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The ‘natural’ rights of settlers: Steven Sarson, ‘”When They Left Their Native Land, and Setled in America”: The Fairfax County Resolves, the Origins of Colonies and Empire, and the American Revolution’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 115, 2, 2026, pp. 31-49

04Jun26

Abstract: The Fairfax Resolves, invoking “the Laws of Nature and Nations,” are often portrayed as among the first statements of the colonists’ natural rights. The idea that civil law should be founded on natural law, however, dated back to Cicero and had long been invoked by colonial writers. Yet the Resolves played a pioneering role in mediating a dispute about how natural law underwrote the colonists’ civil rights. The first clause argued that if Virginia was a “conquered Country” then its “present Inhabitants are the Descendants not of the Conquered, but of the Conquerors” and thus inherited rights to property and self-government earned exclusively by their conquering “Ancestors.” During the revolutionary years, though, some writers, such as Virginian Richard Bland, further argued that the original “Adventurers” had created new and independent states rather than colonies (a “free state” theory of colonization), while others argued that the first colonists had settled under the authority of the crown (a “charter theory” of colonization). Free-state theory, with its claim for no original crown authority in American territory, had the advantage of making American independence easier to approve under the laws of nature and nations. But it remained controversial, and the Fairfax Resolves pioneered an ambiguous language about the origins of colonies that appeared later in the account of “the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” in the Declaration of Independence. The Resolves’ conquest theory also had profound implications for Native Americans and westward expansion by shaping an American empire after the Revolution.


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