From Jacobin: John Quiggin on Locke.

This is the third in a series of articles on John Locke. Well worth reading, IMO. I posted the first two, but he provides links to them as well:

Locke’s Folly Jeffersonian Democrats made a serious attempt to implement Locke’s theories. Colonization and expropriation followed.

Excerpt:

Slaveholders either expanded onto the newly acquired land or shipped their slaves to the growing market, often breaking up families in the process. These wealthy landowners left little for the Jeffersonian yeoman class, who settled on infertile or mountainous land unsuitable for cotton and other slave crops.

But even where slavery was excluded by the Compromise of 1820, the contradictions inherent in the Locke-Jefferson theory rapidly revealed themselves. Just thirty years after the Louisiana Purchase, the United States had overspilled its boundaries and grabbed the Southwest from Mexico, Oregon and Washington from Canada, and everything in between from the indigenous inhabitants.

By the time of the Compromise of 1850 the nation ran “from sea to shining sea.” Advocates of Manifest Destiny proclaimed — and piratical adventurers called “filibusteros” sought to forcefully implement — an empire extending over all the Americas. The failure of the Lockean proviso directly led to the Civil War, as slaveowners and Free Soilers fought over “bleeding Kansas.”

Almost as soon as the Native American population was expelled or wiped out, the land was converted to private property. The inexhaustible flow of pioneers pushed the frontier further and further. By the 1870s, the wars of colonization and expropriation were replaced with a string of small battles between rival groups of ranchers and farmers. Victory typically went to whichever side did a better job enlisting or co-opting state power.