Grim Years

"In 1651 philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes penned Leviathan, his dark vision of an unregulated society. Hobbes, shocked by the execution of Charles I, whom he supported, envisioned a world of unceasing poverty, violence, and death. In the absence of an absolute sovereign, there would be no law, and "where no Law, no Injustice." Competition for power and wealth would go unchecked; the condition of man would become "a condition of War of every one against every one." Unfettered by notions of right and wrong, every man would have "a Right to every thing: even to one another's body." Hobbes believed this to be the case among "the savage people in many places of America [who] . . . have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before."1 Hobbes did not know how mistaken he was regarding Native American society, nor did he imagine that the nightmarish scenario he described would materialize, for a time, in a colony called Carolina"--