Locke, 'Some Americans', and the Discourse on 'Carolina'

Abstract


 
 
 The human inhabitants of ‘the whole great Continent of America’ (IV. xii. 11) captured the imagination of John Locke. They provided, so he thought, historical evidence for a state of nature and ‘a Pattern of the first Ages’ of government (II. 108). They falsified scholastic philosophies of innate ideas and innate principles. They forced a confrontation between cultural diversity and Christian religion. They dramatized the effect of environment and education, proving ‘Custom, a greater power than Nature’ (I. iii. 25). The inhabitants of America were not alone in provoking Locke on these matters, but their anthropological gravity can be felt amidst the other forces of influence on his philosophy and politics. Locke’s selective use of information about ‘Americans’ or ‘Indians’ is evident and fairly well documented in the case of the Two Treatises of Government. However, his attention to peoples of the New World in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding has received far less notice. Moreover, Locke’s references to individual Americans or particular Indian peoples in the Essay, its drafts, or his colonial memoranda have gone nearly unnoticed. And no student of Locke’s life and works has heretofore identified ‘some Americans, I have spoken with’ (II. xvi. 6). Thirty-five years ago, Roland Hall first took serious notice of this remarkable passage in the Essay, when putting the query, ‘When did this occur?’ Daniel Carey has more recently observed: ‘When and where these conver-sations took place remains a mystery’. Moreover, until now, the speakers themselves have remained mysterious. Identifying these various Americans serves historical, biographical, and textual interests in the study of Locke and the early colonial experiment in the New World. It casts new light on Locke—as theorist, reader, and administrator. It deepens our understanding of his anthropo-logical curiosity and philosophical fixation on language; sheds further light on his sources, in print and out; and invites further speculation about his colonial propaganda as (principal) author of the chapter-length ‘discourse’ on ‘Carolina’ in the atlas of America by John Ogilby. It also reinforces the interpretation of Locke’s writing as genre- driven and problem-oriented, given the different and perhaps inconsistent uses to which he put Indians in his various texts.