Locke never addressed, much less resolved, this contradiction. On Afro-American slavery, silence seems to have been his principal bequest to posterity. Locke's silence is all the more difficult to fathom inasmuch as in the "Two Treatises" he developed a general theory and justification of slavery for captives taken in a just war ... I hope to show that this theory is woefully inadequate as an account of Afro-American slavery and, further, that "Locke knew this" ... Locke's silence about the Afro-American slave practices that he helped forward remains profoundly unsettling and poses one of the greatest problems for understanding Locke as a theorist and political actor.