Episode Details

Before he was the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution or the intellectual father of the Declaration of Independence, John Locke was a thirty-seven-year-old physician who had published nothing — and who, in 1669, sat down at his patron’s direction and wrote the most ambitious constitution in the history of English colonial America. The proprietors called it the Grand Model. This episode tells the story of that document and the mind that made it: the silver tube that bound Locke to his patron, the consent-based political philosophy he was only beginning to work out, and the rigid feudal hierarchy he designed for the Carolina wilderness — landgraves, cas-siques, a palatine, hereditary estates of forty-eight thousand acres.

At its heart is the gap between what Locke designed and what Carolina became. He drafted a rigid, almost frozen society — a hereditary nobility, a class of bound leet-men, a palatine ruling from above, the most advanced religious-tolerance guarantee in the English colonies, and the legal framework of a slave economy, all of it set down before a single settler arrived. The colonists kept what served them — the assembly, the tolerance, the land — and threw the rest away. The Grand Model failed as a constitution. But the political philosophy Locke worked out while writing it, government by consent and natural rights, would outlive the document, outlast the colony, and a century later furnish the language of the Declaration of Independence.