The ‘1619 Project’ Is Bunk

Mass Slavery in America
Was Made in England!

John Locke: Godfather of the Confederacy

by Fred Haight

[Print version of this article]

In August 2019, the New York Times began to publish a series of essays called “The 1619 Project,” edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, that sought to redefine American history by placing the institution of slavery at its core.

The articles argued that the selling of some 20-odd African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia by a Dutch sea captain, who had stolen them from a Portuguese slave-ship, constituted the beginning of slavery in America, and that from then on, the country’s development was built on the backs of slaves. The articles make a disingenuous leap from that Jamestown incident to the entirely different, later plantation system, and insist that America has very little good about it, having depended on slavery from the beginning.

Fortunately, this kind of cancel-culture incompetence has been challenged, but here we make two larger points that have not been adequately addressed:

• Slavery in the American colonies before the turning point of the 1660 Restoration of the Monarchy in England, and after it, were two very different things. The Monarchy, with that 1660 Restoration, conspired to subjugate the American colonies. The same individuals and institutions conspired both to overturn the freedoms granted in the Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1629, and to create a new colony based on mass black African slavery—Carolina. These were two simultaneous prongs of the Monarchy’s determination to undermine the independence, economy, and morality of the American colonies.

• The New World was conceptualized as a place to build a better civilization, that could outflank a nobility and an oligarchy who were too deeply entrenched in Europe to be easily defeated. Slavery was not a component of the New World’s idea of labor. The New World’s idea was increase of the power of labor, which came from developing the skills and productivity of the people through discoveries in science and technology, and through education.

PART ONE
The American Colonies 1600–1660

Slavery differed before and after 1660 in American colonies. In 1649, there were some 300 slaves in Virginia, about 2% of the population. Though most Africans and African-Americans were slaves, they were allowed to raise livestock, farm the land, and make money. Some saved enough money to buy their freedom. They could achieve freedom through manumission, self-purchase, and sometimes baptism.

Slaves could often obtain a hearing in court. In 1656, Elizabeth Key sued for and won her freedom in a Virginia court, citing that her father was an Englishman who had had her baptized. A 1654 court decision allowed freed black slaves to buy their own slaves, which some did.

Here, we will compare slavery before the Restoration of the Monarchy, and after—in part by comparing the formation of colonies on the North American Continent (in Roman type face), to the dramatically different colonial process in the so-called West Indies (in italics).

• 1607: The Virginia Company of London establishes Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the Americas, named after King James I.

• 1610–11: William Shakespeare writes The Tempest, one of his last plays. It was likely based on William Strachey’s account of a “most dreadfull Tempest” and shipwreck in the Bermudas. At one point in the play, Ariel tells how Prospero called him “to fetch dew / From the still-vex’d Bermoothes.”

• 1619: The White Lion, a Dutch ship, unloads at Jamestown “Twenty and odd” slaves they had taken as plunder from a Portuguese ship. They had not been requested, but they were sold, as they would have been in many places in the world. To see that as the beginning of an America built on slavery, ignores the fact that by that time, over 500,000 African slaves had been shipped to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

• 1620: The Mayflower lands with 102 Pilgrim passengers and about 30 crew at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. There are no slaves on board.

• 1629: King Charles I of England grants the Massachusetts Bay colony a Charter, giving it a large degree of independence. The administration of the colony was to be elected by the colonists themselves and the colony would be allowed to govern itself so long as its laws aligned with those of England. Its legislature could pass laws that did not have to be approved in England.

• 1629: Barbados officially becomes a British colony. Initially, farms are small, and forced labor is limited, though intense. There were more European indentured servants, who were free when their debt was paid, than African slaves. Barbados also became a haven for escaping monarchists during the period of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1660.

• 1636: Barbados passes draconian laws institutionalizing slavery as racial, lifelong, and hereditary. Why? There was no pressing need for it at the time. They were preparing for something monstrous.

• 1640: The English Colonel James Drax of Barbados goes to Brazil, and purchases a large triple-roller sugar mill and several cauldrons. He then sets up large sugar plantations that, after a while, come to use 100–150 slaves each.

• 1641: The Massachusetts Bay Colony passes the first slave laws in America, the “Body of Liberties.” This document is often characterized as legalizing slavery, the first set of laws ever passed on the subject in the American colonies. The Body of Liberties actually restricted slavery to limited circumstances:

There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or captivitie amongst us unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel concerning such persons doeth morally require….

