James Otis Jr., A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-­Bay . . . (Boston, 1762), 17–20, notes.

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13. James Otis Jr., The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Wood Pamphlets, 1:47. For a summary and discussion of Otis’s radicalism, see Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship,” 378–­403. 14. Contemporary scholars generally characterize Locke’s contract—­or compact—­ theory, where people agree to leave the state of nature and enter political society, as being rather muddled, but consisting of either two or three parts. For the puzzle of Locke’s own apparent confusion, see John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1:133. For a recent discussion of it entailing three steps (1. Leave the state of nature to become members of a political society, 2. Choose a kind of government by majority rule, 3. Delegate power of the new government), see A. John Simmons, “Locke on the Social Contract,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 421–­25. On Locke’s as a two-­phase contract, see Lutz, Popular Consent and Popular Control, 32–­38. Today, scholars generally agree that “the state of nature is a relational concept” and “there seems little doubt that Locke’s conception of the state of nature is primarily that of a moral condition into which each person is born, a condition described for the purpose of contrasting it with the civil condition of being bound by purely consensual political obligations.” Simmons, “Locke on the Social Contract,” 419, 418. Observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not shy away from taking it literally, i.e., historically. 15. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, Wood Pamphlets, 1:50. On the radical implications of Otis’s argument, see Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship,” esp. 385–­87. 16. Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights, 50–­55, 149–­57. As Edelstein points out, it is the “Preface” to the Two Treatises, written after Locke composed the Treatises, which contains the clearest articulation of the preservation of rights in political society. On Otis’s reworking of Locke, see also Ward, “James Otis and the Americanization of John Locke,” 181–­202. Interestingly, as we will see, late-­eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century commentators were critical of Locke’s discussion along these lines. 17. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, 330–­33. 18. Otis, A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives, 20n. See also Breen, “Subjecthood and Citizenship,” 385–­86n11. 19. In the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, commentators would, in fact, delimit the continued applicability and relevance of the Two Treatises, citing Locke’s too-­narrow commitments to the English constitution. For further discussion of this point, see, esp., chapters 3 and 4. In the 1790s, while criticizing Alexander Hamilton’s understanding of presidential power, James Madison, for example, would pair Locke and Montesquieu to disparage them as royalist writers “evidently warped by a regard to the particular government of England,” an assessment that bore some striking similarities to that of  William Knox in the 1760s. [ James Madison], Letters of Helvidius (Philadelphia, 1796), 6. On the surprising similarities between Madison, writing as “Helvidius,” and Knox, see Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution, 201. 20. Otis, A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives, 19–­20. 21. For what remains still a most useful overview of the multiple influences on colonists in the decades preceding the American Revolution, see Bailyn, The John Harvard Library Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–­1776, 1:20–­37. For Sidney’s particular importance, see Robbins, “Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government,” 267–­ 96, and Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America.



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22. As Mark Goldie summarized, in eighteenth-­century America “Locke occupied but one niche in the Whig temple.” Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 1:xxvii. Metaphors portraying Locke as idol in a political temple originated in the twentieth century with Leo Strauss’s discussion of Locke as the “sole idol in the temple of liberalism” in 1960. See Leo Strauss to Willmoore Kendall, June 10, 1960, in KSC, 219. For further discussion, see chapter 7. 23. See, e.g., Arthur Lee’s assessment, in a discussion of consent, that “the reasoning of Mr. Locke is so clear and conclusive, and his authority so great, that it is not necessary to give the words of Sidney and Milton, whose opinions were precisely the same.” [Arthur Lee], An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain, in the Present Disputes with America (New York, 1775), 14. 24. Candidus [Samuel Adams], Boston Gazette, December 23, 1771. 25. See, for example, printings in the Boston Gazette, January 18, 1768, and Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-­Letter, January 21, 1768. Together with William Pitt, later the Earl of Chatham, Camden had worked on repealing the Stamp Act. 26. [ John Dickinson,] “Letter VII,” originally published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia, 1768), Wood Pamphlets, 1:450–­51. 27. George Grenville to William Knox, August 16 [15], 1768, George Grenville Letterbook, Stowe General Volumes, Stowe Papers, LI 7, vol. 2, HL. 28. For the important disambiguation between sovereignty and supremacy, see Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 3:67. As Reid points out, those who understood the matter of Parliament’s power in terms of sovereignty cited Locke instead of common law. 29. Gordon S. Wood, “Preface” to Knox, Wood Pamphlets, 1:613–­14. For a full discussion of Knox’s earlier-­articulated views on the “jurisdiction” of Parliament, particularly his 1765 pamphlet, and its context, see Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire, 228–­29. 30. [William Knox], The Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1769), Wood Pamphlets, 1:649–­50. 31. [William Knox], The Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1769), Wood Pamphlets, 1:653. 32. Soame Jenyns, The Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies . . . Examined (London, 1765), 8. John Selden was an English jurist and scholar who wrote De jure naturali et gentium (1640). Republican martyr Algernon Sidney was the author of Discourses Concerning Government (posthumously published 1698). 33. [Benjamin Franklin], “‘F.B.’: Second Reply to Tom Hint,” The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, December 27, 1765, in PBF, 12:413. Selden, Locke, and Sidney were also a common trio in Boston newspapers that year. See, for example, articles published in the Boston Gazette, July 29, 1765 and in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, October 24, 1765. 34. [Edward Bancroft], Remarks on the Review of the Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies . . . (New London, 1771), Wood Pamphlets, 1:694–­96. 35. [ Jonathan Boucher], Letter from a Virginian (New York, 1774), in Wood Pamphlets, 2:232. Note that Boucher’s authorship is uncertain but widely referenced. If it

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was not Boucher, whoever wrote the pamphlet certainly shared his alarm at what was transpiring in the colonies. 36. Note, too, that when Thomas Hutchinson composed “A Dialogue between Europe and America,” from his vantage point in Massachusetts in the summer of 1768, he acknowledged two dramatically different readings of Locke by both sides of the imperial debate. Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 99–­108. The dialogue remained unpublished in his lifetime. 37. Whether or not he was author of A Letter from a Virginian, Boucher’s rejection of Locke (articulated forcefully in later writings) emerged out of this milieu and is, indeed, indicative of it: he did not revere Locke as others did, but his response was conditioned by their (in his eyes, misguided) approbations of the philosopher. 38. Examples include “Remarkable Story of Mr. Locke,” Edinburgh Magazine, May 1, 1762, AAS; “Story of Mr. LOCKE,” Gentleman’s Magazine (London), May 1, 1762, AAS; “A singular ANECDOTE relating to the celebrated Mr. Locke,” Town & Country Magazine, or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction & Entertainment, April 1, 1774, AAS; and “ANECDOTE of the celebrated Mr. LOCKE” Universal Magazine of Knowledge & Pleasure, October 1, 1774, AAS. 39. “ANECDOTE of the celebrated Mr. LOCKE,” Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg, VA), March 30, 1775. 40. “Last will and testament,” February 28, 1774, Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 6:173–­79. 41. Josiah Quincy Junior, the Patriot (1774–­1775), by Gilbert Stuart (1825), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, printed as the frontispiece to Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, vol. 1. 42. “Josiah Quincy’s Defense,” LPJA, 3:239–­40. 43. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford, 1770), 4:181. 44. “Josiah Quincy’s Defense,” LPJA, 3:239–­40. 45. Regarding the books for his son, Quincy had written, “May the Spirit of Liberty rest upon him.” “Last will and testament,” February 28, 1774, Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 6:174. 46. Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 1:95n2. In keeping his legal commonplace book, Quincy also followed instructions from the legal theorist Matthew Hale. 47. Quincy referenced the “ingenuity of a Locke” and the “discoveries of a Newton” in his diary entry from April 16, 1773, while on a journey through the southern colonies. Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 3:272. The editors imply that he was referencing Locke’s political writings, which seems entirely unlikely given the context. 48. Edmund Quincy, The Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, 19–­20. 49. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 86. 50. Josiah Quincy Sr. to Abigail Quincy, September 25, 1775, Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 6:399. 51. On the widespread practice of adopting Locke’s model for commonplacing, for example, see, e.g., James Wilson, Commonplace Book (1767), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, https://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/15370. Although Thomas Jefferson did not specify Locke’s plan of commonplacing in his instructions to John Minor (1814) and Bernard Moore (1773), when he recommended that



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commonplacing “habituates [a person] to a condensation of thought, and to an acquisition of the most valuable of all talents,” it seems likely that like Chardon, Wilson, the Quincys, and Adams, he knew Locke’s plan. Thomas Jefferson to John Minor, including an earlier letter to Bernard Moore, August 30, 1814, PTJ Ret 7:628. Indeed, in keeping his own commonplace book, Jefferson adopted similar practices to those Locke advised (e.g., quoting directly from books he was reading). See Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage, 47–­48. For further discussion of Americans’ ongoing interest in commonplacing, see chapter 3. 52. Chardon was likely quoting from Of the Conduct of the Understanding, a popular posthumously published complement and addition to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For the identification of the other young men present at the gathering as the two Quincy brothers, see Portrait of a Patriot, ed. Coquillette and York, 2:15. 53. John Adams, Wednesday [October 11] 1758, JA Diary, 1:47. 54. The editors of the legal papers of John Adams suggest that he began keeping his legal commonplace book in 1759, following his visit with Chardon. See “Editorial Note,” LPJA, 1:1. The editors of the Adams papers suggest that Adams began keeping a literary commonplace book—­part diary, part lecture note repository, part commonplace book—­while at Harvard as early as 1754. See JA Diary Earliest, 7–­9. 55. John Adams to Jonathan Sewall, February 1760, PJA, 1:42–­43. 56. [ John Adams], “Novanglus II” ( January 23, 1775), PJA, 2:230. Here Adams responded to Massachusettensis [Daniel Leonard] while also referencing [Robert Prescott], A Letter from A Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston (1774). 57. John Adams, Thoughts on Government (Philadelphia, 1776), in PJA, 4:87. Adams initially articulated his ideas in several letters and drafts sent to William Hooper, John Penn, and the Virginian George Wythe. The references here, in addition to Locke, are to Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham [Needham], Henry Neville, Gilbert Burnet, and Benjamin Hoadly. 58. John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 29, 1775, AFC, 1:317–­18. Like the Quincys, the Adamses owned the three-­volume edition of Locke’s Works (4th ed., 1740), which contained Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education at the start of volume 3. 59. On eighteenth-­century college curricula, see, for example, Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–­1800. 60. The wealthy Englishman Thomas Hollis V (1720–­74), following in his family’s tradition, made many generous donations of books to Harvard, before and after the 1764 fire. He was involved in and supported several publications of Locke’s works, including the sixth printing of the Two Treatises (London, 1764)—­which he edited according to Locke’s own corrections and revisions to the editions printed during his lifetime—­and the seventh edition of the collected Works (2 issues, 4 vols., 1768). On Hollis, see Bond, Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn. 61. John Quincy Adams to Abigail Adams 2nd, October 1, 1785, AFC, 6:398. 62. John Quincy Adams, Diary, February 23, 1786, JQA Diary, 1:408. 63. John Quincy Adams, Diary, March 15, 1786, JQA Diary, 2:1. 64. John Quincy Adams to John Adams, April 2, 1786, AFC, 7:131. Adams wrote to his father again of studying Locke on May 21, 1786. John Quincy Adams to John Adams, May 21, 1786, AFC, 7:181.

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65. John Quincy Adams, Diary, January 27, 1786, JQA Diary, 1:395. 66. John Quincy Adams, Diary, June 13, 1786, JQA Diary, 2:49. 67. Upon completion of their Locke studies, John Quincy and his class began studying and reciting from Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, On the Principles of Common Sense. 68. John Adams to Charles Adams, February 14, 1795, AFC 10:394. 69. The most famous example of attention to Locke’s philosophy of language in these debates is James Madison’s recognition in Federalist 37 that “The use of words is to express ideas.” Publius [ James Madison], Federalist 37, The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 225. On the problem of constitutional language, see Gienapp, The Second Creation, esp. 75–­124. On Locke’s philosophy of language, see Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early-­Modern Philosophy. 70. The second volume of Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind appeared in 1814; the third would not appear until 1827, after Adams had died. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 21, 1820, Founders Online, National Archives https://founders.archives.gov/. 71. John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, February 2, 1807, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/. 72. Three good overviews and summaries of the debate surrounding the relative importance of Locke’s Two Treatises for American political thought are Gibson, “Ancients, Moderns and Americans”; Goldie, introduction to The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 1: xlix–­lix; and Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, 195–­97. Individual works that pay particular attention to Locke and his political thought in eighteenth-­ century and Revolutionary-­era America include Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism; Ohmori, “‘The Artillery of Mr. Locke’”; Huyler, Locke in America; Ward, Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America; West, The Political Theory of the American Founding; and C. Bradley Thompson, America’s Revolutionary Mind. Several books have argued forcefully against the “misplaced emphasis upon John Locke.” See, in particular, John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 2:135, and Shain, The Myth of American Individualism. More recently, Reid’s central claims have been reinvigorated by Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution. Garry Wills famously argued in Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that it was Scottish common sense thinkers, not Locke or English Whig pamphleteers, who most influenced Jefferson’s regard for not only the individual’s but also the community’s common good. Wills’s emphasis on the relative unimportance of Locke’s Second Treatise drew in part from Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century,” 45–­80. For a rejection of  Wills’s argument, see Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment.” For the rise of the paradigm of republicanism, which, generally speaking, challenged accounts of Locke’s preeminence in early American political thought, see chapter 7. 73. For a succinct statement of the present-­day fame of this phrase, see “The Declaration of Independence: What Does it Say?,” National Archives, https://www.archives .gov/founding-­docs/declaration/what-­does-­it-­say. 74. My use of “relevance” and “irrelevance” here is a play on Reid, “The Irrelevance of the Declaration,” esp. 69–­77.



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75. The literature on the Declaration and its intellectual sources is vast. Many works mentioned above discuss the matter. For a recent restatement of an old argument about the intrinsic relationship between Locke, Jefferson, and the American mind, emphasizing the importance of early-­nineteenth-­century accounts of Jefferson taking (or not) from Locke’s Second Treatise, see C. Bradley Thompson, “John Locke and the American Mind.” On the relationship between the Declaration and Locke’s contemporary Algernon Sidney, in particular, see Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, 118–­19. On the Declaration’s status in the early United States, see Maier, American Scripture, 154–­208. 76. On these points, see especially Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1:132–­34, 2:135–­36; Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, 182; Gordon S. Wood, “The History of Rights in Early America,” in The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond, ed. Shain, 237; and Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–­1787, 283. 77. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 2:136. See also Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, 69. 78. Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, esp. 69, 80. 79. Bear in mind, Jefferson was not the sole author of the Declaration. On the question “who wrote the Declaration of Independence?,” see Allen, Our Declaration, 47–­82. 80. For discussion of this point in the context of eighteenth-­century rights talk, see Slauter, “Rights,” 455. 81. Locke, The Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, 350. 82. Just what Locke understood and meant by the word property and the implications of this understanding for Locke’s relationship to capitalism or “possessive individualism” are the subjects of longstanding debate. See especially Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, and Tully, A Discourse on Property. 83. Winterer, American Enlightenments, 3. 84. Slauter, “Rights,” 457. 85. Adams, Thoughts on Government (Philadelphia, 1776), PJA, 4:86. 86. Virginia Provincial Convention, Committee Draft of a Declaration of Rights, May 27, 1776, in Rakove, Declaring Rights, 81. 87. Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789, PTJ, 14:561. See also Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, January 16, 1811, in PTJ Ret, 3:304–­8. 88. Examples include: A Catalogue of the Annapolis Circulating Library (Annapolis, 1786), 29, 49; A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of  Wilmington (Wilmington, DE, 1789), 17; A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Albany Library (Albany, 1793), 28; Catalogue of Books, Belonging to the Gloucester United Library (Providence, 1796), 5; A Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Richmond Library (Richmond, 1801), 10; Catalogue of Books, in the Library of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, 1802), 32; and Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Lexington Library (Lexington, KY, 1804), 16. Harvard, with its 1764 Hollis edition of the Two Treatises, was a notable exception. The catalog for Harvard’s library, for example, listed Locke’s Two Treatises under the heading “Jus Naturale et Politicum.” “The 1790 Catalog,” in The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College Library, 1723–­1790, ed. Bond and Amory, C84. In 1802, the Library Company of Baltimore did not list Locke among a long list of authors—­including

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Blackstone, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Vattel, and Adam Smith—­under the heading “Law, Politics, Trade and Commerce.” Nor did the Charleston Library Society in South Carolina in 1806. Nor did the newly founded Boston Athenaeum, when, in 1810, it categorized a large number of works under the heading “Law, Politics, Economics, and Commerce” for its catalog. There it included works by Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Ferguson, Harrington, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, More, Smith (two editions of his Wealth of  Nations), Sidney, Pufendorf, Rousseau, and Vattel, alongside more recent American works like The Federalist and the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, but no work by Locke. Locke was not entirely absent, however: the catalog listed a 1795 edition of his Essay under the heading “Theology, Metaphysics, and Ethics,” and it seems likely the library had a copy of Locke’s Works as well. For references, see A Catalogue of the Books &c. Belonging to the Library Company of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1802), 2, 6, 33–­46, and 94; Catalogue of the Books in the Boston Athenaeum (Boston, 1810), 6, 10–­28; and A Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society (Charleston, SC, 1806), 42–­47. 89. See below. 90. Slauter, “Reading and Radicalization,” 35–­37. 91. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:52. 92. These distinctions were not new to the late eighteenth century. In fact, Locke himself had drawn them, distinguishing between the theoretical realm of politics “containing the origin[s] of societies, and the rise and extent of political power”—­what eighteenth-­century Americans would understand as the principles of government—­and that which dealt with “the art of governing men in society”—­what eighteenth-­century Americans would understand as the forms of government. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman, in A Collection of Several Pieces (London, 1720), 236. Before its inclusion in the 1751 edition of Locke’s Works, Some Thoughts had been printed in A Collection of Several Pieces, which, for example, both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams owned. 93. To be sure, as we have seen, Quincy, when it suited him, accepted Blackstone’s rendering of the theoretical limits of Locke’s work, but he was generally skeptical of Blackstone’s understanding, regarding Locke, that something that was good in theory could be bad in practice. 94. Blackstone, Commentaries, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1768), 1:161–­62. This was the edition of book 1 that John Adams and Josiah Quincy owned. Adams would also acquire the American printing of the Commentaries (1771/72) produced for subscribers by Robert Bell in Philadelphia. In his later revisions, Blackstone clarified and strengthened this passage: “But however just this conclusion may be in theory, we cannot practically adopt it, nor take any legal steps for carrying it into execution, under any dispensation of government at present actually existing.” Blackstone, Commentaries, 9th ed., with the last corrections of the author (London, 1783), 1:162. 95. Quincy’s annotated copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries is lost, but his annotations appear as notes to appendix 1 of Josiah Quincy Jr. Reports of Cases Argued and Ad­ judged in the Superior Court of Judicature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, between 1761 and 1772, ed. Samuel M. Quincy (Boston, 1865), 527n. According to the preface, Horace Gray Jr. prepared the appendix. 96. [ John Adams], “Novanglus II” ( January 23, 1775), PJA, 2:230.



