John Locke
To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
and in Chapter V, Sect. 26 reasoned a divine right to the land: “God hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.” Chapter V, Sect. 26 was also used to contest the notion that Indigenous people could claim ownership of the lands they had by arguing they could not possess land that they had not “improved” by digging wells for water and building permanent dwellings:
Something becomes property when man removes it from nature. It being removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
This reasoning directly justified the Indian Removal Act of 1830 allowing the U.S. government to dislocate and kill an estimated 100,000 Indigenous people by the 1840s. It further offered a foundation for the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed white male settlers who were citizens, or intended to become citizens (!!) to simply choose a previously unclaimed (by white people!!!) 160 acre parcel, have it surveyed, “improve” it through farming and building, and receive an official deed after living on the parcel for five years. In the Reconstruction era, instead of paying reprimands to the millions of slaves whose blood, sweat and tears, forged American democracy and fed its insatiable brand of capitalism, hundreds of thousands of predominantly white Americans, many of whom were desperately poor and had no other means of social mobility, gained property that would give them a social, economic, and political edge that remains consequential to this day.