• 1630: English Puritan leader John Winthrop arrives in Salem and pronounced the Massachusetts colony “a city upon a hill,” a model for all the world. As its elected Governor, his colony soon has 20,000 residents; he brought over the most skilled people he could find, not slaves.

• 1638: Winthrop forms a militia, and responds to King Charles I’s attempt to revoke the Massachusetts Royal Charter:

If our patent be taken from us, the common people will here conceive that his majesty has cast them off, and that hereby they are freed from their allegiance and subjection, and will therefore be ready to confederate themselves under a new government, for their necessary safety and subsistence.

That sounds like an early Declaration of Independence.

• 1652: The colony of Rhode Island is the first to outlaw all forms of slavery.

PART TWO
The American Colonies from 1660

• 1660: The decrepit Stuart Monarchy is restored with King Charles II. The intent of the Restoration was empire, as was made clear by the terrible poet John Dryden, made Poet Laureate in 1668, in his 1660 “Astraea Redux” (The Stars Restored), subtitled, “A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Second Majesty Charles II”:

Abroad your empire shall no limits know,

But, like the sea, in boundless circles flow.

Your much-loved fleet shall, with a wide command,

Besiege the petty monarchs of the land:

And as old Time his offspring swallow’d down,

Our ocean in its depths all seas shall drown.

• The chaos of 1639–1660. The Crown loses control of its American colonies during a long period of turmoil. In 1639 The War of the Three Kingdoms breaks out, followed by the English Civil Wars in 1642. In 1649, King Charles I is executed and England becomes a Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. During most of that time, and especially the Interregnum 1649–1660, England has not been able to control its American colonies. Charles M. Andrews identified this in his British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622–1675 (1908):

The management of the colonies during the Interregnum was without unity or simplicity. Control was exercised by no single or continuous organ and according to no clearly defined or consistent plan. Colonial questions seemed to lie in many different hands and to be met in as many different ways. Delays were frequent and there can be little doubt that many important matters were laid aside and pigeon-holed.[fn_1]

Those colonies began to outproduce the mother country. Imperial powers always wish to keep their colonies as shippers of raw materials, while monopolizing manufacturing for themselves. But by 1647, the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts was outproducing any such mill in England.

As soon as the Restoration is accomplished, Charles II launches several projects.

• 1660: Charles founds the Royal African Company, which later becomes the largest trader in slavery in the world. Charles’ younger brother, the Duke of York (later King James II) is its head.

• 1660: King Charles creates the Council of Trade and the Council of Plantations (meaning colonies). Several of the powerful men who helped restore the monarchy—including Lord Berkeley of Stratton, Sir George Carteret, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, and Sir John Colleton—serve on both boards, and soon become Lords Proprietors of Carolina.

• 1661: The key player, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Lord Ashley, and later still the First Earl of Shaftesbury, becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer.

• 1661: The Militia Act gives Charles unprecedented authority to maintain a standing army.

• 1661: The Corporation Act allows Charles to purge English boroughs of officials who were “dissenters.” Other legislation places strict limits on the press and on public assembly.

• 1662: The Act of Uniformity creates controls in education.

• 1663: Eight wealthy noblemen petition Charles with a proposed Carolina Act. They seek to create a new colony in America to be named Carolina, that will stretch all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Those eight men were:

1. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper: the ringleader;
2. Sir George Monck: an army commander under Oliver Cromwell who switched allegiances and helped restore Charles;
3. Lord Berkeley of Stratton: an arch-monarchist;
4. Sir William Berkeley: His brother, also an arch-monarchist, and former governor of Virginia. He had been removed as governor with the 1649 execution of Charles I. Charles II immediately restored him as Governor in 1660.
5. Sir George Carteret: Became a Lord Proprietor of New Jersey;
6. Edward Hyde: First Earl of Clarendon; another staunch royalist;
7. Lord Craven;
8. Sir John Colleton: another key player, a plantation owner in Barbados.

And here is the catch. John Colleton’s son Sir Peter was also a planter in Barbados, and headed the newly formed Company of Barbadian Adventurers, to transport both plantation owners and their slaves from Barbados to Carolina, in a ship called Carolina, offering incentives to those owners who would take up the offer.

This was a ready-to-go plan to create a slave-based plantation economy in the American colonies.

