Un-Lockeing the American Idea will surprise some, anger others, but the argument is sound.

...In the preface to my book Common Sense Nation, I wrote:

Americans on all sides of the debate agree that something has gone wrong in American politics. Many Americans believe that we have lost our way because we no longer guide ourselves by the ideas of the Founders. But guiding ourselves by the Founders seems to be easier said than done. Could it be that part of our difficulty is that we no longer use, or even really understand, the language the Founders used or why they used that language?

...This usage of “alienable” is no doubt familiar. We encounter it frequently. Take any book by a conservative from your shelves and you will almost certainly find the word used in just this way. But this is not how the founders understood the word. In fact, “alienable” is a word with an unusually precise definition, one that is unchanged from the founders’ day until our own. Here is how it is defined in my dictionary: “adj. Law. Capable of being transferred to the ownership of another” (emphasis mine). That is the complete definition in my dictionary.

“Alienable,” in other words, is a term used in reference to our right to the property that belongs to us, not our abstract “right to property” but to actual property. Our right to our property is an alienable right because we can transfer it. It is because our right to our property is alienable that we can sell, exchange, and bequeath it....

...To make a long story short, conservative thinkers have sacrificed the actual thinking of the founders—and the founders’ vocabulary—to a narrative about the founders’ thinking. Evidence abounds. Open nearly any book by a conservative about the founders and you will almost certainly read that the Declaration of Independence is an expression of John Locke’s political philosophy.

...The founders would be as baffled by that claim as they would be by the claim that civil rights can be transferred from the ownership of one person to the ownership of another. The founders used the term “unalienable” constantly, and every time they did, they were declaring they were not Lockeans; in fact, they were proclaiming they were un-Lockeans, that it was Locke specifically they had left behind.

As unbelievable as that may seem, it is simple to demonstrate. Those who spin the narrative that the founders were Lockeans make much of the fact that the Declaration borrowed “life and liberty” from Locke—but in fact, Jefferson deftly used “life and liberty” to declare that the founders were un-Lockeans. Putting Locke’s “life and liberty” list and the Declaration’s “life and liberty” list side-by-side will make this clear:

“Man . . . hath by nature a power . . . to preserve his property—that is, his life, liberty and estate.”

“Men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, . . . among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Locke declared that life and liberty are property. The Declaration declared that life and liberty are among our unalienable rights. And, as we have seen, to declare that those rights are unalienable is to declare that they are not property, making it perfectly clear that the founders were declaring they had left Locke’s thinking behind....
I came across this backwards, first in The Locke-Box, Part 2, then part 1, The Locke-Box, and finally the original OP source.

From part 2 which is actually part 3:

So, where did the founders and the founders’ generation get the idea of unalienable rights? It is a fascinating story, the result of that rarest of things: a philosophical breakthrough that changed the world, and did so virtually overnight. Francis Hutcheson, in his 1755 treatise A System of Moral Philosophy, presented that breakthrough to the world: “Our rights are either alienable or unalienable . . . our right to our goods and labours is naturally alienable.”

The distinction between alienable rights and unalienable rights is only one element of Hutcheson’s discovery of a profound new way of thinking about humankind. The idea of unalienable rights was a direct consequence of that new way of thinking. That idea and that way of thinking arrived just in time to provide the American founders with the intellectual tools they needed to conduct the American experiment.

The new way of thinking Hutcheson set in motion is known today as common-sense realism. It was the philosophical system that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton learned at William and Mary, at Princeton, and at the college now called Columbia....

Hutcheson is here making a philosophical point, not making a claim about any government then existing. He showed that unalienable rights entailed limited government philosophically, though no government then existing recognized unalienable rights. It was left to the founders to create the government that did.