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97. See, e.g., [Robert Prescott], A Letter from A Veteran, to the Officers of the Army Encamped at Boston (New York, 1774) and [Boucher], A Letter from a Virginian (New York, 1774), in Wood Pamphlets, 2:215–­35. 98. Benjamin Rush, Observations upon the Present Government of Pennsylvania in Four Letters to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1777), 20. On the importance of James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) and his ideas about mixed government for the founding generation, see especially Conkin, Self-­Evident Truths, 147–­49. 99. In at least one instance, a Federalist supporter of the Constitution did not hesitate to group Montesquieu together with Locke as a “European” writer on the “axioms” of government to point out the practical limitations of Montesquieu’s misguided theory that republics ought to be small. [ John Stevens Jr.], “Americanus I,” New York Daily Advertiser, November 2, 1787, in DHRC, vol. 19, 171. Assigning Locke to the realm of the principles of government’s origins and dissolution rather than to that of the practice of governing proved useful for those opposed to the Constitution’s ratification as well. In the course of his attack on the Constitution and the process of ratification unfolding in Massachusetts, for example, the writer known as “The Republican Federalist” used the “celebrated writer” Locke on account of his assessment that Locke’s “principles and reasonings . . . apply more forcibly to the alteration or formation, than to the administration of government.” “The Republican Federalist IV,” Massachusetts Centinel, January 12, 1788, in DHRC, vol. 5, 701. 100. Garry Wills, building on John Dunn, briefly recognized the limitations of Locke as a “practical guide.” Wills, Inventing America, 172. 101. The frequency with which authors referenced Locke after the Revolution fell to the rate at which they had referenced Blackstone before the Revolution, and the frequency with which they cited Blackstone after the Revolution rose to the rate at which they had cited Locke before the Revolution. See Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, 143, table 3: “Most-­Cited Secular Thinkers (n = 3,154): Blackstone (% of total N = 7.9): 1760s = 1; 1770s = 3; 1780s = 7; 1790s = 11; 1800–­1805 = 15. Locke (% of total N = 2.9): 1760s = 11; 1770s = 7; 1780s = 1; 1790s = 1; 1800–­1805 = 1.” See also Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-­Century American Political Thought.” And at the same time that American publishers saw no reason to print new editions of Locke’s work on government in the decades after the Revolution, they reissued Blackstone’s work, with elaborate notes and annotations. See, esp., St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 1803). 102. On the reality that Locke’s “influence on the design of any [United States] constitution, state or national, is probably exaggerated, and finding him hidden in passages of the U.S. Constitution is an exercise that requires more evidence than has hitherto been provided,” see Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, 144. See also Lutz and Warren, A Covenanted People, 53. 103. John Adams to Edmund Jenings, June 20, 1780, PJA, 9:446. 104. James Wilson, Tuesday, December 4, 1787, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Elliot, 2:456 (emphasis mine).

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105. Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., May 30, 1790, PTJ, 16:448–­50. 106. Americans were not alone. Perhaps the most damning critique of Locke’s political thought was Josiah Tucker, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government in Three Parts (London, 1781). 107. For Rush’s views on the relationship between education in history and a new science of government, see Rush, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1786), 29. For his arguments that “Government is a science; and can never be perfect in America, until we encourage men to devote . . . their whole lives to it,” see Rush, “Address to the People of the United States,” in Friends of the Constitution, ed. Sheehan and McDowell, 3. 108. In the late 1780s, Kent had been happier conducting a rhetorical thought experiment, arguing that the thirteen states were like thirteen individuals in a state of nature in need of joining together in a strong union to secure their liberties. See his defense of The Federalist in “A Country Federalist,” Poughkeepsie Country Journal, December 19, 1787 (supplement), in DHRC, vol. 19, 437. 109. Kent, Dissertations (New York, 1795), 7. 110. Kent, Dissertations, 6. 111. Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, VT, 1793), 14. 112. James Madison “Spirit of Governments,” for the National Gazette, February 18, 1792, PJMCS, 14:233. 113. Madison supplemented his moral philosophy education by reading Locke’s work on government together with works by James Harrington and Algernon Sidney at the recommendation of college president and moral philosophy professor John Witherspoon. See Ketcham, James Madison, 41–­44, and Dennis F. Thompson, “The Education of a Founding Father,” 523–­29. As Thompson explains, this was not, in fact, a political theory class, but rather Witherspoon’s recommended reading for the politics and government section of his moral philosophy course. For Madison encountering Locke in the fall of 1774, see William Bradford to James Madison, October 17, 1774, PJMCS, 1:126. 114. Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government, 71.

Chapter 3 1. Hosack, “A Discourse, introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Physic . . . and a Tribute to the Memory of the late Dr. Benjamin Rush,” 322–­ 23. January marked the tribute’s publication date. Hosack had delivered the discourse two months earlier. Later in his life, Rush’s method of commonplacing may not have been consistent. See, e.g., Rush, Commonplace Book, 1789–­1791 and 1792–­1813, in The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, 173–­360. 2. Henry, Eulogy on the Late Honorable John Caldwell Calhoun, Delivered at Columbia, South Carolina, on Thursday, May 16, 1850, 211. 3. Everett, An Oration, Pronounced at Cambridge, Before the Society of Phi Beta Kappa, August 27, 1824, 22. The emphasis on Locke’s Englishness is important to note. It was, for example, “their Locke on the Understanding,” not our Locke. “Yankee Prowess in England,” Alta California (San Francisco, CA), November 1, 1851.



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4. See below for discussion of Locke’s authorship from both a historical and a historiographical perspective. 5. Gough, The Social Contract, 174–­89. Criticisms generally followed one (or both) of two lines: either (i) the state of nature and the social contract were, not having origins in real history, fantastical; or (ii), taken as philosophical thought experiments, they were unnecessary, logically or otherwise. On the limits of its practical applicability, College of New Jersey professor Samuel Stanhope Smith provides a typical example. In his discussion of Locke’s theoretical defense of the acquisition of property in relation to its origins, Smith explained to his students that Locke’s theory “does not seem to afford a sufficient foundation for the rights of property in land to the extent in which they actually exist.” Samuel Stanhope Smith, The Lectures Corrected and Improved . . . (Trenton, NJ, 1812), 2:190 (emphasis mine). In the late 1820s, when former presi­ dent James Monroe evaluated the relevance of Locke’s work on government for the country, he concluded that it had little “which can be considered applicable to us.” Monroe, The People the Sovereigns, ed. Gouverneur (Philadelphia, 1867), 146. Between 1825 and 1831, Monroe composed this manuscript draft of a book comparing ancient systems of government from the Greco-­Roman world with the nineteenth-­ century American system of government. It was later edited and published by his grandson. 6. E.g., when he dismissed Locke’s work on government as presumably “very interesting and useful to his country” but not to the nineteenth-­century United States, Monroe recognized it, in a vague sense, as promoting “the general cause of liberty.” Monroe, The People the Sovereigns, 146. In other instances, however, mention of Locke, where we might expect to find him, is notably absent. E.g., in William Lloyd Garrison’s famous proposal to publish the Liberator, he listed Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government—­not Locke—­alongside the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents establishing “the right to be free.” William Lloyd Garrison, “Proposals for Publishing a Weekly Paper in Washington, D.C. to be Entitled the Liberator, and Journal of the Times,” National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), August 20, 1830. 7. For an account of how early nineteenth-­century political debates between politicians who “may not have read” Locke’s Second Treatise may be “best understood as alternative interpretations of Locke’s Second Treatise,” see Scalia, “The Many Faces of Locke in America’s Early Democratic Philosophy.” 8. Without fail, biographical sketches foregrounded Locke’s authorship of the Essay as the primary basis of his authority and reputation, even when they went on to discuss his other works. For one example, see “Sketch of John Locke,” Monthly Repository & Library of Entertaining Knowledge (New York), May 1, 1833, 414, AAS, which was reprinted in the Ladies’ Garland in 1840. As author of the Essay, his name was invoked repeatedly alongside Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Isaac Newton as one of Britain’s intellectual gems. See, e.g., Story, A Discourse, Pronounced at Cambridge, Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society . . . (Boston, 1826), 6, 51, and Story, A Discourse upon the Life, Character, and Services of the Honorable John Marshall, LL.D. . . . (Boston, 1835), 7. 9. Universal Gazette (Washington, DC), August 8, 1805. 10. [Probus], “Letters from New York, No. II,” Southern Literary Messenger 5, no. 9 (September 1839): 629.

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11. Sean Wilentz, “Millard Fillmore and His Library,” 5. William H. Herndon to John E. Remsburg [“Extracts 1880–­1890”], in Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, ed. Wilson and Davis, 329. Herndon noted in a letter to Lincoln portraitist Frances Carpenter that Lincoln sent a box of his books to Herndon’s office in 1861, including some “valuable literary works—­Byron—­Goldsmith—­Locke—­Gibbon, &c.” See Herndon to Carpenter, Decem­ ber 19, 1866, in Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, ed. Wilson and Davis, 57 (my emphasis). 12. Everett, “Edward Everett’s College Life,” 24–­25. Everett, who would go on to be a professor at Harvard College and the orator who preceded Lincoln at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery during the Civil War, was a student at Harvard between 1807 and 1811. Other examples of recollections of Locke’s prominence are numerous. See, e.g., Joseph Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story (Boston, 1851), 1:48, and the journal of John Gallison. I am grateful to Stephen Symchych for bringing my attention to Gallison and his careful engagement with Locke’s Essay. Gallison’s journal, edited by Symchych, is available at http://johngallison.com/. 13. For a succinct summary of Bowen’s life and career, see Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, esp. 14, 309–­10. Bowen was first a tutor in Greek and mathematics. He also was editor of the North American Review in the 1840s and early 1850s. 14. Bowen, “Locke and the Transcendentalists,” 183. 15. For a brief summary of Bowen’s gradual transition away from a strict adherence to Scottish common sense philosophy to a warmer embrace of Kantian idealism in the final decades of his career, see Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 14. 16. “Immanuel Kant,” Dial 4, no. 4 (April, 1844), 410. The article discusses how Locke’s philosophy led to the work of Berkeley and Hume. 17. Kant’s idealism offered more unity between one’s internal self or mind and the external world than did Locke’s metaphysics. For a concise discussion of the Transcendentalists taking only what they wanted from Kant and particularly the role the Ver­ mont philosopher James Marsh played in Kant’s American transmission, see Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 75–­78. 18. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” reprinted in Dial 3, no. 3 ( January 1843), 302–­3. 19. “Transcendentalism,” San Francisco Bulletin, Published as the Daily Evening Bulletin, December 20, 1860. 20. For example, at Dartmouth College in the early nineteenth century, the curriculum for seniors included “Locke on the understanding” together with Stewart (philosophy), Burlamaqui (natural law), and “Montesquieu’s spirit of law.” “Course of Studies at Dartmouth College,” Gazette of Maine Hancock Advertiser (Bucksport, Maine), Octo­ ber 24, 1805. 21. At Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, for example, The Elements of Moral Science replaced Locke’s Essay in the curriculum in the late 1830s. Locke was, however, still covered in lectures delivered in spring term to the senior class. See, e.g., A Catalogue of the Officers & Students of Dartmouth College: Course of Instruction, etc. at Dartmouth College, LD 1427.D3 1845, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. 22. William W. Harris, University of  Virginia Notebooks on Mental Philosophy and Chemistry, 1835, Accession #3780, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library,



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University of  Virginia. Merit M. Robinson, Notebook of George Tucker’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 7, box 23, folder “Notes on the Lectures on Moral Philosophy by George Tucker,” in Joseph C. Cabell Papers, 1706–­1920, Accession #38-­111, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of  Virginia. 23. For a succinct telling of Tucker’s own insecurities and those of the parents of his students, see O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 2:1010–­11. 24. University of  Virginia Library List of Books Borrowed, 1825–­1827, Accession #RG-­12/12/1.113, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, 5, 19, 41. 25. E.g., Euterpeiad, or Musical Intelligencer & Ladies Gazette, January 19, 1822, 163, AAS. On the insufficiency of Locke’s approach to the study of classical languages, particularly Latin, see, e.g., “Ascham, Milton, and Locke on Classical Education,” in American Annals of Education ( June 1, 1839), 242–­62, AAS. 26. See, e.g., Jaudon, A Short System of Polite Learning . . . (Philadelphia, 1806), title page. Preston, The Juvenile Instructor . . . (Boston, 1807), title page. They also encountered Locke as an authority on a wide range of specific topics, including, e.g., geography: Morse, Elements of Geography (Boston, 1795), iv. 27. Thomas Cook, The New Universal Letter Writer (Charlestown, MA, 1805), 143. 28. Among the most famous was his 1695 letter to his friend and correspondent the Irish scientist William Molyneux on the advantages of friendship. This was first published as Locke, Some familiar letters between Mr. Locke, and several of his friends (London, 1708). As a young man at Harvard, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson checked out Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of  his Friends, with his Life and Character (4th ed., London, 1742) from the college library. See Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading, 47. 29. John Ash, Grammatical Institutes (Worcester, MA, 1785), appendix. This included passages from Locke’s writings as grammar example exercises and was printed in Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, for example. 30. Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady (Hartford, CT, 1791; Philadelphia, 1809). 31. Advertisement for “Ladies Academy, Mount Health, near Augusta,” Augusta Herald (Georgia), June 15, 1815. In a New England address on normal schools, delivered on September 5, 1839, Edward Everett identified Edgeworth as among the most important authorities on education, except for her views on religious instruction, which he deemed wanting for American students. Everett, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, 2:348. Edgeworth drew on examples from Locke in her Practical Education: Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education (New York, 1801). 32. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (Philadelphia, 1800), 1:139. 33. For an interpretation of Locke’s importance as defender of freedom of religious conscience, see, e.g., Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, 3:727. Story used Locke to contrast a state’s fostering religion with “the right to force the consciences of other men.” 34. Channing, The Works of William E. Channing, 170. 35. Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, 1:70–­71.

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36. See, e.g., “Religion,” American Advocate (Hallowell, ME), October 29, 1811; John Todd, The Student’s Manual, 168; “John Locke,” Millennial Harbinger, March 1, 1845, AAS. 37. An Address, and the Constitution, of the Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, Established in the City of Albany and Its Vicinity, A.D. 1810 (Albany, 1810), http://hdl .loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1140010a. 38. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as delivered in the Scriptures (Boston, 1811), vi. 39. Norton, ed., Locke’s Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles and Le Clerc on Inspiration, iii. 40. Catalogue of  H. Caritat’s Circulating Library, No. 1 City Hotel, Road-­way (New York, 1803), viii. 41. John Mason, Self Knowledge (Hartford, CT, 1803), 107. 42. Editions of, or modeled on, John Bell, A Common place book . . . recommended and practised by Mr. Locke (London, 1770), were popular in the United States as well as Britain. 43. Catherine Post, Commonplace Book, box 1, N.D. MssCol 86, American Nineteenth-­Century Commonplace Books Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 44. Charles Francis Adams, “Literary commonplace book” (1822). For another example, see David H. Storer commonplace-­book, 1823–­[38], Ms. N-­976, Massachusetts Historical Society. Both Adams and Storer (a Massachusetts physician) used A Common Place Book Upon the Plan Recommended and Practised by John Locke, Esq. (Boston, 1821). 45. New Hampshire resident and graduate of Dartmouth Benjamin Franklin Ayer, e.g., adhered to Todd’s method, at least for a while, before he turned his copy of the Index Rerum into an account book. Benjamin Franklin Ayer copy of John Todd, Index Rerum, 11th ed. (Northampton, MA, 1846), Codex 000410, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. 46. Todd, Index Rerum, 3. 47. Letters conveying Locke’s assessment of living a good life were frequently republished. See, e.g., “Locke and Collins,” Boston Spectator, September 10, 1825, and The Ladies’ Garland (Harper’s Ferry, VA), September 17, 1825, AAS. 48. “Anecdote of Mr. Locke,” The Juvenile Magazine, or, Miscellaneous Repository of Useful Information (Philadelphia, 1802), 1:108–­9. Note the very close similarity here to the Spectator’s account of Locke’s aversion to cards. The Spectator, no. 533, Tuesday, November 11, 1712, 4:181. 49. “Extract from Judge Rush’s Charge to the Grand Jury of Berks County at January Sessions, 1802,” The Juvenile Magazine, or, Miscellaneous Repository of  Useful Information (Philadelphia, 1802), 2:56. 50. “Locke on Cards,” New England Farmer & Horticultural Journal, February 19, 1830, AAS. 51. Early nineteenth-­century editions of Locke’s Essay simply reprinted eighteenth-­ century character sketches of the philosopher. E.g., Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, with a Life of the Author (Boston, 1813), 1:iii–­v.



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52. “Newly Discovered Mss. of Locke,” Evangelical Lutheran Intelligencer, July 1, 1829, reprinted from the New-­York Morning Courier, AAS. 53. “John Locke in Holland,” Atheneum: Or, Spirit of the English Magazines (Boston, MA), September 1, 1829, AAS. 54. “John Locke,” Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Boston, MA), January 1, 1832, AAS. 55. See e.g., “Newly discovered MSS. of Locke,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), April 28, 1829; “Newly Discovered Mss. of Locke,” Evangelical Lutheran Intelligencer (Frederick, MD), July 1, 1829, repr. from New-­York Morning Courier, AAS; “John Locke,” Monthly Traveller, Or, Spirit of the Periodical Press 1, no. 4 (Boston), April 1830, 110, AAS; “Discovery of curious Manuscripts of Locke and others,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), June 23, 1829; “Locke,” Philadelphia Album & Ladies’ Literary Gazette, April 3, 1830, AAS. 56. “The Week,” Penny Magazine, August 25, 1832, AAS. See also, e.g., “Locke,” Juvenile Rambler, or Family & School Journal, August 29, 1832, AAS; “Locke and Pitt,” Children’s Magazine (New York), July 1, 1835, AAS. 57. “The Great Locke,” Franklin Farmer (Lexington, KY), Saturday, April 11, 1840, AAS. King’s biography reprinted large portions of Le Clerc’s earlier sketch of Locke’s life, which included a description of Locke’s great skill at acquiring knowledge through conversation. See King, The Life of John Locke, 267–­71. 58. See, for example, “Thus I think,” Unitarian Monitor (Boston), Wednesday, November 21, 1832; “From Locke’s Miscellaneous papers, published in his Life by Lord King, Thus I think,” Middlesex Gazette (Middletown, CT), August 14, 1833. “Thus I think” was printed among Locke’s miscellaneous papers in King, The Life of John Locke, 304–­5. 59. “Temperance,” extract from Dr. Hosack’s Address, delivered at the first anniversary of the New York City Temperance Society, May 11, 1830, Connecticut Courant (Hartford), August 31, 1830. 60. “He who would have a clear head, must have a clean stomach,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), December 14, 1830. 61. “Vegetable Diet,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), June 22, 1830. Meanwhile, the New York State Mechanic reminded its readers that Locke’s example showed not only the importance of avoiding drink and eating well, but also the value of exercise. “Manual Labor,” New York State Mechanic (Albany), July 30, 1842, AAS. 62. Locke’s distaste for (unfiltered) water, which he pointed to as giving him colic, was common in the early modern world. For Locke’s preference for beer, at least until he devised a filtration system in Oates late in life, see Woolhouse, Locke, 215, 350. 63. For more on Locke’s health, see Cranston, John Locke, 160, 330, 342. 64. Locke, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in Political Writings, 211. See also Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 609. 65. For an example of the emphasis placed on the “aristocratical” nature of Locke’s constitution for Carolina, see Noah Webster, An American Selection of Lessons . . . to Instruct them in the Geography, History, and Politics of the United States . . . (Boston, 1803), 98. 66. Farr, “‘Absolute Power and Authority,’” 11.

