Presentation to the United Nations July 18, 1995
by Carol Jacobs, Cayuga Bear Clan Mother



Mr. Ambassador, Chief Shenandoah, Distinguished Guests, Chiefs, Clanmothers, panel: It is my duty to help bring to and end the Haudenosaunee presentation. Chief Harvey Longboat of the Cayuga Bear Clan will be doing the actual closing.

You have heard how we began our meeting today, bringing our minds together in thanks for every part of the natural world. You have heard how we are grateful that each part of the world continues to fulfill the responsibilities that have been set for it by our Creator. It is how we begin every meeting, and how we end every meeting, and how we will end this day.

Most of our ceremonies are about giving thanks, at the right time and in the right way. They are what was given to us, what makes us who we are. They enable me to speak to you about life itself.

We draw no line between what is political and what is spiritual. Our leaders are also our spiritual leaders. Maintaining our ceremonies is an important part of the work of the chiefs and clan mothers. This is right: there is nothing more important than preserving life, recording life, and that is what the ceremonies do.

We are told that when this land was being created, our Creator was challenged to a bet by his brother. The subject of their game was: would there be life? And in one throw, supported by all the living forces of the natural world, our Creator won this bet. He won it all for us. He won it for all of us. We commemorate this each year in part of our Midwinter ceremonies.

This is not just a quaint legend. It is a reminder that, as scientists now agree, life on earth is the result of chance, as well as of intent. Life on earth is a fragile matter. That magnificent gamble could have gone the other way: life could just as easily not have been at all.

That is a reason for constantly giving thanks. We know very well how close life still is to not being. The reminders are all around us.

Among us, it is women who are responsible for fostering life. In our traditions, it is women who carry the seeds, both of our own future generations and of the plant life. It is women who plant and tend the gardens, and women who bear and raise the children. It is my right and duty, as a woman and a mother and a grandmother, to speak to you about these things, to bring our minds together on them.

In our ceremonies and dances, we move counter-clockwise. That is, in this part of the world, earth-wise. In our dances, the women's feet never leave the ground, never leave Mother Earth. This is intentional: we constantly remind ourselves of our connection to the earth, for it is from the earth that life comes.

Our prophecies tell us that life on earth is in danger of coming to an end. Our instructions tell us that we are to maintain our ceremonies, however few of us there are, and to maintain the spirit of those ceremonies, and the care of the natural world.

In making any law, our chiefs must always consider three things: the effect of their decision on peace; the effect on the natural world; and the effect on seven generations in the future. We believe that all lawmakers should be required to think this way, that all constitutions should contain these rules.

We call the future generations "the coming faces". We are told that we can see the faces of our children to come in the rain that is falling, and that we must tread lightly on the earth, for we are walking on the faces of our children yet to come. That attitude, too, we want to have you learn and share.

To us, it does not matter whether it can be scientifically proved that life as we know it is in danger. If the possibility exists, we must live every day as if it were true -- for we cannot afford, any of us, to ignore that possibility. We must learn to live with that shadow, and always to strive toward the light.

We are not a numerous people today. We believe that people who are close to the earth do not allow their numbers to become greater than the land can bear.

We are not an industrialized people today. We do not carry economic power. Our people and lands are like a scattering of islands within a sea of our neighbours, the richest nations in the world.

And yet I tell you that we are a powerful people. We are the carriers of knowledge and ideas that the world needs today. We know how to live with this land: we have done so for thousands of years and have not suffered many of the changes of the Industrial Revolution, though we are being buffeted by the waves of its collapse.

Our families are beyond the small, isolated nuclear families that are so convenient to big industry and big government and so damaging to communities.

Our clans and names give people identity, not facelessness.

Our governments still follow natural law.

Our governments also face challenges---physical, political, legal and moral. We recognize that those challenges come from within our communities as well as from the peoples around us.

We know that we, as communities and as a people, are facing an environmental crisis. We know that we do not have the resources to be able to resolve that crisis by ourselves. That is why we are here, seeking partners.

But we also know that all the world faces the same crisis; that every people and every living thing shares the same challenges. And we are here to offer our partnership, our knowledge and our ideas.

It is time to move beyond "calls to action" and well-meaning agendas. The forces that are injuring our Mother the Earth are not waiting to create subcommittees, to set dates for meetings, to set budgets.

Today we have met, we have taken one another's hands, and we have begun to make commitments. As we leave, the words of thanksgiving will echo in our ears, reminding us that not only our own future generations, but every living thing, relies on us to fulfill our responsibilities as they fulfill theirs.




We need no greater challenge than that.

How Much Land Did the Iroquois Possess?
by Doug George-Kanentiio



Prior to European colonization the Iroquois exercised active dominion over most of what is now New York State. Of the 49,576 square miles of the state the Iroquois held title to about 4/5 of the total area (approximately 39,000 square miles).

Traditional Iroquois boundary lines were quite specific as to which lands belonged to a particular nation. Mohawk territory extended from the Delaware River north to the St. Lawrence and included almost all of the Adirondack Mountains. Their boundaries to the east were Lake Champlain, Lake George and the Hudson River.

By adding up the area of the current counties within this region the Mohawk Nation can lay claim to 15,534 square miles (or 9,941,760 acres) as having been alienated from their possession through various means, including fraudulent "treaties."

Oneidas recognized the West Canada Creek, the Unadilla River and the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in St. Lawrence county as their eastern border with the Mohawks. They also knew their land went as far north as the St. Lawrence River and south to below the Susquehanna. Using the same formula of applying county areas to indigenous Oneida territory, a figure of 5,819 square miles is arrived at (or 3,724,160 acres).

To the west of the Oneidas were the Onondagas; their borders followed the Tioughnioga River, Otselic River and Chittenango Creek as it flowed into Oneida Lake. Within their national boundaries are the counties of Jefferson, Oswego, Onondaga, Cortland, part of Tioga and about half of Broome. Their total is 2,670,720 acres or 4,173 square miles.

Cayuga lands between Rochester and Syracuse included Cayuga, Seneca, Chemung, Schuyler, Wayne, Tompkins and part of Tioga counties. Their region is 3,123 square miles or 1,998,720 acres.

In western New York the Seneca Nation enjoyed fertile lakeshore fields and a rolling terrain which was rich in wildlife. Their lands stretched from east of the Genesee River to the Niagara Peninsula and southwest to Lake Erie. An estimated 10,248 square miles (6,558,720 acres) were held by the Senecas until various land companies removed them to three small reservations in the early nineteenth century.

All together the Iroquois Confederacy held as its own 24,894,080 acres of some of the most beautiful and resource wealthy lands in all of North America. Yet traditional Iroquois were careful custodians of the earth for nowhere in this broad expanse of territory was there a single polluted stream, hazardous waste site or open landfill.

In 1995 the Iroquois hold but a fraction of their former lands. After years of expropriation by New York State officials, various public work agencies and the United States the following is what is left:

Mohawk land in New York as been reduced to 14,640 acres in Franklin County referred to as the "St. Regis Indian Reservation" or, more correctly, the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory.

Technically the Oneidas live on 32 acres in Madison County but have been purchasing additional lands. They now have an estimated 3,000 acres in their possession.

Only 7,300 acres remain to the Onondagas on their territory, mistakenly called a "reservation", south of Syracuse. Cayugas have no land left in New York; they live primarily on the Cattaraugus Seneca lands or on the Six Nations Reserve west of Hamilton, Ontario.

Since the Senecas divided in 1848 they have dwelt on three land areas. Tonawanda is the traditional capital of the Seneca Nation with 7,317 acres in Niagara, Genesee and Erie counties. They were required to buy their ancestral land back from speculators in 1850 when the United States refused to recognize their claims to protection under the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua.

Just west of Tonawanda live the Tuscaroras on 5,778 acres. They had initially been granted the right to settle in Oneida territory but were forced to move to Niagara County after the American Revolution.

Distinct from the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca Nation of Indians (not affiliated with the Seneca Nation at Tonawanda) follows a constitution modeled after the U.S. It controls the reservations of Cattaraugus (17,025 acres) in Erie County and Allegany (30,984 acres) in Cattaraugus County. There is in addition the small 640 acre Oil Springs Reservation northeast of Allegany.

Total land holdings for the Iroquois in 1995 are about 86,716 acres remaining from the original 25,000,000 or .034% of what we once had.

KINDLING A NEW NATIONAL
GRAND COUNCIL FIRE

Native American liberty and the
U.S. Constitution



The British Government cannot be our model. We have
no materials for a similar one. Our manners, our laws,
the abolition of entails and primogeniture, the whole
genius of the people are opposed to it.


--James Wilson at the
Constitutional Convention,
June 7, 1787[1]



We have gone back to ancient history for models of Gov-
ernment, and examined different forms of those Republics
which having been formed with the seeds of their own
dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed
Modern States all round Europe, but find none none of
their Constitutions suitable to our circumstances.


--Benjamin Franklin
at the Constitutional
Convention, June 28, 1787.[2]



As the United States began its second attempt at a viable federal system based on natural rights, native examples continued to exert a powerful influence on this nation of transplanted Europeans. The history of the Sons of Saint Tammany -- and the powerful democratic and nationalistic values that the image of native America evoked -- demonstrated that the rhetoric and imagery of the Iroquois and their allies (notably the Delawares) were familiar not only to many revolutionary leaders, but also to a wide cross section of the American people. The amalgamation of cultures that formed the new nation manifested itself in the rites and rituals of its fraternal orders.
On the eve of the Constitutional Convention, Native Americans and all classes of European-descended peoples mixed easily. Cornplanter's words before the Congress in 1786 and the Iroquois concepts of unity in government were widely reported from Georgia to New England. Indeed, the press in Philadelphia routinely alluded to American Indian images in its editorials about the upcoming Constitutional Convention. In April 1787, a magazine article referred to Iroquois imagery (the bundle of arrows in section 57 of the Iroquois Constitution) as it argued for a stronger union in the new instrument of government under consideration at the Constitutional Convention. After discussing the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, the anonymous author of"Thoughts on the Present Situation of Public Affairs" recalled in fable form the wisdom of Iroquois unity.

I shall now conclude, after calling to your remembrance the following well[-]known fable: . . . a father, on his deathbed, called together his thirteen sons, and desired a bundle of rods to be brought, which when, according to his orders, they attempted to break, they could not effect. The bundle was then loosened, and the rods, when taken singly were broken with the greatest of ease. The moral of this fable is too well known, to need recitation: nor is it necessary to say much concerning the inferences deducible from it, respecting ourselves. This shall suffice: United, we rise superior to the malice of all our enemies; but if divided, distraction, anarchy, and confusion, shall be our undoubted portion. [3, emphasis in original]

This admonition recalled Canassatego's advice on unity to the colonists at the 1744 Lancaster Treaty Council, which Franklin had popularized by printing the sachem's own words. His was one of several early Iroquois pronouncements on the benefits of a union based on the Great Law of the Iroquois. More specifically, this fable recalled Cornplanter's words to the Philadelphia Sons of Saint Tammany meeting in April 1786. As the 1787 magazine article stated, the "bundle of arrows" was a symbol of unity "too well known . . . to need recitation."[4]

Americans of European descent who continued to wrestle with the formation of their national institutions faced a dilemma: they seemed to need a stronger government than the Articles of Confederation had provided, but to shift too far in the other direction would imitate the monarchies that they had repudiated. The example of tribal societies thus provided a counterpoint to European governments of the time. The Tuscarora Anthropologist, J.N.B. Hewitt, described the sentiments of the time in this way:

There are two radically distinct methods of regimentation of people found extant in the world . . . these two methods are known as the tribal system and the national system. The tribal system organizes solely on the basis of blood kinship, real or by legal fiction. The national system organizes solely on the basis of territorial units. So that kinship groups or units are found in tribal society, territorial units in national society.

The family . . . the clan, the tribe, and the confederacy, are always found in tribal society. The concept of law is implicit in all these units. [5]

While the founding fathers recognized that they could not create a kinship state, they did seek to borrow aspects of Iroquois government that enabled them to assert the people's sovereignty over vast geographic expanses since they found no governments in Europe with these characteristics.[6] Certainly many Americans had some familiarity with the Iroquois League. For instance, William Livingston, delegate to the Constitutional Convention from New Jersey, had lived for a year among the Mohawks at the age of fourteen and was quite familiar with the ideas of the Iroquois.[7]

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention arrived in Philadelphia in time for the usual the Tammany Day celebration. George Washington, in particular, was welcomed by Philadelphia publication as the "Great Chief."[8] The Tammany Society, however, was not the only influential secret society that used Native American symbols; it was part of a popular movement before and during the constitutional period. The Masonic Order, which also flourished during the late eighteenth century, shared this identification with American Indian symbols in its secret rites and ceremonies. An article published a century ago maintained that

t has long been claimed that the aborigines of this continent were found the custodians of secret order or orders which in many respects possessed the salient features of Freemasonry. Schoolcraft and others who have spent years with them and in study of their characteristics confirm the claim that at least several; of the tribes and nations had some secret rite of this kind when Columbus discovered [sic]] the continent. [9]

Most of the members of the Constitutional Convention were Masons, and it has been observed that the mystical aspects of Freemasonry are very similar to the rituals of the "Little Water Society" of the Iroquois. Indeed, Arthur C. Parker argued that the Iroquois Eagle Dance and the "Little Water Society" are mystical in a manner very similar to the rites of Freemasonry. Perhaps this was recognized at the time by some notable Iroquois men such as Joseph Brant, who was a member of the Masonic Order at the time of the American Revolution.[10]


Although the Articles of Confederation had failed to hold the country together, it left a notable legacy. It was the first attempt by thirteen very diverse colonies of people descended from Europeans to form a functioning state in America based on the principles of "natural rights" -- a philoosophy whose exemplar was the native peoples with whom the new Americans shared their everyday lives. It was the first attempt to form this kind of government over such a vast territory in the history of the world.

One of the greatest achievements of the Articles of Confederation was the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlined procedures for gradual incorporation of the western lands as new states in the nation, as well as those governing relations with the western Indians. The Northwest Ordinance solved a nettlesome problem for James Wilson, one of the first associate justices of the Supreme Court, since he did not believe the eastern states should expand their boundaries. However, American Indian nations were excluded from the process of incorporation and eventual statehood in the westward expansion. In discussing the purchase of Western lands from American Indians with Wilson in 1785, Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts was of the opinion that the "emigrants to the frontier lands" might be excluded in this process. They were "the least worthy subjects in the United States," being only a "little less savage than the Indians."[11]

The Northwest Ordinance was literally passed while the Constitution was being framed, and it is generally recognized that Charles Thomson (adopted Delaware and secretary to Congress) was the major author of this legislation. While this critical piece of legislation was in progress, Thomson went to Philadelphia to consult with his friends at the Constitutional Convention. Thomson was a Pennsylvanian and, of course, was close to James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin. Thomson also knew most of the other convention delegates who had served previously in the Continental Congress and Confederation government.[12]

The Ordinance also contained an extensive Bill of Rights, a distinctly American idea. The Iroquois Great Law of Peace is very sensitive to the rights of individuals and the potential abuses of the state. Most European governments were still either divine-right monarchies or commercial oligarchies controlled by the middle and upper classes. The Articles of Confederation placed a great deal of emphasis on local rights and autonomy at the expense of defense and the regulation of commerce. But as the Northwest Ordinance was clearing Congress in July of 1787 in New York, a convention was meeting in Philadelphia to draft a blueprint for the government that would replace the Articles of Confederation.[13] Perhaps Thomson and others pushed through the passage of the Northwest Ordinance and its Bill of Rights in order to insure citizen debate and input into the new Constitution during the ratification process.

The size of the thirteen states and the potential for westward expansion were important considerations for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. For various reasons, the founders rejected ancient and modern European models. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina in 1788 recalled the dilemma that the delegates faced when they found "no precedents" in Europe.

From the European world no precedents are to be drawn for a people who think they are capable of governing themselves. . . . Much difficulty was expected from the extent of country to be governed. All the republics we read of, either in the ancient or modern world, have been extremely limited in territory -- we know of none a tenth so large as the United States. Indeed, we are hardly able to determine . . . whether the governments we have heard of under the name of republic really deserved them, or whether the ancients had any just or proper ideas on the subject. [14]

So, Pinckney advocated a government that was inspired by local models -- in particular, the Albany Plan. Using some of the same terminology, the Pinckney plan proposed a unified government that also reflected the concepts of the Iroquois Confederacy. He believed that his plan and the eventual constructs of the Constitution bore no relation to European principles. Wilson's notations on the Pinckney Plan (made as he referred to it while drafting the Constitution) contained concepts that echoed provisions of the Iroquois Great Law.


