Glausser, Wayne : Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century
( University Press of Florida, 1998)
"Locke participated in the institutions of slavery in two basic ways. First, he invested in slave-trading companies. Second, he acted as secretary and, to some degree, policy advisor to three different groups involved in the affairs of the American colonies, including the provision and regulation of slaves.
Facts about the investments are solid enough, if not complete. (Investment records in the seventeenth century were often discarded after a transaction was finished.) Locke put money in two companies whose commercial activities depended on slavery: the Royal African Company and a company of adventurers formed to develop the Bahaman Islands. The first of these was explicitly a slave-trading enterprise. Locke invested six hundred pounds in the Royal African Company, shortly after its formation in 1672. Ashley had invested two thousand pounds, which made him the third largest investor. Locke's investment, then, was no inconsequential matter, either to the company or to Locke, who was always careful with his money.
The Royal African Company was formed in 1672 to trade along the West Coast of Africa and primarily to provide the slaves considered indispensable by planters in America. It was chartered to replace the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa, which had proved unsuccessful in its ten years of operation. The new company included more businessmen and fewer nobles and was determined to attend more to profits than to subtle affairs of state. Certainly Locke was the sort of investor they sought; and Ashley, despite being a nobleman, had a great interest in the mercantile practicalities of American plantations. Ashley as a young man had owned acreage and slaves in Barbados, as well as a fourth share in the Rose, a slave-trading ship.
The new Royal African Company named him sub-governor, a post which he held through 1673, and until 1677 he served in its Court of Assistants. No doubt Locke and Ashley looked carefully both at the company's charter--which granted a monopoly for the trade of "Gold, Silver, Negroes, Slaves," and any other minor Guinea goods--and at a report of its first year's activities, which mentions gold, elephants' teeth, and a few other items but places by far the greatest emphasis on slave shipping and slave factories. The slaves, this report assures, "are sent to all his Majesty's American Plantations, which cannot subsist without them." The Royal African Company fared better than its predecessor, although it was never successful enough to justify its monopoly, and it had trouble meeting the considerable demand for slaves. Ashley sold his stock in 1677 for a reasonable profit, and no doubt Locke did likewise, although not necessarily at the same time.
Locke also invested in a company of Bahamas adventurers. Here again he was collaborating with Ashley. Ashley and five other Carolina proprietors had been granted the Bahaman Islands, and in 1672 they formed a company with eleven "Adventurers to Bahamas" to pursue development. Locke was one of the eleven adventurers. He initially invested one hundred pounds; before long he doubled his share by taking over the hundred-pound investment of his friend John Mapletoft. Fox Bourne calculates that Locke thus "became altogether responsible for a ninth" of the project and guesses that he actually spent much more than two hundred pounds.
We know only a few details about Locke's Bahamas adventure, but some historical background can help. In A History of the Bahamas, Michael Craton explains the terms of the proprietors' grant: they were to stimulate planting and trading of profitable crops, in a colony that had been struggling under Spanish and then English rule. The plantations supported by Locke and the other adventurers were using slaves, of course. Craton cites a 1671 census of the islands recording 443 slaves out of a total population of 1,097. Another document has been found, from about the time of the adventurers, computing the "expense of settling and improving the Bahama Islands for the first three years." According to this estimate, three hundred families would need to bring along six hundred slaves (costing thirty pounds each) and to "trade for 4,000 negroes per annum, being 8,000 for the first two years . . . at 25 pounds per head." The adventurers were evidently not up to these stakes, and planters in the Bahamas complained that the proprietors and their company provided insufficient support. Locke and his patron, however, remained interested in the Bahamas. Shaftesbury tried to bolster planters' confidence with plans for new crops and a hereditary nobility. Locke attended to Bahamian matters for some years, and apparently at one point he was considering a more active involvement in planting. This can be inferred from a letter to Locke from his friend Sir Peter Colleton, a West Indies planter: "I find I am your partner in the Bahama trade which will turn to accompt if you meddle not with planting, but if you plant otherwise then for provizion for your factor you will have your whole stock drowned in a plantation and bee never the better for it . . . If other men will plant there, I mean the Bahamas, hinder them not, they improve our province, but I would neither have you nor my lord ingadge in it." Fox Bourne interprets the letter as Colleton discouraging Locke from managing a full plantation at a great distance; Craton reads it differently and infers that Locke had inquired about moving to the Bahamas as a planter. Either way, Locke apparently entertained notions of increasing his moderate but serious participation in American planting and trade.
