Colonial America the Philosophy of Individual Rights

Colonial America

The Philosophy of Individual Rights Before the Constitutional Convention in England and America

Although many individuals today might like to romanticize the origin of individual rights in America, suggesting that such rights began and ended with the passage of the current version of the United States Constitution that now governs the totality of the American land, the actual history of a private citizen's individual rights in America and England is far more checkered and complex. America's founding fathers owe a far greater debt to English and French philosophies of rights and liberties than were acknowledged at the time for the idea that the individual citizen possesses certain inalienable rights that cannot be impinged upon by the state. Also, the Articles of Confederation that were eventually passed contained the seeds of the later document that was to govern the land, even though it was too weak a document to provide the type of unity that the international politics of the time demanded to accord respect to the new American union and nation.

The English Empiricist philosopher John Locke was one of the first philosophers to coin the idea of "life, liberty, and property" as being inalienable rights of every human citizen and person. Equally important as the exact definition of the rights themselves was the simple notion itself that individual citizens possessed rights that were intrinsic to their human mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual persons that no sovereign could impinge upon. Unlike earlier political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes who placed a priority on an overall orderly society under the will of a monarch, Locke turned his view to the rights of the human being in society, rather than focusing on the state or on society alone as an entity in need of order and protection.

Thomas Jefferson was later to take up Locke's philosophy and words. As later and concisely and eloquently stated by Thomas Jefferson, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with *inherent and* [certain] inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles, & organizing it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness."

Happiness, rather than property held sway in Jefferson's rhetoric, for the Declaration was a rhetorical rather than a legal or even a philosophical document. Still, the principles were the same as articulated in Locke's philosophy. Jefferson paid a nod to Hobbes in the Declaration's text when he noted, "Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses & usurpations *begun at a distinguished period and* pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security." Jefferson states that he and his fellow rebels know the risks of disorder than severance poses, but the risks of tyranny to the individual are more in need of address, ultimately, than the risks posed to society.

None of Jefferson's ideas were new, thusly -- nor was even the language he used to articulate them. In fact, the idea of individual rights could be said to extend far back in England as the Magna Charta, which specified the duties owned not simply of lords to the king but also of the king to those who served him. Even the ultimately unsuccessful Roundhead revolution of Cromwell did establish some idea that Parliament, as opposed to purely royal and dictatorial authority, could hold sway over an executive authority conferred by birth rather than election, and that Houses elected by the populace should have a voice in the form of the House of Commons. The Founding Fathers of America feared another king, like that of England, and another tyranny at the end of the Revolutionary War. This is why articles of Confederation were an extremely weak document. The first of the Articles of Confederation reads, "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."

But the first article also shows that individual rights were not purely conceptualized in the human form, but also in terms of the rights of the states. Because the states were more responsive to individual needs, they were accorded with more power, true. But also, there was an idea that the 'state' had individual rights on a micro level, rather than the individual simply being a citizen. Although the notion of individual rights was historical and powerful, it was still not as clearly conceptualized for the Founding Fathers, nor in the same way, that it is today in America, or even as it was for Locke and Rousseau.

In the Articles of Confederation, the ideal of the sovereign state in a loosely confederated union was upheld first and foremost, at the expense of the federal rule of the national union as a whole and also individual persons residing within the states. Article IV of the articles reads, "If any person guilty of, or charged with, treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall, upon demand of the Governor or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offense." Contrast this with the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, barring illegal searches and seizures -- there could be no more powerful a contrast between how the idea that the state held sway.

Of course, in terms of individual rights of so-called 'non-persons' or slaves or Negroes, as they were referred to, confusion reigned supreme. In Jefferson's autobiography, he noted, "there is no more reason therefore for taxing the Southern states on the farmer's head, & on his slave's head, than the Northern ones on their farmer's heads & the heads of their cattle, that the method proposed would therefore tax the Southern states according to their numbers & their wealth conjunctly, while the Northern would be taxed on numbers only: that Negroes in fact should not be considered as members of the state more than cattle & that they have no more interest in it." The link between property and states as opposed to the rights of the individual body of the citizen, black or white, thus remained firm, even for the Founding Fathers. Jefferson and most of the Founding Fathers were gentlemen farmers for the most part -- and property, despite the rhetoric of the Declaration, was an important thing, and even non-slave owners considered slaves a kind of property.