A Confederation between the free and independent States . . . is hereby solemnly made uniting them together under a general . . . government for their common benefit and for . . . Defenses and Security against all designs and Leagues that may be [injurious] to their interests.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


The assent of the Legislature of ______ States shall . . . bind the whole confederacy . . .

The Articles of Confederation shall be . . . observed and the Union shall be perpetual. [15]
Charles Pinckney, James Ramsay of South Carolina and others believed that the American people and its government were created in a unique environment distant from European concepts.

Since South Carolina was one of the most informed states on American Indian affairs, it would not be surprising that its delegates entertained Native American ideas at the Constitutional Convention. On May 20, 1787, George Mason (Virginia delegate to the convention) observed that the "most prevalent idea" at the convention was to create "a great National Council." Mason also stated that among the delegates there were "some very eccentric opinions upon this subject."[16] A few weeks later, Mason observed that John Adams' idea of a "legislative, a judiciary & an executive" in a "Great National Council" was "still the prevalent one."[17] These statements occurred within the ideological context of Adams' Defence of the Constitutions of . . . the United States, an influential three-volume "handbook" to which Convention delegates referred on the floor. This contextual guide to the ideas that spawned the Constitution mentioned European attempts at federated republican government based on conceptions of natural rights, as well as precedents in native America.[18]

The United States Constitution would create executive, judicial, and legislative branches as well as augment the powers of the central government. Essentially, James Madison and others proposed in the Virginia Plan that the Confederation be turned inside out (critical powers were to be given to the federal government rather than to the states). The New Jersey Plan (a revised version of the Articles of Confederation) was supported only by New York, New Jersey and Delaware and was easily voted down. There was wrangling to achieve compromise on the issue of representation in the legislature with the result being a bicameral legislature (Senate and House) to solve problems of proportional and state representation. After the representation issue was settled, the main battle was between Northern and Southern delegations over the representation of slaves in the Congress with the resulting 3/5ths Compromise.

By June of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were engaged in a debate about the fundamental nature of the Union. A Philadelphia magazine openly addressed a poem using Native American imagery to the members of the Constitutional Convention:

To bid contending states their discord cease;
To send through all the calumet of peace. [19]


Many delegates appeared to agree with James Wilson when he stated, on June 1, 1787, that he would not be "governed by the British model which was inapplicable to . . . this country." Wilson believed that America's size was so great, and its ideals so "republican, that nothing but a great confederated republic would do for it."[20] Iroquois rhetoric and imagery was already an important part of the political awareness of the times symbolized by the Saint Tammany society. On June 8, 1787, James Wilson (according to James Madison's notes) used an interesting argument about unity that surely must have harkened back to his experiences with the Iroquois at Fort Pitt in 1775.

Among the first sentiments expressed in the first Congress, one was that Virginia was no more, that Massachusetts was no more, that Pennsylvania is no more &c. we are now one nation of brethren. We must bury all local distinctions. This language continued for some time [n.b. Madison's sentence about "language" shows that he probably cut off notetaking of Iroquois rhetoric here since it was so well known]. The tables at length began to turn. No sooner were the state governments formed than their jealousy and ambition began to display themselves . . . till at length the confederation became frittered down to the impotent condition in which it now stands. Review the progress of the articles of confederation thro' Congress and compare the first and last draught of it. To correct its vices is the business of this convention. One of its vices is the want of an effective control in the whole over the parts. [21]

As we shall see later, this instance was just one of several that demonstrated the presence of Iroquois ideas of consensus-seeking brethren in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787. The ideas and imagery of the Iroquois were present in the minds of the some of the framers. For instance, William Livingston of New Jersey had lived for a year among the Mohawks at the age of fourteen.[22]

At about the same time, at a meeting with large delegation of the Iroquois, Shawnees and Creeks, in western Virginia, American Indians on June 30, 1787, characterized their own polity as "the Great Council of the Americans," and went on to characterize their relationship.

We take a strong hold, with both hands, at the end of the great wampum of union. Let the other end also be fast held by those near the Great Water . . . and by all the Red People . . . whereby we shall form a strong chain of defense. [23]

Certainly, the founding fathers had reason to fear a strong an unified American Indian confederacy if they failed to implement a government that secured unity.


In July of 1787, The American Museum (a Philadelphia magazine read by most of the members of the Constitutional Convention), republished an article of Franklin's entitled: "The Origin of Tobacco" that ridiculed European cultural and religious arrogance. In the story, a Susquehannah Indian and a Swedish minister exchange accounts of the origins of their respective religions. After the Indian had recounted his story, the Swedish minister scoffed at the Indian story and called it "fable, fiction, a falsehood" while characterizing the Christian version as "sacred." In replying to the rude minister, the offended Indian asserted that we believed your stories and so " Why then do you refuse to believe ours?" This account was an extract from Franklin's "Remarks concerning the Savages of North-America, 1783." Written just four years before the Constitutional Convention while Franklin was in France, the "Remarks Concerning the Savages" give us a great deal of insight into Franklin's knowledge of American Indian polity. Although Franklin quoted anecdotes and discussed matters relating to the Delawares, Susquehannas and the Iroquois in his "Remarks Concerning the Savages," it is plain that when he turned to the diplomacy and political structure of American Indians, he was discussing the "Six Nations" since he referred specifically to the "Chiefs of the Six Nations" and how they trained their men for war and government before he began his discourse on Iroquois "public Councils." In discussing Iroquois government, Franklin asserted that

Having frequent Occasions to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order and Decency in conducting them. The old Men sit in the foremost ranks, the Warriors in the next, and the Women and Children in the hindmost. The business of the Women is to take exact notice of what passes, imprint it in their Memories, for they have no Writing, and communicate it to their children. They are the Records of the Council, and they preserve Tradition of the Stipulations in Treaties a hundred Years back, which when we compare with our Writings we always find exact. He that would speak rises. The rest observe a profound Silence. When he has finished and sits down, they leave him for five or six Minutes to recollect, that if he has omitted anything . . . he may rise again and deliver it. . . . How different this is from the Conduct of a polite British House of Commons, where scarce a Day passes without some Confusion that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to order. [24]

In the midst of the Constitutional Convention in recalling such American Indian stories, Franklin was playing the role of "philosopher as savage." Certainly, Franklin and Rush's association with the Constitutional Sons of Saint Tammany and their use of American Indian imagery was on their minds in the summer of 1787.

On July 26, l787, the Constitutional Convention adjourned for ten days while a Committee of Detail (John Rutledge of South Carolina, chairman, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut and James Wilson of Pennsylvania) met to "arrange and systematize the materials which" the convention had collected.[25] For ten days, the committee met, sometimes at Independence Hall or at James Wilson's house, and once at the Indian Queen Tavern. At the beginning of the committee's deliberation, John Rutledge was supposed to have read aloud some Iroquois advice that reflected on the will of "the people," and according to his biographer, Rutledge had been impressed with the government of the Iroquois from the time of the Stamp Act Congress.[26]

An examination of James Wilson's "Notes on Drafting a Constitution" reveals that there was a great deal of committee discussion "on the original authority of the people" Wilson's notes reflect that there was uncertainty on "what the sense of the people is" and how "long it existed . . . in an improper manner . . . and from improper sources." (See figure 37.) However, Wilson noted that the committee meant to discuss "the different points in question --"


on principle.

by the Ind[ian] sense of the States in Common.

By some striking instance which may happen if the plan be adopted. [27]







Figure 37. James Wilson argued that the British model could not be applied to the United States. By John Kahionhes Fadden.




The themes of American Indians and expansion, freedom of expression and human rights were often present in the founders' minds. In 1785, at the Treaty of Hopewell, the Congress actually had invited the Cherokees "to send a deputy of their choice . . . to Congress."[28] In the formative years of the United States, the use of Iroquois ideas and phrases were common and relations with Indians, in general, were often on a basis of equality and mutual respect. Political discussion was often cloaked in Native American terms, pseudonyms or "fables." The synthesis of Native American and European ideas is demonstrated clearly in the activities of the Tammany Society and its interaction with political leaders of the time. The editorial policy of The American Museum clearly recognized and reflected the intercultural exchange that was a crucial part of nation building.

In 1787, on the eve of the Constitutional convention, John Adams published his Defence of the Constitutions of . . . Government in the United States. (See figure 36.) Although Adams was selected as a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional convention he chose not to attend and published his lengthy essay instead. Adams' grandson points out that the Defence "was much circulated in the convention, and undoubtedly contributed somewhat to give a favorable direction to the opinion of the members." On June 6, 1787, James Madison, while reporting the opening of the Constitutional Convention to Thomas Jefferson, wrote that "Mr. Adams' Book . . . has excited a good deal of attention." Madison believed that Adams' Defence would be read and "praised, and become a powerful engine in forming the public opinion."[29]








Figure 36. In his Defence of the Constitution . . ., John Adams discussed the Iroquois political system. By John Kahionhes Fadden.




Adams' Defence was a critical survey of world governments and he included a description of the Iroquois and other Native American government in his analysis. In his preface, Adams mentioned the Inca, Manco Capac, and the political structure "of the Peruvians." He also noted that tribes in "North America have certain families from which their leaders are always chosen."[30] Adams believed that American Indian governments collected their authority in one center (a simple or unicameral model), and he also observed that in American Indian governments "the people" believed that "all depended on them."[31] Later in the preface, John Adams observed that Benjamin Franklin, the French Philosophes and other "great philosophers and politicians of the age were "attempting to "set up governments of . . . modern Indians."[32]

According to Adams, the French Philosopher Turgot believed that the new American constitutions that Franklin showed him were "an unreasonable imitation of the usages of England."[33]

Turgot, like Franklin, objected to the perpetuation of bicameral legislatures by the American states and reserved praise only for the unicameral legislature found in the new Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776. The Pennsylvania Constitution also contained a "Council of Censors" that functioned similarly to the Council of Elders of the Iroquois. The Council of Censors' duties included inquiring into whether the constitution was "preserved inviolate . . . and whether the legislative and executive branches" have discharged their duty" as guardians of the people." Like the Iroquois League, the Pennsylvania Constitution provided that

The doors of the . . . general assembly, shall be and remain open for the admission of all persons who behave decently. [34]

In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787), Adams implied that Turgot's preference for the Pennsylvania constitution was probably the result of conversations with Franklin. Adams believed that "Americans are advised" by Turgot, Franklin and others to go back to the political structures of Ancient Germans and modern Indians. While he was critical of this suggestion, Adams argued that "the three powers [of government] are strong in every tribe." Adams also talked of the importance of certain families in American Indian governments.[35] Adams was familiar with the opinions of Richard Price, the radical British thinker, who had received a letter from Turgot in 1778 on the nature of American constitutions.[36] Price believed that Americans had established forms of "government more equitable and more liberal than any the world has yet known." He also believed that as a result of the American Revolution the "Britons themselves will be the greatest gainers."[37] It is very likely that Franklin favored unicameral legislatures because of his experience in Pennsylvania and his exposure to the ideas of Iroquois. Certainly, this was what Adams tried to imply in his Defence. The Iroquois governmental system helped reinforce Franklin's belief (similar to that of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson), that the best government governed least-- and with the simplest bureaucratic machinery.[38]

Adams, an ardent believer in the fundamentals of the British Constitution, opposed Franklin's intimation that the new government should resemble the native confederacies, but he did believe it would be productive to have "a more accurate investigation of the form of governments of the . . . Indians." In addition, Adams argued that it would be "well worth the pains . . . to collect . . . the legislation of the Indians" for study while creating a new constitution. Adams believed that in studying American Indian governments such as the League of the Iroquois, Americans could observe the best examples of governmental separation of powers. In fact, Adams stated that separation of powers in American Indian governments "is marked with a precision that excludes all controversy."[39]

Indeed, Adams pointed out that American Indian governments were so democratic that the "real sovereignty resided in the body of the people."[40] Personal liberty was so important to American Indians, according to Adams, that Mohawks might be characterized as having "complete individual independence."[41]

While discussing the Mohawks, Adams referred to "fifty families governed by all authority in one centre." This statement reflects the extent of Adams' knowledge of the structure of the Iroquois confederacy. In fact, Adams notes rather casually the number of Iroquois sachemships that were delineated by Lewis Henry Morgan, pioneer ethnographer of the League, more than sixty years later. Adams' insight indicates that the founders knew a great deal more about the Iroquois governance system than has been previously acknowledged. The fact that Morgan arrived at similar conclusions without reference to Adams' and other founders' observations provides independent verification of such knowledge. However, the extent of Adams' understanding of the nature of Iroquois government is less important than the awareness that there were profound intellectual connections between native Americans and the founding fathers. Essentially, Adams' insights about Indian governments were really personal and cultural manifestations of a lengthy and sustained dialogue between Euroamericans and Native Americans.[42]

Adams' knowledge of Iroquois and other American Indian confederacies can be seen in his reference to the sachemship system in American Indian governments, which also resembles Morgan's work. Adams wrote that a sachem is elected for life and lesser "sachems are his ordinary council." In this ordinary council, all "national affairs are deliberated and resolved" except declaring war when the "sachems call a national assembly round a great council fire." At this council, the sachems "communicate to the people their resolution, and sacrifice an animal." No doubt, the animal sacrifice is a reference to the "white dog ceremony" of the Iroquois, also described by Morgan more than six decades after Adams. Adams further describes Iroquois custom, when he states that "the people who approve the war . . . throw the hatchet into a tree" and then "join in the subsequent war songs and dances." Adams also exhibits an understanding of the voluntary nature of Iroquois warfare, when he asserts that those who do disapprove of the decision to go to war "take no part in the sacrifice, but retire."[43]

Adams was critical of such European thinkers as Turgot, John Locke and David Hume. Adams felt their theories of government were too abstract and that European thinkers did not know enough about tribal societies and republican governments.[44] In an analysis of the Iroquois and other tribal governments, Adams saw American Indian governments as a window to the pre-monarchical past of Europeans. The founders looked to American Indian ideas about government because they believed that American Indian societies possessed a democratic heritage that European society had largely lost. Adams and other thinkers of the time were critical of all governments, but when they rejected the monarchy and the aristocratic House of Lords of the British Constitution, the often turned to American Indian governmental structures to seek alternatives. To an American like John Adams, firsthand knowledge of American Indian governments helped him in political discussions of emerging republicanism during the eighteenth century. Examples from native America thus framed their debates.

Adams' Defence was no unabashed endorsement of native models for government. Instead, he refutes the arguments of Franklin and Turgot, who advocated a one-house legislature resembling the Iroquois Grand Council, a model that had been used in the Albany Plan and Articles of Confederation. Among Europeans, Adams did not trust the consensus model that seemed to work for the Iroquois. Adams believed that without the checks and balances built into two houses, the system will succumb to special interests and dissolve into anarchy, or despotism. When Adams described the Mohawks' independence, he exercised criticism while Franklin wrote about Indian governments in a much more benign way. Adams believed:

Is it not sublime wisdom, to rush headlong into all the distraction and divisions . . . which are the certain consequence of the want of order and balances, merely for the sake of the popular caprice of having fifty families governed by all all authority in one centre? Even this would not satisfy; the fifty families would soon dissolve their union, and nothing would ever content them short of the complete individual independence of the Mohawks; for it may be depended on, that individual independence is what every unthinking human heart aims at, nearly or remotely. [45]

Adams sought to erect checks on the caprice of the unthinking heart, and cited the Iroquois Grand Council (the fifty families) as a negative example, ignoring the fact, as Franklin wrote to Parker in 1751, that it "has subsisted ages." Franklin was more of a utopian: he still sought a government based upon the best in human nature, calling its citizens to rise to it. He did not fear unrestrained freedom as did Adams. During the Convention, Franklin, according to James Madison's notes, argued that "We shd. not depress the virtue & public spirit of our common people. . . . He did not think the elected had any right in any case to narrow the privileges of the electors." The United States, having tasted revolution and the better part of a decade under the Articles of Confederation, seemed ready, in 1787, to agree with Adams, whose advocacy of two houses prevailed over Franklin's unicameral model. Still, the example of native liberty exerted a telling pull on the national soul, and conceptions of native America played an important role in these debates. The fact that Adams repeatedly called upon native imagery even in opposition to its use is proof of how widely these ideas were discussed.

