Indeed, Byrd believed his plantation, Westover , was his own kingdom where he could be king and exercise his own authority. Although he enjoyed the isolation of his plantation, Byrd also understood himself to be a social figure and felt the need to display his status and be an integral part of the surrounding community of his friends and extended family. Byrd was busy visiting throughout most of the year. Byrd's understanding of himself as a public figure created a basis for his insistence that the family farm was not just a place of subsistence and isolation, but a unit of economic production, as well as social advancement and communication, that would provide the family with something more than merely survival. As a student in London in the late 1600's who was a regular in intellectual circles throughout the city, Byrd probably would have read and discussed John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, which was published in 1690.
Labor is the way to acquire property and claim it as one's own.
Likewise, once one has labored and gained property, Locke argues, this property must be protected. Although Byrd himself did not have to work very hard to inherit his great fortune, he seems to incorporate Locke's ideas on property into his own sense of work ethic and the importance of labor. Byrd insists that the way to advance and rise in society is through the attainment of more and more property. For Byrd, and for his father, the attainment of an increasing amount of property comes through hard work and the willingness to strive for something more than what one possesses. Byrd, like Locke, believes that property and property rights come through one's own labors.