The "Kevins" make a good point about Edmund Pendleton's phrase "when they
enter into a state of society" in regard to slavery (and children) and the
Virginia Declaration of Rights.
     In *Mr. Jefferson's Women* I show that virtually identical logic was
applied to women. The legitimacy of the American republic, I argued, "rested
on the fundamental premise, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of
Independence, that 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed.' If the authority of
government no longer came from above, through the divine right of kings,
then legitimacy demanded that 'individuals must themselves consent . . . to
relationships that created 'political obligation and political authority.'
    "At some theoretical moment prior to the formation of human society and
government, men _*and women*_ had existed in a state of nature. . . .
Regardless of whether that mythic state of nature had been benign or
vicious, for Hobbes and Locke, and for Jefferson and the founders of the
American republic, the critical event in history was the moment when
government was created by civil compact: the moment when 'our Fathers or
Progenitors passed away their natural Liberty, and thereby bound up
themselves and their Posterity to a perpetual subjection to the Government,
which they themselves submitted to.'
     "Insofar as families were regarded as the fundamental units of social
order in a state of nature, at the critical moment when civil government was
created by compact, women simply disappeared from consent-based political
theory. They disappeared as completely in Lockean theory as they did from
English common law under doctrine of *coverture*, and for basically the same
reason: 'by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; [and] . .
. the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended.'"Insofar as
families were regarded as the fundamental units of social order in a state
of nature, at the critical moment when civil government was created by
compact, women simply disappeared from consent-based political theory. They
disappeared as completely in Lockean theory as they did from English common
law under doctrine of coverture, and for basically the same reason: 'by
marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; [and] . . . the very
being or legal existence of the woman is suspended.' The result was that
although Enlightenment philosophers expressly included women within their
universal definitions of humanity in its original state of nature, they
silently consigned women to domestic subordination as they imagined the
progress of humanity from that state of nature, through the organization of
patriarchal families, to the creation of civil society and government by
social compact."
*(Mr. Jefferson's Women, *pp. 178-9)
     The result -- joining Professors Gutzman and Hardwick reminder that
Lockean ideas were applied to slaves and children with my explanation of how
these ideas were applied to women -- explains Jefferson's comments in an
1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival:
"Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants should meet
together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from
their deliberations: 1. Infants, until arrived at age of discretion. 2.
Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could
not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men. 3. Slaves, from whom
the unfortunate state of things with us takes away the rights of will and of
property."

-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com <http://www.jonkukla.com/>
===================================
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 6:26 PM, <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Kevin Gutzman's argument is cogent and sound, and I do not disagree with
> it.
> . . . .
> Locke wrote the Second Treatise in part to criticize the patriarchalism on
> which Filmer, and other defenders of the Stuart absolutism, based their
> arguments.  In chapter six of the Second Treatise, Locke examines the nature
> of paternal power, and concludes that children cease to owe absolute
> obedience to their parents at the point at which they are able to exercise
> mature adult rationality on their own.  Thus, he demonstrates that the
> patriarchal metaphor for the nature of absolute monarchical power is flawed,
> because in due time children grow up.
>
> Jefferson, in NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, extends this argument to the
> slaves.  His argument there is not as fully developed as that of subsequent
> pro slavery proponents, but it is clearly tending in that direction.  Slaves
> can not be part of the social compact, because they can not exercise full
> adult rationality and hence can not be self governing.  . . . .

=================================

> ---- Original message ----
> >Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:23:36 -0400
> >From: Kevin Gutzman <[log in to unmask]>
>  . . . .
>
>In response to Kevin Hardwick, I note that it was not Jefferson who
>discovered a way to reconcile slavery with Lockean liberalism, but the May
>Convention of 1776 -- that interim ruling body of revolutionary Virginia.
>It was that body that decided, in debating George Mason's draft Declaration
>of Rights, not to come out and flatly claim that all men were born free and
>equal and that government was to protect their rights, but instead
>interlineated Edmund Pendleton's phrase "when they enter into a state of
>society" (or some such).  As a result, Virginia from its birth was a
>society in which the blacks had not been parties to the social compact;
>they had not "entered into a state of society," but had been kept as a
>captive nation.  *Before* republican Virginia was established, its leaders
>made this decision to have *both* a Lockean social compact *and* slavery.
>
>I detail this development in chapter one of _Virginia's American
>Revolution:  From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840_ (Lexington Books, 2007).

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