Furthermore, Adams specifically stated that many thinkers of the era liked the governmental structures of Native Americans. Since Adams' Defence was "much circulated in the [Constitutional] convention," it seems that his portrayal of the crosscurrents of ideas at the time is an accurate reflection of the thinking of the era.[46]

Given the nature of Adams' Defence, there can be no doubt that Native American governmental structures and ideas were part of the process of constitution making. Even though John Adams and Thomas Jefferson disagreed fundamentally about the nature of government, both men used American Indian ideas and customs to support divergent points of view. This insight leads to the realization that both men were in agreement over the source of distinctly American ideas even though they interpreted that source very differently. In the end, it is significant that American Indian ideas and political structures, as perceived by Adams and Jefferson, were used to construct a uniquely American political system.

The issue of property, and whether government should be constituted to protect it, was a major issue of debate at the Constitutional Convention, as it had been during the Revolution. Jefferson had substituted "happiness" for Lockean "property" as a natural right in the Declaration of Independence, and invoked native Americans as examples of it when he wrote to Edward Carrington in January of 1787. Six months later, at the Convention, the native example was invoked negatively by Gouverneur Morris in a similar argument. "Men do not enter into Society to protect their Lives or Liberty -- the Savages possess both in perfection -- they unite in Society for the Protection of Property," according to notes taken July 5, by Rufus King.[47] Morris' remark came as delegates debated whether they should establish a numerical ratio of one representative per 40,000 inhabitants, a debate that was later resolved by the establishment of a House of Representatives based on population, and a Senate with an equal number of seats for each state. Morris feared that if population was the sole criterion, the poor of the western states would ultimately "destroy or oppress the Atlantic States."[48] He favored representation based on the amount of taxation paid.

On August 8, according to King's notes, Morris again cited a native example in a negative manner when he expressed support for a proposal to require fourteen years' citizenship before one could be elected to the United States Senate.

The Indians are the most liberal of any People, because when Strangers come amongst them, they offer their wives and daughters for their carnal amusement. It is recommended that we open our Doors, and invite the oppressed of all Nations to come & find asylum in America. It is true we have invited them to come & worship in our Temple, but we have never proposed that they should become Priests at our Altars. [49]

Morris showed his ignorance of gender equity among most native peoples: husbands did not order their wives to do such things. Instances of such things were recorded, with the women usually acting as intelligence agents for their nations.

Benjamin Franklin made an impassioned plea for unity and pragmatic compromise near the end of the debates:

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve . . . but . . . the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to more respect to the judgment of others. . . . I doubt whether any Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution . . . so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet for the purpose of one another's throats. [50]

Throughout the process of nation building Franklin consistently had stressed unity as a fundamental concept in any form of government. No matter how old he got nor how many revisions his Albany Plan of Union underwent, Franklin never forgot the Iroquois roots of the U. S. Constitution and the need for unity. On June 30, 1787 while the Constitutional Convention was resolving the bitter dispute on proportional representation, he wrote to Indian leaders using direct references to the "Great Spirit" and the council fire of the American government.[51]

I am sorry that the Great Council fire of our Nation is not now burning, so that you cannot do your business there. In a few months, the coals will be rak'd out of the ashes and will again be rekindled. Our wise men will then take the complaints of your nation into consideration. [52]




This statement demonstrates that American Indian governmental concepts persisted in the mind of Benjamin Franklin long after the Albany Plan of Union was first offered as an instrument of American government. During the month of July, 1787, another noted Pennsylvanian, Benjamin Rush, M.D., had published a letter stating that Independence Hall was filled with "legislators astonishing the world with their wisdom and virtue" on the same site "where had been seen an Indian council fire."[53]
In August of 1787, the bundle of arrows imagery was once again recalled in a Philadelphia magazine. The imagery was very similar to the one published in April of 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention. In fable form, the editor again openly urged the delegates to use the bundle of arrows as a method to obtain unity. (Section 57 of the Iroquois Constitution). The fable did not appeal to ancient or modern European states.

Unanimity recommended to Americans
-- A Fable -- Addressed to the
Federal Constitution
A careful sire, of old, who found
Death coming, call'd his sons around.
They heard with reverence what he spake,
Here, try this bunch of sticks to break.

The took the bundle: ev'ry swain
Endeavour'd but the task was vain.
`Observe,' the dying father cry'd;
And took the sticks himself and try'd;

When separated, lo! how quick
He breaks asunder ev'ry stick
`Learn my dear boys, by this example,
So strong, so pertinent, so ample,

That Union saves you all from ruin,
But to divide is your undoing:

For if you take them one by one,
See, with what ease the task is done!
Singly, how quickly broke in twain,
How form the aggregate Thirteen!'

Is not the tale, Columbians, clear?
What application needs there here?
This motto to your hearts apply,
Ye Senators, Unite or Die.[54, emphasis in original]



At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Franklin could have been recalling the December, 1776 "rising sun" speech of an Iroquois sachem when he stated

I have . . . looked at that [chair] behind the President without being able to tell whether it was a rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun. [55]

Certainly, Franklin had used Iroquois imagery in late June 1787 when the Convention had finally decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation and create a whole new bicameral legislature.

Wilson described the course of debate at the Constitutional Convention:

the extent of the country for which the New Constitution was required, produced another difficulty in the business of the Federal convention. It is the opinion of some celebrated writers, that to a small territory the democratical, to a middling territory (as Montesquieu has termed it) the monarchial, and to an extensive territory the despotic form of government is best adapted. Regarding then, the wide an almost unbounded jurisdiction of the United States, at first view the hand of despotism seemed necessary to control, connect and protect it; and hence the chief embarrassment arose. For we knew that, although our constituents would cheerfully submit to legislative restraints of a free government, they would spurn at every attempt to shackle them with despotic power.

In this dilemma, a Federal Republic naturally presented itself . . . as a species of government which secured all the internal advantages of a republic, at the same time that it maintained the external dignity and force of a monarchy. [56]

Therefore, it is not surprising that Wilson would explain that "the most important obstacle to the proceedings of the Federal Convention" was in drawing the "line between the national and the individual governments of the states." However, Wilson stated that the sentiments of the convention and of the American people on this issue were "expressed in the motto some of them" had adopted "Unite or die."[57]

As a Pennsylvanian, Wilson was aware of the influence of Iroquois imagery and how it was used by the Constitutional Sons of St. Tammany, or Columbian Order. Wilson was a good friend of Franklin having read Dr. Franklin's speeches "to the Convention . . . it being inconvenient for the Doctor to remain long on his feet."[58] With these facts in mind, it is not surprising that Wilson would explain to the ratification convention that "the most important obstacle to the proceedings of the Federal Convention" was the drawing of the "line between the national and the individual governments of the states." However, Wilson stated that the sentiments of the convention and of the American people on this issue were "expressed in the motto some of them" had adopted "Unite or die" (this phrase is one of the mottoes of the Tammany society).[59]

Iroquois imagery was used by James Wilson to explain the process of territorial expansion and the establishment of new states. Wilson made it clear that the Eastern States should not expand their western boundaries and instead new semi-independent states ought to be created. Wilson believed that in order to have the respect of western settlers new government officers should be:

chosen by the people to fill the places of greatest trust and importance in the country; and by this means, a chain of communication and confidence will be formed between the United States and the new settlements.

To preserve and strengthen this chain it will, I apprehend, be expedient for Congress to appoint a minister for the new settlements and Indian Affairs. [60]

In using covenant chain imagery, Wilson was echoing the rhetoric of Iroquois and American diplomacy. Since Wilson served on many Indian committees in the Continental Congress and had met with the Iroquois on several occasions, he seems to have been impressed by Iroquois ways concerning the rights of the people and territorial expansion.[61] In December of 1787, The American Museum published a poem that used chain imagery as a model to unite the vast United States. In part, the poem stated:

In federal laws connect the wide domain,
And bind the Union with a deathless chain.[62]


In 1788, an editorial on the Constitution appearing in South Carolina also recalled the "unite or die" motto and urged the people to be "of one heart and mind."[63] In November of 1788, The Columbian Magazine (one of the foremost magazines of the day) published an article on Canassatego's version of the origin of the Five Nations.[64] Clearly, Iroquois concepts and rhetoric were prevalent in the American press at the time of ratification. David Ramsay of South Carolina argued during ratification that the American union was a kinship state. Ramsay, who was president of Congress on May 2, 1786 when Cornplanter spoke on Iroquois unity, stated that

When thirteen persons constitute a family, each should forego everything that is injurious to the other twelve. When several families constitute a parish or county, each may adopt what regulations it pleases with regard to its domestic affairs, but must be abridged of that liberty in other cases, where the good of the whole is concerned.

When several parishes, counties or districts form a state, the separate interests of each must yield to the collective interest of the whole. When several states combine in one government, the same principles must be observed. These relinquishments of natural rights, are not real sacrifices; each person, county, or state, gains more than it loses, for it only gives up the right of injuring others, and obtains in return aid and strength to secure itself in the peaceful enjoyment of all remaining rights. [65]

Ramsay and other influential intellectuals of the time led a movement to develop a distinct American character that was different from Europe's. Ramsay, like Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, believed that few European ideas were really applicable to the American environment. It is only logical that these thinkers turned to their "native" roots for inspiration.

During the writing of the Constitution in August of 1787, The American Museum had called the Iroquois "sires" and had utilized the bundle of arrows imagery of the Iroquois (Section 57 of the Great Law) as a metaphor for union. By 1789, the editor of The American Museum, Matthew Carey, was just publishing the obvious relationships between Iroquois ideas and the new government that had been a part of the folk tradition of the American Revolution. The founders, the members of the "Tammany" society, and the American people at the time of ratification knew of the native American roots of American government.[66] In a very real sense, the articles on the Albany Plan and the items on American Indian customs printed in The American Museum and the Columbian Magazine in 1788 and 1789 should be considered Franklin's "Federalist Papers." "The Albany Papers" argued that there was a marked similarities between the Constitution and Franklin's Albany Plan. Matthew Carey featured the "Albany Papers" articles in his magazine after he had consulted with Franklin.

While Franklin was known to be a member of the Tammany Society and Washington attended meetings, the Tammany society held reservations about the implementation of the new constitution. During ratification, Alexander Hamilton addressed the concerns of the Tammany Society in Federalist No. 69. An editorial under the pseudonym of "Tamony" was published in several Virginia and Pennsylvania newspapers that reflected the political philosophy (strong legislature and weak executive except in war) of the Tammany Society. In particular, the Tammany Society feared that the new executive might have peacetime powers akin to the British Crown and that such powers could abridge basic rights and freedom of expression even in peacetime. In Federalist No. 69, Hamilton sought to explain the powers of the executive in terms that would eliminate some of these feelings raised by Tammany members.[67] During ratification, the Tammany Society feared that the executive branch might usurp American freedoms in peacetime as could the British King. This issue was raised in an article appearing in both Virginia and Pennsylvania newspapers.[68]

Another obvious reference to Native American political imagery was a poem entitled "Character of St. Tammany" that idolized the old Delaware Chief who wanted "To live in freedom or with honor die." The monthly American Museum's list of subscribers included just about every major political figure of the era (Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, et. al.) so it had an enormous impact. The clustering of the Albany Plan, the Albany conference of 1775 and a poem on St. Tammany during ratification was deliberate. It sent a clear message to the American people about the nature of American government and its origins.

In early 1789, The American Museum called attention to the similarities of Franklin's Albany Plan of Union and the new constitution. The article said that the Albany Plan of 1754 had a "strong . . . resemblance to the present system." The essay further observed that an examination of the similarities of the two documents will "convince the wavering, the new constitution is not the fabrication of the moment." The essay further asserted that Franklin never lost sight of his favorite system until the end of his life, when he "lived to see it accomplished." After this article, the publication launched a three-part series entitled "Albany Papers with notes by Franklin" that explored the evolution of American government from the Albany Plan to the framing of the Constitution. The American Museum also carried several essays on American Indian manners and customs during this time. When ratification was in its last stages, The American Museum reprinted the major speech by the Americans to the Iroquois at the Albany conference in the summer of 1775. The reprinted speech contained the "tree of peace" imagery and many other familiar references.

James Wilson figured in a direct use of Iroquois imagery during ratification. An essay titled "The New Roof" styled him as an architect, adding rafters to the national house, in much the same way as Section 6 of the Iroquois Great Law provides for amendment of the Great Law in precisely the same language. He observed that:

In forming this plan [the Constitution], they [the founders] consulted the most celebrated authors in ancient and modern architecture and brought into the plan the most approved parts . . . selected from the models before them. [69]



A dramatic example of the symbolism of the Iroquois and its relationship to the U.S. Constitution occurred in 1790 at a Tammany meeting in New York City. George Washington had been impressed with the Philadelphia Tammany Society's welcome of Cornplanter to the City of Philadelphia in 1786, so he asked the New York Tammany Society in 1790 to welcome the Creek chief, Alexander M'Gillvray, to New York City. The Tammany Society's welcoming of M'Gillvray and his chiefs reflected the debt that many Americans had acknowledged to the ideas of American Indians.
On July 21, 1790, the Tammany Society escorted M'Gillvray and several other Creek chiefs through the streets of New York. The speeches during this visit had a great deal of Tammany rhetoric in them and the Creeks seemed to like the references to the Iroquois since they referred to the Iroquois as their "grandfathers" throughout this occasion.[70] President George Washington wanted to negotiate a favorable treaty with the Creek Nation so he asked the New York branch of the Saint Tammany Society to escort and entertain the Creek leaders when they visited New York City in July and August of 1790. Washington was aware of the favorable impression that the Saint Tammany Society of Philadelphia had made on Cornplanter and several Senecas during their visit in 1786 so he asked the New York branch of the society to conduct a similar welcoming ceremony for the Creeks.

With ratification complete, Washington was ready to negotiate with American Indian nations such as the Creeks. Certainly, the speeches and toasts of the Saint Tammany Society during this occasion clearly indicate the pervasiveness of Native American, especially Iroquois, idea and symbols in American politics at the time. Washington had attended Tammany meetings for years, and he knew Tammany societies from Georgia to Rhode Island were referring to the new Constitution as the "New Fire which we have kindled in peace."[71]

The visiting Creeks were escorted throughout the city by three officers of "The Society of Saint Tammany, in their proper dresses." Toasts were made to a "strong and perpetual chain of friendship between the United States, and the Creek Nation" and to the "Oblivion of all prejudices and resentments."[72] On August 2, 1790, the Sons of Saint Tammany sought to explain the purpose of the society to the Creeks. Their great object was to "cherish -- to spread abroad, and to maintain the love of freedom."

At a remarkable banquet on August 2, 1790, the Sons of St. Tammany acknowledged the country's debt to the Iroquois for providing notions of unity and federalism to the founders. This banquet was attended by the members of the Tammany Society, Thomas Jefferson (Secretary of State), John Jay (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), Henry Knox (Secretary of War), and the Creeks. According to the traditions of the Tammany Society, its great object was to "cherish -- to spread abroad, and to maintain the love of freedom." In the traditions of the Tammany Society, its two great leaders (Tammany and Columbus) were supposed to direct the society in all of its proceedings and both men lived together "in a world of the spirits in great harmony." The Tammany sachems pointed out that M'Gillvray was both white and Indian, and that we "are altogether children of one father."[73]

Subsequently, the scribe of the Tammany Council asserted:

Our institution, erected on the basis of natural freedom, records, in its formation, the noblest sentiments . . . public virtue and political friendship; men actuated by a sameness of principle, become our brethren, and we embrace than as friends.

present to you our public constitution. In it you will behold the strong features of political freedom, and that a sacred regard for the rights of human nature originated in our institution . . . let these [principles] prove a covenant chain between us, the brightness of whose links will never know rust. . . . Let us take hold of it, and, as we are all children of the same soil, let one tree of peace shelter us with its branches of union. . . . The . . . constitution . . . was then presented by him to the acceptance of Col. M'Gillvray." [74]

After this speech, hands were shaken, patriotic songs sung and the Creeks danced. Several toasts were offered to "Washington -- the beloved sachem of the 13 fires," and to universal peace and happiness, or the "Tammanical Chain extended thro' the Creek Nations and round the whole earth."[75] The Creeks were pleased with the ceremony and enjoyed the rhetoric of their grandfathers, the Iroquois, whose political imagery and theory was now firmly embedded in the minds of the American people during the Washington administration. Indeed, Washington remarked that "the citizens . . . were . . . animated with the hope of transmitting to posterity the spirit of a free constitution in its native purity."[76]

In discussing the synthesis of American Indian and European cultures, the Tammany society asserted that the "constitution . . . [had] . . . a sacred regard for the rights of human nature." Furthermore, the Tammany society toasted the constitution as our "tree of peace . . . [that shelters] . . . us with its branches of union."[77] Thus, in the presence of Thomas Jefferson and many other dignitaries, the debt to Iroquois political theory was acknowledged by the Tammany Society during the final stages of the Constitution's ratification. Americans not only had forged a new identity but also a new political structure that was a synthesis of the European and the Native American worlds. The grand equation, our constitution, was a product of the American and European experience.

