John Locke and North Carolina’s Constitution (1669)

• John Locke, one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment, is generally regarded as one of the originators of the modern doctrines of religious tolerance and representative government.  Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the proprietors of North Carolina, was a close friend of Locke and enlisted his assistance in writing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) to replace much of the original charter. 

• The Lockean constitution was an odd mix of feudal and Enlightenment principles.  It provided for broad freedom of religion and gave the colony one of the most liberal suffrage provisions of the colonial era:  anyone who owned 50 acres could vote and anyone who owned 500 acres could hold office (in the thinly-populated colony, it was not overly difficult to meet such qualifications).

• On the other hand, the constitution enshrined a rigid social hierarchy of “landgraves” (large landowners), “caciques” (smaller landowners), landless workers reduced largely to serfdom, and slaves.  The Lockean constitution did not sit well with the yeoman farmers and workers who were rapidly filling up the colony; it was never ratified by the North Carolina assembly and was largely abandoned by 1700.

The Coastal Upper South’s Revolutionary Constitutions

• At the beginning of the American Revolution (1776), all four coastal Upper South colonies enacted constitutions in order to provide a basic governmental framework for their new existence as independent states.  The constitutions were an important leap forward: they rejected the English tradition of an unwritten constitution shaped by custom and judge-made laws. Constitutions would now be in writing for all to see, changeable only by formal action of the whole people through their legislatures or through constitutional conventions.

• All four states accepted Thomas Jefferson’s view that there should be no state involvement with religion, a view embodied in Virginia’s 1786 Statute of Religious Freedom (see above).  They did not put aside religion entirely, however:  the constitutions referred to religious freedom for Christians and did not say if such freedom would be extended to Jews and other non-Christians.  Like the New England colonies (see § __), Maryland levied taxes to support religion, but unlike New England it allowed each taxpayer to designate the denomination to which the funds would go or, alternatively, to direct that the funds be used for poor relief.

• The coastal Upper South states expanded the right to vote only modestly during the Revolution:  all four states retained some property qualifications for voting.  Unlike other colonies, all four provided that their governors would be elected by the legislature rather than the people directly.