The Barbadian sugar plantations were brutal. A slave, once on the plantation, could expect to live only 7–10 more years. The slave-owners could make fabulous profits, if they could ensure a steady replacement of slaves. As a larger labor force was needed, black slaves were imported in great numbers from Africa. They soon replaced indentured servants, and outnumbered the white population of Barbados.

• 1650s: Barbados was called “the richest colony in English America,” and led the world in sugar production; it was also a refuge for monarchists until the Restoration.

• 1662: Charles II marries Katherine of the Portuguese Braganza monarchy that had ruled Brazil since 1640.

• 1666: Over 24 years, the number of landowners in Barbados is forced down from 8,300 to 760, as the lucrative sugar plantations squeeze out everything else. Some Brazilian sugar barons move to Barbados and eventually set up their own plantations.

• 1685: Black African slaves now outnumber European settlers in Barbados four to one! Slave uprisings are put down. The white Europeans become so fearful, that they resort to branding in the face with a hot iron for the mildest opposition to a “Christian.” Barbados has to import food, as the landowners don’t wish to grow crops on land that could grow the more lucrative sugar cane.

Charles II’s Objectives

With the restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, Charles sets out a two-pronged attack on the American colonies. One was the export of the Barbadian model of cruel, mass-based slavery to the new colony of Carolina. The other is to repeal the long-standing freedoms of New England, especially Massachusetts.

See how they intermingle.

• 1660: The Massachusetts General Court is very much aware that the newly restored King does not mean them well, and fears the revocation of the colony’s independence. It immediately sends a petition to Charles:

To Supplicate your Majesty for your Gracious Protection of us in the continuance both of our Civil Privileges as well as our Religious Liberties, according to the Patent conferred upon this Plantation by your Royal Father....[fn_2]

• 1661: Virginia, having no clear laws on slavery, passes a Barbados-like law making slavery racial, and another in 1662 stating that slavery is inherited from the mother. This, again, is not based on the current situation in Virginia, but is done in preparation for what is planned for the near future.

One of the eight Lords Proprietor of Carolina, as noted, is Sir William Berkeley. He, a staunch monarchist, had been removed as Governor of Virginia after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. He was promptly reinstated in 1660 by King Charles II. As Governor he strongly opposes public education for everyone, claiming it will bring “disobedience, heresy and sects into the world”; he hates printing just as much. He personally supervises the passing of the 1662 law.

All of Virginia’s slave laws were modelled on those of Barbados, and those of the rest of the colonies were all modelled on Virginia’s.

• 1661–62: At the same time, a drive for freedom is escalating. The General Court of Connecticut, rightly worried about the possibility of revocation of its liberties, sends their Governor, John Winthrop, Jr. (son of Massachusetts’ John Winthrop) to England with £500 credit. With the aid of a few sympathetic Lords, Winthrop is able to secure the “Royal Charter of 1662,” which gives the Connecticut Colony an unprecedented degree of self-governance, almost completely independent of English influence, and merges the disparate plantations throughout the territory of Connecticut into one significantly larger, unified colony whose territory stretches to the Pacific Ocean.

Though the territorial grant was soon re-examined, the Charter’s lasting grant of virtual autonomy was so comprehensive that, following the American Revolution, Connecticut citizens simply made a few small modifications (namely, removing all references to the Crown) and continued using the Charter to govern the state until 1818.

• 1663: The Carolina Petition. (See above.)

• 1664: Charles issues secret orders to Col. Richard Nicholls and the other royal commissioners sent to New England, demanding that they bring:

the general disposing [of] that people to an entire submission and obedience to our government…. All designs of profit for the present seem unreasonable and may possibly obstruct the more necessary design upon their obedience and loyalty.

• 1664: Four royal commissioners arrive in New England in July 1664 and travel the region, attempting to renegotiate charters on terms favorable to the Crown and its Parliament, who were working to bring the colonies, especially puritan-led colonies, into line with the priorities of their new regime.

In the town of Hadley, Massachusetts, the pretext is seeking two men who had sat on the 1649 court that condemned Charles I to death, and had voted for his execution. Anyone helping to protect these regicides, is to be sentenced to death. A local official had protected the regicides, so the entire town was placed under threat.

• 1664–65: Boston, Hadley, and other towns, send more petitions to Charles II.