In 1792, the Tammany Society built toward a mass tricentennial celebration of Columbus' arrival in America. On March 17, joy bells rang in Philadelphia to mark the arrival of 47 "chiefs and warriors of the Seneca Nation of Indians," who "came from the northward," landing at the Market Street Wharf. They were escorted to Eller's Hotel by a detachment of light infantry to the booming of cannon, where the governor of the state met with them.[78]

On October 12, 1792, the Columbian tricentennial celebration peaked in New York City. As had become their custom, Tammany members remembered the occasion by retelling Franklin's anecdotes about Indians. The society also used this occasion, among others, to advocate its political platform, which included abolishment of imprisonment for debt and a continuous review of the Constitution. The society also advocated making of America an "asylum for the oppressed of all nations and religions." In keeping with its belief that all human beings should "assume the native rights and privileges of American freeman," the Tammany Society pledged that the ensuing one hundred years would be the "last Columbian century" in which anyone would be held as a slave in any nation. The Society questioned the assumptions that lay behind slavery (and racism in general), contending that Indians were their "equal brothers." Along the same lines, Tammany Society members sought to expand the scope of suffrage and "subversion to monarchy." The platform echoed the concepts of Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and others who, after the American revolution, spread their political convictions in an attempt to foment "a world republic."[79]


Throughout the nineteenth century, the Tammany Society kept alive the idea that America was a synthesis of European and American Indian ideas. Gradually, other societies evolved that perpetuated this concept. One of these societies was the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal society that, like the Tammany Society, traces its roots back to the Sons of Liberty. A description of the fundamental principles of the organization formally states that American democracy was derived from Native American roots.

The early patriots who founded the old Sons of Liberty in colonial times, never knew what real American liberty was. . . . Their first vision of real freedom was caught from the wild savages, who . . . selected their own Sachems and forms of religious worship; and who made their own laws . . . while white men . . . were continually . . . hampered by unreasonable laws and regulations, imposed by a distant king. . . . They began to chafe under their thralldom, which finally resulted in the "Boston Tea Party," the Declaration of Independence, and the War of the Revolution.

The children of the forest . . . furnished the first inspiration of true liberty. . . . [Thus] it was but natural that the name of the old Sons of Liberty should be changed . . . thereby giving honor to whom honor was due, hence -- "The Improved Order of Red Men." [80]



American Indian concepts of freedom and democracy were crucial ideas in the formation of a new American identity. The evolution of an American identity that synthesized Native American and European cultures led to a synthesis of political concepts as well. The founders acknowledged this debt in a variety of ways. James Wilson and Charles Pinckney believed that the Old World did not provide adequate governmental precedents for a free and democratic people so they emphasized New World precedents. Others such as John Adams saw the need for a more balanced synthesis of Native American principles and the British Constitution. In the final analysis, Tammany Day and the activities of the Tammany Society sought to recognize the debt that Euroamericans owed to Native American cultures.
After the creation of the Constitution, the American Republic would overlay the theme of American democracy with a Neoclassical Greek and Roman theme. This was an obvious attempt to give the new Republic an image of stability and antiquity despite the observations by Charles Pinckney, Benjamin Franklin and others that such ancient governments were not applicable to the American experience. Oddly enough, recent research by Martin Bernal refuted the racist assumptions about the exclusive European origins of ancient Greek culture. Bernal argued that Greek culture can be attributed to African and Asian antecedents as well as European sources. Bernal argues that scholars have fabricated a Greek culture exclusive of Non-European roots in the last two centuries to maintain that European culture is not related to and "above" African and Asian societies.[81]

It appears that in their haste to "legitimize" the new American government of 1787. The "opinion leaders" of the time drew a Neoclassical "veil" across not only the African and Asian roots of European society but also sought to ignore the debts to Native Americans as well. In 1789, a magazine article on the antiquity of Indian mounds and "former strength of the aborigines" in the Ohio River Valley stated that

if we and our fathers, desire to conceal our shame from posterity, history must draw a veil over the conduct of foreigners towards their tawny brethren. [82]

Chief among these Native American debts are a distinctive American identity, federalism, unity without imperialism across a vast geographic expanse (this was not typical in Europe). Through a study of the St. Tammany Society and a careful reading of interactions with Native Americans, Americans can regain an understanding of its North American roots.[83] Certainly, the evidence that America is a synthesis of Native America and Europe can be found in the Works of John Adams and in the philosophy of the Tammany society. Early historians of the American Revolution such as David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren believed that Americans had a distinctive national character that was linked to the environment. Indeed, Mercy Otis Warren asserted that the environment of America enforced a natural equality of man because the state of civilization in the colonies did not allow the development of great wealth and power. She coupled this analysis with the realization that American frontiersmen had "the habits of savages, and appear scarce a grade above" them. Warren feared westward expansion because she felt it would destroy the happy balance in America between the state of nature and the over-refined civilization in the states of the Eastern seaboard.[84]

Two generations ago Carl Van Doren and Julian Boyd summed up the appeal of the Iroquois confederacy to the colonists in this way.

From family, council to town, to tribe to confederacy and down again there were regular steps in the chain of administration. . . . Their confederacy was but a League of ragged villages, as Franklin said of it, but it worked better than any other in the colonies. [85]

Certainly, the political concepts of Native Americans held a great fascination for the revolutionary generation. Repeatedly, the historical record shows that no matter what ideology an Adams, a Jefferson or a Franklin espoused, they often referred to their perceptions of Native American society. An examination of the papers of the founding fathers demonstrates that they felt free to discourse on the nature of American Indian governments. Some like Charles Pinckney and Benjamin Franklin felt that European governments were inapplicable in North America. Thomas Jefferson summed it up best in his letter to John Rutledge (Constitutional delegate from South Carolina) as Rutledge was finishing the first draft of the Constitution. Jefferson wrote that the "effect of kingly government . . . is to produce the wanton sacrifice . . . of the people." Jefferson concluded his analysis by observing that some Americans characterized "our's a bad government. The only condition on earth to be compared with ours, is that of the Indians, where they still have less law than we. The European, are governments of kites over pigeons."[86] There can be no denying that many founding fathers were compelled to examine the merits of Native American governments in their search for an alternative to the British monarchy.


References


Adrienne Koch, ed., Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), p. 85. The official United States government interpretation of the origins of the United States Constitution can be found in the words of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Chairman of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. In Burger's foreword to We the People of the Untied States: Official Commemorative Edition, The Constitution of the United States (Washington: Citicorp/Citibank and the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, 1986). He stated that in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, there was no nation in the "world that governed with separated powers and divided powers providing checks and balances on the exercise of authority by those who governed." In effect, Burger chose to ignore the existence of the Iroquois confederacy and John Adams' call in 1787 for a "more accurate investigation of the forms of governments of the . . . Indians" in framing a new constitution; and former Chief Justice Burger also chose to ignore Adams' observation in 1787 that with regards to American Indian governments, the separation of powers "is marked with a precision that excludes all controversy," see Adams, ed., Works, IV, pp. 296-298. Instead, Burger only traced the roots of the Constitution "back to Magna Charta and beyond." Burger ignored American Indian history when he stated that the United States Constitution was the "the first of its kind in human history." Needless to say, the official literature surrounding the 200th anniversary of the creation of the United States Constitution glossed over basic facts and scholarship and mislead the American people (see Burger, "Foreword," in We the People . . . ). For an extensive recent collection of documents, essays and other writings that was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and other foundations and relate to the Constitution but ignore the American Indian influence see Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders' Constitution, [5 volumes] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Another volume that ignored the influence of Native Americans on American government was Richard Beeman, et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
For the existing recent literature on the controversy regarding the Native American roots of American government, see Donald A. Grinde, Jr., The Iroquois and the Funding of the American Nation (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977), Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution (Ipswich, MA.: Gambit, 1982), Wilbur Jacobs, Dispossessing the American Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1985), "Special Constitution Bicentennial Edition, 1988" of Northeast Indian Quarterly, IV, 4 (Winter, 1987) and Volume V, 1 (Spring, 1988), Elisabeth Tooker, "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League," Ethnohistory, XXXV, 4 (Fall 1988), Donald A. Grinde, Jr., "Iroquoian Political Concept and the Genesis of American Government: Further Research and Contentions," and Robert Venables, "The Founding Fathers: Choosing to Be Romans," Northeast Indian Quarterly, VI, 4, (Winter, 1989). See also Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde, Jr., "The Debate Regarding Native American Precedents for Democracy: A Recent Historiography," American Indian Culture and Research Journal, XIV, 1, and Bruce E. Johansen, "Native American Societies and the Evolution of Democracy in America, 1600-1800: A Commentary," Ethnohistory, Vol. XXXVII, 3 (Summer, 1990)


Benjamin Franklin, June 28, 1787 in Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), [4 vols.], I, p. 450. After reiterating frustration with the inapplicability of European governmental systems, Franklin would write three cryptic letters to "Indians" on June 30, 1787. For an example of one of these letters using Iroquois rhetoric by Franklin (the philosopher as savage) see Benjamin Franklin to Cornstalk, June 30, 1787, Franklin Papers Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

F O R G O T T E N
F O U N D E R S






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By Bruce E. Johansen



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Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the
American Revolution






1 9 8 2

C O N T E N T S



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE A Composite Culture

CHAPTER TWO The Pre-Columbian Republic

CHAPTER THREE "Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans"

CHAPTER FOUR Such an Union

CHAPTER FIVE Philosopher as Savage

CHAPTER SIX Self-Evident Truths

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX





Inside Book Jacket

Book excerpts

I N T R O D U C T I O N







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It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Futhermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native School of thought. --
Chief Luther Standing Bear
Lakota (Sioux)
Land of the Spotted Eagle





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The seeds for this book were sown in my mind during a late-summer day in 1975, by a young American Indian whose name I've long since forgotten. As a reporter for the Seattle Times, I had been researching a series of articles on Washington State Indian tribes. The research took me to Evergreen State College in Olympia, where a young woman, an undergraduate in the American Indian studies program, told me in passing that the Iroquois had played a key role in the evolution of American democracy.

The idea at first struck me as disingenuous. I considered myself decently educated in American history, and to the best of my knowledge, government for and by the people had been invented by white men in powdered wigs. I asked the young woman where she had come by her information.

"My grandmother told me," she said. That was hardly the kind of source one could use for a newspaper story. I asked whether she knew of any other sources. "You're the investigative reporter," she said. "You find them."

Back at the city desk, treed cats and petty crime were much more newsworthy than two-centuries-past revels in the woods the width of a continent away. For a time I forgot the meeting at Evergreen, but never completely. The woman's challenge stayed with me through another year at the Times, the writing of a book on American Indians, and most of a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. I collected tantalizing shreds -- a piece of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin here, an allegation there. Individually, these meant little. Together, however, they began to assume the outline of a plausible argument that the Iroquois had indeed played a key role in the ideological birth of the United States, especially through Franklin's advocacy of federal union.

Late in 1978, the time came to venture the topic for my Ph.D. dissertation in history and communications. I proposed an investigation of the role that Iroquois political and social thought had played in the thinking of Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Members of my supervisory committee were not enthusiastic. Doubtless out of concern for my academic safety, I was advised to test my water wings a little closer to the dock of established knowledge. The professors, however, did not deny my request. Rather, I was invited to flail as far out as I might before returning to the dock, colder, wetter, and presumably wiser.

I plunged in, reading the published and unpublished papers of Franklin and Jefferson, along with all manner of revolutionary history, Iroquois ethnology, and whatever else came my way. Wandering through a maze of footnotes, I early on found an article by Felix Cohen, published in 1952. Cohen, probably the most outstanding scholar of American Indian law of his or any other age, argued the thesis I was investigating in the American Scholar. Like the Indian student I had encountered more than three years earlier, he seemed to be laying down the gauntlet -- providing a few enticing leads (summarized here in chapter one), with no footnotes or any other documentation.

After several months of research, I found two dozen scholars who had raised the question since 1851, usually in the context of studies with other objectives. Many of them urged further study of the American Indians' (especially the Iroquois') contribution to the nation's formative ideology, particularly the ideas of federal union, public opinion in governance, political liberty, and the government's role in guaranteeing citizens' well-being -- "happiness," in the eighteenth-century sense.

The most recent of these suggestions came through Donald Grinde, whose The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (1979) reached me in the midst of my research. Grinde summarized much of what had been written to date, reserving special attention for Franklin, and then wrote that "more needs to be done, especially if America continues to view itself as a distinct entity set apart from many of the values of Western civilization." He also suggested that such a study could help dissolve negative stereotypes that many Euro-Americans still harbor toward American Indians' mental abilities and heritage.

By this time, I was past worrying whether I had a story to tell. The question was how to tell it: how to engage readers (the first of whom would be my skeptical professors) with history from a new angle; how to overcome the sense of implausibility that I had felt when the idea of American Indian contributions to the national revolutionary heritage was first presented to me.

Immersion in the records of the time had surprised me. I had not realized how tightly Franklin's experience with the Iroquois had been woven into his development of revolutionary theory and his advocacy of federal union. To understand how all this had come to be, I had to remove myself as much as possible from the assumptions of the twentieth century, to try to visualize America as Franklin knew it.

I would need to describe the Iroquois he knew, not celluloid caricatures concocted from bogus history, but well-organized polities governed by a system that one contemporary of Franklin's, Cadwallader Colden, wrote had "outdone the Romans." Colden was writing of a social and political system so old that the immigrant Europeans knew nothing of its origins -- a federal union of five (and later six) Indian nations that had put into practice concepts of popular participation and natural rights that the European savants had thus far only theorized. The Iroquoian system, expressed through its constitution, "The Great Law of Peace," rested on assumptions foreign to the monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders' impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois' law and custom upheld freedom of expression in political and religious matters, and it forbade the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women and the relatively equitable distribution of wealth. These distinctly democratic tendencies sound familiar in light of subsequent American political history -- yet few people today (other than American Indians and students of their heritage) know that a republic existed on our soil before anyone here had ever heard of John Locke, or Cato, the Magna Charta, Rousseau, Franklin, or Jefferson.

To describe the Iroquoian system would not be enough, however. I would have to show how the unique geopolitical context of the mid-eighteenth century brought together Iroquois and Colonial leaders -- the dean of whom was Franklin -- in an atmosphere favoring the communication of political and social ideas: how, in essence, the American frontier became a laboratory for democracy precisely at a time when Colonial leaders were searching for alternatives to what they regarded as European tyranny and class stratification.

Once assembled, the pieces of this historical puzzle assumed an amazingly fine fit. The Iroquois, the premier Indian military power in eastern North America, occupied a pivotal geographical position between the rival French of the St. Lawrence Valley and the English of the Eastern Seaboard. Barely a million Anglo-Americans lived in communities scattered along the East Coast, islands in a sea of American Indian peoples that stretched far inland, as far as anyone who spoke English then knew, into the boundless mountains and forests of a continent much larger than Europe. The days when Euro-Americans could not have survived in America without Indian help had passed, but the new Americans still were learning to wear Indian clothing, eat Indian corn and potatoes, and follow Indian trails and watercourses, using Indian snowshoes and canoes. Indians and Europeans were more often at peace than at war -- a fact missed by telescoped history that focuses on conflict.

At times, Indian peace was as important to the history of the continent as Indian war, and the mid-eighteenth century was such a time. Out of English efforts at alliance with the Iroquois came a need for treaty councils, which brought together leaders of both cultures. And from the earliest days of his professional life, Franklin was drawn to the diplomatic and ideological interchange of these councils -- first as a printer of their proceedings, then as a Colonial envoy, the beginning of one of the most distinguished diplomatic careers in American history. Out of these councils grew an early campaign by Franklin for Colonial union on a federal model, very similar to the Iroquois system.

Contact with Indians and their ways of ordering life left a definite imprint on Franklin and others who were seeking, during the prerevolutionary period, alternatives to a European order against which revolution would be made. To Jefferson, as well as Franklin, the Indians had what the colonists wanted: societies free of oppression and class stratification. The Iroquois and other Indian nations fired the imaginations of the revolution's architects. As Henry Steele Commager has written, America acted the Enlightenment as European radicals dreamed it. Extensive, intimate contact with Indian nations was a major reason for this difference.