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67. See North Carolina Charters and Constitutions 1578–­1698, ed. Parker, xxi, 130–­31. 68. See Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 607. 69. See, especially, Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government”; Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’”; and Farr, “‘Absolute Power and Authority.’” For broader discussions of the relationship between liberalism and colonialism and/or empire, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, and Ivison, “Locke, Liberalism and Empire,” 86–­105. The corpus of work on Locke and slavery is enormous. See, esp., Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories; Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’”; Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery”; and Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, esp. 197–­206. 70. Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” 607. British and European observers also paid attention. And some, like Edmund Burke, emphasized the happier aspects of Locke’s efforts—­such as his support for freedom of religious belief in the new colony. See, e.g., Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757; Boston, 1835), 297. 71. When John Oldmixon wrote an early account of the English settlement of Carolina for his work The British Empire in America in 1708, for example, he did not mention Locke but attributed the Fundamental Constitutions to Shaftesbury alone. When he revised his work for a second edition in 1741, Oldmixon changed his attribution, identifying the Fundamental Constitutions as those “which Locke drew up” at Shaftes­ bury’s request. Oldmixon, The British Empire in America Containing The History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress, and present State of all the British Colonies, on the Continent and Islands of America (London, 1741), 1:522, 462. Daniel Defoe claimed Locke as their author in 1705: Defoe, Party-­Tyranny: or, An occasional bill in miniature: being an abridgement of the Shortest way with the Dissenters, As now practiced in Carolina (London, 1705), 8. 72. Benjamin Franklin, “Marginalia,” in PBF, 16:319–­20. 73. See, for example, the reference to “the constitution of John Locke,” in The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. Cooper (Columbia, SC, 1836), 1:42. 74. [William Barton], Observations on the Trial by Jury . . . (Strasburg, PA, 1803), 33. 75. The following discussion of Adams and his Defence draws on Arcenas, “Justifying an Energetic Executive.” 76. Adams’s familiarity with Locke’s efforts in Carolina was not new. In his diary entry from April 1778, e.g., he made a brief reference to Ralph Izard of South Carolina as being descended from one of Mr. Locke’s landgraves. See the entry for April 21, 1778, JA Diary, 4:70. 77. Not all assessments of it were positive. There were those, like the Reverend James Madison at the College of  William and Mary in Virginia, who read Adams’s work quite negatively, as a secret plot against the new American government. On Madison’s reading, see McCullough, John Adams, 379. And John Taylor of Caroline devoted an entire work to attacking Adams: John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA, 1814). 78. For an overview of the Defence in the context of the Constitutional Convention, see Nelson, The Royalist Revolution, 335n125. For accounts that emphasize the displeasure of Jefferson and Madison, see Appleby, “What Is Still American in the Political



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Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?,” 292, 291, and Appleby, “The Jefferson-­Adams Rupture and the First French Translation of John Adams’ Defence.” 79. In the New York (1787) and Boston (1788) printings, letter 54 became 55. 80. All three volumes appeared in the collections of the New-­York Society Library by 1789. The Charter, Bye-­laws, and Names of the Members of the New-­York Society Library. With a Catalogue of Books Belonging to the Said Library (New York, 1789), 18. The first volume was in Yale’s collection by 1791. Mooney, Eighteenth-Century Catalogues of the Yale College Library, C44. In 1800, it was requested for the newly formed Library of Congress. The First Booklist of the Library of Congress: A Facsimile (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1981), 6. In 1802, it was part of the Library of the Two Houses of Congress. Catalogue of Books, Maps, and Charts, Belonging to the Library of the Two Houses of Congress (Washington City [Washington, DC], 1802), 7, https://www.loc. gov/item/81180057/. And in 1810, it was part of the Boston Athenaeum. Catalogue of the Books in the Boston Athenaeum (Boston, 1810), 10. 81. In London, the English Review included excerpts of Adams’s assessment of Locke’s work in Carolina in its November 1787 edition. Three years later, the Gazette of the United States in New York reprinted the same selections. “Article I,” English Review, vol. 10 (November 1787), 321–­29. “From the English Review, For November, 1787,” Gazette of the United States (New York), October 9, 1790. 82. William Gordon, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America (London, 1788), 1:78. 83. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1787), 1:365. It seems Adams confused the date of Locke’s plan (1669) with the date of the colonial charter granted by King Charles II (1663). More interestingly, the chronological separation between the appearance of the Fundamental Constitutions in 1669 and the publication of Locke’s other works several decades later did not strike Adams or his contemporaries as significant. The assumption running throughout comparisons such as Adams’s was that Locke’s ideas were fixed in place throughout his life, no matter when they were published. 84. Adams, A Defence, 366. David Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1777). 85. See, e.g., Payne, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography (New York, 1799), 4:370, which did not cite Adams, and Winterbotham, An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the United States of America (New York, 1796), 3:22, which did cite Adams. 86. Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, VT, 1793), 134. 87. Kent, Commentaries on American Law (New York, 1826), 1:264. 88. Jefferson mentioned Locke alongside Lycurgus, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, and Abbé de Mably. Thomas Jefferson to William Lee, January 16, 1817, PTJ Ret, 10:670–­71. 89. Review of John Haywood and Robert L. Coobs, “The Statute Laws of Tennessee,” American Jurist and Law Magazine 8, no. 16 (1832): 311. 90. For a good overview of the impact of partisanship on political thought at this time, see Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-­Revolutionary America.” 91. “Mr. Locke,” American Citizen and General Advertiser (New York), October 26, 27, 1801. My interpretation of these two articles vis-­à-­vis Locke differs from that of C. Bradley Thompson, “John Locke and the American Mind,” 577.

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92. Outside of the US, observers also saw connections between Locke and the revolution in France. See, e.g., Alexandre-­Stanislas, baron de Wimpffen, A Voyage to Saint Domingo, letter 16 (London, 1797), 138–­39, https://archive.org/details/voyagetosaint dom00wimp/page/138. I am grateful to Professor Peter Thompson for this reference. 93. The Carolina Gazette (Charleston, SC), February 20, 1800. 94. King, The Organization of Liberty on the Western Continent: An Oration Delivered before the Municipal Authorities of the City of Boston, at the Celebration of the Seventy-­ Sixth Anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, July 5, 1852 (Boston, 1892), 30. According to King, “nothing, indeed, [could] illustrate more brilliantly” the contrast than the Fundamental Constitutions. 95. Hillard, An Oration Pronounced Before The Inhabitants of Boston, July the Fourth, 1835: In Commemoration of American Independence (Boston, 1835), 18–­19. 96. To be sure, Locke appeared by name in community orations that paid no attention to his failed efforts in Carolina. In those addresses, he received mention alongside other celebrities of England’s past: Bacon, Shakespeare, and Newton, as well as Harrington, Sidney, and Milton. But these references were usually nothing more than a passing gesture—­a waving of one’s hand, as it were, to familiar names an audience would recognize in the given context. See, for example, Everett, “First Settlement of New En­ gland” (December 22, 1824), in Everett, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, 1:64, and Daniel Webster, Address, Delivered at Bunker Hill, June 17, 1843 on the Completion of the Monument (Boston, 1843), 31. 97. Hedge, An Oration, Pronounced before the Citizens of Bangor, on the Fourth of July, 1838: The Sixty-­Second Anniversary of American Independence (Bangor, ME, 1838), 20. 98. See above, preface, n. 7. 99. Hale, History of the United States, from Their First Settlement as Colonies, to the Close of the War with Great Britain, in 1815 (1820; New York, 1825), 105. 100. For an earlier discussion of Locke’s Englishness and his having “conceived no idea of any other security to the enjoyment of liberty, than what was to be found in the constitution of England,” see Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government, 133, 134. 101. Hale, History of the United States, 104. Note, however, that Hale mixed up his chronology in suggesting that Locke was already well-­known for his political writings when the colonial proprietors called on him to help them craft a constitution for Carolina. 102. Pitkin, A Political and Civil History of the United States of America (New Haven, 1828), 1:59. 103. Abiel Holmes, The Annals of America (Cambridge, MA, 1829), 351–­52n. 104. The copy is still in the collections of the Charleston Library Society. See John Locke, “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Charleston Library Society, https:// lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:53757. 105. Bancroft, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 15th ed. (Boston, 1854), 2:150n. Even those who did not share Bancroft’s unabashedly Democratic political views found little praiseworthy in Locke’s efforts, although at least one historian rated them more favorably than South Carolina’s antebellum government. See, e.g., Hildreth, The History of the United States of America (1849; New York, 1875), 2:30, 31, 211. 106. Bancroft, History of the United States, 2:150.



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107. Bancroft, History of the United States, 2:145, 390, 152. 108. Bancroft, History of the United States, 2:146, 145. 109. George Tucker, The History of the United States (Philadelphia, 1856), 1:37, 38n. Tucker mentions Hildreth and Bancroft, indicating knowledge of works written to date on the subject. 110. Quotations from “Mr. Adams’ Anti-­Masonry,” in Natchez Gazette (Natchez, MS), October 30, 1828. 111. “General Hamilton,” New-­York Spectator, May 1, 1827. Alexander Hill Everett, America, 111. 112. See [Philo Lowndes], “Communications,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), October 6, 1827, and [W.T.W.T.], “Communications,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), October 12, 1827. 113. The newspaper article from which the above discussion and quotations are drawn was first published under the pseudonym “William Penn”—­perhaps reflecting an oft-­drawn comparison between Penn’s plans for Pennsylvania and Locke’s for Carolina—­as “Communication,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), December 19, 1829. It was reprinted in newspapers across the country. See, for example, “From the National Intelligencer. Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians. No. XXIV,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, CT), January 26, 1830; and “Political Morality,” Observer and Telegraph (Hudson, OH), March 5, 1830. 114. Appendix to the Cong. Globe, 30th Cong., 1st Sess. 572 (1848). 115. Daily Alta California (San Francisco, CA), January 7, 1851. 116. Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 755 (1860). 117. Daniel E. Huger, “Penitentiary System,” Raleigh Register, and North-­Carolina Gazette, August 28, 1818. 118. “Sketch of John Locke,” Monthly Repository & Library of Entertaining Knowledge (New York), May 1, 1833, 415 (emphasis mine). Notably, this same piece identified Locke first and foremost as “the author of the Essay on the human understanding” (414). 119. Huger, “Penitentiary System.” 120. “Internal Improvements,” Raleigh Register, and North-­Carolina Gazette, March 23, 1821. 121. “Internal Improvements.” 122. Hanckel, “South Carolina—­Her State Sovereignty,” 317. 123. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, from its first settlement in 1670 to the year 1808, 2:69, 68. 124. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, 1:16. 125. Quoted in Review of “A Review of the plan of Education in South Carolina; Address to the Graduates of the South Carolina College; December 1821,” 310. 126. The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. Cooper, 1:42. 127. “Critical Notices,” review of Thomas Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC, 1836), in American Jurist and Law Magazine 19, no. 37 (April 1838): 238. 128. Trescot, “South Carolina—­A Colony and State,” 685. Trescot had delivered a version of these remarks to the Historical Society of South Carolina, and they also appeared in the Charleston Mercury.

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129. O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 2:805. For Upshur’s discussion of the naturalness of property and the inextricable relationship between society and property, see the proceedings of the Virginia convention in Peterson, Democracy, Liberty, and Property, 280–­81, 284. 130. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA, 1854), 187. It bears mention here that Fitzhugh juxtaposed “Locke’s theory of the social contract” with Aristotle’s arguments in his Politics (25). For a good overview of Fitzhugh’s rejection of Locke in favor of Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery, see Monoson, “Recollecting Aristotle,” 247–­77. Ironically, Fitzhugh seemed unbothered by the theoretical nature of Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery. 131. Thomas G. Wynne, Notebook from William & Mary College, Williamsburg, Va., 1853–­54, Accession #518-­a, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of  Virginia. 132. For one pairing of the US Constitution and Fundamental Constitutions, see “The Message, The Constitution, and the Times,” esp. 157, and for a distinction, see R. Cutter, “Political Constitutions,” 621–­23, AAS. I believe the author of the first is George Fitzhugh. 133. Simon Greenleaf to Francis Lieber, October 3, 1842, box 8, Folder: Correspondence with Simon Greenleaf, Francis Lieber Papers, HL. Francis Lieber’s discussion of property and its origins in his Essays on Property and Labour, which explicitly countered Locke’s theories, received a warm reception from Greenleaf, a lawyer and Harvard professor. See also, Willson, A Treatise on Civil Polity and Political Economy . . . For the Use of Schools (New York, 1838), 6–­7, which expressly drew on Kent’s and Story’s discussion of property. 134. John Quincy Adams, who spoke of Massachusetts, and John R. Cooke, who spoke of  Virginia, provide two examples. See John Quincy Adams, The Social Compact Exemplified in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts . . . (Providence, RI, 1842); and John R. Cooke, speech in the proceedings of the Virginia convention, in Peterson, Democracy, Liberty, and Property, 260–­62. 135. Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-­Government, 207.

Chapter 4 1. “John Locke, Author of ‘An Essay on the Understanding,’” Colman’s Rural World and Valley Farmer (St. Louis, Mo.), December 1, 1865, AAS. 2. For Charles Darwin’s significant influence on American intellectual life at the time, see Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism, xii–­26, and Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America. 3. For an overview of transformations of the “self ” in nineteenth-­century America, see especially Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy, and Howe, Making the American Self. For the result of these same transformations of the “social self,” see Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution. 4. Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism, xii. As Cotkin argues, this generation of intellectuals did not wholeheartedly embrace modernity. Rather, they worked to forge a “middle ground between what they perceived to be the comforting but weakening assumptions of  Victorianism and the exciting but frightening implications of modernity” (xi).



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5. Other important figures included the British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 50. 6. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography was published regularly across the nineteenth century, and details of  his life appeared regularly in newspapers and periodicals. It bears mention that—­as is the case with Franklin’s modern-­day biographers—­they noted Franklin’s debt to Locke’s Essay. See, for example, Edward Everett, “The Boyhood and Youth of Franklin” (November 17, 1829), in Everett, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, 2:21. 7. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams Jr., in The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al., 1:350. 8. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–­2000, 100. For university restructuring in the postbellum United States, see especially Veysey, The Emergence of the American University, and Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 316–­53. 9. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 46. On the “reinvigoration of empiricism” during this period in particular, see also Joel Isaac, “Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History,” 205. 10. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 2 vols. (New York, 1876). 11. According to Locke’s twentieth-­century biographer Maurice Cranston, Bourne’s main fault was that he simply did not have access to the enormous Lovelace collection of papers made available to researchers only in the 1940s. Cranston, John Locke, x. 12. Bourne, The Life of John Locke, 1: vii–­ix. 13. Morley was teaching at University College London, where Bourne attended his lectures on English literature. At the time, Bourne was a student at London University. See H. C. Swaisland, “Bourne, Henry Richard Fox (1837–­1909), writer and campaigner for the rights of indigenous peoples,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 23, 2004). 14. “Literary Notices,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, CT), December 14, 1876. 15. “Literary Notices,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, CT), December 14, 1876. 16. “The Life of John Locke by H. R. Fox Bourne,” 138. 17. In classes on the history of British philosophy at Columbia University in New York, for example, Bourne’s work remained an integral component of classes that covered Locke and the history of philosophy well into the twentieth century. See, e.g., “Columbia University, New York, Department of Philosophy and Education, Philosophy IV, 1898–­99, British Philosophy from Locke to Herbert Spencer . . . Outline of Topics and References,” Historical Subject Files (UA#002), series I: Academics and Research, box 50, folder 17, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries; and The History of Philosophy: Bibliographies and Questions, Philosophy 61-­61, 161-­162 (New York: Columbia, 1920), 31, Historical Subject Files (UA #002), series I: Academics and Research, box 44, folder 10, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries. 18. Aldrich, “Report of the Council,” 28. This was the case despite, as Aldrich explained, eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century Americans’ familiarity with his other works on religion and government. Moreover, as Aldrich observed, Locke’s status as important metaphysician in college philosophy did not encompass the entirety of his American influence. On Aldrich, see Reno, Memoirs of the Judiciary and The Bar of New England for the Nineteenth Century, 3:476–­77.

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19. Aldrich, “Report of the Council,” 22–­23. Here Aldrich is drawing on Dugald Stewart’s assessment of Locke. 20. Preface to “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 21. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 102–­3, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 22. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 103, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. As was common practice at the time, these notes were reused and reprinted over multiple academic years. 23. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 103, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 24. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 108, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 25. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 103, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 26. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 108–­9, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 27. “Philosophy Notes,” September 1882, 109, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 19, folder “Philosophy 1882,” PUA. 28. As we will see below, courses at Harvard, taught by Francis Bowen, were an exception. 29. Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Kentucky University for the Academical Year 1865–­1866, 1:24. 30. “Metaphysics of Junior and Senior Year,” Published by Class of ’66 (Princeton, 1865), 17, Syllabi and Course Materials Collection (AC333), box 18, folder “Logic, 1865,” PUA. For Wayland’s discussion of Locke, see Francis Wayland, The Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (1854; New York, 1865), esp. 130–­36. 31. In his effort to uncover clearly and systematically “the difficult problems of Psychology” in his Mental Philosophy, Haven, for example, discussed Locke’s various faults and inconsistencies at length. Haven, Mental Philosophy: Including the Intellect, Sensibilities, and Will (Boston, 1860). Alexander’s Outlines of Moral Science presented a more focused critique of Locke’s “zeal to disprove the existence of innate truths.” Archibald Alexander, Outlines of Moral Science (New York, 1868), 37. 32. For Hamilton in philosophy courses at UVA and the College of  William and Mary, see, e.g., Catalogue of the University of  Virginia, Session of 1865–­’66 (Richmond, VA, 1866), 27–­28, and The History of the College of William and Mary, from its foundation, 1693, to 1870 (Baltimore, 1870), 150. 33. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 50. 34. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 66. 35. McCosh, Philosophical Papers: I. Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Logic II. Reply to Mr. Mill’s Third Edition III. Present State of Moral Philosophy in Britain (New York, 1869), 484. 36. Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 119. 37. For a discussion of McCosh and Hodge’s debate in the context of Darwinism in the United States more generally, see Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism, 1–­26.