From the 1665 Petition from the Inhabitants of Hadley:

The king of heaven will give his poorest subject on Earth leave to challenge resolutely his right and not to let it go for frowns or threats. And why should we think that a just and gracious king on Earth will not do in like manner? We have right from God and man to choose our own governors, make and live under our own laws. Our liberty and privileges herein as men we prize and would hold as our lives. This makes us freemen and not slaves. Our privilege herein as Christians in regard of the kingdom, name, [and] glory of our God is far more precious than our lives….

These attempts to undermine the freedoms of New England were run out of the Council of Trade and the Council of Plantations, set up in 1660. Besides some of the future Carolina Lords Proprietors, Lord Willoughby, former Governor of Barbados, and Col. James Drax, who had introduced mass African slavery to Barbados through his sugar plantations, also sat on both Councils.

These two councils were simultaneously promoting the revocation of new England’s liberty, and a society based on mass black African slavery.

• 1664: The Dutch cede New Amsterdam to England. Charles II sends Edmund Andros, who had spent time in Barbados (and was married to the daughter of one of the Carolina Lords Proprietors, the Earl of Craven), to negotiate the handover. Later, Andros becomes Governor of New York. And he was one of the biggest investors in the reorganized Royal African Company, as it became the world’s largest trader of slaves. Still later, he was deployed to crush New England, as Governor.

• 1666: John Locke becomes personal assistant to Anthony Ashley Cooper/Shaftesbury.

• 1666–67: Instead of a foreign affairs advisor, Charles, who had to tread carefully, relies on a secretive five-man cabal whose initials spell CABAL. The second “A” stood for Ashley.

John Locke’s Carolina Constitutions

Anthony Ashley Cooper/Shaftesbury is the key operative, getting himself appointed to almost every colonial body:

• 1660: The Council of Trade and the Council of Plantations which he helped organize;

• 1661: Chancellor of the Exchequer;

• 1663: A Lord Proprietor of Carolina;

• 1670: A Lord Proprietor of the Bahamas along with most of the other Carolina Lords Proprietors;

• 1670: Deputy Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company (with Peter Colleton of Barbados);

• 1671: Governor of the Somers Isles Corporation which ran Bermuda;

• 1670: The new Council of Trade and Plantations;

• 1672: Lord Chancellor;

• 1672: Head of the revised new Council of Trade and Plantations, to which he appoints John Locke as Secretary;

• 1672: Shaftesbury became one of the largest investors when the Royal Africa Company was reorganized into the Royal African Company of England (RAC), soon to become the world’s largest shipper of slaves. John Locke invested on his advice, and Edmund Andros was one of the largest investors. The RAC primarily exported African slaves to England’s American colonies.

One of Shaftesbury’s biographers, K.H.D. Haley, said that Shaftesbury was the closest thing to a colonial minister that England had yet seen.

• 1667: Virginia’s General Assembly passes “An Act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.”

• 1669: John Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper/Shaftesbury plan the new colony of Carolina in great detail, before the first settlers arrive. Locke, the chief planner, administers the “Grand Modell” for the Province of Carolina. His urban plan provides detailed standards for block size, lot size, street width, and waterfront setbacks.

• 1669: Locke, under Shaftesbury’s direction, writes the bizarre and dictatorial Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (the “Grand Modell”), composed “in order to avoid too numerous democracy.”

They wrote it at the request of Peter Colleton’s Company of Barbadian Adventurers! The Barbadians were planning to set up a plantation society based on mass slavery, and they knew they would need dictatorial powers. They wanted it all in place first.

A few items from Locke’s 120 points (Constitutions) show that it was a strict hereditary oligarchy. Unusual titles were used, such as the native cazique, and Landgrave, so that it might not seem like England; but the core of this monolith was the Lords Proprietors themselves:

One. The eldest of the lords proprietors shall be palatine; and, upon the decease of the palatine, the eldest of the seven surviving proprietors shall always succeed him.

Two. There shall be seven other chief offices erected, viz: the admirals, chamberlains, chancellors, constables, chief justices, high stewards, and treasurers; which places shall be enjoyed by none but the lords proprietors, to be assigned at first by lot, and, upon the vacancy of any one of the seven great offices, by death or otherwise, the eldest proprietor shall have his choice of the said place.