This book has two major purposes. First, it seeks to weave a few new threads into the tapestry of American revolutionary history, to begin the telling of a larger story that has lain largely forgotten, scattered around dusty archives, for more than two centuries. By arguing that American Indians (principally the Iroquois) played a major role in shaping the ideas of Franklin (and thus, the American Revolution) I do not mean to demean or denigrate European influences. I mean not to subtract from the existing record, but to add an indigenous aspect, to show how America has been a creation of all its peoples.

In the telling, this story also seeks to demolish what remains of stereotypical assumptions that American Indians were somehow too simpleminded to engage in effective social and political organization. No one may doubt any longer that there has been more to history, much more, than the simple opposition of "savagery" and "civilization." History's popular writers have served us with many kinds of savages, noble and vicious, "good Indians" and "bad Indians," nearly always as beings too preoccupied with the essentials of the hunt to engage in philosophy and statecraft. This was simply not the case. Franklin and his fellow founders knew differently. They learned from American Indians, by assimilating into their vision of the future, aspects of American Indian wisdom and beauty. Our task is to relearn history as they experienced it, in all its richness and complexity, and thereby to arrive at a more complete understanding of what we were, what we are, and what we may become.

-- Bruce E. Johansen
Seattle, Washington
July 1981

C H A P T E R O N E


A Composite Culture





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When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. . . . --
Felix Cohen,
"Americanizing the White Man,"
American Scholar, 1952





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After Christopher Columbus's first encounter with a continent that he initially mistook for India, North America became the permanent home of several markedly different cultural and ethnic groups. The "Age of Discovery" that Columbus initiated in 1492 was also an age of cultural interchange between the peoples of Europe and the Americas. Each learned from the other, borrowing artifacts -- and ideas. This traffic continues today. The result of such extensive communication across cultural lines has produced in contemporary North America a composite culture that is rich in diversity, and of a type unique in the world.

The creation of this culture began with first contact -- possibly long before Columbus's landing. Fragments of pottery that resemble Japanese patterns have been found in present-day Equador, dated well before the birth of Christ. The Vikings left some tools behind in northeast North America. But while pottery, tools, and other things may be traced and dated, ideas are harder to follow through time. Thus, while the introduction of new flora, fauna, and tools has been given some study, the communication of ideas has been neglected.

American Indians visited Europe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Squanto, a Wampanoag, one of several Indians kidnapped from their native land (the immigrants called it New England), visited England during 1614 and returned home in time to meet the somewhat bewildered Pilgrims, who arrived during the fall of 1620, unprepared for winter on a continent that, to them, was as new as it was forbidding. It was Squanto who surprised the Pilgrims by greeting them in English and who helped the new immigrants survive that first winter, a season that produced the first Thanksgiving. At that first feast, Indians provided the Europeans with turkey, one of the best-remembered examples of cultural interchange in United States popular history. For his role in acculturating these English subjects to a new land, Squanto has been called a Pilgrim father.

During the years following the landing of the Pilgrims, American Indians contributed many foods to the diet of a growing number of Euro-Americans. By the twentieth century, almost half the world's domesticated crops, including the staples -- corn and white potatoes -- were first cultivated by American Indians. Aside from turkey, corn, and white potatoes, Indians also contributed manoic, sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, peppers, pumpkins, tomatoes, pineapples, the avocado, cacao (chocolate), chicle (a constituent of chewing gum), several varieties of beans, and at least seventy other domesticated food plants. Almost all the cotton grown in the United States was derived from varieties originally cultivated by Indians. Rubber, too, was contributed by native Americans.

Several American Indian medicines also came into use among Euro-Americans. These included quinine, laxatives, as well as several dozen other drugs and herbal medicines. Euro-Americans adapted to their own needs many Indian articles of clothing and other artifacts such as hammocks, kayaks, canoes, moccasins, smoking pipes, dog sleds, and parkas. With the plants and artifacts came the Indian words used to describe them, and other features of what, to the Europeans, was a new land. Half the states in the United States of America today bear names first spoken among Indians; the thousands of words that entered English and other European languages from American Indian sources are too numerous even to list in this brief survey.

Assertions have also been made that Indian contributions helped shape Euro-American folksongs, locations for railroads and highways, ways of dying cloth, war tactics, and even bathing habits. The amount of communication from Indians to Euro-Americans was all the more surprising because Indians usually made no conscious effort to convert the colonists to their ways. While Euro-Americans often used trade and gift giving to introduce, and later sell, products of their cultures to Indians, Euro-American adoption of Indian artifacts, unlike some of those from Euro-Americans to Indians, was completely voluntary. In the words of Max Savelle, scholar of the revolutionary period, Indian artifacts "were to contribute their own ingredients to the amalgam that was to be America's civilization." This influence was woven into the lives of Europeans in America despite the fact that Indians lacked organized means of propagation, but simply because they were useful and necessary to life in the New World.

Unlike the physical aspects of this amalgam, the intellectual contributions of American Indians to Euro-American culture have only lightly, and for the most part recently, been studied by a few historians, anthropologists, scholars of law, and others. Where physical artifacts may be traced more or less directly, the communication of ideas may, most often, only be inferred from those islands of knowledge remaining in written records. These written records are almost exclusively of Euro-American origin, and often leave blind spots that may be partly filled only by records based on Indian oral history.

Paul Bohanan, writing in the introduction of Beyond the Frontier (1967), which he coedited with Fred Plog, stressed the need to "tear away the veils of ethnocentricism," which he asserted have often kept scholars from seeing that peoples whom they had relegated to the category of "primitive" possessed "institutions as complex and histories as full as our own." A. Irving Hallowell, to make a similar point, quoted Bernard de Voto:

Most American history has been written as if history were a function soley of white culture -- in spite of the fact that well into the nineteenth century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. Those of us who work in frontier history are repeatedly nonplussed to discover how little has been done for us in regard to the one force bearing on our field that was active everywhere. . . . American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all these affected white men and their societies.[1]
To De Voto's assertion, Hallowell added: "Since most history has been written by the conquerers, the influence of the primitive people upon American civilization has seldom been the subject of dispassionate consideration."

Felix Cohen, author of the Handbook of Indian Law, the basic reference book of his field, also advised a similar course of study and a similar break with prevailing ethnocentricism. Writing in the American Scholar (1952), Cohen said:

When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. What the Roman historians did not see was that captive Greece would take captive conquering Rome and that Greek science, Greek philosophy and a Greek book, known as Septaugint, translated into the Latin tongue, would guide the civilized world and bring the tramp of pilgrim feet to Rome a thousand years after the last Roman regiment was destroyed.
American historians, wrote Cohen, had too often paid attention to military victories and changing land boundaries, while failing to "see that in agriculture, in government, in sport, in education and in our views of nature and our fellow men, it is the first Americans who have taken captive their battlefield conquerers." American historians "have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," Cohen asserted. In his view, "The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man."

Cohen's broad indictment does not include all scholars, nor all historians. The question of American Indian influence on the intellectual traditions of Euro-American culture has been raised, especially during the last thirty years. These questions, however, have not yet been examined in the depth that the complexity of Indian contributions warrant.

To raise such questions is not to ignore, nor to negate, the profound influence of Europe on American intellectual development. It is, rather, to add a few new brush strokes to an as yet unfinished portrait. It is to explore the intellectual trade between cultures that has made America unique, built from contributions not only by Europeans and American Indians, but also by almost every other major cultural and ethnic group that has taken up residence in the Americas.

What follows is only a first step, tracing the way in which Benjamin Franklin and some of his contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, absorbed American Indian political and social ideas, and how some of these ideas were combined with the cultural heritage they had brought from Europe into a rationale for revolution in a new land. There is a case to be made in that American Indian thought helped make that possible.[2]

Comparison of the Iroquois' system of government with that of the new United States' began with Lewis Henry Morgan, known as the "father of American anthropology," who produced in 1851 the first systematic study of an American Indian social organization in his League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Following more than a decade of close association with the Iroquois, especially Ely Parker (the Seneca who helped arrange Morgan's adoption by the Iroquois), Morgan observed:

Among the Indian nations whose ancient seats were within the limits of our republic, the Iroquois have long continued to occupy the most conspicuous position. They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organization and acquired a higher degree of influence than any race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru.
Morgan likened the federalism of the Iroquois to that of the newly united British colonies: "The [six] nations sustained nearly the same relation to the [Iroquois] league that the American states bear to the Union. In the former, several oligarchies were contained within one, in the same manner as in the latter, several republics are embraced in one republic." Morgan also noted checks and balances in the Iroquoian system that acted to prevent concentration of power: "Their whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals." The Iroquois, according to Morgan, maximized individual freedom while seeking to minimize excess governmental interference in peoples' lives: "The government sat lightly upon the people who, in effect, were governed but little. It secured to each that individual independence which the Ho-de-no-sau-nee knew how to prize as well as the Saxon race; and which, amid all their political changes, they have continued to preserve."
"The People of the Longhouse commended to our forefathers a union of colonies similar to their own as early as 1755," Morgan wrote. "They [the Iroquois] saw in the common interests and common speech of the colonies the elements for a confederation." Morgan believed that the Iroquois Confederacy contained "the germ of modern parliament, congress, and legislature."

Morgan's major works have been widely reprinted in the United States and in several other countries during the century and a half since he first sat around the Iroquois Confederacy's council fire with his newly acquired brothers. In some of these editions, the idea of Iroquois influence on the formation of the United States' political and social system have been raised anew. Herbert M. Lloyd, in an introduction to the 1902 Dodd, Mead and Company edition of League of the Iroquois, wrote:

Among all the North American peoples, there is none more worthy of study, by reason of their intellectual ability, the character of their institutions and the part they have played in history, than the Iroquois of the League. And, as it happens, this is the people which has longest been known to ourselves, which has been most closely observed by our writers and statesmen, and whose influence has been most strongly felt in our political constitution and in our history as colonies and nation.
Lloyd continued: "In their ancient League the Iroquois presented to us a type of Federal Republic under whose roof and around whose council fire all people might dwell in peace and freedom. Our nation gathers its people from many peoples of the Old World, its language and its free institutions it inherits from England, its civilization and art from Greece and Rome, its religion from Judea -- and even these red men of the forest have wrought some of the chief stones in our national temple."

In an early history of the relations between Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois, William E. Griffis in 1891 advised further study of Iroquoian influence on the formation of the United States, especially Benjamin Franklin's role in this interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur C. Parker, son of the Ely Parker who had been close to Morgan, wrote in a preface to his version of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man and centuries before it became the clamor of the new America of the white invader. Who now shall call the Indians and Iroquois savages?
A similar point of view was taken in 1918 by J. N. B. Hewitt, who not only suggested that the Iroquois influenced the formation of the United States, but that the Iroquois league also served as something of a prototype for the League of Nations.

The Iroquois' Great Law of Peace, wrote Hewitt, "made a significant departure from the past in separating the conduct of military and civilian affairs." The confederacy, he continued, also recognized no state religion: "All forms of it [religion] were tolerated and practiced." The Iroquois polity separated the duties of civil chiefs and prophets, or other religious leaders. Hewitt also noted the elevated position of women in the Iroquois system of government.

In 1930, Arthur Pound's Johnson of the Mohawks again introduced the possibility of intellectual communication: "With the possible exception of the also unwritten British Constitution deriving from the Magna Charta, the Iroquois Constitution is the longest-going international constitution in the world." Pound remarked at the "political sagacity" of the Iroquois, as well as the checks and balances built into the Iroquois league, which was structured in such a way that no action could be taken without the approval of all five represented Indian nations. It was Pound's belief that "in this constitution of the Five Nations are found practically all of the safeguards which have been raised in historic parliaments to protect home affairs from centralized authority."

Carl Van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin, published in 1938, noted Franklin's admiration of the political system of the league, and suggested that his plans for a Colonial union, expressed first during the 1750s, owed some debt to the Iroquois. Franklin, Van Doren wrote, found no European model that was suitable for the needs of the colonies that he hoped to unite.

In 1940 Clark Wissler asserted that "students of politics and government have found much to admire in the league [of the Iroquois]. There is some historical evidence that knowledge of the league influenced the colonists in their first attempts to form a confederacy and later to write a constitution."[3] Five years later, Frank G. Speck, finding the Iroquois "a decidedly democratic people,"[4] quoted Wissler to support his contention that the Iroquois played a role in the founding of the United States. Wissler mentioned advice, given by the Iroquois chief Canassatego at the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) treaty of 1744, to the effect that the colonists could benefit by forming a union along Iroquoian lines.

By 1946, the nations of the world had established a second international organization and, as in 1918, attention was turned to the Iroquois in this regard. Paul A. W. Wallace, who devoted his scholarship to a study of the Iroquois, used quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the Preamble to the Constitution of the United Nations to open and close his book, the White Roots of Peace:

I am Deganwidah, and with the Five Nations confederate lords I plant the tree of the Great Peace. . . . Roots have spread out from the Tree . . . and the name of these Roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace . . . they may trace the Roots to their source . . . and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree. . . .
We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . . and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights . . . and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for law can be maintained . . . do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

While Wallace's White Roots of Peace was principally an account of the traditional story of the creation of the Iroquois league, he also mentioned Franklin's attention to Iroquois political institutions and the possible role that this attention played in the founding of the United States.

By 1952, suggestions of Iroquoian contributions to the evolution of the United States' political structure, as well as that of international bodies, had been "in the air" of Euro-American scholarship for more than a century. During that year, Felix Cohen began to develop the idea in the American Scholar. Cohen wrote that in their rush to "Americanize" the Indian, Euro-Americans had forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that they had themselves been influenced by Indian thought and action. To Cohen, American disrespect for established authority had Indian roots, as did the American penchant for sharing with those in need. In the Indian character resided a fierce individuality that rejected subjugation, together with a communalism that put the welfare of the whole family, tribe, or nation above that of individuals.

"It is out of a rich Indian democratic tradition that the distinctive political ideals of American life emerged," Cohen wrote. "Universal suffrage for women as well as for men, the pattern of states within a state we call federalism, the habit of treating chiefs as servants of the people instead of as their masters . . ." Cohen ascribed at least in part to the "Indian" in our political tradition. To this, Cohen added: "The insistence that the community must respect the diversity of men and the diversity of their dreams -- all these things were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed." To support his assertion, Cohen offered an excerpt from a popular account of America that was circulated in England around 1776: "The darling passion of the American is liberty and that in its fullest extent; nor is it the original natives only to whom this passion is confined; our colonists sent thither seem to have imbibed the same principles."[5]

"Politically, there was nothing in the Empires and kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to parallel the democratic constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, with its provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, and its suffrage for women as well as for men," Cohen continued. The influence of such ideas spread to Europe, where they played a part in Thomas More's Utopia. Cohen further asserted that "to John Locke, the champion of tolerance and the right of revolution, the state of nature and of natural equality to which men might appeal in rebellion against tyranny was set not in the remote dawn of history, but beyond the Atlantic sunset." Cohen also found the influence of Indian thought in Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, "and their various contemporaries." Anticipating the arguments of Charles Sanford nine years later, Cohen implied that many of the doctrines that played so crucial a role in the American Revolution were fashioned by European savants from observation of the New World and its inhabitants. These observations, packaged into theories, were exported, like the finished products made from raw materials that also traveled the Atlantic Ocean, back to America. The communication among American Indian cultures, Europe, and Euro-America thus seemed to involve a sort of intellectual mercantilism. The product of this intellectual traffic, the theories that played a role in rationalizing rebellion against England, may have been fabricated in Europe, but the raw materials from which they were made were, to Cohen, substantially of indigenous American origin.

Cohen, continuing his synthesis of a hundred years of suggestions that Indian ideas helped shape America's and Europe's intellectual traditions, asserted that "the greatest teachers of American democracy have gone to school with the Indian." He mentioned Canassatego's advice to the colonists at the 1744 Lancaster treaty, and asserted that Benjamin Franklin had integrated this advice into his ideas favoring Colonial union seven years later. Cohen also asserted that Thomas Jefferson freely acknowledged his debt to the conceptions of liberty held by American Indians, and favorably compared the liberty he saw in Indian politics with the oppression of Europe in his time.