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38. McCosh, Notes on Psychology from Lectures Given by James McCosh (Princeton, 1880), 124. 39. McCosh, Notes on Psychology from Lectures Given by James McCosh, 126. 40. McCosh, Notes on Psychology from Lectures Given by James McCosh, 56, 70. 41. McCosh, Notes on Psychology from Lectures Given by James McCosh, 56. 42. Atwater, Notes on Metaphysics from Lectures Given by Lyman H. Atwater (Princeton, 1880), 28, 37–­38. Like many of Locke’s critics, Atwater was concerned not so much about Locke’s ideas as about where later thinkers, like Hume, had taken them: namely, toward nihilistic skepticism. 43. For an overview of current interpretations of Locke’s understanding of morality, see Catherine Wilson, “The Moral Epistemology of Locke’s Essay,” in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” ed. Newman, 381–­405. 44. McCosh, Notes on Psychology from Lectures Given by James McCosh, 100. 45. For example, for the philosopher John Dewey’s full immersion in German Idealism (specifically Hegelian critiques of Kant) when graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1884, see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 43. 46. Ormond, Notes on Prof. Ormond’s Metaphysics Lectures by J. P. King ’92 (Prince­ ton, [1892]), 2. On Ormond, see Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, 361–­62. 47. Ormond, Notes on Prof. Ormond’s Metaphysics Lectures by J.P. King ’92, 2–­3. 48. For Francis Bowen’s interest in Locke’s moral philosophy and psychology through a Scottish moralist lens and his gradual warming toward Immanuel Kant, see Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 14, 37–­40, and Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers, 131–­41. 49. HUC (Cambridge, MA, 1866–­67), 102. Bowen’s course was titled “John Locke and the Philosophy of the Seventeenth Century.” 50. See HUC (1866–­67), 102; HUC (1871–­72), 59; HUC (1872–­73), 69; HUC (1874–­75), 219. 51. See HUC (1879–­80), 84; HUC (1880–­81), 82; HUC (1882–­83), 89; HUC (1883–­84), 88; HUC (1885–­86), 95. 52. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 109. 53. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 113. 54. Philosopher George Santayana pointed out the “spiritual kinship” between James and Locke. Santayana, Some Turns of  Thought in Modern Philosophy, 25. On Pragmatism and William James, in particular, see esp. Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, chap. 9. See also Hollinger, “William James and the Culture of Inquiry” and “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History,” in In the American Province, 3–­22, 23–­43; Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism”; and Westbrook, Democratic Hope. 55. The literature on the history and rise of the social sciences in the nineteenth-­ century United States is large. See esp. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science; Gunnell, “American Political Science, Liberalism, and the Invention of Political Theory”; Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory; Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity; and Gunnell, “The Archaeology of American Liberalism.” 56. American Social Science Association, “Introductory Note,” Journal of Social Science 1 ( June 1869): 3.

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57. American Social Science Association, “Introductory Note,” 1; Strong, “The Study of Social Science,” Journal of Social Science 4 (1871): 2. 58. Strong, “The Study of Social Science,” 2. 59. For a discussion of the late-­eighteenth-­and early-­nineteenth-­century origins of Americans’ concerns about Locke’s involvement in the creation of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and for an overview of current debates about the nature of his role, see chapter 3. 60. Strong, “The Study of Social Science,” 4. 61. “Census of 1870,” Journal of Social Science 1 ( June, 1869): 165. Garfield’s remarks to Congress were reprinted in the journal. “Census of 1870,” Journal of Social Science 1 ( June, 1869): 167. Garfield discussed the importance of the census in more detail in “The American Census,” Journal of Social Science 2, no. 1 (1870): 31–­55. 62. Garfield was confident about the importance of statistical knowledge: “The legislator without statistics is like the mariner at sea without a compass.” Garfield, “Census of 1870,” 168. For a broader discussion of the growing importance of statistics, see Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–­1900. For the rising certainty of many Gilded Age intellectuals about the relationship between natural and market forces for good governance, see White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 179, and Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 195. 63. Garfield, “Census of 1870,” 167. 64. See, for example, the specificity of Francis Newton Thorpe’s discussion of the Fundamental Constitutions in Thorpe, The Government of the People of the United States (Philadelphia, 1889), 45. 65. Bispham, “Law in America,” 176. 66. Morey, “The Genesis of a Written Constitution,” 547–­48. 67. Francis Lieber’s departure from South Carolina in 1857, discussed below, was significant. 68. Lieber, who arrived at Columbia in 1857, was appointed the first professor of political science in the country as chair of history and political science. In 1865, the administration eliminated the chair and Lieber assumed the chair of constitutional history and public law. Adcock, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science, chap. 3. 69. Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-­Government, 207. 70. Francis Lieber, Notes for a lecture, Constitution (English), n.p., Francis Lieber Papers, LI 163, HL. 71. See, for example, one student’s emphasis on Lieber’s claims that “our Constitution does by no means pretend to proceed upon a general, philosophical plan” and “that it is one of the best features in the history of the U.S. that our forefathers did not proceed upon a philosophical plan, and make a Constitution in the closet according to abstractions.” Francis Lieber, Introductory Lecture on the Constitution of England, lecture notes transcribed by H. H. Bond from Columbia College (NY), Francis Lieber Papers, LI 164, HL. 72. Francis Lieber, “Notes, whilst I read Locke on Government” (dated on the folder c. 1830, but no date on the manuscript), box 18, LI 471, Francis Lieber Papers, HL. 73. See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 39. 74. Lieber wrote extensively about “Anglican liberty” throughout his career. For a focused discussion, see Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-­Government, chap. 5.



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75. Francis Lieber, Lectures on Political Philosophy, Phonographically reported by H. H. Bond, 73, Francis Lieber Papers, LI 69, HL. In contrast to those of Hobbes, Lieber allowed that Locke’s theories were directed toward furthering—­rather than restricting—­freedom and liberty. 76. Francis Lieber, Lectures on Political Philosophy, Phonographically reported by H. H. Bond, 73–74, Francis Lieber Papers, LI 69, HL. 77. Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics. 78. Woolsey, Political Science; or, The State Theoretically and Practically Considered, 1:25, 27. For Hallam’s assessments of Locke’s inadequacies, see Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, 1:221–­22. 79. Woolsey, Political Science; or, The State Theoretically and Practically Considered, 1:167. Woolsey based this work largely on his Yale lectures from 1846–­71. 80. See Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-­Century America”; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 64–­77; and Adcock, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science, 105–­6. 81. After studying the historical-­political sciences at German universities under the supervision of scholars like Swiss-­German Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, freshly minted PhDs returned to American universities ready to embrace a historicist approach whole hog. For example, John W. Burgess, who had studied at Germany’s leading universities, following the path paved by Lieber more than two decades earlier, founded and began directing a school of political science, with a deep emphasis on the importance of historical training, at Columbia in 1880. 82. John A. Jameson, “Speculation in Politics,” 276. 83. Maine, Ancient Law, 110. 84. Lowell, Essays on Government, 7. 85. Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered With Some Reference To Its Origins, 188. 86. Elisha Mulford, The Nation, 88.

Chapter 5 1. In 1931, the Harvard philosopher Benjamin Rand edited and published a draft of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671). Locke, An Essay Concerning the Understanding, Knowledge, Opinion, and Assent, ed. Rand. 2. Dunning, History of Political Theories, 368. Dunning’s History of Political Theories: From Luther to Montesquieu was the text Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course used to teach Locke’s political theory, beginning in 1919. See Introduction to Contemporary Civilization: A Syllabus, 38. 3. “Review of Of Civil Government: Two Treatises. By John Locke,” 248. 4. On Locke becoming liberal in the twentieth century, see Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?”; Gunnell, “The Archaeology of American Liberalism”; and Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity, esp. 230. 5. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philosopher, 1783–­1861.” 6. Curti devoted about four pages to education, fewer than three to religion, about fifteen to politics and economics, and approximately twenty-­three to epistemology. 7. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 135.

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8. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 151. In the last section of his analysis, Curti singled out Walton H. Hamilton’s discussion of the “continuing stream of thought” linking Locke’s chapter on property with the Progressive Era Supreme Court. See Walton H. Hamilton, “Property. According to Locke,” 864. For further discussion of Curti, Hamilton, and this argument, see below. 9. “Price Greenleaf Awards Made: Fifty-­Four Freshmen Received Benefits from Endowment Fund,” Harvard Crimson, November 1, 1916. 10. Pettegrew, “The Present-­Minded Professor.” Curti, “Harvard College Transcript,” Harvard College Student Records, UAIII 15.75.12, 1920–­1927, box 5, HUA. 11. One student’s notes for this class from the academic year 1923–­24 makes brief mention of Locke’s political philosophy. Lester Snow King, “Notes for Philosophy A, 1923–­24,” Student papers, 1923–­1928, HUC 8923.300.45, box 2, folder 1, HUA. 12. Edward Channing had long taught Locke at Harvard, in ways that reflect the philosopher’s place in the historical political sciences discussed in chapter 4. See, e.g., HUC (1895–­96), 99. 13. Morison, Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government 1690. 14. William Seal Carpenter, introduction to John Locke, Of Civil Government Two Treatises (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924), v. 15. Merle Curti, “The Influence of the West on Emerson and Whitman,” Curti Papers (Mss24), box 48, folder 8, SHSW. 16. James Thorpe, “The Founder and His Library,” 304. 17. Billington, “The Genesis of the Research Institution,” 370. 18. Merle Curti to Max Farrand, May 17, 1935, Curti “Research Report Correspondence,” 13.1.2.1, folder 1934–­1937, The Huntington Institutional Archives, HL. Curti had wanted his dissertation to be on this topic, but once Turner left Harvard and Curti began working with Arthur Schlesinger Sr., he changed projects, instead focusing on nineteenth-­century peace movements, saving his projects about American “self-­consciousness” for later. Note, too, Curti’s dedication of The Growth of American Thought “To the Memory of Frederick Jackson Turner.” 19. Max Farrand to Frederick Jackson Turner, March 22, 1927, Frederick Jackson Turner Papers, Correspondence, box 36, folder 19, HL. 20. Curti ended the acknowledgments section in The Growth of American Thought by thanking Max Farrand for his time at the Huntington (xx). Farrand worked closely with Professor Frank J. Klingberg to offer Curti a joint position as a continued researcher at the Huntington alongside an enviably light teaching position at UCLA. Although Curti turned the offer of this California package down in favor of a position at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York, it was not for a lack of deep appreciation for the Huntington. See [Max Farrand] to Frank J. Klingberg, January 20, 1937, and Merle Curti to Max Farrand, January 29, 1937, Merle Curti “Research Report Correspondence,” 13.1.2.1, folder 1934–­1937, Huntington Institutional Archives, HL. 21. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 109n1. 22. Josh Barbanel, “Dr. Marjorie Nicolson Dies at 87; Smith College Dean for 11 Years,” New York Times, March 10, 1981. 23. Marjorie Nicolson to Merle Curti, Sunday, day and year unknown [1937?], Curti Papers (Mss24), box 28, folder 6, SHSW.



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24. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 135. 25. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 136. 26. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 139. 27. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 135. 28. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 139. 29. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 150, 151. 30. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 140, 151. 31. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 149–­50. 32. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 150. 33. This is the only place in his discussion of Locke’s thought where Curti explicitly brings his discussion into the present and references the “continuing stream of thought” linking past to present, on which see more below (151). 34. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” 150. 35. Curti did not, as far as I can tell, label himself a Marxist, although there is evidence that others saw it fitting to apply the label to Curti. See, for example, Fulmer Mood to Merle Curti, May 4, 1934, Curti Papers (Mss24), box 27, folder 4, SHSW. And for Yale historian Ralph Henry Gabriel’s assessment in 1942 that Curti was “even more a Marx[ist] than [Charles] Beard,” see Rollin G. Osterweis, Notes on a class with Professor Ralph Gabriel, February 1942, Yale Course Lectures Collection (RU 159), accession 19ND-­A, box 91, folder 397b, University Archives, Yale University Library. 36. Avery Craven, for his part, took Curti’s political leanings and his desire for a third party option seriously—­so much so, in fact, that when he learned of the possibility of Curti’s being in residence at the Huntington, Craven warned Curti that the intellectual environment at the library was not “as progressive” as Curti might want. “The board of trustees,” Craven elaborated, “is quite inclined to Hoover conservatism and sharply resentful of anyone at the library having lea[n]ings other than these.” Avery Craven to Merle Curti, June 28, 1935, Curti Papers (Mss24), box 10, folder 18, SHSW. 37. Merle Curti to Avery Craven, June 25, 1935, Curti Papers (Mss24), box 10, folder 18, SHSW. 38. For works that cited Merriam and relied heavily on his account, see, e.g., Gettell, History of American Political Thought; Larkin, Property in the Eighteenth Century With Special Reference to England and Locke; and Francis G. Wilson, The American Political Mind. 39. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, vii. 40. Dunning, Essays on Civil War and Reconstruction, 365. 41. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 343, 336. 42. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 21, 55, 90, 92. Charles Beard gave as good a definition as any of Teutonic history when he explained that its practitioners in the nineteenth century understood it in the following terms: “The Teutonic peoples were originally endowed with singular political talents and aptitudes; Teutonic tribes invaded England and destroyed the last vestiges of the older Roman and British culture; they then set an example to the world in the development of ‘free’ government. Descendants of this specially gifted race settled America and fashioned their institutions after old English models. The full fruition of their political genius was reached in the creation of the Federal Constitution.” Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 3.

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43. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 94, 55, 94. 44. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 170–­71. 45. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1922), 79, 72. 46. In an earlier work, Becker had also made clear his views that eighteenth-­century American Revolutionaries “needed no instruction in the significance of the ‘glorious revolution’” because they had read and knew “the political gospel of John Locke,” which, as he explained it, had provided “the high justification” of 1688. Becker, The Eve of the Revolution: A Chronicle of the Breach with England, 59. The classic statement of Locke as an apologist for 1688 was Sir Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics (New York, 1890), 65. Indeed, at this time, Locke’s work was still understood as having been written in response to 1688, not events of the late 1670s and early 1680s, as we now know. 47. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1922), 27. 48. On the Revolution of 1688 and subsequent interpretations of it, see esp. Pincus, 1688. 49. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, 92; Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States, 49. On Rousseau, see also, e.g., Friedenwald, The Declaration of Independence, 198. On Montesquieu, see, e.g., Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 59; Beck, The Constitution of the United States, 232; and Sol Bloom, The Story of the Constitution, 170. 50. On the origins of the American Political Science Association, see Adcock, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science, 269–­75. 51. Willoughby, “The Individual and the State,” 10, 11. For an earlier discussion of what constituted the police power of the state, see Walter Wheeler Cook, “What Is the Police Power?” 52. Willoughby, “The Individual and the State,” 2–­3. 53. Willoughby, “The Individual and the State,” 8. 54. Of course, associations between Locke, his political thought, and private property were not new, but over the course of the nineteenth century, specific attention to Locke’s arguments about property had been largely critical. For further discussion, see chapters 3 and 4. 55. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, 118. When it was published in the United States by Harper & Brothers, The Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation was retitled The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization, in a marketing ploy for American readers. See also Thomas I. Cook, History of Political Philosophy, 517. He titled a chapter “Locke’s Life and the Triumph of the Middle Class.” 56. See Tully, “The Framework of Natural Rights in Locke’s Analysis of Property,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy, 96–­97. Tully cites C. H. Driver, “John Locke,” in The Social and Political Ideas of Some English Thinkers of the Augustan Age, 1650–­1750, ed. Hearnshaw, as the last example of a socialist interpretation of Locke he was able to find. I believe he is correct, although this does not mean attention to the matter disappeared immediately. E.g., Charles Sherman in his edition of John Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration in 1937 (on which see below) included a lengthy acknowledgment of Locke’s former socialist interpreters. 57. Gooch, The History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 358.



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58. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics, 40–­41. Beard also identified Locke as providing English, rather than French, origins for Jefferson’s “gospel of the Declaration of Independence” (69). 59. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics, 41. 60. The Economic Basis of Politics was reprinted in 1923 and 1924; a second edition was released in 1934, and demand was so high that it was immediately reprinted again that year and in 1935 (in Great Britain). See Clyde W. Barrow, introduction to Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics, 4–­5. 61. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 1:240. 62. Also noteworthy is their discussion of Locke’s involvement in the failed Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. At a time when Locke and Carolina had generally moved to the footnotes of textbooks and accounts of early American history, the Beards explained that Locke created “one of the most fantastic documents now to be found in the moldering archives of disillusionment. . . . it could no more be realized in Carolina than the moon. Its interest to-­day lies in the fact that it reveals the type of society which the Whigs, the most liberal of the governing classes in England, would have established in America if they had not been defeated by the irrepressible and stubborn realities of life on the frontier.” Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 66. 63. Gettell, History of American Political Thought, 82, 140. Gettell referenced both An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and The Rise of American Civilization (117, 140). 64. Parrington, The Colonial Mind, vol. 1 of Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 269. E. H. Eby, preface to Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, vol. 3 of  Main Currents in American Thought, x. According to Parrington, “it is a liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of favors than any known past.” 65. For Parrington’s own assessment of his growing radicalism, see H. Lark Hall, V. L. Parrington, 203. 66. Parrington, The Colonial Mind, 270. 67. Parrington, The Colonial Mind, 272–­73. 68. Parrington, The Colonial Mind, 271. 69. Parrington, The Colonial Mind, 344. 70. For the general absence of connections between Locke and liberalism at this time, see Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 73–­81, 84. In 1919, Harold Stearns, Liberalism in America, did not discuss Locke, even though he had an entire chapter titled “The English Heritage and the American Development.” For Sterling Lamprecht, The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Locke (1918), thinking about Locke as “liberal” did not lead to thinking about an ideology of “liberalism.” 71. Larkin, Property in the Eighteenth Century With Special Reference to England and Locke, 171. Indeed, one criticism of Larkin’s discussion of Locke’s influence on American life was he relied too heavily on secondary sources. See Hamilton, “Property. According to Locke,” 875. 72. Larkin, Property in the Eighteenth Century With Special Reference to England and Locke, 238.

