Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

work of his hands are properly his own, to which no one has right but himself;
it will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of the state that
nature has provided and left it in, he has his labour with it, and joined something
to it that is his own, and thereby makes it his property .... Thus every
man having a natural right to [or being proprietor of] his own person and his
own actions and labour, which we call property; it certainly follows, that no
man can have a right to the person or property of another. And if every man
has a right to his person and property; he has also a right to defend them . . .
and so has a right of punishing all insults upon his person and property.
Consequently, a law violating natural and constitutional rights is no true
law and requires no obedience. The natural right of private judgment was
also upheld by the Reverend William Rand of Massachusetts in 1757, and
by the Reverend Joseph Fish of Connecticut three years later.
During this period, many of the New Light ministers, under pressure of
establishment persecution in several colonies, began to move towards a
libertarian position. Elisha Williams was a New Light. The Reverend Samuel
Davies, leader of the Southern New Side Presbyterians, declared in
1751 that people had a "legal as well as natural right to follow their own
judgment," and to gauge governmental authority against the great principles
of natural justice. Davies' focus, of course, was on religious aspects
of liberty. Princeton, the training ground of the New Lights, soon developed
as a libertarian center. Davies, president of Princeton from 1759 to
1761, lauded the English Puritan Revolution and exhorted his listeners to
fight if need be for their liberties. His predecessor, the Reverend Aaron
Burr, was noted as a "great friend to liberty, both civil and religious," in
state and church.
"Separates"—New Lights in Massachusetts and Connecticut who insisted
on clear-cut separation from the state establishment—petitioned extensively
for religious liberty and exemption from church taxes, even though the petitions
were almost always spurned by the government. Daniel Hovey, of
Mansfield, was imprisoned in 1747 for refusing to pay the church tax, and
petitioned for relief on the ground that liberty of conscience was "the unalienable
right of every rational creature." The Separates of Canterbury
went beyond this to include the right of liberty and property. In their
petition of 1749, they asserted that God's law strictly limited the functions
of government to "defense of everyone in the free enjoyment and improvement
of life, liberty, and property from the force, violence and fraud of
others; their different opinions in ecclesiastical affairs notwithstanding." The
Canterbury Separates also insisted on the natural right of parishioners to
dissent and to separate from them—a welcome consistency for that or indeed
for any era. Another leading libertarian petition came in 1743-44 from Exeter,
Massachusetts. The petition asked: "Is not liberty equally every man's
right . . . ?" The Exeter Separates asserted the right of private judgment,
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