Leet-men (serfs) were bound to give one-eighth of their crops in perpetuity, and could not leave their masters. Serfdom was hereditary:

Twenty-two. In every signiory, barony, and manor, all the leet-men shall be under the jurisdiction of the respective lords of the said signiory, barony, or manor, without appeal from him. Nor shall any leet-man or leet-woman have liberty to go off from the land of their particular lord and live anywhere else, without license obtained from their said lord, under hand and seal.

Twenty-three. All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations.

Twenty-six. Whoever is lord of leet-men, shall, upon the marriage of a leet-man or leet-woman of his, give them ten acres of land for their lives; they paying to him therefor not more than one-eighth part of all the yearly produce and growth of the said ten acres.

Negro slaves are to have freedom of worship, but not of their persons:

One hundred and seven. Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them shall think best, and, therefore, be as fully members as any freeman. But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in the same state and condition he was in before.

One hundred and ten. Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.

• 1670: With these “Constitutions,” the Lords Proprietors issue The Barbados Proclamation. They provide a frigate, the Carolina, offering free land to those who relocate to Carolina, including 100 extra acres for each servant brought. The first permanent colony of Carolina begins, near modern-day Charleston. Within a short period of time, 50% of the population of Carolina is Barbadian. The first slaves come from Barbados, not Africa.

Why did they wait so long after the 1663 Carolina petition? Perhaps they feared slave rebellions (which had already occurred in San Domingo), and were not going to make their move until Locke’s Constitutions gave them a sense of security.

Barbados/Carolina vs. The Rest

Now, the two prongs of the Restoration Monarchy’s attack on the American colonies can be seen to be a one. The revocation of the liberties of New England, and its return to monarchical autocracy, is matched by the design for Carolina as an oligarchical dictatorship. It’s not only slavery. Serfdom is re-introduced.

• 1670: On Shaftesbury’s advice, Charles creates the new and secretive Council of Trade and Plantations, with only a few members.

British historian and Shaftesbury biographer K.H.D. Haley quoted a member at a 1671 meeting of that Council regarding Massachusetts:

Our fear there, was of their altogether taking from dependence on this nation ... some of our Council were for sending them a menacing letter ... which those who understood the touchy and peevish nature of that colony were utterly against.

The Council was charged to recommend colonial laws to the King and Privy Council for approval or rejection, Haley says. Yet the Council did not do so. “A possible means of control, was thus neglected.”

• 1672: That Council of Trade and Plantations is replaced with a new one, under the personal control of Shaftesbury, with John Locke as his secretary. Its meetings are held in secret.

Colonial historian Charles McLean Andrews, who collected the letters and speeches of Anthony Ashley Cooper, wrote:

During the years 1668 and 1669 no member of the government was more active in promoting the development of the plantations than Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. As one of the proprietaries of Carolina, he had taken the lead in advancing that settlement, had called upon John Locke to frame a new constitution, and had himself organized the expedition of 1669 which gave to the new colony its most important impetus. He became a proprietary of the Bahamas in 1670 and later attempted to found a plantation on the Edisto River….[fn_3]

It is noteworthy that the sessions of the Council were held in secret, no one being admitted except members, and even those only after each had taken an oath not to betray the proceedings:

You shall swear, to be true and faithful to our Sovereign Lord the King, his heirs and successors; you shall according to the best of your skill, discretion, knowledge, and experience give unto his Majtie true and faithful councell, in all things that shall be demanded of you touching or concerning his Maties forreigne Plantations. You shall keepe secret and conceale his Maties said Councells, without disclosing the same to any person except he be of the same Councill, and if the matter touch any of the same Councill you shall not disclose the same to him. You shall not promote or further any matter in the said Councill, for any reward, favour, affection, or displeasure. And in case you shall perceive anything to be done contrary to his Maties honour and service you shall to the utmost of your Power with stand and Lett the same.…

Historian Andrews commented:

The most noteworthy difference between the two councils is to be found in the instructions, which for the Council of 1672 form a very comprehensive and intelligent statement of the essentials of plantation control. The draft was undoubtedly written by Shaftesbury and Locke, for a preliminary sketch is to be found among the Shaftesbury Papers; the preliminary meeting for the consideration and approval of the articles was held at Shaftesbury’s residence, Exeter House; and the essential portions of the document are all to be found embodied in one form or another in the instructions and suggestions sent to the planters in the Bahamas and Carolina, colonies which for two years had been a kind of experimental station for Shaftesbury’s and Locke’s ideas.