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73. Fourteenth Amendment, section 1. The Fourteenth Amendment extended the application of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the states. For discussion, see Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, esp. 279–­84. Historians generally summarize decisions of the Progressive Era Court in terms of laissez-­faire conservatism. See, e.g., Lepore, These Truths, 377–­78. In Allgeyer v. Louisiana the Court defined liberty of contract as “the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned.” Allgeyer v. Louisiana 165 US 578 (1897). Across the early decades of the twentieth century, the Court’s interpretations and applications of liberty of contract were expansive. Among the most important of its decisions along these lines was the 1905 case Lochner v. New York. In a 5–­4 decision, the Court ruled that a New York law limiting the number of hours bakery employees could work violated an individual’s liberty of contract. In so doing, it set a precedent for decades of legal decisions. It was not until 1937, in its landmark decision in West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, that the Court signaled a narrowing of its interpretation of liberty of contract, deeming a state’s minimum wage regulations constitutional. 74. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 US 525 (1923). 75. Hamilton, “Property. According to Locke,” 864. 76. Hamilton, “Property. According to Locke,” 880. In Adkins, the dissent had argued that, in certain cases, Congress should exert its policing power. 77. Thomas I. Cook, History of Political Philosophy from Plato to Burke, 544, 546. Cook saw that it was “in America that Locke’s doctrines had the most obvious, and perhaps the most lasting, influence” (545). 78. Reading list for Philosophy 20, HUC 8570.3.1, box 1, folder “Syllabi, course outlines and reading lists in Philosophy, 1940–­41,” HUA. 79. Osterweis, Notes on a class with Professor Ralph Gabriel, February 1942, University Archives, Yale University Library. 80. Curti, Probing Our Past, 69–­118. For evidence of the extent to which Curti’s work continued to have influence long after its publication, see, e.g., Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 352–­53; Dienstag, “Serving God and Mammon”; and Dunn, “Measuring Locke’s Shadow,” 260. 81. Harold Laski to Merle Curti, July 7, 1937, Curti Papers (Mss 24), box 23, folder 24, SHSW. 82. Curtis Nettels to Merle Curti, May 28, 1939, Curti Papers (Mss 24), box 27, folder 24, SHSW. 83. As late as 1937, Charles Sherman could still tell his readers that he felt comfortable with minimal discussion of “the writings for which Locke is best known to the present generation,” in favor of focusing only on two of Locke’s works that were less well known. Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Sherman, ix. 84. See, for example, William Seal Carpenter, review of The Lasting Elements of Individualism, by William Ernest Hocking. 85. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (1937), 540. For a discussion of Sabine’s not labeling Locke a liberal or using liberalism to discuss Locke’s political thought, see Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” 85.



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86. Locke, Of Civil Government Two Treatises, ed. Carpenter, xvii. Thomas I. Cook, History of Political Philosophy, 544. 87. Carpenter, review of The Lasting Elements of Individualism, 961. 88. Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Sherman, xiii. A year earlier, Harold Laski had observed that Locke’s “theories defined the essential outlines of Liberal doctrine for nearly two centuries.” Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, 104–­5. 89. Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Sherman, xv. 90. Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Sherman, xv.

Chapter 6 1. “Are You Educated?,” Life Magazine, October 16, 1950, 23. 2. “The Active Mind and the Wider Vision,” Inaugural Address by Robert F. Goheen, Princeton University, September 1957, in Weaver, Builders of American Universities, 3:19. 3. “Are You Educated?,” 34, 28. 4. Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke,” and Hamilton, “Property. According to Locke.” 5. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 61–­65. 6. On the place of the “Founding Fathers” in twentieth-­century American intellectual life, see Sehat, The Jefferson Rule. 7. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 427. 8. 85 Cong. Rec. 1151 (1939) (remarks of Rep. William Irving Sirovich). 9. 85 Cong. Rec. 1146–­49 (1939) (remarks of Rep. William Irving Sirovich). 10. 85 Cong. Rec. 1148 (1939) (remarks of Rep. William Irving Sirovich). 11. 85 Cong. Rec. 1146 (1939) (remarks of Rep. William Irving Sirovich). 12. 87 Cong. Rec. 1724 (1941). The quote is from an editorial in the Bismarck Tribune against the Lend-­Lease Bill, then being debated in the Senate. Langer asked that it be included in the Record. 13. Editorial, “The American Task: It is to See that Free Men, Strong in their Freedom, ‘Shall Not Perish from the Earth,’” Life, January 2, 1950, 28. 14. Dumbauld, The Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today. 15. When Becker prefaced a reprint of The Declaration of Independence for a 1942 Knopf edition, he situated his discussion in terms of his—­and Alfred Knopf ’s—­ conviction that “just now, when political freedom, already lost in many countries, is everywhere threatened, the readers of books would be more than ordinarily interested in the political principles of the Declaration of Independence.” Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1942), xviii. 16. John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” review of John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, New York Times, August 7, 1943. 17. John Chamberlain, “An Anthropologist Tests the Pulse of America,” review of Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character, New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1948. 18. John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” review of James Truslow Adams, The American, New York Times, September 21, 1943.

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19. Just weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombing, Chamberlain held Locke up as the true forebear of democracy, in response to criticism some liberals on the left leveled at Locke’s theory of private property rights. In a review of Irwin Edman’s Fountainheads of Freedom, which attempted to trace the origins and “growth of the Democratic Idea” from biblical times, Chamberlain concluded that apologizing, as Edman had done, for Locke’s emphasis on property in his “democratic triad” of life, liberty, and property was unproductive. John Chamberlain, “The Growth of the Democratic Idea through the Ages: Irwin Edman’s Fine Anthology Traces It Down from the Days of the Prophet Samuel,” New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1941. 20. Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” review of Adams, The American. 21. John Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” review of Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, New York Times, April 25, 1944. 22. This was part of a larger spread: “18th Century England: In an Era of Elegance and Empire, Britain Established Traditions of Political Freedom which She Handed on to the Colonies She Lost,” Life, September 13, 1948, 119. 23. “Western Faith: At Last a Good Basic Book to Fling at the Communists,” Life, March 21, 1949, 36. The pretext of the editorial is its review of Paul McGuire’s There’s Freedom for the Brave: An Approach to World Order (New York: W. Morrow, 1949), which the editors suggest Americans might “fling in the faces of the Communists.” 24. Sabine, preface to the second edition of A History of Political Theory, new ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 1950), ix. 25. Final paper assignment ( January 30, 1948), Politics 503, Fall Term 1947, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students: 1930–­1964, box 14, folder “Graduate Syllabus,” PUA. 26. My use of ideology—­in the sense of a shared package of commitments, beliefs, and basic understandings that seem incontestable and obvious—­matches that of Belletto, “Inventing Other Realities,” 86–­87n3. It is different, for example, from “ideology” as defined and used by Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, jacket cover. 27. Among the earliest was Yale professor of political science Francis W. Coker, who titled his introduction to Democracy, Liberty, and Property “Origins of the American Political Tradition.” 28. Francis G. Wilson, The American Political Mind, preface. 29. Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, xxxix. 30. For Hofstadter’s thoughts about American political culture as involving more than politics per se, see Christopher Lasch, foreword to Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, xiv. 31. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 165. As he had articulated it the year before for the New York Times, “The problem of United States policy is to make sure that the Center does hold; and this can be done only by supporting it against all blandishments and all threats, from whatever direction they may come.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center: The Hope of the Future Lies in the Widening and Deepening of the Democratic Middle Ground,” New York Times, April 4, 1948. 32. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., lecture, “The Liberal Tradition in America” [c. 1946?], box 323, folder 1, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.



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33. Orton, The Liberal Tradition, 1, 108, 113. 34. Wilson, The American Political Mind, 62, 84. On the “American way,” see Wall, Inventing the American Way. 35. Under the umbrella of totalitarianism, many Americans deliberately connected and drew parallels between fascism and communism. See Adler and Paterson, “Red Fascism.” 36. Crick, The American Science of Politics, 11. 37. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 1. 38. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 8. For an assessment of Boorstin’s arguments, see Diggins, “The Perils of Naturalism.” 39. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Peardon, vii. 40. Chafe, The Rise and Fall of the American Century, 142. 41. “Estimates of Illiteracy, by States: 1960,” 1–­2. 42. Grayson Kirk, “Inaugural Address,” Columbia University, January 20, 1953, in Weaver, Builders of American Universities, 3:24. 43. For a general overview of these programs, especially in the interwar years, see Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 423–­538. For an early assessment of Harvard’s program for a “General Education in a Free Society,” see Charles W. Bevard Jr., “General Education: The Forgotten Goals: Program Altered Much after 1945 Debut,” Harvard Crimson, March 4, 1964. See below for an extended discussion of Mortimer J. Adler, Robert M. Hutchins, and the Great Books initiative. 44. “The crisis in liberal education” was, for example, how St. John’s College characterized the situation in its course catalogue. St. John’s College, Official Statement of the St. John’s Program: Catalogue for 1940–­1941 (Annapolis, MD, 1941), 17, St. John’s College Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/174. 45. Robert Maynard Hutchins, preface to A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education, ed. Adler and Wolff, 1: v. 46. Scott Buchanan, “The New Program at St. John’s College in Annapolis,” Supplement to the Bulletin (Annapolis, MD, 1937), 8, St. John’s College Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/257. 47. St. John’s College, St. John’s College in Annapolis: Official Statement of the St. John’s Program, Catalogue for 1940–­1941 (Annapolis, MD, 1941), 43, St. John’s College Digital Archives http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/174. 48. St. John’s College, The St. John’s List (Annapolis, MD, 1983), 15, St. John’s College Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6535. 49. Blair Clark, “U. Chicago Educator Urges Saner Reading of Great Books,” Harvard Crimson, March 20, 1940. 50. At Columbia, Adler had known professor of English and Great Books apostle John Erskine. In addition to his efforts starting the General Honors Course in 1920, Erskine was famous for Erskine, The Delight of Great Books. 51. When Hutchins prefaced A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education in 1959, he noted that Great Books discussion groups “have provided inspiration to hundreds of thousands of participants.” Hutchins, preface to A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education, ed. Adler and Wolff, 1: vii. 52. “1,000 to Launch Great Books Study Program Next Week,” St. Louis Star-­Times, January 13, 1948.

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53. Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, vols. 2–­3, ed. Adler. For cross-­ referencing counts, see Mortimer J. Adler, “The Adjective ‘Great,’” published online through the Center for the Study of Great Ideas, https://www.thegreatideas.org/old /greatideas1.html. 54. Great Books of the Western World, vol. 35, ed. Adler. 55. Hutchins, preface to A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education, ed. Adler and Wolff, 1: v–­vi. 56. Selections from Locke’s Essay appeared in the more specialized volumes, including no. 9, “Biology, Psychology, and Medicine,” and no. 10, “Philosophy.” 57. A General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education, ed. Adler and Wolff, 1:123–­24. 58. This was Contemporary Civilization in the West A: the first part of the course. Alongside it, professor of English John Erskine began a readings course in General Honors at Columbia in 1920, which later became a two-­part Humanities (LitHum) core course sequence, beginning in 1937. While Locke’s Essay appeared on Erskine’s list of readings for General Honors in the 1920s (with Locke’s other writings listed only as “recommended”), Locke was not part of the Humanities A (LitHum) curriculum, the offspring of the General Honors course. 59. Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (1946), 1:784–­85. 60. To be sure, there was only an additional page of text added, bringing Locke’s coverage from 43 to 44 pages, but the additions are illuminating. Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, 2nd ed. (1954), 1:940–­84. 61. “List of authors and works unanimously agreed upon as of unquestionable merit” (early 1944), quoted in Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture, 236–­37. 62. Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, 3rd ed. (1960), 1:1010–­ 53, 1057–­69. The third edition was printed in a red binding, giving the source book its famous moniker, the “Red Book.” 63. The Department of Politics became a separate entity in 1924. See Leitch, A Princeton Companion, 370. 64. Syllabus for Politics 303: “American Political Thought” with Professor Mason, Fall Term 1947–­48, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 14, folder “Politics 303,” PUA. 65. Syllabus for Politics 101: “American Government,” Fall Term 1946, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 14, folder “Politics 101,” PUA. 66. Second Day—­Senior Comprehensive Examination, January 17, 1947, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 14, folder “Senior Comprehensive Examination,” PUA. 67. For two examples of many, see Professor William Ebenstein’s 1949–­50 fall-­term “Modern Political Theory” course, in which students studied “John Locke’s approach to the problem of property.” Syllabus for Politics 301: “Modern Political Theory,” with Professor Ebenstein, Fall Term 1949–­50, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 15, folder “Pol. 301,” PUA. And Professor William Seal Carpenter included only one question on the thinker for his final exam for a course on the history of political theories in the spring term of 1952: “What is Locke’s



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theory of property?,” Final Examination for Politics 302: “History of Political Theories,” with Professor Carpenter, Spring Term 1952, Department of Politics (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 16, folder “Pol. 302,” PUA. 68. Syllabus for Politics 301: “Modern Political Theory,” with Professor Ebenstein, Fall Term 1949–­50, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 15, folder “Pol. 301,” PUA. 69. Midterm Examination (November 5, 1951) for Politics 301: “Modern Political Theory,” with Professor Ebenstein, Fall Term 1951–­52, Department of Politics Records (AC166), Series 2: Courses and Students 1930–­1964, box 16, folder “Pol. 301,” PUA. 70. E.g., Humanities 5, “Suggested Term Paper Topics,” Spring Term 1955–­1956, HUC 8540.3.1, box 1, folder “Syllabi, course outlines, and reading lists in Humanities, 1955–­1956,” HUA. 71. See Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 252, for the failure of the prediction. 72. “A List of 250 Outstanding Books of the Year,” New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1955. 73. David Margolick, “Louis Hartz of Harvard dies; Ex-­Professor of Government,” New York Times, January 24, 1986. For two accounts of Hartz’s legacy, see Rodgers Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz,” and Abbott, “Still Louis Hartz after All These Years.” 74. James T. Kloppenberg has eloquently shown that in using “Locke” to contrast America’s liberal tradition with Europe’s feudal one, Hartz did not, in fact, mean “Locke” literally, but rather was invoking the spirit of ideals associated with the philosopher. See Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect.” 75. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 140. 76. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 4–­5. 77. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity, 228–­29. 78. Hofstadter, “Without Feudalism: Review of Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution,” New York Times Book Review, February 27, 1955. For another early assessment of Hartz’s work, see Marvin Meyers, “Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.” 79. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., lecture, “Political Thought—­Locke” [c. 1959–­60?], box 362, folder 2, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 80. John Leo, “American Historians Shift Emphasis to Conflict,” New York Times, January 2, 1969. Note that while he saw the positive good that American liberalism could do (and had accomplished in the past), Hartz himself was largely critical of the so-­called liberal consensus approach to American history of the postwar era. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity, esp. 228–­29. For the extent to which the prevalence of the monolithic liberal consensus “school” in the postwar era has been exaggerated, see Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, esp. 188–­238. 81. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Conservatives for a Change,” New York Times Book Review, October 20, 1968. 82. Wolfgang von Leyden, “Notes concerning Papers of John Locke in the Lovelace Collection.” The Bodleian purchased the Lovelace Collection in 1947. Von Leyden

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himself was famous for deciphering Locke’s shorthand, which made reading his journals possible and greatly expanded the material available to Locke scholars. 83. His published stories included Maurice Cranston, Tomorrow We’ll Be Sober (London: John Westhouse, 1946), and Introduction to Switzerland (London: Chaterson, 1949). When he began work on the biography, Cranston also penned personal requests and took out multiple advertisements requesting additional information about the whereabouts of Locke’s papers in public and private collections. See, for example, advertisements in the Times Literary Supplement (April 2, 1949) and the Sunday Times (August 14, 1949). This advertisement, for example, received a reply from a genealogist in Dover, Kent, whose wife belonged to the Lock(e) family. See Maurice Cranston Papers, box 14, folder 7, HRC. 84. Maurice Cranston, “John Locke in Somerset” (c. 1950), Maurice Cranston Papers, box 14, folder 8, HRC. 85. Cranston’s claims centered on his discovery of a reply Locke wrote in 1661 to Edward Bagshawe’s The Great Question Concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship, in which Locke argued against Bagshawe’s radical calls for religious toleration, and on his recognition of the fact that H. R. Fox Bourne’s attribution of On the Roman Commonwealth to Locke was incorrect. See Cranston, “The Politics of Locke,” (c. 1952) in box 14, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. For a review that took issue with his characterization of Locke in 1660–­61 as “a man of the Right, an extreme authoritarian,” see Zagorin, review of John Locke: A Biography, by Maurice Cranston. Cranston, John Locke: A Biography, 67. Cranston’s biography was also published in London by Longmans, Green & Co. 86. C. P. Snow, review of John Locke: A Biography by Maurice Cranston, Weekend Review ( July 25, 1957), in box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 87. “On the Bat’s Back,” review of John Locke: A Biography by Maurice Cranston, Huddersfield Examiner, August 10, 1957, in box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 88. Others simply pointed out that American readers should find the biography particularly interesting. See for example Paul Jordan-­Smith, “Letters and Manuscripts Bare Many-­Sided John Locke,” review of John Locke: A Biography, by Maurice Cranston, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1957, box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 89. Max Freedman, “Locke Exposed as Mere Man,” review of  John Locke: A Biography, by Maurice Cranston, in the Washington Post (and Times Herald), August 14, 1957, box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 90. Sam Acheson, “Of Locke, Jefferson’s Mentor,” review of Cranston in the Dallas Mercury News, August 4, 1957, box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 91. “The Briton Who Inspired Americans to Rebellion,” review of Cranston, Standard Times (New Bedford, MA) August 1957, box 14, folder 11, Maurice Cranston Papers, HRC. 92. Cranston, “Locke and Liberty,” Wilson Quarterly 10, no. 5 (Winter 1986): 82. 93. 106 Cong. Rec. A1943–­44 (1960). 94. See, e.g., the discussion between Senators Paul Douglas of Illinois and William Proxmire of Wisconsin, 110 Cong. Rec. 22271 (1964), in which Douglas reminds his colleagues that while Locke “emphasized life, liberty, and property . . . Jefferson



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emphasized life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Note, too, that John F. Kennedy, the decade before, had brought into the Record remarks by Adlai E. Stevenson defining liberalism in which Stevenson used Locke and the founders to show how Jefferson and the drafters of the Constitution changed Locke’s property to happiness to indicate the importance of progressive, forward thinking for liberalism. See 102 Cong. Rec. A5203 (1956). 95. E.g., 111 Cong. Rec. 18357 (1965) (remarks by Senator Walter Mondale); 111 Cong. Rec. 19097 (1965) (remarks by Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff ). 96. 106 Cong. Rec. 4259 (1960) (remarks by Senator Hubert Humphrey). For a broader overview of the relationship between civil rights legislation and activism domestically and international and overseas ventures as part of the Cold War, see Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, esp. 10–­134. 97. 110 Cong. Rec. 8069 (1964) (remarks by Senator Olin D. Johnston). 98. 110 Cong. Rec. 8069, 8068 (1964) (remarks by Senator Olin D. Johnston). 99. 109 Cong. Rec. A4350 (1963). 100. 109 Cong. Rec. A4585–­86 (1963). 101. 110 Cong. Rec. 13187 (1964) (remarks by Senator Robert Byrd). 102. 110 Cong. Rec. 13174 (1964) (remarks by Senators Robert Byrd and Hubert Humphrey). 103. 110 Cong. Rec. 13173 (1964) (remarks by Senator Robert Byrd). 104. 110 Cong. Rec. 13175, 13178 (1964) (remarks by Senator Robert Byrd). 105. 115 Cong. Rec. 21435 (1969) (remarks by Representative Shirley Chisholm). 106. 115 Cong. Rec. 21435 (1969) (remarks by Representative Shirley Chisholm). 107. On the “Classics of American Democracy Program,” see 102 Cong. Rec. A488–­A495 (1956) and 107 Cong. Rec. 17798–­17803 (1961), quote at 17798. Note that Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration was also among the books proposed for the program in 1956.

