Private Property
Its role in the (early) history of the U.S.
The Declaration of Independence, essentially written by Thomas Jefferson, in its second sentence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That sentence is one of the best-known sentences in all of Western literature, and rightly so. Where did it come from? Was Jefferson the creator of the sentence? To answer these questions requires going just a bit deeper into history. What follows is based on the early pages of Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States.1
When English sailors arrived in the New World at the beginning of the 17th century, they were somewhat late to the colonization game. The Spanish and the French had already long had settlers in North America, and the Portuguese more or less had control of the West African coastline. At that time, just 150 years before the Declaration, as Lepore puts it, “[T]he king’s subjects on both sides of the ocean believed that men were created unequal and that God had granted to their king the right to rule over them” (Lepore, p. 34). That’s a long way from what Jefferson wrote.
By the end of the 17th century (1690, to be precise), John Locke argued that “all men are born into a state ‘of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another’” (Lepore, quoting Locke, p. 34). This is a broad statement, one that most of us today would agree with. But Locke didn’t stop with this statement; he believed that, without government, this state of equality would not continue. Curiously, he specifically applied this to the status of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Locke evaluated Indigenous peoples as (1) having been born completely free, but as (2) not having personal property (so he thought), which is a signal that they had no government. The second part of his evaluation was a huge misunderstanding of Native Americans and their culture(s), but it was a necessary argument that led to much of what he, and those who followed him, believed. In Lepore’s summary, “A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property [my emphasis]” (p. 54).
Therefore, a people who do not have private property do not have a government and therefore can be made subject to another group of peoples’ government—namely, the rule of the English invaders/colonists. Furthermore, the fact that American Indigenous peoples generally did not practice much agriculture (not in the way that the English did, at any rate) meant that they had not “joyned with the rest of Mankind” (Locke). In effect, they had abandoned the natural equality with which they had been born.
In Locke’s time, and before, slavery could be justified by the English if persons were captured due to war, which the English entered into with the Indigenous peoples when the latter, as happened frequently early on, reacted by waging war on the English colonists. Any captured Indigenous peoples were liable to be enslaved, legally, as far as the political theorists of the time thought, because they resisted English rule.
This principle was extended to Blacks and the importation of slaves from Africa (which the English came to later, after the Spanish, especially): owning slaves—human beings—was acceptable because this was a function of government, not of nature; it was “a state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive” (Locke, quoted by Lepore, p. 55).
Today, this reads as nothing short of rationalization, as justification for a practice that the privileged (land-owners) wanted access to and wanted to continue. But at the time, for Locke, this made perfect sense, as it did for many of the founders of the U.S., who were deeply influenced by Locke.
But back to the matter of that second sentence of the Declaration.
It’s well known that the founders of the U.S., including the writers and thinkers (including Jefferson, of course) who penned the Declaration and then the Constitution were all land-owning White men. They certainly didn’t want to be under England’s rule any longer, and the Declaration Jefferson drafted reflects their perspective, but certainly not the perspective of the vast majority of inhabitants of the colonies at the time: ca. 75% of the colonists who came to the new world from the British Isles were either debtors or convicts or indentured servants, and none of these people owned property and, as Lepore notes, they certainly were not free (p. 56). Originally, only White men who owned land could vote, and this requirement took a very long time to expunge, well into the late 19th century and beyond.
So: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It turns out that the phrase that everyone of Jefferson’s day knew was “life, liberty, and the protection of property.” The latter was Locke’s phrasing of the purpose of government. The protection of property had long been a concern of the privileged, because property was wealth, whether it was land itself, which frequently was the major source of wealth, or goods of variable value such as precious metals and furs and textiles and raw materials. That concern stretched back to Medieval times (and beyond), when only a very few were wealthy—the barons, the dukes, and so on—because they held all the land and the best that others could hope for was to work for a pittance (food and water) on those lands, producing ever more wealth for the land-owner.
When Jefferson substituted “pursuit of happiness” for “protection of property”—a choice he never explained, so far as I can tell—he was not abandoning the old principle; instead, his goal was to include “protection of property” as a utilitarian thing: it was needed in order to secure the means of pursuing happiness, which he and others believed came with wealth. Wealth meant that one could be happy, one could buy the things that made one happy. The idea that “pursuit of happiness” could extend to anyone other than landed White men was hardly in anyone’s mind.
How does this factor into 21st-century American life?
The idea that taking another person’s life or depriving them of liberty (enslaving them) is permissible is no longer a part of American society, even though it was acceptable in 1776 despite the Declaration’s statement. That is, we for the most part no longer believe that anyone needs to own property to be protected by the government or to take part in the government. We believe that our government’s job is to protect all peoples’ life, liberty, and opportunity.
We also believe that the government should help to bring order to society and should protect our personal property. But we no longer believe that not owning land somehow reduces our rights as persons.2 Even so, we don’t want others to steal our property.
It should nonetheless be clear that the idea of the right to personal property derives from (in the case of English law and, therefore, U.S. law) Medieval times, when property ownership and wealth went hand in hand. This is a stark contrast with Indigenous peoples in the Americas, who certainly did have some moveable personal property (such as tipi, blankets, hides) but who did not consider any single individual as owning land. This clash of cultures—English colonists believing in the private ownership of land and wealth and Indigenous peoples believing in communal and/or tribal “ownership” of land (at the least)3—did not end well for Indigenous peoples, as is well known.
What’s the legacy? I’ve not attempted to do a survey of any kind of the laws on U.S. federal and state books, but I’m guessing that the vast majority of our laws have to do with property and its protection. We certainly do care about life and liberty, but we still adhere to Locke’s (and, therefore, Jefferson’s) belief that property was the key to happiness.
Is it?
Land, a primary form of property, is almost always not communal. Families own houses, farms, and so on. (And, nowadays, yes, corporations do, too, which shows that capitalism is increasingly encroaching.) The “American dream” is to own one’s own house, yard, lawnmower, and so on. This can be a source of happiness, but it also is a strong form of individualism, something that the founders also believed in. At the same time, is it any wonder that we suffer from a lack of commitment to the common good, and that the common good is frequently seen as in opposition to my property rights.
Finally, I’d note that this seems to be one more evidence that we are wrong to enshrine the Founders’ ideas as so inspired that we dare not consider updating anything they wrote or thinking that they got everything precisely right, that their words were adequate for all time. They themselves believed that change was both necessary and inevitable,4 and our nation is poorer because we have enshrined those original principles as the Founders understood them as guiding lights for the 21st century (or even the 19th).
Thanks to my brother John for the Christmas gift of the book; he knows that I love history, and I’m grateful. Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University, and she writes both academic works and more accessible works related to American history. We live in a time when knowing our past as a country may be more important than ever before.
There seem to be a few people on the extreme right who want to bring back the idea that only property-owners should be able to vote. I don’t think there’s much chance of our country moving in that direction; but there is a small minority that would like to disenfranchise non-property-owners.
Whether Indigenous peoples even thought about land ownership is at least open to question. They used the land, but with a deep sense of dependence on it that wasn’t primarily concerned with what we think of as “ownership.”
Jefferson famously argued that the Constitution should be rewritten or revised once each generation.
Thank you for this. I totally agree with what you’ve said. I didn’t know that the founders, or Jefferson, thought the constitution needed updated every generation. Somehow that part got missed by many.