Bastille Day this Thursday, July 14; and do you know where South Carolina fits in?
July 8, 2016
By Temple Ligon
The English philosopher John Locke scored his first real job working for Anthony Ashley Cooper, head of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. Cooper was rich, and his support of King Charles II helped to restore the throne in 1660 following the death of Cromwell and his Commonwealth. In appreciation, the king granted the Carolina Charter of 1663, and issued a second in 1665, declaring Carolina to be all the land between what is today Daytona and the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia, running west uninterrupted to the Pacific Ocean, more than 800,000 square miles.
Charleston was to be the capital once it was located in 1670.
In 1669, Locke and Cooper finished the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the set of laws proposed for the Province of Carolina. Never ratified, the constitutions still got around as the basis for a life of freedom. Other maybe than the religious freedoms established in Rhode Island, Carolina offered more freedoms than anywhere else in the hemisphere.
What Thomas Jefferson wrote a century later in the Declaration of Independence – government’s protection of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – actually began with Locke and Cooper and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.
In Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration (1689),” he declared “the magistrate’s power was limited to preserving a person’s civil interest: life, liberty, health and indolency of body – and the possession of outward things.”
Locke called the pursuit of happiness the foundation of liberty, not merely the pursuit of pleasure, property and self-interest.
Following Locke by way of Jefferson, America won its independence, and the French picked up on the same sense of the world on July 14, 1789, when they stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, beginning the French Revolution. In August, a month later, Jefferson and Lafayette pushed for the French Rights of Man and of the Citizen, using language found in the American Declaration of Independence, all which got its start in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.
Personally, I have a connection here, something that puts my past in place with the French. My ancestor Lygon (spelled with a “y”) came across the English Channel with William I in 1066, remembering the rule: Always come over with the winning team.
Regardless of how small the connection may be, don’t forget Jefferson: “Every man has two countries. His own and France.”