Following publication of Cohen's article, suggestions that American Indian, and especially Iroquoian, thought had played some role in the genesis of a distinctly American conception of society and government became more numerous. In 1953, Ruth Underhill (Red Man's Continent) wrote that Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington all were familiar with the Iroquois polity, which, she said, "was the most integrated and orderly north of Mexico. Some have even thought that it gave suggestions to the American Constitution." Underhill also devoted some attention to the equality of women, and the political powers reserved for them, in the Iroquois structure. Like Wallace before her, Underhill also asserted similarity between the Iroquoian system and the modern United Nations. Both, she wrote, "dealt only with international concerns of peace and war."

In 1955, Thomas R. Henry, in an account of the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, picked up Hewitt's suggestion of intercultural communication. Hewitt, wrote Henry, had used Canassatego's 1744 speech and a remembrance of it in a 1775 treaty council to support his assertion that the Six Nations had played a role in the formation of the United States. "J. N. B. Hewitt was firmly convinced that the League of the Iroquois was the intellectual progenitor of the United States." While acknowledging Hewitt's argument, Henry wrote that more research in the area needed to be done.

A. Irving Hallowell in 1957 mentioned the subject of intellectual origins of the American republic in connection with the Iroquois, but did not delve into it. "It has been said that information about the organization and operation of the League of the Iroquois which Franklin picked up at various Indian councils suggested to him the pattern for a United States of America." He also advised more study of these suggestions.

In 1960, author Edmund Wilson, having traveled to Iroquois country to research his book, Apologies to the Iroquois, heard an oral-history account from Standing Arrow, a Seneca, of the reliance that Franklin had placed on the Great Law of Peace. He did not pursue the subject in the book.

In 1961, Charles Sanford's Quest for Paradise again raised the possibility of intellectual mercantilism. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, originator of the "Frontier Hypothesis" who found democracy inexplicably emerging from among the trees, Sanford stressed the effect of the New World's geography over its inhabitants, but he still found a few Indians in the forest that he characterized as a new Eden:

The archetypical Adam, living in a state of nature was thus endowed by his creators, which included Thomas Jefferson, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The revolutionary doctrines which grew out of discoveries of the New World were first developed by European savants only to be borrowed by the American colonists and turned against Europe.
In 1965, William Brandon wrote that more attention should be paid to "the effect of the Indian world on the changing American soul, most easily seen in the influence of the American Indian on European notions of liberty." Brandon asserted that the first British inter-Colonial union of any kind, the New England Confederation of 1643, came about "not only as a result of the Pequot War but possibly in some imitation of the many Indian confederacies . . . in aboriginal North America." The first formal inter-Colonial conference outside of New England, which took place in Albany in 1684, "was held at the urging of the Iroquois and to meet with Iroquois spokesmen," Brandon wrote.[6] He also described accounts by Peter Martyr, the first historian of the New World, which enthusiastically told of the Indians' liberty, the absence of crime and jails, and the greed that accompanied a societal emphasis on private property. Martyr and other Europeans of his time wondered whether, in Brandon's words, the Indians lived "in that golden world of which the ancients had spoken so much." Out of such imagery came the myth of the Noble Savage, another product of the intellectual mercantilism that seemed to accompany its economic counterpart across the Atlantic Ocean. Out of such imagery, too, came the assumption that Indians, at least those Indians still uncorrupted by European influences, lived in the original state of all societies and that, by observing them, the new arrivals from Europe could peer through a living window on their own pasts. To many who had recently escaped poverty, or fled tyranny in Europe, this was a vision of the past that must have carried no small amount of appeal.

During 1967, C. Elmore Reaman's work on the Iroquois' role in the conflict between the British and French during the mid-eighteenth century again raised the possibility of Iroquoian influence on the founding of the United States: "Any race of people who provided the prototype for the Constitution of the United States, and whose confederacy has many of the aspects of the present-day United Nations, should be given their rightful recognition." Reaman supported his assertion by quoting from a speech given by Richard Pilant on Iroquoian studies at McMaster University April 6, 1960: "Unlike the Mayas and Incas to the south, the Longhouse People developed a democratic system of government which can be maintained [to be] a prototype for the United States and the United Nations. Socially, the Six Nations met the sociologist's test of higher cultures by having given a preferred status to women." Reaman added that the Iroquois league, in his estimation, "was a model social order in many ways superior to the white man's culture of the day. . . . Its democratic form of government more nearly approached perfection than any that has been tried to date. It is claimed by many that the framers of the United States of America copied from these Iroquois practices in founding the government of the United States." This material was based on Hewitt's work.

Throughout the next few years, a thread of interest in the Iroquois' communication of political ideas to the new United States continued to run through literature in this area of history. In 68, Allan W. Eckert wrote:

The whites who were versed in politics at this time [c. 1750] had every reason to marvel at this form of Indian government. Knowledge of the league's success, it is believed, strongly influenced the colonies in their own initial efforts to form a union and later to write a Constitution.
In 1971, Helen A. Howard borrowed part of Wallace's White Roots of Peace, including the paired quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the United Nations' Constitution, to raise the question of Iroquoian intellectual influence. During the same year, Mary E. Mathur's Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin asserted that the plan of union that Franklin proposed at the Albany congress (1754) more closely resembled the Iroquoian model than the British. Mathur placed major emphasis on an appearance by Hendrick, an Iroquois statesman, at the congress. She also asserted, but did not document, reports that Felix Cohen had read accounts written by British spies shortly before the Revolutionary War that blamed the Iroquois and other Indians' notions of liberty for the colonists' resistance to British rule.

A European, Elemire Zolla, in 1973 recounted Horatio Hale's belief, published in The Iroquois Book of Rites, that democracy sprang mainly from Indian origins. Zolla also recounted Edmund Wilson's encounter with Standing Arrow and the Senecas. In 1975, J. E. Chamberlin's The Harrowing of Eden noted that "it is generally held that the model of the great Iroquois [Six Nations] Confederacy was a significant influence on both the Albany plan and the later Articles of Confederation." In a footnote to that reference, Chamberlin wrote that the Iroquois had also exerted influence on Karl Marx and Frederich Engels through Lewis H. Morgan. Engels, having read Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Light of the Researchers of Lewis Henry Morgan (1884), which contained an intricate account of the Iroquoian polity that most directly examined the league's ability to maintain social cohesion without an elaborate state apparatus. The Iroquois, wrote Engels, provided a rare example of a living society that "knows no state."[7]

Francis Jennings's finely detailed work, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1975), closed a discussion that noted Euro-Americans' perceptions of Indians' liberty with a sweeping statement: "What white society owes to Indian society, as much as to any other source, is the mere fact of its existence."

Donald A. Grinde in 1979 collected much of what had been written about the subject of Iroquoian intellectual interaction with English-speaking Euro-Americans. While his The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation was mostly a military and diplomatic account of the Iroquois' role during the time period around the American Revolution, it also contained most of the published evidence in secondary sources on this topic. Grinde reserved special attention for the interaction of Franklin and Jefferson with the Iroquois, and urged more study of the matter: "More needs to be done. Especially if America continues to view itself as a distinct entity set apart from many of the values of Western Civilization." Grinde also stated that such study could help dissolve negative stereotypes that many Euro-Americans harbor about American Indians' heritage.

The negation of stereotypes is important to this investigation because to study the intellectual contributions of American Indians to European and American thought, one must to some degree abolish the polarity of the "civilized" and the "savage" that much of our history (not to mention popular entertainment) has drilled into us. We must approach the subject ready to be surprised, as our ancestors were surprised when they were new to America. We must be ready to acknowledge that American Indian societies were as thoughtfully constructed and historically significant to our present as the Romans, the Greeks, and other Old World peoples.

What follows is only a beginning. The Iroquois were not the only American Indians to develop notions of federalism, political liberty, and democracy long before they heard of the Greeks or the Magna Charta. Benjamin Franklin was not the only Euro-American to combine his own heritage with what he found in his new homeland. And the infant United States was not the only nation whose course has been profoundly influenced by the ideas of the Indians, the forgotten cofounders of our heritage.

C H A P T E R T W O


The Pre-Columbian Republic





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The chiefs of the League of Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skins shall be seven spans . . . their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the League. . . . --
The Great Law of Peace, Paragraph 24,
Akwesasne Notes version, 1977
Mohawk Nation, New York





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When the Iroquois Confederacy was formed, no Europeans were present with clocks and a system for telling time before and after the birth of Christ. Since ideas, unlike artifacts, cannot be carbon dated or otherwise fixed in unrecorded time, the exact date that the Senecas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Cayugas stopped battling one another and formed a federal union will never be known. It is known, however, that around 1714 the Tuscaroras, a kindred Indian nation, moved northward from what is presently the Carolinas to become the sixth national member of the confederacy.

A wide range of estimates exist for the founding date of the confederacy. Iroquoian sources, using oral history and recollections of family ancestries (the traditional methods for marking time through history), have fixed the origin date at between 1000 and 1400 A.D.; Euro-American historians have tended to place the origin of the Iroquois league at about 1450.

By an Iroquois account, Cartier made his first appearance among the Iroquois during the life of the thirty-third presiding chief of the league. The presiding chief (Atotarho was the name of the office) held a lifetime appointment unless he was impeached for violating the Great Law of Peace. The Iroquois who use this method of tracing the league's origin place the date at between 1000 and 1100. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca, used Iroquoian recall of family lines and lifespans to estimate the founding date at 1390. Paul A. W. Wallace, a student of the Iroquois who has written extensively about them, estimated the founding date of the league at 1450. This is only a sample of the attempts that have been made to solve an unsolvable riddle.

At whatever date the confederacy was formed, it came at the end of several generations of bloody and divisive warfare between the five nations that joined the league. According to the Iroquois' traditional account, the idea of a federal union was introduced through Deganwidah, a Huron who lived in what is now eastern Ontario. Deganwidah was unsuited himself to propose the idea not only because of his non-Iroquoian ancestry, but also because he stuttered so badly that he could scarcely talk. He would have had the utmost difficulty in presenting his idea to societies where oratory was prized. And writing, aside from the pictographs of the wampum belts, was not used.

Deganwidah, wandering from tribe to tribe trying to figure ways to realize his dream of ending war among them all, met Hiawatha, who agreed to speak for him. Hiawatha (a man far removed from Longfellow's poetic creation) undertook long negotiations with leaders of the warring Indian nations and, in the end, produced a peace along the lines of Deganwidah's vision.

This peace was procured, and maintained, through the constitution of the league, the Great Law of Peace (untranslated: Kaianerekowa). The story of the Great Law's creation is no less rich in history and allegory than the stories of cultural origin handed down by European peoples, and is only briefly summarized here.

The Great Law of Peace was not written in English until about 1880 when Seth Newhouse, a Mohawk, transcribed it. By this time, many of the traditional sachems of the league, worried that the wampum belts that contained the Great Law's provisions might be lost or stolen, sought a version written in English. One such translation was compiled by Arthur C. Parker. In recent years, the text of the Great Law has been published in several editions by Akwesasne Notes, a journal for "native and natural peoples" published on the Mohawk Nation. The substance of all these written translations is similar, although wording varies at some points.

The text of the Great Law begins with the planting of the Tree of the Great Peace; the great white pine -- from its roots to its spreading branches -- serves throughout the document as a metaphor for the unity of the league. The tree, and the principal council fire of the confederacy, were located on land of the Onondaga Nation, at the center of the confederacy, the present site of Syracuse, New York.

From the Tree of the Great Peace

Roots have spread out . . . one to the north, one to the west, one to the east and one to the south. These are the Great White Roots and their nature is peace and strength. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and shall make this known to the statesmen of the League, they may trace back the roots to the tree. If their minds are clean and they are obedient and promise to obey the wishes of the Council of the League, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.
This opening provision complements the adoption laws of the confederacy, which contained no bars on the basis of race or national origin. Nor did the Great Law prohibit dual citizenship; several influential Anglo-Americans, emissaries from the Colonial governments, including William Johnson and Conrad Weiser, were given full citizenship in the confederacy. Both men took part in the deliberations of the Grand Council at Onondaga.

Following paragraphs three and four, which outlined procedural matters such as the calling of meetings and maintenance of the council fire, the Great Law began to outline a complex system of checks and balances on the power of each nation against that of the others. The Great Law ensured that no measure (such as a declaration of war) would be enacted by the Council of the League without the consent of all five represented nations, each of which would first debate the question internally:

The council of the Mohawks shall be divided into three parties . . . the first party shall listen only to the discussion of the second and third parties and if an error is made, or the proceeding irregular, they are to call attention to it, and when the case is right and properly decided by the two parties, they shall confirm the decision and refer the case to the Seneca statesmen for their decision. When the Seneca statesmen have decided in accord with the Mohawk statesmen, the case or question shall be referred to the Cayuga and Oneida statesmen on the opposite side of the house.
After a question had been debated by the Mohawks, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas on both sides of the "house," it was passed to the Onondagas, the firekeepers, for their decision. The Great Law provided that every Onondaga statesman or his deputy be present in council and that all agree with the majority "without unwarrantable dissent." Decisions, when made, had to be unanimous. If Atotarho, or other chiefs among the Onondaga delegation were absent, the council could only decide on matters of small importance.

If the decision of the "older brothers" (Senecas and Mohawks) disagreed with that of the "younger brothers" (Cayugas and Oneidas), the Onondagas were charged with breaking the tie. If the four nations agreed, the Onondagas were instructed by the Great Law to confirm the decision. The Onondagas could, however, refuse to confirm a decision given them by the other four nations, and send it back for reconsideration. If the four nations rendered the same decision again, the Onondagas had no other course but to confirm it. This decision-making process somewhat resembled that of a two-house congress in one body, with the "older brothers" and "younger brothers" each comprising a side of the house. The Onondagas filled something of an executive role, with a veto that could be overriden by the older and younger brothers in concert.[1]

Paragraph 14 of the Great Law provided that the speaker for any particular meeting of the council would be elected by acclamation from either the Mohawks, Senecas, or Onondagas. The Great Law also provided for changes to the Great Law, by way of amendment:

If the conditions which arise at any future time call for an addition to or a change of this law, the case shall be carefully considered and if a new beam seems necessary or beneficial, the proposed change shall be decided upon and, if adopted, shall be called "added to the rafters."
The next major section of the Great Law concerned the rights, duties, and qualifications of statesmen. The chiefs who sat on the council were elected in two ways. Traditionally, they were nominated by the women of each extended family holding title (in the form of special wampum strings) to a chiefship. Increasingly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chiefs were elected outside this hereditary structure on the basis of their leadership qualities.

In order to keep his office, a chief had to abide by several rules, most of which were written into the Great Law. A chief could not, for example, refuse to attend meetings of the council. After one warning by the women who had nominated him, a chief who continued to ignore council meetings was removed.

More seriously, a chief could be removed from the council if it became "apparent . . . [that he] . . . has not in mind the welfare of the people, or [if he] disobeys the rules of the Great Law. . . ." Complaints about the conduct of chiefs could be brought before the council by "the men and women of the league, or both acting jointly," and communicated to the accused through the war chiefs who, in peacetime, often acted as the peoples' monitors on the other chiefs in council. An erring chief, after three warnings, would be removed by the war chiefs if complaints continued and the erring chief did not mend his ways.

One of the most serious offenses of which a chief could be accused was murder. The sanctions against this crime may have been made as stringent as they were because blood feuds were a major problem before Deganwidah united the Iroquois.

If a chief of the League of Five Nations should commit murder, the other chiefs of the nation shall assemble at the place where the corpse lies and prepare to depose the criminal chief. If it is impossible to meet at the scene of the crime the chiefs shall discuss the matter at the next council of their nation and request their war chief to depose the chief guilty of the crime, to "bury" his women relatives and to transfer the chieftanship title to a sister family.
The reference to burial was figurative; the law provided that a chief guilty of murder would not only lose his own title, but deprive his entire extended family of the right to be represented on the council. In addition, a chief guilty of murder was banished from the confederacy.

Certain physical and mental defects, such as idiocy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, or impotency could also cause a chief's dismissal from office, although the Great Law provided that "in cases of extreme necessity," the chief could continue to exercise his rights in council.

While holding membership on the confederate council, the Great Law provided that a chief should be tolerant and attentive to constituent criticism:

The chiefs of the League of Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skins shall be seven spans, which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive action and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the League. With endless patience, they shall carry out their duty. Their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodging in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.
Paragraph 35 of the Great Law outlined provisions for election of "pine-tree chiefs" -- those who held membership in the council because of their special abilities, rather than the hereditary titles of their extended families. The name "pine-tree chief" was given to such individuals because they were said to have sprung, like the Great White Pine under which the council met. While the pine sprang from the earth, the pine-tree chiefs sprang from the body of the people. The nomination to the council came directly from the chiefs sitting on it.

