The Carolina Charter of the Barbados Barons

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), English statesman and Carolina proprietor, commissioned the Fundamental Constitutions with his secretary John Locke in 1669. Shaftesbury envisioned a hierarchical colonial society with absolute property rights in enslaved persons—a vision that contradicted Locke's later *Second Treatise of Government* (1689) and exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of Enlightenment liberalism. The document bears Shaftesbury's ambition and Locke's pen; neither man resolved the contradiction between natural rights philosophy and chattel slavery.

The Fundamental Constitutions was not a machine but a legal apparatus—a system of property law designed to maximize planter wealth and labor control. Its engineering lay in the stacking of jurisdictions: proprietors at the apex held ultimate land title; planters held hereditary estates; enslaved persons were classified as real property (like land itself), heritable and saleable. The document borrowed from Barbados slave codes (particularly the 1661 *Barbados Slave Code*) and from English feudal precedent, creating a hybrid that made slavery not incidental but foundational to colonial order. The charter's brilliance—and its moral catastrophe—was its legal precision: it anticipated every argument a slaveholder might need, from perpetual bondage to racial descent, decades before race-based slavery hardened into law elsewhere in North America.

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) stands as the most explicit legal codification of slavery in early English America. Drafted by Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke for the eight Carolina proprietors, it created a feudal-slave hybrid society modeled on Barbados plantation capitalism. The document was never fully implemented—colonial assemblies resisted its most extreme provisions, and by the 1690s it was effectively abandoned—yet its logic persisted. It established slavery as perpetual, heritable, and racial; it denied enslaved persons all legal personhood; it made slave codes the foundation of colonial law rather than an afterthought. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he invoked natural rights and human equality while holding over 600 enslaved people. The Constitutions expose the genealogy of that contradiction: Carolina's planters had already written the script. By the 1760s, when American revolutionaries claimed liberty from British tyranny, they did so from societies built on the legal architecture that Shaftesbury and Locke had designed a century before.

The Fundamental Constitutions existed to solve a planter crisis: how to attract wealthy settlers to a new colony while guaranteeing them absolute control over labor and land. Barbados, by 1669, had already demonstrated that sugar and slavery could generate immense wealth, but it was crowded and expensive. Carolina offered land—vast, cheap, and empty (to English eyes). The proprietors needed to assure investors that their property—including enslaved property—would be secure, heritable, and legally unassailable. They also needed to prevent the emergence of a landless, dangerous class of poor whites (as had occurred in Barbados). The Constitutions solved both problems: they promised planters absolute slave property and hereditary estates, while offering indentured servants and small farmers a path to land ownership and, crucially, the chance to own slaves themselves. This created a cross-class alliance of white settlers united by slavery. The document was also a response to English legal uncertainty: English common law had no clear category for chattel slavery. By writing it into a charter, the proprietors sought to make slavery English law, not an exotic colonial aberration.

The Fundamental Constitutions was not a daily-use document for ordinary colonists. It functioned as a legal reference for planters, colonial magistrates, and proprietors' agents. A planter might invoke Article XXIII when claiming absolute power over an enslaved person; a court might cite the slave articles when adjudicating disputes over slave property or punishment. Enslaved persons never saw it—they experienced it as the invisible law that made them property. Indentured servants and small farmers knew it mainly through its effects: the availability of cheap land, the legality of slavery, the promise of eventual freedom dues and land grants. Ministers and magistrates used it to understand the colony's religious and civil order. In practice, the Constitutions were honored more in the breach than the observance; colonial assemblies modified or ignored provisions that conflicted with local interests. By the 1690s, it was largely superseded by ad hoc legislation and proprietary orders. Yet its core logic—slavery as perpetual, heritable, and absolute—remained embedded in Carolina law and custom.

The Fundamental Constitutions were composed in London in 1669, likely in Shaftesbury's residence or in the offices of the Carolina proprietors. Locke, as Shaftesbury's secretary, drafted the text in English legal language, drawing on English feudal law, the Barbados Slave Code (1661), and proprietary precedents from other charters (Maryland, New Jersey). The document was written on parchment and sealed by the eight proprietors. Copies were made and sent to Carolina; the original was retained in London (now British Library, Add. MS 5540). The text went through revisions in 1670 and 1682 as proprietors and colonial assemblies sought to adapt it to local conditions. The composition process was not democratic: the proprietors decided unilaterally, with no input from settlers or enslaved persons. The document's authority derived entirely from the proprietors' legal right to govern their colony as they saw fit.

The Fundamental Constitutions themselves are the famous example—the most explicit early codification of slavery in English America. No single physical artifact is more famous than the original parchment, held at the British Library (Add. MS 5540). However, the document's influence is visible in the South Carolina Slave Code (1696), which became the model for slave laws throughout the American South, and in the laws of Georgia, North Carolina, and other colonies. The Constitutions are also famous for the contradiction they embody: John Locke, who drafted them, later wrote the *Second Treatise of Government* (1689), which became the philosophical foundation for American independence and human rights. Locke never acknowledged or resolved this contradiction; it haunted Enlightenment liberalism and American democracy itself.

No archaeological artifacts directly associated with the Fundamental Constitutions have been recovered. The document exists as a written text in archives, not as a physical object with archaeological significance. However, archaeological work on colonial Carolina sites—particularly in Charleston and the Lowcountry—has uncovered material evidence of slavery's daily reality: enslaved persons' quarters, tools, personal items, and human remains. The Smithsonian Slave Wrecks Project has also recovered artifacts from slave ships that operated under laws modeled on the Fundamental Constitutions, providing material evidence of the trade that the document enabled. These artifacts, though not directly connected to the Constitutions, illuminate the human cost of the legal regime it established.