Americans and their land: the deep roots of property and liberty

AFTER World War II Carl and Mae Shockley owned a farm along the Current River in Carter County, Missouri. The river bottom territory is the best agricultural land in this rocky Ozark area. Before the 1970s, by dint of tremendous work, they managed to derive a living from their land reminiscent of earlier agrarian generations. They made difficult labour into competitive games. They would race each other putting up hay in hundred-degree weather. Carl cut all the wood needed for fuel with a handsaw. Mae refinished the floors in their two-story house by hand-sanding every board.

On August 27, 1964, they stopped working. On that day President Lyndon Johnson signed a law creating the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, a new Park Service entity. When Carl and Mae heard the news on the radio they knew they would lose the property through eminent domain.

Carl and Mae Shockley, like most landowners in the United States, had likely never heard of John Locke (1632-1704). Locke was the seventeenth-century philosopher who championed liberty and property rights in England. He wrote the Carolina Constitution, strongly inspired both English and American Whigs, and profoundly influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. Americans' constitutional rights of 'Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness' were borrowed from Locke's original phrase, 'Life, Liberty, and Property'. The Shockleys may not have recognized Locke, but Locke certainly would have recognized the Shockleys' sense of land ownership.

How esoteric Lockean principles of property ownership came to pervade popular American culture remains a fascinating topic among legal scholars that defies definitive answers. Locke and other Enlightenment era philosophers strongly influenced the American legal and political system, but the actual frontier conditions throughout much of American history probably had an equally profound effect in shaping attitudes of unfettered land ownership. Between the two influences, Americans developed sometimes mythical ideas of 'God given' rights to property that remain very powerful today.

America was sparsely populated compared to Europe and rapidly became less populated with aborigines as a host of Old World diseases killed the immune-deficient New World peoples. Even before the multifarious pandemic began its grim course, the natives did not cultivate the land in the comparably intense way of Europe, lending further rationale for seizing property. The Indians were not Christians, and thus an old European prejudice that had pitted Christians against Muslims for centuries came into play. European Christians used this same rationale to enslave non-Christians. Finally, the Native Americans looked different. With the rise of race-based trans-Atlantic African slave trade, skin colour and cultural differences gave the English and Anglo-Americans an additional self-justification for taking land from people unlike themselves.

English people decided the American aborigines were not utilizing their lands properly, since the latter hunted, fished, and only planted food nominally compared to the relatively intense style of European agricultural cultivation. In the English mind this meant the indigenous people did not 'own' the land. Conveniently, their own Christian God had thus ordained that the English possess it. In a 1629 New England land grant lawyers for the late King James I addressed the document 'to all Christian people'. Indians were irrelevant. The 1732 Charter of Georgia described 'their whole southern frontier' as open only to 'savages', and thus unsettled and not properly owned. Tragically, the invaders did not appreciate the native view of the land.

Indians were intimately aware of their natural surroundings as could only be expected from a people who lived in such daily close proximity to it, and whose daily subsistence depended directly upon it. Like other pre-literate peoples whose intellectual faculties are used to other ends (such as memorizing many hours of oral tradition), some Indians were experts on the features of their landscape. They drew excellent maps and could recount intricate details such as individual trees next to specific bends in a particular river, sometimes hundreds of miles from their home base.

The aborigines' environmental intimacy contributed to a view of their world steeped in natural forces and phenomena, such as weather features and animals. In many ways, their perspective was typically animistic and encompassed every aspect of the world around them. As the early ethnologist James Mooney reported, rivers figured centrally in this worldview. The Cherokee assigned anthropomorphic qualities to rivers, thinking of them as giant men whose heads lay high in the mountains and whose feet stretched down into the lowlands. Daily purification in such waters became vitally important. James Adair, a trader and resident among the Cherokee from 1736-1743, wrote that they were 'strongly attached to rivers--all retaining the opinion of the ancients, that rivers are necessary to constitute a paradise'.