Chapter 7 1. Leo Strauss to Willmoore Kendall, June 10, 1960, KSC, 219. 2. In the 1970s, British historian and journalist Godfrey Hodgson coined the phrase “liberal consensus” to describe the shared economic and political goals of the left and right in the United States during the 1950s. Hodgson, America in Our Time. At the same time that Kendall and Strauss were offering a critique of Locke’s role in American intellectual life and political culture, Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson was mounting an attack from the left on Locke’s bourgeois conception of property rights and his portrayal of individuals severed from social bonds, referred to as “possessive individualism.” Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. See also Macpherson, “The Social Bearing of Locke’s Political Theory.” 3. The authority on midcentury conservatism and its relationship to both anticommunism and liberalism remains George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, Since 1945. See also Burns, “Liberalism and the Conservative Imagination.” For Kendall’s own conservatism, see Nash, “The Place of  Willmoore Kendall in American Conservatism,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 3–­15. 4. Leo Strauss to Nellie Kendall, October 28, 1970, KSC, 258–­59.

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5. A good overview of postwar political science is Adcock and Bevir, “Political Science,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Backhouse and Fontaine , 71–­101. 6. Kendall, Conservative Affirmation, 99. See also John E. Alvis, “The Evolution of Willmoore Kendall’s Political Thought,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 79. 7. On Straussians and Straussianism, see Jaffa, Crisis of the Strauss Divided. 8. Nash, “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (I),” 127. On Kendall’s career, see Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 1–­2. 9. With no hope of a promotion at Yale and with Stanford off the table, Kendall left for the University of Texas, Dallas, where he settled into the final years of his career as chairman of the Department of Economics and Politics until his death in 1967. 10. See, e.g., Yale News Course Critique Pamphlet, April 1948, Willmoore Kendall Papers, box 29, HIA. 11. During a decade of animosity between Kendall and the university, with his department set against his promotion, Kendall largely taught elsewhere. Kendall himself noted that he had been in the classroom only five years between 1941 and 1957. Kendall to Strauss, January 9, 1957, KSC, 198. 12. For the “buttered rum” incident early in his time at Stanford, see Kendall to Strauss, February 18, 1959, KSC, 204. 13. Kendall, Willmoore Kendall: Contra Mundum. 14. Nash, “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (II),” 243. 15. Kendall thought that Kirk, as a “self-­styled Burkean,” was overly committed to the eighteenth-­century Edmund Burke rather than to the framers of the US Constitution, which meant that Kirk did not properly understand the importance of The Fed­ eralist and specifically American politics and an American political tradition. See Nash, “The Place of  Willmoore Kendall in American Conservatism,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 9. For Kirk’s own disdain for a strain of progressive liberal democracy championed by the likes of John Dewey, see Hartman, Education and the Cold War, 93–­96. For an overview of the association between Burke and conservatism in the United States and Great Britain, see Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–­1914, and Maciag, Edmund Burke in America. 16. Kendall to Strauss, February 9, 1959, KSC, 203. 17. Kendall to Strauss, June 11, 1949, KSC, 191. He was referring to Leo Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14, no. 4 (December 1947): 455–­87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40982184. 18. See the series of letters exchanged between the two, January 19–­February 4, 1960, KSC, 213–­17. 19. Nellie D. Kendall to Strauss, October 18, 1970, KSC, 258. 20. Kendall to Strauss, Thursday, 1955, KSC, 192. 21. Strauss to Kendall, February 13, 1959, KSC, 203; Strauss to Kendall, April 7, 1959, KSC, 209. 22. Strauss to Kendall, May 14, 1961, KSC, 237. 23. Nash, “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (I),” 128. 24. Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule, 54, 135. 25. For Kendall and his longstanding interest in majority rule, see George W. Carey, “Willmoore Kendall and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 17–­46.



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26. Eric Voegelin to Willmoore Kendall, November 23, 1941, Willmoore Kendall Papers, box 15, HIA. 27. Thomas I. Cook, “Review of  Willmoore Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” 1167. 28. Kendall, “John Locke Revisited,” 234. 29. Nash, “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (I),” 129. See Kendall, Conservative Affirmation, 5–­120. 30. For how Kendall’s majoritarianism meshed with his anticommunism, see Carey, “Willmoore Kendall and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” esp. 21. 31. For more on Kendall’s views on Lincoln in particular, see John A. Murley, “On the ‘Calhounism’ of  Willmoore Kendall,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 99–­140. 32. For a recent defense of the Declaration and its claims for equality, see Allen, Our Declaration. 33. Kendall quoted in Nash, “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (II),” 237. 34. Francis G. Wilson, “The Political Science of  Willmoore Kendall,” 41. 35. Kendall’s lecture transcripts are in Willmoore Kendall Papers, box 26, HIA. 36. On the nature of Kendall’s anticommunism and conservatism, see also East, “The Political Thought of  Willm[o]ore Kendall.” 37. Harry Jaffa to Willmoore Kendall, November 8, 1959, Willmoore Kendall Papers, box 17, HIA. See also Strauss to Kendall, October 29, 1964, KSC, 251. For a more in-­depth discussion of Jaffa’s critique of Kendall’s attitudes toward Locke and the Declaration, see Catherine H. Zuckert and Michael P. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss, 243–­46. 38. For Kendall’s opposition to Kirk, see Nash, “The Place of  Willmoore Kendall in American Conservatism,” in Willmoore Kendall, ed. Murley and Alvis, 9. 39. Russell Kirk, introduction to Of Civil Government, viii, xi. 40. Kirk, introduction to Of Civil Government, xi, xii. 41. Kirk, introduction to Of Civil Government, xiii. 42. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 1, 2. 43. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 8. 44. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 248. 45. Strauss to Kendall, June 10, 1960, KSC, 219. 46. Kendall, Willmoore Kendall: Contra Mundum, 430n19. 47. Kendall, “John Locke Revisited,” 227. 48. Gerhart Niemeyer to Willmoore Kendall, May 28, 1965, Willmoore Kendall Papers, box 21, HIA. 49. East, “The Political Thought of  Willm[o]ore Kendall,” 207–­8. 50. Strauss to Kendall, June 10, 1960, KSC, 219–­20. 51. Strauss to Kendall, April 27, 1965, KSC, 255. 52. Strauss to Kendall, June 2, 1967, KSC, 257. 53. East, “The Political Thought of Willm[o]ore Kendall,” 201, 210. 54. The chief works that gave shape and voice to the paradigm shift toward republicanism are Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–­1787; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:

224

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Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. See also, Pocock, “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,” for Pocock’s assessment of Locke’s mythological status in an ideology of liberalism. Other important works include Robbins, The Eighteenth-­Century Commonwealthman; Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution; Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology; and McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Those who contextualized or cast doubt on Locke’s centrality and illuminated the expansive range of non-­Lockean influences on early American political thought turned their attention to the more communitarian thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Francis Hutcheson; republican writers like Cicero, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney; a robust Whig pamphlet culture exemplified by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters; and a deep tradition of English constitutionalism, contained in the writings of, among others, the English jurist Edward Coke. 55. For example, Bailyn’s Ideological Origins won both the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize in 1968. Wood’s Creation of the American Republic won the Bancroft Prize in 1970. Wood’s dozens of reviews for the New York Review of Books, beginning in 1981, span nearly four decades. 56. Kelley, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” 536. My discussion of republicanism’s meteoric rise draws from Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept.” 57. As Rodgers observed, historian Edmund S. Morgan, for example, did not think in terms of “republicanism” in his essay “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution” in 1967, but rather relied on a concept of a deep and abiding “Puritanism” to characterize American colonists’ fears of corruption and luxury and their concern with cultivating virtue (15). Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution.” 58. Rodgers, “Republicanism,” 12, 13. 59. Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis,” 49. More than a decade later, Shalhope returned to reassess the field’s shift in “Republicanism and Early American Historiography.” 60. Rodgers, “Republicanism,” 15. 61. The 1980s and 1990s bore witness to a wave of reactions against republicanism’s decentering of Locke, over the previous decades, with works that recentered Locke in one way or another. See, e.g., Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-­Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism; Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke; Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination; Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution; Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism; Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era; and more recently Ward, Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America; West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom; and C. Bradley Thompson, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. Among those who saw possibility in a kind of consensus in the republicanism-­versus-­liberalism divide include Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Republicanism vs.



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Liberalism? A Reconsideration”; Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse”; and Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition. Several scholars mentioned above, including Pocock and Wood, have since offered revised assessments of their earlier perspectives. Compare also Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited,” with Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century England and America. 62. Rodgers, “Republicanism,” 17. 63. Rakove, Original Meanings, 373n29. 64. Following Strauss’s death in 1973, his students and followers fractured into two camps, what became known as the West Coast Straussians concentrated around Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Review and East Coast Straussians, a somewhat less geographically concentrated cohort but with close ties to Strauss’s own institution, the University of Chicago. See Jaffa, Crisis of the Strauss Divided. 65. As Thomas G. West argued in his review of The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom understood Locke as being a “secret admirer and follower of Thomas Hobbes.” West’s review was largely critical, explaining, e.g., that Bloom misunderstood the founders and the nature of their Lockean commitments. West, “Allan Bloom and America.” 66. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 167, 172. 67. Nagel, “Libertarianism without Foundations,” 137. 68. For the prevalence of Lockean libertarianism in discussions of Nozick’s work, see, for example, Richard J. Arneson, “Side Constraints, Lockean Individual Rights, and the Moral Basis of Libertarianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” ed. Bader and Meadowcroft, 15–­37. In the 1980s and 1990s, there emerged political theories of left-­libertarianism, which argued for “a theory of distributive justice that seeks to harness the premises of the libertarian right to the political agenda of the egalitarian left.” Fried, “Left-­Libertarianism,” 66. For one example of a left-­libertarian account, which draws inspiration from Locke’s Second Treatise, see Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality. 69. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 225n. 70. Nagel, “Libertarianism without Foundations,” 138. 71. See again Arneson, “Side Constraints, Lockean Individual Rights, and the Moral Basis of Libertarianism,” 15–­37. 72. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 9. 73. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 149. 74. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 149. 75. Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, 288. 76. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 174. 77. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 182. 78. Sandel, introduction to Liberalism and Its Critics, 8. 79. Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 104; Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, 505. 80. Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, 506–­7. 81. Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice, 104–­5. See also Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism, 506–­7.

226

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82. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 19, 136, and passim. 83. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 11. 84. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 135n. For a good overview of Rawls’s argument here, see John Meadowcroft, “Nozick’s Critique of Rawls: Distribution, Entitlement, and the Assumptive World of A Theory of Justice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” ed. Bader and Meadowcroft, 171–­72. 85. Samuel Freeman, “Introduction: John Rawls—­An Overview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Freeman, 11. 86. This does not mean that Rawls and Locke are never connected in genealogical discussions of liberalism. See, for example, Thomas Nagel, “Rawls and Liberalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Freeman, 62–­85.

Epilogue 1. “Road Trip,” season 3, episode 14, Parks and Recreation, aired May 12, 2011 on NBC. 2. It is striking, for example, that when social critic Ta-­Nehisi Coates needed a symbolic representation of the American canon from which he as a child felt alienated, he chose Locke. Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “Acting French,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2014. 3. Pateman, The Sexual Contract. The question of Locke’s views on racialized slavery has received significant attention in recent years. See, e.g., Uzgalis, “‘An Inconsistency not to be Excused’: On Locke and Racism,” and Uzgalis, “John Locke, Racism, Slavery, and Indian Lands.” For a succinct assessment that “Locke offered no satisfactory engagement with slavery,” see Goldie, “Locke and America,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 558. 4. Goldie, “Locke and America,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, 546. 5. John Quiggin, “John Locke Against Freedom,” Jacobin Magazine, June 28, 2015. Kenan Malik, “Why Western Liberals Have Long Picked the Wrong Historical Hero,” The Guardian, September 8, 2019. My current research takes up the place of John Stuart Mill in American thought and culture. 6. According to its website, the John Locke Foundation, based in North Carolina, is “conservative, (classically) liberal, [and] libertarian.” See “Is the John Locke Foundation Conservative?,” https://www.johnlocke.org/about-­john-­locke/is-­the-­john-­locke -­foundation-­conservative/. In addition to the John Locke Foundation, Locke is a favorite reference point at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, both based in Washington, DC. Meanwhile the organization FreedomWorks, which is dedicated to “a desire for less government, lower taxes, and more economic freedom,” took umbrage with then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s lack of respect for Locke-­ inspired property rights. Jason Pye, “Donald Trump versus the Founding Fathers: Private Property Rights Are the Cornerstone of Liberty,” FreedomWorks, August 2015. See also, for example, individual publications such as Jon Hersey, “John Locke: The Father of Liberalism,” The Objective Standard, August 21, 2019; Joseph Loconte, “The Need for a Revival of Lockean Liberalism,” National Review, September 11, 2019.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Academy and College of Philadelphia, 13 Acheson, Sam, 140 Adams, Abigail, 46 Adams, Charles Francis, 65 Adams, Henry, 86 Adams, John, 32, 42, 45–­48, 51, 53–­54, 65, 70–­73, 76, 189n51, 189n54, 189n57, 189n58, 192n94, 201n83; devotion to Locke, 45–­48; on happiness, 51; ownership of Locke’s Works, 189n58 Adams, John Quincy, 47–­48, 61, 76 Adams, Samuel, 22, 36 Addison, Joseph, 180n59 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 117 Adler, Mortimer J., 133–­35, 217n35, 217n43, 217n50, 217n53 Aldrich, Peleg Emory, 89, 205n18 Alexander, Archibald, 92 Alexander, James, 17 Alison, Francis, 182n87 American Century, 122 American exceptionalism, 131

American Political Science Association, 112 American political tradition, 1, 3, 119, 123, 129–­31, 136, 140, 145–­46, 148, 150, 152–­53, 157, 216n27; concept of tradition, 130; Locke as basis for, 150 American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, The (Hofstadter), 129 American Revolution, 32, 49, 52–­54, 58, 74, 108, 126, 140–­41, 157, 186n21, 187n28, 212n46, 224n57 American Science of Politics, The (Crick), 131 American Social Science Association, 97 “American way,” 130, 217n34 Amherst College, 92, 114, 120 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 148, 159–­61 Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (Maine), 101 Annals of America, The (A. Holmes), 75

252

index

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 98 anticommunism, 127, 149, 151–­52, 221n3. See also Kendall, Willmoore Aristotle, 53, 100, 101, 134, 144, 204n130 Atwater, Lyman Hotchkiss, 94, 207n42 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 144 Backus, Isaac, 30 Bacon, Francis, 42, 51, 195n8 Bailyn, Bernard, 148, 157 Bancroft, Edward, 39 Bancroft, George, 2, 74–­76 Barnard College, 131 Barton, William, 70 Bayly, Thomas H., 77–­78 Beard, Charles A., 114–­15, 129, 211n35, 211n42; on Locke and property, 114–­15 Beard, Mary Ritter, 115 Becker, Carl, 111–­12, 125, 157, 212n46, 215n15 behaviorism, 150 Bennett, John, 63 Berkeley, George, 23–­24, 96, 182n93 Bill of Rights, 143 Blackstone, William, 43, 52–­54, 82, 191n88, 192n94 Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, 81 Bloom, Allan, 158–­59, 225n65; on Locke and property, 159 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, 209n81 Bodleian Library, 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 73, 134 Boorstin, Daniel J., 131, 149; on Americans’ lack of interest in abstract political theory, 208n71 (see also Lieber, Francis) Boston Evening-­Post, 33 Boston Gazette, 33, 36 Boston Massacre, 42 Boucher, Jonathan, 39, 187n35, 188n37, 205n11, 207n48 Bourne, Henry Richard Fox, 85, 87–­90, 205n13, 205n17, 220n85

Bowen, Francis, 61–­62, 86, 95, 96, 196n13, 196n15, 207n48 Boyle, Robert, 5 Broderick, David, 78 Brown, Thomas, 62 Browne, Daniel, 22 Buchanan, Scott, 133 Buckley, William F., Jr., 149 Burgess, John W., 209n81 Burke, Edmund, 100, 117, 136, 149, 153–­ 54, 200n70, 222n15 Burlamaqui, Jean-­Jacques, 36 Byrd, Robert C., 143–­44 Byrd, William, II, 175n1, 179n47 Calhoun, John C., 58–­59, 81 Calvinism, 7, 24–­26, 28. See also Edwards, Jonathan Camden, Earl of (Charles Pratt), 37 Campbell, Alexander, 64 Cannibals All! (Fitzhugh), 81 capitalism, 4, 51, 104, 113–­17, 122, 128, 164, 191n82; liberalism, democracy and, 122, 164. See also property Carolina, colony of, 7, 59, 68–­73, 75, 77–­ 80, 82, 97, 99–­100, 110, 200n71, 202n96, 202n101, 203n113, 208n59, 213n62. See also Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (Locke); North Carolina; South Carolina Carolina Gazette (Charleston), 73 Carpenter, William Seal, 106, 131, 136, 196n11, 218n67 Cartesian philosophy. See Descartes, René Catholicism, 5–­6; arguments about extending toleration for, 5. See also religious toleration Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 36, 224n54 Chamberlain, John, 126–­27, 149, 216n19; on Locke and property, 127 Channing, Edward, 105 Channing, William Ellery, 64 Chardon, Peter, 45, 188n51 Charles I (king of England), 86, 174n9



Charles II (king of England), 68, 201n83 Charleston Library Society, 75 Charlotte (queen consort of Great Britain), 40, 41 childrearing, Locke considered as authority on, 7, 9–­11, 32, 40, 86, 176n8 Chipman, Nathaniel, 56, 72 Chisholm, Shirley, 144–­45 Christianity: Locke and, 3, 7–­8, 15, 20, 27–­30, 64, 93, 141, 175n3, 182n93, 184n115; Locke’s rejection of original sin, 20; Locke viewed by some conservatives as not sufficiently Christian, 153. See also Letter Concerning Toleration, A (Locke); Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, A (Locke); Reasonableness of Christian­ ity, The (Locke); Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke) Churchill, Awnsham and John (book­ sellers), 8 Church of England, 7, 23, 28, 35, 68–­69, 75; “Anglican liberty,” 100, 208n74 Cicero, 45, 154, 157 civil disobedience, 145 civil government, 38, 77, 104, 106, 134–­36; origins of, 56. See also state of nature Civil Liberty and Self-­Government (Lieber), 99 civil rights, 141; movement, 121. See also rights Civil Rights Act, 142–­44 Civil War (English), 5 Civil War (Spanish), 149 Civil War (US), 59, 73, 82, 84–­86, 86, 99, 196n12 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 158–­59, 225n65 Coates, Ta-­Nehisi, 226n2 Coke, Edward, 36, 224n54 Coker, Francis W., 216n27 Colbourn, H. Trevor, 157 Colden, Cadwallader, 17–­18 cold war, 4, 128, 133, 137, 164; Locke’s relevance for, 137