In recommending the appointment of governors and other officials, passing upon colonial laws, scrutinizing nominations as of colonial councillors, corresponding with the governors, organizing an efficient system of communication and supervision in all matters touching trade and commerce, and in making reports to the King in Council,—in short, in the control and management of colonial affairs, the Council of 1672 placed the British colonial policy on a broader and more comprehensive foundation than had hitherto been laid and inaugurated a more thorough system of colonial control than had been established by any of its predecessors.

Intermezzo: Was Profit the Motive?

King Charles II had called for bringing the colonies into submission, and warned that profit should not be permitted to be the driving motivation. But the usual excuses made for the creation of a slave-based economy in Carolina are based on the profit motive.

That doesn’t quite make sense. The richest of the American colonies was Massachusetts, which only had a handful of slaves and outlawed slavery with the Quock Walker legal decision in 1781. Massachusetts was based on skilled labor. In 1630 John Winthrop had brought over people of every skill.

As Barbados ran out of room, England looked to other of its Caribbean colonies such as Jamaica, and later Guyana, to produce the most lucrative crop, sugar. Carolina was too far north to grow sugar. Why then, was it a priority? Rice eventually did become profitable, but when? The rice strain that became Carolina Gold, and did make them rich, was not introduced until 1685. What were they doing from 1670 to 1685?

Some historians insist that the colony fared poorly until about 1700, when they began to prioritize importing the Gullah people from West Africa as slaves. The Gullah people had been growing rice for 3,000 years, and had the skills necessary for that demanding crop. Their decadent and lazy white owners were not up to the task. In fact, it is reported that at first, the Gullah-Geechee rice-masters were finished with their work by noon, and their masters did not know what to do with them. So much for the value of slave labor. It was African skilled labor that made rice work.

The Gullah-Geechee people have a rich culture of speech, music and cuisine that is still vibrant today, far more so than the boring mansions of the white oligarchy.

John Locke’s Continued Role

• 1672: War with the Dutch prevents Shaftesbury’s Council from acting against the American colonies.

• 1674: Charles II appoints the infamous Edmund Andros to become Governor of New York.

• 1675: Charles replaces Shaftesbury’s Council of Trade and Plantations with the Lords of Trade and Plantations. Shaftesbury has fallen from grace, but two Carolina Lords Proprietors, the Earl of Craven and Lord Berkeley, are still on the new Council.

• 1680: After the death of George Carteret, the Carolina Lord Proprietor who was Governor of New Jersey, Edmund Andros tries to take over the province. Fortunately, he fails, and Quaker William Penn buys out Carteret’s widow.

• 1681: Attacks on literacy and great art increase in England. Theater, including Shakespeare, had been banned during the Commonwealth period (1649–1660). Nahum Tate (later Poet Laureate) rewrites Shakespeare’s King Lear to give it a “happy ending.” Performances of Shakespeare’s plays become degenerate, even pornographic.

• 1682: William Penn achieves a grant to found a new province, Pennsylvania. He welcomes people from all faiths and all countries to live in freedom. This included so-called “Quakers,” “Pietists,” and Mennonites.

• 1685: By this time, black African slaves outnumber white settlers 4:1 in Barbados. In Carolina, the slave population is increasing.

• 1686: Andros is sent to be Governor of a combined Dominion of New England. The Lords of Trade and Plantations insists that he rule without an Assembly, just himself and his Council. He seeks to revoke the charters of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Andros is also one of the largest investors in the reorganized Royal African Company, which becomes the world’s largest shipper of slaves.

• 1688: Francis Daniel Pastorius founds Germantown, Pennsylvania. He authors the Germantown Quaker Petition against Slavery, the first by a religious body against slavery in the Thirteen Colonies.

• 1688–89: The “Glorious Revolution” installs Holland’s William of Orange as King of England, supplanting the Stuart dynasty.

• 1689: Locke’s famous denunciation of slavery in his Two Treatises on Government is a fraud, merely an endorsement of the “Glorious Revolution.” He identifies slavery as “absolute monarchy,” such as that of the Stuarts, and never mentions black African slavery, or his own role in it.

• 1689–90: Locke, who had promoted the idea of human beings as “property,” publishes his Essay on the Human Understanding, insisting that the mind begins as a “tabula rasa,” a blank slate, with no preconceived ideas or morals.

