As the Pilgrim leader William Bradford later recalled it, some "strangers"—that is, non-Pilgrims—began to make "discontented & mutinous speeches" on the ship. The Mayflower, they noted, was landing in a place outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company. Therefore, the strangers argued, "none had the power to comand them"; they were free in that state of nature to "use their owne libertie," and they need not submit to a government that had not acquired their consent. The result was the Mayflower Compact, a document establishing that this consent had been given. And the argument that led there, Kelly notes, "sounds remarkably like Stephen Hopkins's political discourse in Bermuda."
Again and again the process repeated itself. That first settlement in what is now Massachusetts may have been influenced by the attempt to go marooning in Bermuda; when Massachusetts society grew too repressive, its dissidents lit out for Indian lands or formed new communities of their own. Not all of those new communities lasted as long as Rhode Island did. There was, for example, the short-lived outpost of Merrymount, whose defiant residents ignored a host of Puritan rules and traded freely with the natives.
Kelly doesn't mention it, but Hopkins was part of the expedition that seized Merrymount and disarmed its leaders. Evidently, Locke wasn't the only person whose liberalism had limits. But the idea of liberty is larger than any one spokesperson anyway.
America was born, we're often told, as a place where the dissidents of the Old World could create freer spaces for themselves. There is truth to that, but the settlement of the continent was caught up with a lot of uglier factors too: with slavery and empire, with feudal status and monopoly privilege. What undermined those evils—what made America a place where liberty as well as power could take root—was the fact that it wasn't just the exiles of the Old World who set up communities here. The outcasts of the New World sought and sometimes seized the right to drop out and build their own Americas too. When Europeans arrived intending to form new societies, they soon found that some of their dissatisfied subjects were happy to break off and form yet more new societies of their own—or just to move to a more appealing-looking society next door, be it Rhode Island or the Algonquins.
Carolina was a startup society, complete with both profit-seeking proprietors and utopian ideals; the founders even had John Locke on hand to help write their constitution. But for a lot of the people who lived there, for a long stretch of its history, the only hope of happiness lay in breaking the law, asserting their own right of exit, and perhaps forming a more consensual startup society of their own. In re-enacting the rebellion of those slaves in San Miguel de Guadalupe. In walking away.