Index 253

Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, A (Locke), 13, 17, 178n33 College of New Jersey. See Princeton University College of William and Mary, 28, 82, 180n61, 182n84, 200n77, 214n32 Colman’s Rural World and Valley Farmer, 84, 87 Columbia College. See Columbia University Columbia University, 55, 99, 107–­10, 129, 205n17, 208n71; Contemporary Civilization curriculum in, 132, 134–­35, 218n58, 218n60; General Honors Course, 218n51 Commentaries on American Law (Kent), 71 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 43, 52 commonplace books, 175n3, 179n46, 175n47, 188n46, 189n54, 194n1, 198n44; Locke’s influence on, 14–­16, 14, 43–­45, 58–­59, 65–­66, 179n46, 188n51, 198n42 Common Place Book Upon the Plan Recommended and Practised by John Locke, Esq., A, 65, 198n44 common sense philosophy. See Scottish common sense philosophy communism: Locke used as bulwark against, 142; parallels drawn with fascism, 216n23, 217n35. See also anticommunism; cold war compact theory. See social contract theory Connecticut Courant (Hartford), 67, 88 consensus, as school of historiography. See historiography conservatives, 108, 117, 140, 144, 148–­54, 165, 221n3, 226n6. See also anticommunism; Christianity; happiness; Locke, John; property; rights Constitutional Convention, 70, 115, 164 Continental Congress, 39, 46, 56 contract theory. See social contract theory Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies, The (Knox), 37–­39

254

index

Cook, Thomas I., 117–­18, 151; on Marx and property, 117–­18 Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) Cooper, Thomas, 80 Cornell University, 111 Cosby, William, 17–­18 Coste, Pierre, 17 Cranston, Maurice, 4, 139–­40, 205n11, 220n83, 220n85, 220n88 Crick, Bernard, 131 Cromwell, Oliver, 125–­26 Cudworth, Damaris (Lady Masham), 6 currency crisis, Locke and, 9, 33, 176n9, 185n4, 185n5. See also Some Consid­ erations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (Locke) Curti, Merle: biography, 105; contradictions in Locke’s political thought, 108; influence in classrooms, 118; on Locke and property, 105, 108–­9; Locke as “America’s Philosopher,” 1, 104, 107, 119, 173n1; on “orthodox Locke­ anism,” 108; political views of, 109, 195n6, 211n35, 211n36; on remaking Locke, 109, 145; use of “ephemeral” materials, 107, 118 Daily Alta (San Francisco), 78 Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), 2 Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 77 Dallas Mercury News, 140 Darwin, Charles, 84, 93, 96, 204n2, 206n37 De Jure naturali & gentium (Pufendorf ), 13 Declaration of Independence, 49–­51, 58, 68, 74, 111, 116, 123, 125–­28, 136, 141–­43, 145, 152–­53, 157, 190n73, 190n74, 190n75, 191n79, 213n58, 215n15, 223n37; happiness vs. property, 50–­51, 141, 221n94; myth of Lockean origins, 51–­52. See also Jefferson, Thomas

Declaration of Independence, The (Becker), 111–­12, 125, 157, 212n46, 215n15 Declaration of Independence and What It Means Today, The (Dumbauld), 125 Declaratory Act, 37 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 86 Descartes, René, 5, 20, 90, 95, 180n64; Locke’s reading of, 174n17, 180n64 Dietze, Gottfried, 144 Dial, The, 61–­62 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 26 Dickinson, John, 37 Discourse Concerning the Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked, in the Next World, A (Sherlock), 21 Dobbs, James, 143 Douglas, Paul, 141, 220n94 Dumbauld, Edward, 125 Dunning, William A., 103, 109–­10 Dunton, John, 21, 181n75 East, John P., 156–­57 Ebenstein, William, 218n67 Economic Basis of Politics, The (C. Beard), 114–­15, 213n60 Edgeworth, Maria, 64, 197n31 Edict of Nantes, revocation of, 27 Edwards, John, 28 Edwards, Jonathan, 24–­26, 183n82;  “integrated conception of mind,” 26; lifelong engagement with Locke, 25 Eisenhower, Dwight, 142 Elements of Intellectual Philosophy (Wayland), 92 Elements of Moral Science, The (Wayland), 62 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Stewart), 48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 61–­62, 106, 197n28 empiricism, 24, 26, 87, 93, 96, 205n9 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 134 Engels, Friedrich, 137, 143



English constitution, 35, 43, 50, 111, 186n19, 224n24 epistemology, Locke and, 3, 91, 93–­95, 105, 107, 209n6. See also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) equality, 143–­44, 152–­53, 160–­61, 164; defense of claims in Declaration of Independence, 223n32 Erskine, John, 217n50, 217n51, 218n58 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 2–­3, 6–­13, 15, 18–­25, 30, 32–­34, 47–­48, 58–­61, 63–­64, 67, 83–­ 93, 96, 101, 103–­8, 133–­35; as basis for Locke’s authority, 195; Franklin’s reading of, 177n25, 177n26; library holdings of, contrasted with Second Treatise, 176n14; metaphysical con­ tribution, 64; pervasive influence of, 89; popularity of contrasted with Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 177n18; symbolic deployment of, 19 Essay Concerning Toleration (Locke), 88 Everett, Alexander Hill, 77 Everett, Edward, 59, 61, 196n12, 197n31 Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy, An (McCosh), 92–­93 Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, An (Mill), 92 Farrand, Max, 106–­7, 210n20 Federalist, The, 136, 153, 222n15 Federalist Society, 226n6 Fillmore, Millard, 60 Filmer, Robert, 7, 100 Fitzhugh, George, 81, 204n130 Flynt, Henry, 181n77 Fortescue, John, 144 Fourteenth Amendment, 117, 214n73 Franklin, Benjamin, 11–­13, 39, 48, 86, 177n24, 177n25, 177n27, 177n28, 178n31, 178n40, 179n43, 192n92, 205n6; assessments of Grotius and Pufendorf, 178n40; Autobiography, 177n24, 177n28, 178n35, 205n6; dis-

Index 255

covery of Locke, 177n24, 177n25; homage to Locke, 178n31; ideas for Junto, influenced by Locke, 12–­13, 178n33, 178n35; influenced by An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 11–­12, 205n6; influenced by Locke’s ideas about writing, 11–­13; as a Lockean liberal, 179n43; Locke’s and Franklin’s ideas on moral action, 177n27, 177n28; ownership of Locke’s Works, 192n92 Franklin, James, 11 Freedman, Max, 139 Freedom of the Will (Edwards), 25 French Revolution, 72, 110, 112, 114, 202n92 Fuller, Margaret, 61 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (Locke), 2, 5, 59, 68–­69, 70, 72–­81, 85, 97–­100, 110–­11, 213n62; debated authorship of, 200n71, 201n83, 208n59; Declaration of Independence and, 202n94; exemplifying political theory vs. political practice, 68, 70–­72, 74–­ 76, 78–­83; influence on later debates over “Indian removal,” 77. See also South Carolina Gabriel, Ralph Henry, 118 Garfield, James A., 97–­98, 208n62 Garrison, William Lloyd, 195n6 General Introduction to the Great Books and to a Liberal Education, A (Adler and Wolff ), 134 Genius of American Politics, The (Boorstin), 131 Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar (Guthrie), 47 Gettell, Raymond, 115 Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 75 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 5, 112, 114, 212n46 Goheen, Robert F., 121 Gooch, G. P., 114 Gordon, Thomas, 36, 223n54

256

index

Gorer, Geoffrey, 126–­27 Great Awakening, 27 Great Books, 132–­35, 159, 217n43, 217n51, 218n58, 218n60. See also Columbia University; Harvard Univer­sity; Prince­ ton University; St. John’s College; Yale University Great Books of the Western World, The, 134 Great Coinage Crisis. See currency crisis, Locke and Grenville, George, 37–­38 Grotius, Hugo, 13, 36, 101, 144, 178n40, 181n83 Guthrie, William, 47 Hale, Matthew, 188n46 Hale, Salma, 75 Hamilton, Alexander, 186n19 Hamilton, Walton, on Locke and property, 117–­18 Hamilton, William, 86, 92, 95, 117–­18, 186n19 Hanckel, Thomas, 79–­80 happiness: John Adams on “science of social happiness,” 51; and property, debates about meaning of, 49–­51, 116, 127, 141, 143, 221n94. See also Declaration of Independence; Jefferson, Thomas; Locke, John; Mason, George, on “inherent natural rights”; property Harper & Brothers, 60, 87 Harrington, James, 36, 46, 53, 78–­79, 125, 157, 194n113, 202n96 Hartz, Louis, 1–­2, 137–­38, 157–­58, 219n73, 219n74, 219n78, 219n80; criticism of liberal consensus approach to history, 219n80; “irrational Lockeanism explained,” 138; legacy of, 219n73; merges liberalism with Lockeanism, 138 Harvard University, 14, 20–­23, 27, 33, 47–­ 48, 61, 95–­96, 101–­2, 105–­6, 118, 129, 132, 137, 148, 161, 180n61; Locke in early curriculum, 21–­22, 105–­6, 182n88

Haven, Joseph, 92 Hayek, Friedrich A. von, 126, 137 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 74 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 124, 207n45 Heritage Foundation, 226n6 higher education, 130–­35; emergence of research universities, 86–­87, 217n43. See also liberal education; and specific universities Hillard, George, 73–­74 historiography: consensus school, 131, 138, 219n80; postcolonial turn, 164; reemergence of Locke in 1980s and 1990s, 224n61; “republican turn,” 157, 223n54, 224n59 History of American Political Theories, A (Merriam), 109–­10 History of American Political Thought (Gettell), 115 History of Political Philosophy from Plato to Burke (Cook), 117 History of Political Theory, A (Sabine), 119 History of South Carolina (D. Ramsay), 80 History of the United States (G. Bancroft), 75, 202n105 History of the United States (D. Ramsay), 74 History of the United States, The (G. Tucker), 76 Hoadly, Benjamin, 36, 46, 189n57 Hobbes, Thomas, 100, 124, 130, 144, 154–­ 56, 159, 181n83 Hodge, Charles, 93 Hodgson, Godfrey, 221n2 Hofstadter, Richard, 129, 138, 216n29, 216n30 Hollis, Thomas, 47, 189n60 Holmes, Abiel, 75 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 96 Hook, Sidney, 149 Hopkins, Samuel, 25, 183n82 Hosack, David, 58 Hosmer, Lucile, 141 How to Read a Book (Adler), 133 Hubbard, John, 23



Huger, Daniel, 79 Hume, David, 26, 71, 86, 92, 176n7, 183n106, 207n42 Humphrey, Hubert, 141–­44, 221n96 Huntington, Arabella, 106 Huntington, Collis P., 106 Huntington, Henry Edwards, 106 Huntington Library, 104–­6 Huntington Library Bulletin, 105, 119 Hutcheson, Francis, 24, 183n98, 223n54 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 132–­35, 217n51 Hutchinson, Thomas, 33–­34, 182n87 idealism, 61–­62, 85, 92–­93, 95–­96, 196n17; Berkeley and, 23–­24. See also Bowen, Francis; Kant, Immanuel ideology, 213n70, 216n26 In Defense of Property (Dietze), 144 Index Rerum (Todd), 65 “Indian removal,” comparisons drawn with Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 77 individualism, 104, 113–­14, 116–­17, 120, 138, 151, 153, 157, 191n82, 221n2 individual rights. See rights innate ideas, 7, 10–­11, 20–­21, 23–­24, 48, 92, 94, 107, 206n31. See also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, An (Reid), 24, 47 intellectual history, 4, 86, 118, 158 Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West (Staff of Columbia University), 134–­35, 218n60, 218n62 Jackson, Andrew, 77, 124, 207n54 Jaffa, Harry, 152; critique of Kendall’s view of Locke, 223n37 James, William, 86, 96 Jameson, John A., 101 Jefferson, Thomas, 48–­55, 71, 74, 110–­11, 122, 124–­28, 136–­37, 141–­43, 145, 191n75, 191n79, 200n78, 201n88; com-

Index 257

monplacing, 188n51; Locke’s complex influence on, 49–­52; on meaning of happiness, 49–­51. See also Declaration of Independence; happiness Jenyns, Soame, 39 John Locke: A Biography (Cranston), 4, 139–­40, 220n85 John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Kendall), 151 John Locke Foundation, 165, 226n6 Johns Hopkins University, 112, 207n45 Johnson, Lyndon B., 142 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 23, 181n80; corre­ spondence with Berkeley about Locke, 182n93 Johnson, Thomas, 22 Johnston, Olin D., 142–­43 Kant, Immanuel, 61–­62, 86, 88–­89, 92, 95, 196n15, 196n17, 207n45, 207n48; contrasted to Locke, 61–­62, 88–­89, 92, 196n17 Kelley, Robert, 157 Kendall, Willmoore, 147–­53, 155–­57, 221n2, 221n3, 222n9, 222n11; anticommunism and majoritarianism, 151–­52, 223n36; “Calhounism” of, 223n31; critique of Kirk, 222n15; on equality, 152; influenced by Strauss, 155–­57; majority rule, 151, 222n25; on over-­valuation of Declaration of Independence, 152 Kennedy, John F., 221n94 Kent, James, 32, 55–­57, 67, 71, 82; defense The Federalist, 194n108; on property, 204n133 King, Peter, 66–­67, 139 Kirk, Grayson, 132 Kirk, Russell, 147, 149, 153–­54 Kloppenberg, James T., 92; on Hartz, 219n74 Langer, William, 125 language, Locke and, 7, 10, 48, 63, 190n69 Law of Nations (Vattel), 34

258

index

Le Clerc, Jean, 17, 19, 180n59 Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (W. Hamilton), 92 Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Brown), 62 Lenin, Vladimir, 128, 153 Leo, John, 138 Letter Concerning Toleration, A (Locke), 7, 15, 22, 27–­28, 30, 120, 134–­35, 182n87, 183n107 Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (Dickinson), 37 Leverett, John, 20–­21 Leyden, Wolfgang von, 219n82 liberal, 28; adjective applied to Locke, 13; emphasis on natural rights, 141; “liberal consensus,” 147–­48, 158, 221n2. See also historiography; liberal democracy; liberalism; Lockean liberalism liberal arts education, 86, 131, 133–­34. See also liberal education liberal democracy, 4, 123, 132, 164, 222n15; liberal tradition and, 129, 133, 137–­ 38, 148, 151, 164–­65, 219n74. See also liberalism liberal education, 121, 123, 132–­35; crisis in, 132, 217n44, 217n51; defined, 132; importance for democracy, 121–­35 liberalism, 104, 109, 115–­16, 119–­20, 122–­ 23, 128–­30, 131, 137–­38, 145, 147, 152, 174n9, 216n31; debates over meaning of, 120; Hartz’s views of, 138; individualism and, 104; Parrington’s views of, 115; welfare state and, 158. See also Lockean liberalism; progressive liberals Liberal Tradition, The (Orton), 130 Liberal Tradition in America, The (Hartz), 1, 137–­38 libertarianism, 1, 126, 148–­49, 159–­60, 162, 164, 174n9, 225n68; left-­libertarianism, 225n68 liberty: Anglican, 100; civil, 99, 101; Declaration of Independence and, 49, 51; democracy and, 123–­24; English, 43;

equality and, 82, 123; happiness and, 116, 125, 143–­44; individual, 3, 113, 116, 159, 165; natural right and natural rights (see rights); political, 39, 42, 79, 134; practical, 82; property and, 50–­ 51, 108–­9, 113, 117, 127–­28, 136, 143, 163, 214n73, 217n19, 220n94, 226n6; religious (see religious freedom); social justice and, 109; spirit of, 60, 140, 195n6 libraries: holdings of Locke’s works, 21–­ 22, 24, 52, 65, 175n21 (intro.), 175n1 (chap. 1), 175n2, 176n7, 176n14, 177n18, 177n24, 183n96, 191n88; quantitative studies of, 176n7; White House Library, 60 Lieber, Francis, 82, 99–­101, 113, 204n133, 208n67, 208n68, 208n71; on Americans’ lack of interest in abstract political theory, 208n71; on individual rights, 100 Life Magazine, 121, 122, 125, 128–­29 Life of Locke (King), 66–­67 Lincoln, Abraham, 61, 124, 152 Locke, John: alcohol, objections to, 2; and American political tradition, 1, 3, 119, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131, 136, 140, 145–­ 46, 148, 150, 152–­53, 157, 216n27; and American Protestantism, 26–­27; as “America’s Philosopher,” 1, 104, 107–­9, 131, 173n1; anticommunism and, 127, 131, 137, 151–­52; asthma, 6; authority of, 2, 4, 9, 19, 27, 30, 33, 43, 82, 83, 86, 104; biography, 5–­7, 6, 139; cartoon of, 122; and childrearing, 7, 9–­11, 18, 32, 40, 86, 176n8; Christianity and, 3, 7–­8, 20, 27–­30, 64, 93, 140, 153, 175n3; civil rights (see rights); as civil servant, 7; cold war and, 4, 128, 133, 137, 164; and commonplace books, 14–­15, 44–­45, 58, 65, 179n46; on conversation, 199n57; criticism of, 8, 70–­71, 76, 81, 85, 100, 130; on cultivation of character, 3, 4, 40, 91; and currency debates, 9, 33, 176n9; empiricism, 24, 26, 87, 93, 96,

Index 259



205n9 (see also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An [Locke]); “Englishness” of, 3, 194n3, 202n100; epistemology, 3, 91, 93–­95, 105, 107, 209n6 (see also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An [Locke]); as exemplar, 9, 13, 17–­18, 25, 30, 32, 40, 43–­44, 57, 58–­83; on friendship, 40, 197n29; on gambling, 66; on government (see Second Treatise [Locke]; social contract theory; Two Treatises [Locke]); and happiness, 12, 116, 126, 127, 141, 143, 220n94; on human soul, 182n93; “Indian Removal,” used in debates over, 77; and individualism (see individualism); and innate ideas, 20–­21; on innate moral knowledge, 94–­95; on innate sinfulness of children, 11, 20; and Lady Masham, 6; on language, 7, 10, 48, 63, 190n69; liberalism and (see liberalism); malleability in use of, 39; metaphysics, 5, 21, 25, 30, 48, 61–­63, 70, 76, 83, 92–­94, 196n17 (see also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An [Locke]); method, 11; and moderation, 12; on morality, 10, 135, 177n28; and moral philosophy, 10, 24, 61–­63, 76, 87, 92–­ 95, 135, 194n113, 207n43, 207n48; on natural rights (see rights); as negative example, 59, 68–­71, 73, 78, 83, 97–­98, 101; on neighborhoods, 2; on old age, 9; on olives, silkworms, and viticul­ture, 31–­32, 68; on original sin, 20; on origins of state, 99 (see also social contract theory); on personal identity, 176n12; popularity of works, 176n14, 176n18 (see also titles of individual works); pragmatism and, 96, 207n54; on property (see property); on religious toleration, 3, 25, 69, 127–­28, 139, 220n85 (see also Essay Concerning Toleration [Locke]; Letter Concerning Toleration, A [Locke]); religious views, 2, 29, 180n66 (see also Christianity; Para­

phrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, A [Locke]; Reasonableness of Christianity, The [Locke]; Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity [Locke]); and self-­improvement, 3, 4, 13; slavery, 6, 34, 69, 77–­78, 80–­81, 142, 164, 200n69, 204n130, 226n3 (see also Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina [Locke]); socialist interpre­ tations of, 212n56; Socinianism, accusation against, 28; on state of nature, 7, 35, 50, 55–­56, 60, 81, 99–­101, 143, 160, 162, 186n14, 194n108, 195n5; tabula rasa (see innate ideas); on temperance, 67; as theorist of revolution, 110; theory vs. practice, exemplified by, 54, 59, 68, 70–­72, 74–­76, 78–­83, 192n93; on virtue, 4, 10, 12, 24, 46, 48, 83, 131, 177n18, 178n29, 224n57; and women (see Masham, Lady [Damaris Cudworth]; women) Locke, Samuel, 14–­16, 16, 179n50 Lockean: Franklin as Lockean liberal, 179n43; term coined, 174n9; various meanings of adjective, 1, 13, 34, 49–­ 51, 95, 108, 109, 131, 138, 141, 147–­ 62, 174n9, 179n42 Lockeanism, 147–­62; as ideological abstraction, 3 Lockean liberalism, 3, 9, 116, 120, 124, 138, 157–­58, 179n43, 214n85; critiques of, 147–­62, 164–­65, 195n5, 213n71, 216n19; as defense against communism, 128; and the “Liberal Tradition,” 129. See also Hartz, Louis Lockian. See Lockean Logan, James, 4, 19 Logick (Watts), 23 London School of Economics, 131 Lovelace, Earl of, 139, 205n11 Luce, Henry, 122 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 124, 155, 224n54; Kendall on Locke and, 155–­56; Strauss on Locke and, 154