His second kind of participation in the institutions of slavery called for investments of time rather than money. Locke held three relevant administrative positions: secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, and commissioner of the Board of Trade.
In the first of these positions he helped Ashley and seven other noblemen who had been granted proprietorship of Carolina in 1663. Locke acted as a secretary for them and probably as an advisor--but to what extent remains uncertain. The most significant document in the Carolina papers is the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which sets out an interesting mixture of liberal policies and restrictive social hierarchies. A scheme of nobility was invented; Locke was granted the second highest rank of "Landgrave" and fortyeight thousand acres that came with the title. Most relevant to our discussion is a provision that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slave of what opinion or religion soever" ( Works, 10:196). The proprietors thus clarified that the religious freedom granted Carolina slaves did not imply another sort of freedom. Scholars have variously proposed that Locke (a) authored the entire Carolina constitution (there is a manuscript in Locke's hand, and many editions of his work include it); (b) had no part in it, except as amanuensis; and (c) effectively coauthored it with Ashley. Most recent scholars have argued for this third conclusion, which seems the most plausible, given the two men's respect for each other.
But did Locke endorse the slavery clause? There is evidence that he disagreed with at least one other clause, establishing the Church of England; so some would like to assume a similar objection to the slavery clause. Such an objection seems unlikely, however. Not only did he go on to make the slave investments already described, but in the much later commentaries to St. Paul, Locke carefully restated the distinction between religious and civil freedom articulated in the Carolina constitution. According to the constitution, slaves are free to attend the church of their choice, "but yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before." Here is part of Locke's paraphrase of St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:20-24: "Christianity gives not anyone any new privilege to change the state . . . which he was in before. Wert thou called, being a slave? . . . In whatsoever state a man is called, in the same he is to remain, notwithstanding any privileges of the gospel, which gives him no dispensation, or exemption, from any obligation he was in before"; to which he adds this commentary: "The thinking themselves freed by Christianity, from the ties of civil society and government, was a fault, it seems, that those Christians were very apt to run into" ( Works 8:116). Apparently Locke could endorse the Carolina slavery clause without qualms, even if he did not himself compose it.
Locke's other two offices were government appointments. In 1673 he became secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, a position he held for over a year. As secretary he had to correspond with proprietors, governors, planters, merchants, and anyone else connected with the colonies who brought a complaint, made a proposal, or held useful information. Much of the council's work went toward expediting the triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and manufactured goods. One of the council's directives was to oversee the provision of slaves and to investigate disputes between the chartered slaving company and the American plantations. (As we have seen, Locke held investments on both sides of such disputes; putting him in an interested but neutral position.) For over a year, then, Locke spent much of his time immersed in these matters. But it is difficult to say how actively he contributed to the council's decisions: "In all the voluminous correspondence . . . [there is nothing] to show how far he acted merely as a secretary, and how far he initiated the proceedings that he had to direct." There is no such uncertainty about Locke's second stint as colonial administrator. In 1696, he took office as a commissioner of the new Board of Trade, created to solve problems such as poor colonial government, piracy, and abused or ineffective trade regulations. In this position he was unquestionably an active policy-maker. Cranston concludes that "documents of the Board of Trade make abundantly clear, that Locke was the leading Commissioner in nearly everything which was undertaken." This opinion has been reinforced by Peter Laslett, who emphasizes Locke's contribution to the board's formation and early policies. He served until 1700, when he became too ill to continue.