A pine-tree chief could not be officially deposed, as could the hereditary chiefs, for violating the Great Law. If such a chief lost the confidence of the people, however, the Great Law told them to "be deaf to his voice and his advice." Like other civil chiefs, the pine-tree chiefs could not name their successors; nor could they carry their titles to the grave. The Great Law provided a ceremony for removing the title from a dying chief.

One war chief from each of the five represented nations also sat on the confederate council along with the hereditary and pine-tree chiefs. These chiefs were elected from the eligible sons of the female families holding title to the head chieftainship in each of the five nations. The war chiefs in peacetime acted as the peoples' eyes and ears in the council, carrying messages to and from the council and constituents. In wartime, these chiefs raised fighting forces, a task that often took no small amount of eloquence, since there was no enforced draft, and warriors had to be convinced that a cause was worth fighting for. It was also the duty of the war chief to lay questions of the people (other societies might call them petitions) before the Council of the League. War chiefs, like civil chiefs, could be recalled from office if they violated the Great Law's standards of leadership.

To prevent factions within the confederacy, Deganwidah and his confederates built into it a system of clans that overlapped each nations' political boundaries. The clans bore such names as Great Bear, Turtle, Deer Pigeon, Hawk, and Wild Potatoes. Each member of a particular clan recognized as a relative others of the same clan, even if they lived in different nations of the league. The clan structure and the system of checks and balances kept one nation from seeking to dominate others and helped to insure that consensus would arise from decisions of the council. Checks and balances were evident between the sexes, as well. Although the members of the Grand Council were men, most of them had been nominated by the women of their respective extended families. Women also were considered to be the allocators of resources, and descent was matrilineal.

Surely the first reference to a "United Nations" in American history occurred in paragraph 61 of the Great Law. A concept of national self-determination is expressed in paragraph 84, which allowed conquered non-Iroquoian nations, or those which peacefully accepted the Great Law, to continue their own system of internal government as long as it refrained from making war on other nations. Paragraph 98 confirmed the people's right to seek redress from the Grand Council through their respective war chiefs. Paragraph 99 guaranteed freedom of religion. Paragraph 107 denied entry to the home by those not authorized to do so by its occupants.

The Great Law was not wholly unwritten before its transcription into English during the late nineteenth century. Its provisions were recorded on wampum belts that were used during council meetings whenever disputes arose over procedure, or over the provisions of the law itself. Wampum was also used to record many other important events, such as contracts and other agreements. A contemporary source credits the belts with use "to assist the memory."[2]

"When a subject is of very great importance the belt is very wide and so on -- if a Mohawk makes a promise to another, he gives him one of these belts -- his word is irrevocable & they do not consider anything a greater reproach [than a] . . . word not binding," the same source recorded. Contrary to popular assumption many Indian cultures, the Iroquois among them, used some forms of written communication. These forms were only rarely appreciated by eighteenth-century Euro-American observers.

In addition to its use as an archive (usually kept by senior sachems), wampum also served as a medium of exchange. It had a definite value among the Iroquois and other Indians in relation to deerskins, beaver pelts, and (after extensive contact with Euro-Americans) British coins. Fashioned from conch and clam shells in the shape of beads, wampum was sewn into intricate patterns on hides. Each design had a different meaning, and understanding of the designs' meaning was indispensable to the conduct of Iroquoian diplomacy, as it was the lingua franca for conduct between nations (Indian to Indian and Indian to European) in North America for more than a century.

To do diplomatic business with the Iroquois, the British and French envoys had to learn how wampum was used. When the occasion called for giving, they should expect to get a string (often called a "strand" in treaty accounts) or a belt of wampum. A strand -- beads strung on yard-long leather strips tied at one end -- signified agreement on items of small importance, but still worth noting. Belts, often six feet long and up to two feet wide, were reserved for important items. The Iroquois dealt with the English and French only under their own diplomatic code, a way of reminding the Europeans that they were guests on the Indians' continent, which they called "Turtle Island." Euro-American diplomats who came to council without a sufficient supply of wampum strands and belts to give, or one who failed to understand the message of one or more belts, could make or break alliances at a time when the Iroquois' powerful confederacy and its Indian allies constituted the balance of power between the English and French in North America.

On a continent still very lightly settled with Europeans -- islands of settlement in a sea of Indian nations -- it behooved diplomatic suitors to know the difference between a peace and a war belt. It also helped to have Indian allies as guides through what Europeans regarded as a limitless and trackless wilderness. Without Indian help (on both sides) the Colonial wars in North America might have taken a great deal longer than they did. Without Indian guides, the armies would have had a much harder time finding one another, except by accident.

During the 1730s and 1740s, the British Crown decided that if it was to stem the French advance down the western side of the Appalachians, alliance with the Iroquois was imperative. The French advance south from the Saint Lawrence Valley and north from Louisiana threatened to hem the English between the mountains and the Atlantic. And so the peace belt went out in a diplomatic offensive that would end in France's defeat two decades later.

To win the Iroquois, the British envoys had to deal with the Iroquois on their own terms, as distasteful as this may have been to some of the more effete diplomats. They would find themselves sitting cross-legged around council fires many miles from the coastal cities, which Indian sachems refused to visit except on the most compelling business, fearing disease and the temptations of alcohol, as well as possible attacks by settlers along the way.

In order to cement the alliance, the British sent Colonial envoys who usually reported directly to the various provincial governors, one of whom was Benjamin Franklin, to the frontier and beyond. This decision helped win North America for the British -- but only for a time. In the end, it still cost them the continent, or at least the better part of it. The Colonial delegates passed more than wampum over the council fires of the treaty summits. They also came home with an appetite for something that many proper colonials, and most proper British subjects, found little short of heresy. They returned with a taste for natural rights -- life, liberty, and happiness -- that they saw operating on the other side of the frontier. These observations would help mold the political life of the colonies, and much of the world, in the years to come.








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The Tuscaroras had no voting rights after they joined the confederacy during the early eighteenth century.

New York State Library Ms. #13350-51, reprinted in Charles M. Johnston, ea., The Valley of the Six Nations: A Collection of Documents on Indian Lands of the Great River (Toronto. The University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 28-29. Note that the wampum belts, used in this fashion, served as a set of symbols used to retain and convey meaning. Like the Aztecs (who kept tax records and other written materials), the Iroquois were not illiterate. Written communication evolved to fit specialized needs, and its utilization was restricted to a minority, not unlike the use of writing in Europe before the invention of the printing press.

C H A P T E R T H R E E


"Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans"





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The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow no kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.

-- Cadwallader Colden, 1727


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By the mid-eighteenth century, when alliance with the Six Nations became an article of policy with the British Crown, English colonists had been living in North America for little more than a century. The colonies comprised a thin ribbon of settlement from a few miles north of Boston to a few miles south of Charleston. Barely a million people all told, the British colonists looked westward across mountains that seemed uncompromisingly rugged to English eyes, into the maw of a continent that they already knew was many times the size of their ancestral homeland. How much larger, no one at that time really knew. No one knew exactly how wide the forests might be, how far the rivers might reach, or what lay beyond them. There was a widespread belief that the Pacific Ocean lay out there, somewhere. The map makers settled for blank spaces and guesses.

Across the mountains were the homelands of Indian confederacies -- the Iroquois to the northwest, the Cherokees to the Southwest, and others -- which outnumbered the colonists and whose warriors had proved themselves tactically, if not technologically, equal to the British army on American ground. And there were the French, sliding southward along the spine of the mountains, establishing forts as close as Pittsburgh, their soldiers and trappers building the bases of empire along the rivers that laced the inland forests.

The British decision to seek the Iroquois' favor set in motion historical events that were to make North America a predominantly English-speaking continent. These events also, paradoxically, provided an opportunity for learning, observation, and reflection which in its turn gave the nation-to-be a character distinct from England and the rest of Europe, and which thus helped make the American Revolution possible.

The diplomatic approach to the Iroquois came at a time when the transplanted Europeans were first beginning to sense that they were something other than Europeans, or British subjects. Several generations had been born in the new land. The English were becoming, by stages, "Americans" -- a word that had been reserved for Indians. From the days when the Puritans came to build their city on a hill there had been some feeling of distinction, but for a century most of the colonists had been escapees from Europe, or temporary residents hoping to extract a fortune from the new land and return, rich gentlemen all, to the homeland. After a century of settlement, however, that was changing.

From the days of Squanto's welcome and the first turkey dinner, the Indians had been contributing to what was becoming a new amalgam of cultures. In ways so subtle that they were often ignored, the Indians left their imprint on the colonists' eating habits, the paths they followed, the way they clothed themselves, and the way they thought. The Indians knew how to live in America, and the colonists, from the first settlers onward, had to learn.

When the British decided to send some of the colonies' most influential citizens to seek alliance with the Iroquois, the treaty councils that resulted provided more than an opportunity for diplomacy. They enabled the leading citizens of both cultures to meet and mingle on common and congenial ground, and thus to learn from each other. The pervasiveness and influence of these contacts has largely been lost in a history that, much like journalism, telescopes time into a series of conflicts -- conquistadorial signposts on the way west.

Lost in this telescoping of history has been the intense fascination that the unfolding panorama of novelty that was America held for the new Americans -- a fascination that was shipped eastward across the Atlantic to Spain, France, Britain, and Germany in hundreds of travel narratives, treaty accounts, and scientific treatises, in a stream that began with Columbus's accounts of the new world's wonders and persisted well into the nineteenth century.

The observations and reports that flooded booksellers of the time were often entirely speculative. Travel was very difficult, and what explorers could not reach, they often imagined. "A traveler'" wrote Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard for 1737, "should have a hog's nose, a deer's legs and an ass's back" -- testimony to the rugged nature and agonizingly slow pace of overland travel by stage or horse at a time when roads were virtually nonexistent outside of thickly settled areas, and when motorized transport was unknown. If crossing the ocean was an exercise in hardship, crossing the boundless continent was even more difficult. For the few people who did it (or tried) and who could read and write, there was a market: the boundaries of popular curiosity were as limitless as the continent seemed to be. That curiosity was matched by an equal array of ornate speculations on what lay beyond the next bend in this river or that, or beyond the crest of such and such a mountain. What new peoples were to be found? What new and exotic plants and animals? Were there cities of gold? Mountains two miles high? Giants and Lilliputians? The speculations assumed a degree of vividness not unlike twentieth-century musings over the character of possible life on the planets.

The first systematic English-language account of the Iroquois' social and political system was published in 1727, and augmented in 1747, by Cadwallader Colden, who, in the words of Robert Waite, was regarded as "the best-informed man in the New World on the affairs of the British-American colonies." A son of Reverend Alexander Colden, a Scottish minister, Colden was born February 17, 1688, in Ireland. He arrived in America at age twenty-two, five years after he was graduated from the University of Edinburgh. Shortly after his arrival in America, Colden began more than a half century of service in various offices of New York Colonial government. His official career culminated in 1761 with an appointment as lieutenant governor of the colony. In addition to political duties, Colden carried on extensive research in natural science. He also became close to the Iroquois, and was adopted by the Mohawks.

In a preface to his History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America, Colden wrote that his account was the first of its kind in English:

Though every one that is in the least acquainted with the affairs of North-America, knows of what consequence the Indians, commonly known to the people of New-York by the name of the Five Nations, are both in Peace and War, I know of no accounts of them published in English, but what are meer [sic] Translations of French authors.
Colden found the Iroquois to be "barbarians" because of their reputed tortures of captives, but he also saw a "bright and noble genius" in these Indians' "love of their country," which he compared to that of "the greatest Roman Hero's." "When Life and Liberty came in competition, indeed, I think our Indians have outdone the Romans in this particular. . . . The Five Nations consisted of men whose Courage and Resolution could not be shaken." Colden was skeptical that contact with Euro-Americans could improve the Iroquois: "Alas! we have reason to be ashamed that these Infidels, by our Conversation and Neighborhood, have become worse than they were before they knew us. Instead of Vertues, we have only taught them Vices, that they were entirely free of before that time. The narrow Views of private interest have occasioned this."

Despite his condemnation of their reputed cruelty toward some of their captives, Colden wrote that Euro-Americans were imitating some of the Iroquois' battle tactics, which he described as the art of "managing small parties." The eastern part of the continent, the only portion of North America that the colonists of the time knew, was, in Colden's words, "one continued Forrest," which lent advantage to Iroquoian warfare methods. Such methods would later be put to work against British soldiers in the American Revolution.

Colden also justified his study within the context of natural science: "We are fond of searching into remote Antiquity to know the manners of our earliest progenitors; if I be not mistaken, the Indians are living images of them." The belief that American Indian cultures provided a living window on the prehistory of Europe was not Colden's alone. This assumption fueled curiosity about American Indian peoples on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean throughout the eighteenth century. Colden's was one of the first widely circulated observations of this sort, which compared Indians, especially the Iroquois, to the Romans and the Greeks, as well as other peoples such as the Celts and the Druids. Looking through this window on the past, it was believed that observation of Indian cultures could teach Europeans and Euro-Americans about the original form of their ancestors' societies -- those close to a state of nature that so intrigued the thought of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Colden, elaborating, wrote:

The present state of the Indian Nations exactly shows the most Ancient and Original Condition of almost every Nation; so, I believe that here we may with more certainty see the original form of all government, than in the most curious Speculations of the Learned; and that the Patriarchal and other Schemes in Politicks are no better than Hypotheses in Philosophy, and as prejudicial to real Knowledge.
The original form of government, Colden believed, was similar to the Iroquois' system, which he described in some detail. This federal union, which Colden said "has continued so long that the Christians know nothing of the original of it," used public opinion extensively:

Each nation is an absolute Republick by itself, govern'd in all Publick affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems of Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gained by and consists wholly in the opinions of the rest of the Nation in their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force Upon any of their People. Honour and Esteem are their principal Rewards, as Shame and being Despised are their Punishments.

The Iroquois' military leaders, like the civilian sachems, "obtain their authority . . . by the General Opinion of their Courage and Conduct, and lose it by a Failure in those Vertues," Colden wrote. He also observed that Iroquois leaders were generally regarded as servants of their people, unlike European kings, queens, and other members of a distinct hierarchy. It was customary, Colden observed, for Iroquois sachems to abstain from material things while serving their people, in so far as was possible:

Their Great Men, both Sachems [civil chiefs] and captains [war chiefs] are generally poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the Presents or Plunder they get in their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves. If they should be once suspected of selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men, and would consequently lose their authority.
Colden used the words of Monsieur de la Poterie, a French historian, to summarize his sentiments about the Iroquois' system of society and government:

When one talks of the Five Nations in France, they are thought, by a common mistake, to be meer Barbarians, always thirsting after human blood; but their True Character is very different. They are as Politick and Judicious as well can be conceiv'd. This appears from their management of the Affairs which they transact, not only with the French and the English, but likewise with almost all the Indian Nations of this vast continent.
Like Colden, French writers sometimes compared the Iroquois to the Romans. Three years before Colden published his History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America in its 1727 edition, a line drawing from a book by the Frenchman Joseph Francois Lafitau purported to illustrate an Iroquois council meeting. As was rather apparent from the drawing, the artist had never seen a meeting. In the drawing, a chief was shown standing, holding a wampum belt. He and other Iroquois sitting around him in a semicircle wore white, toga-like garments and sandals. Their hair was relatively short and curly, in the Roman fashion. The chiefs were shown sitting against a background that did not look at all like the American woodland, but more like the rolling, almost treeless Roman countryside. Accounts of Indian (especially Iroquoian) life and society, especially those by Colden, enjoyed a lively sale on both sides of the Atlantic.

Other eighteenth-century writers compared the Iroquois to counterparts of Old Testament life; James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775) "prefers simple Hebraic-savage honesty to complex British civilized corruption." Indians, wrote Adair, were governed by the "plain and honest law of nature . . . ":

Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty; and when there is equality of condition, manners and privileges, and a constant familiarity in society, as prevails in every Indian nation, and through all our British colonies, there glows such a cheerfulness and warmth of courage in each of their breasts, as cannot be described.
Iroquoian notions of personal liberty also drew exclamations from Colden, who wrote:

The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories. They never make any prisoner a slave, but it is customary among them to make a Compliment of Naturalization into the Five Nations; and, considering how highly they value themselves above all others, this must be no small compliment . . .
The Great Law provided for adoption of those prisoners willing to accept its provisions. For those who did not, there awaited the possible death by torture that Colden had deplored.

