Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina

The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina was an ambitious 1663 blueprint for an elitist colonial order, devised by the colony’s proprietors and their secretary, the philosopher John Locke. It sought to prevent a broadly based democracy by placing political authority in the hands of a landed aristocracy. Yet the society its authors designed could not be imposed on settlers with other options: Carolina’s proprietors ultimately lost, and South Carolina became a royal colony in 1729.

Formation and purpose

Carolina was founded in 1663 by eight proprietors, among them Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper. Ashley-Cooper and Locke formulated the Fundamental Constitutions as a plan for governing the province. Like the earlier Charter of Maryland, it offered a model of colonial society organized around concentrated landownership and the authority of a privileged elite.

Its preamble stated that Carolina’s government should accord with the monarchy and that the province should avoid “erecting a numerous democracy.” That declaration made the document’s political purpose explicit: it was not simply a scheme for administering a new colony, but an effort to shape its political community before settlers could claim a wider share of power.

A hierarchy written into land and status

The Constitutions set out a rigid social structure. At its base were the “leet-men,” who held no political power. Their status was to pass to their children and continue “to all generations,” making subordination a permanent condition rather than a temporary rank.

Above them, the landgraves and caziques were to form the aristocracy. Each landgrave was to receive 48,000 acres, and each cazique 24,000 acres. These provisions joined political standing to enormous grants of land, concentrating authority and property in a small group while defining the rest of society by their position beneath it.

The document did provide for a parliament, but not an independent legislature. Landgraves and caziques would be represented, and the body could debate only measures already approved by the eight proprietors. Its existence therefore did not undo the hierarchy: the proprietors retained control over which questions could reach deliberation.

The plan meets colonial conditions

The Fundamental Constitutions belonged to a broader series of efforts by English elites to restrict the economic and political rights of most colonial inhabitants. The Maryland plan had likewise envisioned large estates run by lords, with tenants working the land and paying rent. In both colonies, however, the attempt to establish a rigid, top-down society ran into the practical difficulty of compelling settlers to accept it when other opportunities were available.

The book’s account emphasizes that settlers could not simply be forced into the hierarchy. They had to be given incentives to work, and they increasingly demanded greater economic freedom and political rights. In Maryland, settlers insisted on owning land and compelled Lord Baltimore to create an assembly; in 1691 that assembly persuaded the king to make Maryland a Crown colony, removing Baltimore’s political privileges and those of his great lords. Carolina followed a prolonged struggle in which the proprietors also lost, and South Carolina became a royal colony in 1729.

Significance and limits

The Constitutions expose the gap between a formal blueprint and the institutions settlers would accept and sustain. Their detailed allocations of land, inherited status, and restricted legislative debate reveal how deliberately the proprietors sought to preserve elite control. But the document’s provisions did not secure that outcome: the wider availability of choices in the New World made a rigid social order difficult to enforce, while settlers’ demands for land and political rights pushed against proprietary authority.

That failure forms part of a larger contrast in the colonies. By the 1720s, all thirteen colonies that would become the United States had governors and assemblies elected by male property holders. These governments excluded women, enslaved people, and the propertyless, and were not democracies; nonetheless, their political rights were broad in comparison with those of contemporary societies elsewhere. The assemblies later helped coalesce into the First Continental Congress in 1774. Against that subsequent development, Carolina’s proposed parliament—limited to debate on measures the proprietors had already approved—stands as a particularly clear expression of an alternative, more restrictive colonial order.