• 1696: The English Parliament passes a new Navigation Act and Locke gets appointed as a Commissioner of Trade to help enforce it. The Act explicitly bars the colonies from trading with Scotland and Ireland, or any foreign countries, “unless the same have been first landed in the kingdom of England ... and paid the rates and duties ... under the penalty of the forfeiture of the ship and goods....”

• 1699: The English Parliament passes the Woolen Act, which prohibits the export of all woolen products from America, along with other measures designed to suppress colonial manufacturing and force the colonies to remain a source of cheap raw materials for the mother country. As Locke had so inelegantly put it, 30 years earlier:

All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men and so to all generations.

Carolina Model Resisted

• 1700: England leads the world’s trade in slavery, shipping some 20,000 a year, mostly to its own colonies.

• 1704: Gottfried Leibniz counters Locke with his New Essays on the Human Understanding, which, unfortunately, is published only much later. The Locke-Leibniz debate is at the heart of what America will become.

• 1705: Virginia’s General Assembly passes the “Act concerning Servants and Slaves,” a series of brutal slave laws modeled on those of Barbados:

All servants imported and brought into the country by sea or land who were not Christians in their native country … shall be accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to Christianity afterward….

All Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within this dominion ... shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction ... the master shall be free of all punishment, as if such accident never happened.

• 1708: 31.5% of the population of Carolina is black African slaves. Another 15% are “Indians,” so about half of the population was enslaved.

• 1712: Carolina divides into North and South—North Carolina lacks the marshland suitable for rice or indigo.

• 1713: The Treaty of Utrecht cedes French L’Acadie (today’s Maritime provinces of Canada) to the British. It also gave the British the Asiento de Negros, the right to ship slaves to the Spanish colonies. The South Seas Company takes up the idea, and tens of thousands of ordinary British citizens invest in it, hoping to make a fortune from the slave trade.

• 1720: The South Sea bubble bursts. Stocks fall to a tenth of their former value. Multitudes of ordinary people find themselves bankrupt and are cast into the merciless debtors’ prisons in England.

• 1722: Civil libertarian James Edward Oglethorpe becomes a member of Parliament, fights to end the press gangs and manages to free thousands from debtors’ prisons. His father Theophilus is a close friend of William Penn; both were charged with treason under Queen Mary, widow and successor of William of Orange. Oglethorpe’s mother was in the court of Queen Anne and is praised by Jonathan Swift.

• 1724: 69.5% of the population of South Carolina are now black African slaves. This is new in the English-American colonies! The Brazil model has been deliberately transported, via Barbados, to the North American English colonies.

• 1732: James Edward Oglethorpe personally founds the colony of Georgia, which bans slavery, welcomes oppressed Jews and Lutherans, and promotes good relations with the “Indians.” He is determined to defeat the Carolina model, and prove that a successful southern colony can be built without slaves.

The music of George Frideric Handel plays into this fight for civil rights. Handel donates his personal proceeds from his oratorio, Messiah, to Foundling Hospital in London, one of the first true charities in a cruel and merciless England. “Foundling” does not mean “orphan”; it means babies found abandoned on street corners. The founder of the hospital was sea captain Thomas Coram, who was also one of Oglethorpe’s Georgia Trustees.

Handel dedicated a seven-part Anthem to that hospital which ends with the Hallelujah Chorus. Lord John Percival, English patron of the Georgia project, was a great fan of Handel. When Oglethorpe brought native Americans to England, he made sure they attended concerts of Handel.

Epilogue

The British Empire’s drive for world domination escalated with the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In that war it drove the French out of North America and India, and immediately resumed the campaign to reverse American freedoms with the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), etc., escalating into the American Revolution. There is an overriding theme here, of an American fight for freedom from Empire, from its very foundations.

This battle, between oligarchical and republican forces in both England and the American colonies, is relatively unknown. This author believes it is critical to establishing our true history and identity, and awaking from the Rip van Woke nightmare.

Contact the author at fhaight@gmail.com.

For Further Reading

Fred Haight, “The Proprietors of Carolina: John Locke and the Introduction of Mass African Slavery in the Americas to Undermine ‘Republican’ Culture,” EIR Vol. 48, No. 2, Jan. 8, 2021, pp. 30–42, here.

Fred Haight, “Georgia vs. South Carolina: The Battle Over Slavery in the American South,” EIR Vol. 35, No. 12, March 21, 2008, pp. 62–71, here.

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