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’s first ten charges, the king is accused of refusing to accept the laws of the colonies, interfering with the operations of the colonies, supplanting colonial law with his own dictates, and dissolving representative legislatures—that is, an obvious plan of subjugation against the colonists by means of usurpation, abuse, obstruction, and neglect. Indeed, under the Declaration’s sixth charge, the Founders assert that whatever authority the king once had over the colonies has already been dissolved. “[T]he legislative powers … have returned to the people at large for their exercise.…” By Locke’s standards, the charges provided more than enough evidence of tyranny and validation for revolution. The remaining seventeen charges accuse the king of waging war against the colonies, making his own government illegitimate and allegiance to it self-defeating. After all, men adhere to governments that have as their purpose the preservation and protection of their inalienable rights.

EXAMPLE 6

Locke’s writings also include emphatic condemnations of slavery. Slavery conflicted with Locke’s view of liberty, rights, labor, and property. In the first sentence of the first chapter of the First Treatise of Government, Locke writes bluntly, “Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less Gentleman, should plead for’t” (1, 1).

In the Second Treatise, Locke elaborates on slavery’s perniciousness. “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’ This nobody has any right to but himself. The ‘labor’ of his body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by his labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this ‘labor’ being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others” (5, 16).

Locke also observed, “The Natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of Nature for his rule. The liberty of man in society is to be under no legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the domination of any will, restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact according to the trust put in it.… [F]reedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it. A liberty to follow my own will in all things where the rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint by the law of Nature” (4, 21). “For a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot by compact or his own consent enslave himself to anyone, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another to take away his life when he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has himself, and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give that power over it” (4, 22).

Although Jefferson was a slaveholder, his original draft of the Declaration included a charge against the king for his promotion of slavery, which was removed by Congress in the Declaration’s final version because of objections by members from Georgia and South Carolina. However, Jefferson’s original version provided that “he [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of