260

index

Macpherson, C. B., on Locke and property, 191n82, 221n2 Madison, James, 56, 186n19, 190n69, 194n113 Main Currents in American Thought (Parrington), 115 Maine, Henry, 101 majority rule, 151, 222n25; “majority-­r ule authoritarianism,” 155 Marsh, James, 196n17 Marx, Karl, 124, 128, 131, 137, 143, 153 Marxism, 114, 131, 137; labor theory of value, Locke’s influence on, 104, 114, 117; socialist interpreters of Locke, 212n56. See also communism Masham, Lady (Damaris Cudworth), 6 Mason, Alpheus Thomas, 136 Mason, George, on “inherent natural rights,” 51 Mason, John, 65 Mather, Cotton, 15, 178n33; refrained from endorsing Locke’s Essay, 23 Mayhew, Jonathan, 182n87 McCosh, James, 90, 92–­95; debate with Hodge, 93, 206n37; on innate moral knowledge, 94–­95, 206n37 McGovern, George, 144 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 138 Mental Philosophy (Haven), 92, 206n31 Merriam, Charles E., 109–­12; on Locke’s “destructive” and “constructive” political theories, 110–­11 “Metaphysical Club,” 96 metaphysics, Locke and, 5, 21, 25, 30, 48, 61–­63, 70, 76, 83, 92–­94, 181n83, 192n88, 196n17, 206n30, 207n42. See also Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) Michel, Humfrey, 174n9 Mill, John Stuart, 92–­93, 136, 151, 165, 226n5 Milton, John, 36, 46, 125, 195n8, 202n96, 224n54 modernism, 204n4 Mondale, Walter, 141

Monroe, James, 195n5, 195n6 Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles-­Louis de Secondat), 53, 55–­56, 112, 125, 186n19, 192n88, 193n99, 196n20, 212n49 moral philosophy, 24, 61–­63, 76, 87, 92–­ 95, 194n113, 207n48. See also Scottish moral philosophy More, Hannah, on women reading Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 63–­64 More, Thomas, 98 Morey, William Carey, 98 Morgan, Edmund S., 224n57 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 105 Morley, Henry, 88, 205n13 Morrill Land Grant Act, 92 Morris, Lewis, 17–­18 Morris, Lewis, Jr., 17–­18 Mulford, Elisha, 102 Nagel, Thomas, 159–­60 Nash, George H., 149–­50, 168, 221n3 Nation, The (Mulford), 102 National Association of Manufacturers, 129 National Gazette (Philadelphia), 56 National Review, 149 Natural Right and History (Strauss), 154–­55 natural rights. See liberty; rights Nature and Extent of Christ’s Redemption, The (Stith), 28 Nettels, Curtis P., 119 New Method of a Common-­Place-­Book, A (Locke), 14, 179n46, 179n50 Newton, Isaac, 5, 33–­34, 46, 51, 53, 56, 63, 67, 188n47, 195n8, 202n96; Franklin on, 178n31; taught together with Locke at Yale, 21–­22 New York Review of Books, 157 New York Times, 137–­38, 160 New-­York Weekly Journal, 17–­18 Nicolson, Marjorie, 107, 118 Niemeyer, Gerhart, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124 North American Review, 79, 88–­89, 91, 98



North Carolina, 79, 156, 226n6 Norton, Andrews, 64 Norton, Charles Eliot, 64 “Novanglus” letters, 53 Nozick, Robert, 148, 159–­62; on Locke and property, 160 Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives (Locke), 31 Of Civil Government (Locke), 106, 135–­ 36. See also Second Treatise (Locke); Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Morison); Treatise of Civil Government (Locke); Two Treatises (Locke) Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Locke), 177n26 O’Hara, Barratt, 145 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 84 Ormond, Alexander Thomas, 95 Orton, William Aylott, 130 Osterweis, Rollin G., 118 Otis, James, Jr., 32–­36, 56, 186n13, 186n15, 186n16 Outlines of Moral Philosophy (Stewart), 48 Outlines of Moral Science (A. Alexander), 92, 206n31 Oxford University, 5, 88, 90, 139 Paley, William, 62 Palmer, George Herbert, 96 Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 10, 177n16 Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, A (Locke), 2, 29–­30, 64, 141, 174n6, 184n119 Parks and Recreation (TV show), 1, 164 Parrington, Vernon L., 115–­16, 118, 127, 213n64, 213n65; on Locke and capitalism, 115–­16; on Locke and property, 116 Pateman, Carole, 164 Peardon, Thomas P., 131, 145 Pearl Harbor bombing, 125, 216n19 Peirce, Charles S., 96

Index 261

Penn, William, 8, 19, 76, 175n1, 175n2, 183n107, 203n113 Perry, Bliss, 105 philosophy, changes in academic discipline, 86–­87, 99 Pinckney, Charles, 10 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 11 Pinckney, Eliza Lucas, 9–­11, 176n12, 177n16, 177n22; on childrearing, 11; as Locke devotee, 10–­11, 176n12, 177n22; as reader, 9–­11, 176n16 Pitkin, Timothy, 75 Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania, A (Rush), 194n107 Plato, 53, 78, 79, 98, 134 Pocock, J. G. A., 157, 223n54, 225n61 Political and Civil History of the United States of America, A (Pitkin), 75 political science, 4; changes in academic discipline, 4, 82, 86–­87, 99–­101, 147–­ 48, 150; Kendall and Strauss on, 147–­ 48, 150, 156; professionalization, 99, 147–­48. See also social sciences popular sovereignty, 54 Post, Catherine, 65 pragmatism, 87, 96, 206n54 Pratt, Charles (Earl of Camden), 37 Preston, Thomas, 42 Princeton Theological Seminary, 93 Princeton University, 24–­25, 56, 90–­93, 106, 121, 129, 136–­37, 195n5 Principia (Newton), 5, 22 Probing Our Past (Curti), 119 progressive liberals, 164–­65 progressives, 109, 112–­14, 117 property, 3, 7, 37, 39, 50–­51, 81, 82, 100, 105, 108–­9, 121, 127, 133, 136–­38, 140–­44, 153, 160, 163, 164, 174n9, 191n82, 195n5, 204n129, 204n133, 210n8, 212n54, 216n19, 218n67, 220n94, 221n2, 226n6; and meaning of happiness, 49–­51, 116, 127, 141, 143, 221n94. See also Beard, Charles A.; Bloom, Allan; Chamberlain, John;

262

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property (cont.) Cook, Thomas I.; Curti, Merle; Declaration of Independence; Hamilton, Walton, on Locke and property; happiness; Macpherson, C. B., on Locke and property; Mason, George, on “inherent natural rights”; Nozick, Robert; Parrington, Vernon L.; Strauss, Leo; Willoughby, Westel Woodbury Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Franklin), 13, 178n37 Protestantism, 23, 26–­28, 30, 32, 184n114 Proxmire, William, 220n94 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 13, 36, 144 Quaestiones Philosophicae in Justi Systematis Ordinem Dispositae (T. Johnson), 22, 182n86 Quincy, Abigail, 32, 42, 44–­45 Quincy, Edmund, 44 Quincy, Josiah, 45 Quincy, Josiah, Jr., 42–­44, 45, 52–­53 Quincy, Josiah, III, 42, 44 Raleigh Register, and North-­Carolina Gazette, 79 Ramsay, Allan, 40–­42, 69 Ramsay, David, 74–­75, 80 Randolph, Thomas Mann, Jr., 54–­55 Rawls, John, 148, 161–­62, 226n84, 226n86 Reasonableness of Christianity, The (Locke), 7, 8, 15, 28–­30, 64, 141, 175n3, 184n116 reception: defined, 29; reception of Locke, 4, 20, 29, 108 Reid, Thomas, 24, 47, 92, 190n67 religious freedom, 7, 27, 68, 84, 184n114, 197n33, 200n70. See also Reasonableness of Christianity, The (Locke); Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke) religious toleration, 3, 5–­7, 25, 27, 69, 127–­ 28, 139, 220n85. See also Letter Concerning Toleration, A (Locke)

republicanism, 157, 190n72, 223n54, 224n57, 224n59, 224n61. See also historiography Ricardo, David, 117 Richardson, Samuel, 10, 177n16 rights: civil rights, 122, 141–­44, 161, 221n96; equality and, 36, 82, 138, 143, 144, 223n32; individual rights, 3, 51, 100–­ 101, 112–­13, 116, 120, 127, 138, 143–­ 44, 147, 151–­56, 159–­60, 162, 164–­65, 174n9; left-­libertarianism and, 225n68; majority rule and, 151, 155–­56; natural right and natural rights, 34–­36, 38, 50–­51, 56, 70–­71, 81–­82, 100, 108, 126, 136, 141–­42, 144, 147, 151–­52, 154, 157, 184n114; property rights (see property). See also Declaration of Independence; Kendall, Willmoore; Locke, John; religious freedom; Strauss, Leo Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, The (Otis), 34–­35 Rise of American Civilization, The (C. and M. Beard), 115, 213n62, 213n63 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 126 Robbins, Caroline, 157, 224n54 Rodgers, Daniel T., 157–­58, 224n56, 224n57 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 78, 101, 110, 112, 113, 123, 124, 136, 150, 192n88, 201n88, 212n49 Royal Society, 6 Royce, Josiah, 96 “Rules of a Society” in A Collection of Several Pieces (Locke), 12–­13, 178n33 Rush, Benjamin, 53, 55, 57, 58; on commonplacing, 194n1; “government is a science,” 194n107; importance of studying history and the “new science of government,” 194n107 Rutgers University, 138 Ryan, Alan, 161, 174n9 Sabine, George H., 119–­20, 128, 214n85 Santayana, George, 207n54



Schlatter, Richard, 144 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 129–­30, 138, 216n31 Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr., 105, 210n18 scholasticism, 5, 20 Scottish common sense philosophy, 24, 47, 62, 85, 92–­95, 190n72, 196n15 Scottish Enlightenment, 224n54 Scottish moral philosophy, 24, 48, 61, 207n48 Second Treatise (Locke), 3, 28, 34, 38, 43, 45, 49–­52, 72, 81–­82, 99–­100, 104–­6, 108, 110–­11, 117, 120, 122, 123, 127, 130–­36, 140–­41, 145, 148, 151, 153–­56, 158–­60, 163, 176n8, 182n87, 184n114, 190n72, 191n75, 195n7, 225n68; poor sales in early America, 52; rediscovered as “great book,” 122; understood as deception by some conservatives, 154–­56. See also Of Civil Government (Locke); Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Morison); Treatise of Civil Government (Locke); Two Treatises (Locke) Second World War. See World War II Selden, John, 36, 39, 187n32, 187n33 Selections from John Locke’s Second Trea­ tise of Government (Morison), 105. See also Of Civil Government (Locke); Second Treatise (Locke); Treatise of Civil Government (Locke); Two Treatises (Locke) Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c. (Locke), 8 Sewell, Jonathan, 45 “sexual contract,” 164 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 6, 66, 69, 76, 88–­89, 200n71 Shalhope, Robert E., 158, 224n59 Sherlock, William, 21, 181n71 Sherman, Charles, 120, 131, 212n56, 214n83 Sickles, Daniel, 78 Sidney, Algernon, 35–­36, 39, 42–­44, 46, 53–­54, 125, 186n21, 187n23, 187n32,

Index 263

187n33, 189n57, 191n75, 192n88, 194n113, 195n6, 202n96, 224n54 Sieyès, Abbé, 72–­73 Sirovich, William Irving, 123–­25 Sketches of the Principles of Government (Chipman), 71, 202n100 slavery, 6, 69, 77–­78, 80–­81, 142, 164, 200n69, 204n130, 226n3. See also Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (Locke) Smith, Adam, 55, 116, 128, 192n88 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 195n5 Smith, William, 17–­18, 182n85 Smith College, 107 Snow, C. P., 139, 220n86 social compact. See social contract theory Social Contract (Rousseau), 123–­24 social contract theory, 50, 55, 60, 81, 99–­ 102, 113–­14, 123–­24, 130, 145, 153, 161–­62, 186n14, 195n5, 204n130, 204n134; “sexual contract” and, 164 socialism, 212n56. See also Locke, John; Marxism social sciences: development of, 87, 97–­ 101, 207n55; embrace of relativism, 154. See also political science Socinianism, 28 Sociology for the South (Fitzhugh), 81, 204n130 Socrates, 154 Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money (Locke), 185n5 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 40, 44, 63, 177n18, 177n19, 178n29, 183n100, 189n58 Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman (Locke), 192n92 South Carolina, 58, 74, 79–­81, 142–­43, 202n105, 203n128, 208n67. See also Carolina, colony of Spencer, Herbert, 137 Spengler, Oswald, 124 Staatswissenschaft, 4, 99

264

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Stalin, Joseph, 128 Stamp Act, 31, 37, 39, 187n25 Standard Times (New Bedford), 140 Stanford University, 149, 150, 222n9, 222n12 state of nature, 7, 35, 50, 55–­56, 60, 81, 99–­ 101, 143, 160, 162, 186n14, 194n108, 195n5. See also rights; social contract theory Statute of Westminster, 124 Steele, Richard, 25, 177n18, 180n59 Stevenson, Adlai, 221n94 Stewart, Dugald, 48, 62, 190n70, 196n20, 206n19 Stiles, Ezra, 30 Stith, William, 28–­29, 184n117 St. John’s College, 133, 217n44 St. Louis Star-­Times, 134 Stoddard, Solomon, 25 Story, Joseph, 82, 197n33, 204n133 Strauss, Leo, 147–­50, 154–­59, 187n22; divisions between East and West Coast Straussians, 222n7, 225n64; influence on Kendall, 149–­50, 155–­57; on Locke and property, 154; Locke as “idol in temple of liberalism,” 147, 155, 187n22 Strong, William, 97–­98 Stuart, Gilbert, 42 Sutherland, George, 117 System of Moral Philosophy, A (Hutcheson), 24 tabula rasa. See innate ideas Talmadge, Herman E., 143 Temple, William, 181n83 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 148, 161 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 134, 142, 144, 154 Thoughts on Government ( J. Adams), 46, 189n57 Thoughts on Machiavelli (Strauss), 149 Thurmond, Strom, 143 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 86, 152 Todd, John, 65, 198n45 totalitarianism, 122, 137, 217n35

transatlantic context, 4, 40, 54, 86 transcendentalism, 61–­62, 196n17 Treatise Concerning Civil Government in Three Parts, A ( J. Tucker), 194n106 Treatise of Civil Government (Locke), 136, 212n56, 214n83, 215n88. See also Of Civil Government (Locke); Second Treatise (Locke); Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Morison); Two Treatises (Locke) Trenchard, John, 36, 224n54 Trescot, William Henry, 81, 203n128 Trump, Donald, 226n6 Tucker, George, 62–­63, 76, 197n23, 203n109 Tucker, Josiah, 194n106 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 70 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 105–­7, 210n18 Two Treatises (Locke), 1–­3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17, 22, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 45, 52, 56, 60, 85, 105, 106, 126, 164, 173n2, 173n3, 175n1, 175n3, 176n8, 176n14, 182n86, 182n87, 186n16, 186n19, 189n60, 190n72, 191n88. See also Of Civil Government (Locke); Second Treatise (Locke); Selections from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Morison); Treatise of Civil Government (Locke) United States Constitution, 11, 48–­49, 53–­ 54, 70–­71, 82, 114–­15, 123, 128, 141–­ 42, 152, 164 United States Supreme Court, 97, 117–­18, 210n8 University of Chicago, 109, 131–­33, 149, 158; Great Books Program, 132 University of Illinois, 129, 150 University of Kentucky, 92 University of London, 116 University of Pennsylvania, 13 University of Rochester, 98 University of  Virginia, 62, 76 University of  Wisconsin, 119 Upshur, Abel P., 81, 204n129

Index 265



Vattel, Emmerich de, 34, 192n88 Vietnam War protests, 145 Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-­Bay, A (Otis), 34 Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke), 7, 8, 15, 28–­30, 64, 141, 175n3, 184n115, 184n116 Virginia Declaration of Rights, 51 Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), 40 virtue, Locke on, 4, 10, 12, 24, 46, 48, 83, 131, 178n29, 224n57 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger Jr.), 129–­30, 216n31 Voegelin, Eric, 151 Voting Rights Act, 142 Washington, Henry Augustine, 82 Washington Post, 139 Waterhouse, Benjamin, 48 Watts, Isaac, 23, 47, 179n45 Wayland, Francis, 62, 92, 213n62 Whigs, 42 Whitefield, George, 27 Williams, Elisha, 27, 184n114

Willoughby, Westel Woodbury, 112–­13 Wilson, Francis G., 129–­30, 152 Wilson, James, 54, 188n51 Wilson, Woodrow, 112 Witherspoon, John, 24, 56, 194n113 women: in civil society, 4, 6, 29–­30, 32, 42, 63, 117, 164, 184n120; as readers of Locke, 2, 9–­11, 30, 32, 42, 63–­64, 95, 134, 177n18 Wood, Gordon S., 148, 157, 224n55, 225n61 Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 100–­101 Works (Locke), 15, 17, 24, 28, 29, 42, 44, 45, 52, 63, 69, 177n14, 178n33, 179n46, 183n96, 189n58, 189n60, 192n88, 192n92 World War II, 122, 123, 127, 132, 138–­39, 145, 147 Wormeley, Ralph, 175n1 Yale University, 100, 149–­50; teaching of Locke, 21 Younger, J. Arthur, 140–­41 Zenger, John Peter, 17