The Iroquois' extension of liberty and political participation to women surprised some eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. An unsigned contemporary manuscript in the New York State Library reported that when Iroquois men returned from hunting, they turned everything they had caught over to the women. "Indeed, every possession of the man except his horse & his rifle belong to the woman after marriage; she takes care of their Money and Gives it to her husband as she thinks his necessities require it," the unnamed observer wrote. The writer sought to refute assumptions that Iroquois women were "slaves of their husbands." "The truth is that Women are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England & that they possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a very great measure to their system of Education." The women, in addition to their political power and control of allocation from the communal stores, acted as communicators of culture between generations. It was they who educated the young.

Another matter that surprised many contemporary observers was the Iroquois' sophisticated use of oratory. Their excellence with the spoken word, among other attributes, often caused Colden and others to compare the Iroquois to the Romans and Greeks. The French use of the term Iroquois to describe the confederacy was itself related to this oral tradition; it came from the practice of ending their orations with the two words hiro and kone. The first meant "I say" or "I have said" and the second was an exclamation of joy or sorrow according to the circumstances of the speech. The two words, joined and made subject to French pronunciation, became Iroquois. The English were often exposed to the Iroquois' oratorical skills at eighteenth-century treaty councils.

Wynn R. Reynolds in 1957 examined 258 speeches by Iroquois at treaty councils between 1678 and 1776 and found that the speakers resembled the ancient Greeks in their primary emphasis on ethical proof. Reynolds suggested that the rich oratorical tradition may have been further strengthened by the exposure of children at an early age to a life in which oratory was prized and often heard.

More than curiosity about an exotic culture that was believed to be a window on a lost European past, drew Euro-Americans to the Iroquois. There were more immediate and practical concerns, such as the Iroquois' commanding military strength, their role in the fur trade, their diplomatic influence among other Indians and the Six Nations' geographical position astride the only relatively level pass between the mountains that otherwise separated British and French settlement in North America. During the eighteenth century, English Colonial settlement was moving inland, along the river valleys. Only a few hundred miles west of what was then the frontier outpost of Albany, the French were building forts north and west of the Great Lakes. The French, constantly at war with England during this period, were also penetrating the Mississippi Valley. Between the English and the French stood the Iroquois and their allies, on land that stretched, northeast to southwest, along nearly the entire frontier of the British colonies. Before 1763, when the French were expelled from North America by the British and their Iroquois allies, the Six Nations enjoyed considerable diplomatic leverage, which was exploited with skill. The Iroquois' geographical position was important at a time when communication was limited to the speed of transportation, and the speed of transportation on land was limited to that of a man or woman on horseback. The Iroquois controlled the most logical transportation route between the coast and the interior, a route through which the Erie Canal was built in the early nineteenth century. Although the pass controlled by the Iroquois was relatively level compared to the land around it, the area was still thickly wooded. It was part of a wilderness that seemed so vast to the Euro-Americans that many of them assumed that Indians would always have a place in which to hunt, no matter how much of Europe's excess population crossed the Atlantic.

The rivalry between the British and French was on Colden's mind as he wrote the introduction to the 1747 edition of his History of the Five Indian Nations:

The former part of this history was written at New-York in the year 1727, on Occasion of a Dispute which then happened, between the government of New-York and some Merchants. The French of Canada had the whole Fur Trade with the Western Indians in their Hands, and were supplied with their Woollen Goods from New-York. Mr. Burnet, who took more Pains to be Informed of the Interest of the People he was set over, and of making them useful to their Mother Country than Plantation Governors usually do, took the Trouble of Perusing all the Registers of the Indian Affairs on this occasion. He from thence conceived of what Consequences the Fur Trade with the Western Indians was of to Great Britain . . . the Manufactures depending on it.
The Iroquois had not only the best route for trade and other transport, but also plenty of beaver. Colden recognized that to whom went the beaver might go the victory in any future war between France and Britain in North America. The mid-eighteenth century was a time when two nations could not join in battle unless they occupied neighboring real estate. The Iroquois' position indicated to Colden that their friendship, as well as business relations, must be procured if the English were to gain an advantage over the French:

He [Burnet] considered what influence this trade had on the numerous nations of Indians living on this vast continent of North America, and who surround the British Colonies; and what advantage it might be if they were influenced by the English in case of a war with France, and how prejudicial, on the other hand, if they were directed by the French Counsels.
The New York legislature soon recognized this reasoning, and acted to channel trade from the French to the English, Colden wrote. Such steps were not uncommon in the economic cold war between England and France during the middle of the century. The drawing up of sides that Colden advised was but another small step along the road to the final conflict in North America between these two European Colonial powers. As with the building of empires before and since the eighteenth century, trade and the flag often traveled in tandem, and economic conflict preceded overt military warfare. Robert Newbold (The Albany Congress and Plan of Union, 1955) assigned the competition for diminishing stocks of beaver a central role in the conflict between the British and French empires in North America during this period.

To Colden, trade with the Six Nations also presented an opportunity to mix and mingle with the Indians, and to convert them to the British Colonial interest:

I shall only add that Mr. Burnet's scheme had the desired effect: The English have gained the Trade which the French, before that, had with the Indians to the Westward of New York; and whereas, before that time, a very inconsiderable number of men were employed in the Indian Trade Abroad. Now above three hundred men are employed at the Trading House at Oswego alone, and the Indian trade has since that time yearly increased so far, that several Indian nations come now every summer to trade there, whose Names were not so much as known by the English before.
As Colden had noted in his essay, the British were assembling a wide-ranging program of trade and diplomatic activity to insure that in any future war the Iroquois' powerful confederacy would side with them. Although, when the continent and its history are taken as a whole, the French were better at mixing with Indians and securing their alliance, at this particular time and in this place the English had the upper hand. This was accomplished through a series of adroit diplomatic moves, many of which were performed with the help of a group of men who, although English in background, were at home with the Iroquois as well.

The importance of the British alliance with the Iroquois was enhanced not only by the Six Nations' strategic position and military strength, but also by the Iroquois' diplomatic influence with many of the Indian nations of eastern North America. English and American writers remarked at the Iroquois' diplomatic and military power as early as 1687, when Governor Dongan of New York wrote that the Iroquois "go as far as the South Sea, the North West Passage and Florida to warr." The Iroquois did more than wage war; they were renowned in peacetime as traders, and as orators who traveled the paths that linked Indian nations together across most of eastern North America. When the English colonists had business with Indians in Ohio, and other parts of the Mississippi Valley, they often consulted the Iroquois. Clark Wissler classified many of the Indian nations situated around the Six Nations, including the Cherokees to the south, as members of the "Iroquois Family." The Iroquois' language was the language of diplomacy among Indians along much of the English Colonial frontier. These nations often contributed to, and borrowed from, practices of others. There is evidence that the Iroquoian form of government was imitated by other Indian nations.

One way that the English acted to maintain their alliance with the Iroquois, noted previously, was trade. The giving of gifts, an Indian custom, was soon turned by the English to their own ends. Gift giving was used by the English to introduce to Indians, and to invite their dependence on, the produce of England's embryonic industrial revolution. The English found it rather easy to outdo the French, whose industries were more rudimentary at the time, in gift giving. The Iroquois -- premier military, political, and diplomatic figures on the frontier -- were showered with gifts.

By 1744, the English effort was bearing fruit. At a treaty council during that year, Canassatego, the Iroquois chief, told Colonial commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia:

The Six Nations have a great Authority and Influence over the sundry tribes of Indians in alliance with the French, and Particularly the Praying Indians, formerly a part with ourselves, who stand in the very gates of the French, and to shew our further Care, we have engaged these very Indians, and other Indian allies of the French for you. They will not join the French against you. They have agreed with us before we set out. We have put the spirit of Antipathy against the French in those People. Our Interest is very Considerable with them, and many other [Indian] Nations, and as far as it ever extends, we shall use it for your service.
During the 1744 treaty conference, the British commissioners traded with the Iroquois goods they held to be worth 220 pounds sterling and 15 shillings, including 200 shirts, four duffle blankets, forty-seven guns, one pound of vermillion, 1000 flints, four dozen Jews Harps, 202 bars of lead, two quarters shot, and two half-barrels of gun powder. The preponderance of military items indicated the strength of the alliance, and the expectation of hostilities with the French, against whom Canassatego had pledged the Iroquois' aid.

Although some of the older chiefs complained that the Indians ought to make do with their traditional clothes, foods, and weapons, the British gifts and trade items apparently were eagerly accepted. The accommodating English even established a separate gift-presentation ceremony for the chiefs, who were forbidden by the Great Law to take their share from the officially presented gifts until other tribal members had picked them over.

The English were not giving because they were altruistic; by showering the Iroquois with gifts, the English not only helped secure their alliance, but also made the Indians dependent on some of England's manufactures, thus creating new markets for the Crown. If, for example, the Iroquois took up European arms and laid down their traditional weapons, they also became dependent on a continuing supply of powder and lead. According to Jacobs, the British skillfully interwove the political and military objectives of imperialism with the economic objectives of mercantilism.

Much of the gift giving took place at treaty councils. Historically these meetings were some of the most important encounters of the century. By cementing an alliance with the Iroquois, the British were determining the course of the last in a series of Colonial wars with France in North America. The councils were conducted with solemnity befitting the occasion, a style that shows through their proceedings, which were published and widely read in the colonies and in Europe.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the only way to carry on serious diplomatic business was face to face. There were, of course, no telephones, no telegraph, and no shuttle diplomacy. Where it existed at all, mail service was slow, expensive, and often unreliable. It often took a letter as long to get from Boston to Charleston as from either city to London -- at least a month, more likely six weeks, depending on the weather and other unpredictable circumstances.

On the English Colonial side of the table (or the council fire) sat such notables as Benjamin Franklin, his son William, William Johnson, Conrad Weiser, and Colden. The Iroquois' most eloquent sachems often spoke for the Six Nations, men such as Canassatego, Hendrick, and Shickallemy. These, and other lesser-known chiefs, were impressive speakers and adroit negotiators.

Canassatego was praised for his dignity and forcefulness of speech and his uncanny understanding of the whites. At the 1744 treaty council, Canassatego reportedly carried off "all honors in oratory, logical argument, and adroit negotiation," according to Witham Marshe, who observed the treaty council. Marshe wrote afterward that "Ye Indians seem superior to ye commissioners in point of sense and argument." His words were meant for Canassatego. An unusually tall man in the days when the average height was only slightly over five feet, Canassatego was well muscled, especially in the legs and chest, and athletic well past his fiftieth year. His size and booming voice, aided by a commanding presence gave him what later writers would call charisma -- conversation stopped when he walked into a room. Outgoing to the point of radiance, Canassatego, by his own admission, drank too much of the white man's rum, and when inebriated was known for being unflatteringly direct in front of people he disliked. Because of his oratory, which was noted for both dignity and power, Canassatego was the elected speaker of the Grand Council at Onondaga during these crucial years.

Shickallemy was known among his own people as Swatane. As the Onondaga council's main liaison with the Shawnees, Conestogas, and Delawares, he was frequently in contact with the governments of Pennsylvania and New York, whose agents learned early that if they had business with these allied nations, they had business with Shickallemy, who handled their "European Affairs." Unlike many of the Iroquois chiefs, he was not a great orator. He was known for being a gentleman and a statesman -- sensitive enough to deal with the Iroquois Indian allies, but also firm enough to deal with the whites beyond the frontier. In 1731, Governor Gordon of Pennsylvania gave to Shickallemy one of the first British Colonial messages ' seeking alliance against the French. In the swath of wooded hills that lay between the colonies and the governing seat of the Iroquois league, it was Shickallemy's sign -- that of the turtle, his clan -- that guaranteed safe passage to all travelers, British and Indian. In the Iroquoian language his name meant "the enlightener," and when he died in 1749, one year before Canassatego's death, word went out all through the country, on both sides of the frontier, that a lamp had gone out.

Shickallemy's life illustrated just how permeable the frontier could be during the eighteenth century. Born a Frenchman, he was taken prisoner at an early age by the Iroquois. He was later adopted by them and eventually elevated to membership in the Grand Council of the Confederacy as a pine-tree chief. Shickallemy, as an Iroquois chief, cultivated the friendship of the British colonists, and tried to pass this affection to his children, the youngest son of whom was Logan, who turned against the Euro-Americans only after most of his family was murdered by land squatters in 1774. Logan's speech after the murders was published by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia and passed on, from there, to millions of nineteenth-century school children through McGuffy's Readers.

Hendrick's Iroquois name was Tiyanoga. Like Canassatego, he was described as one who could combine traditional Iroquoian dignity with forcefulness and brutal frankness when occasion called. The principal chief of the Mohawks, his warriors guarded the "eastern door" of the Iroquois longhouse, through which most diplomats and traders passed. Hendrick, like Canassatego, was described as an eloquent speaker. "No one equalled his force and eloquence," wrote Milton W. Hamilton. Hendrick, like some of the other chiefs, was fluent in English, but rarely spoke the language at treaty councils or in other contact with Euro-Americans. He apparently enjoyed eavesdropping on colonists' comments about the ignorant Indians who surely, they thought, couldn't understand what they were saying. Hendrick was a close friend of Sir William Johnson; it was this relationship, more than any other individual bond, which kept the Iroquois allied with the English until the French were expelled from the continent in 1763.

If it is surprising to find on the Indian side of the table sachems bearing names usually associated with European nobles, it may be just as surprising to find on the English side men who had absorbed so much of Indian life that they were at home on both sides of the frontier. During the period when the English and Iroquois were allied, these men -- English and Iroquois -- mixed and mingled freely, sitting in each other's councils, and living each other's lives. Probably the most important Englishman on the frontier was Sir William Johnson, Baronet. Johnson may have been one of the men Franklin had in mind when he wrote that English Colonial society had trouble maintaining its hold on many men once they had tasted Indian life. An unidentified friend of Johnson's wrote of him:

Something in his natural temper responds to Indian ways. The man holding up a spear he has just thrown, upon which a fish is now impaled; the man who runs, with his toes turned safely inward, through a forest where a greenhorn could not walk, the man sitting silent, gun on knee, in a towering black glade, watching by candle flame for the movement of antlers toward a tree whose bark has already been streaked by the tongues of deer; the man who can read a bent twig like an historical volume -- this man is William Johnson, and he has learned all these skills from the Mohawks.[1]

If Franklin was the most influential single individual at the Albany congress, Johnson was not far behind. It was Johnson who persuaded the reluctant Iroquois to attend the congress, and who helped maintain an alliance that was often strained severely by conflicts over land, as well as the colonists' refusal to unite in face of the French threat. Johnson was characterized by the Mohawks at the Albany congress as "our lips and our tongue and our mouth." Johnson often dressed as an Iroquois, led war parties, sat on the Great Council of the league at times, and pursued Mohawk women relentlessly. His freelance sexual exploits were legend on both sides of the Atlantic; Johnson was said to have fathered a hundred Mohawk children. Such accounts have been disputed, but it is relatively certain that he fathered at least eight children among the Mohawks. The Mohawks did not seem to mind his fecundity; they did not worry about dilution of their gene pool because racial ethnocentricity was not widely practiced in Iroquoian culture. In fact, the Mohawks at the time appreciated Johnson's contributions because their population had been depleted by war, and since theirs was a matrilineal society, every child he bore became a Mohawk. The shade of one's skin meant less to the Mohawks than whether one accepted the laws of the Great Peace, which contained no racial bars to membership in the Six Nations.

Johnson's sexual exploits sometimes met with wry reproval from some of his white friends. Peter Wraxall, a former aide to Johnson, wrote to him after hearing that he was suffering from syphilis: "I thank God the pain in your breast is removed. I hope your cough will soon follow. As to the rest, you deserve the scourge and I won't say I pity you."

Johnson dealt extensively and maintained a close friendship with Colden. He also was a close friend of Hendrick, with whom he could speak fluent Iroquois. If the two men wished, they could also communicate in English, since Hendrick spoke it well, although he rarely spoke the language at treaty councils. The experiences of Johnson, who was at least as comfortable among the Iroquois as he was among the English (his knowledge of England came from Iroquois chiefs who had been there) illustrates how permeable the Anglo-Iroquois frontier was at this crucial juncture in Colonial history.

Perhaps the most important Pennsylvania colonial at the treaty councils was Conrad Weiser, a Mohawk by adoption who supplied many of the treaty accounts which Franklin published. A close friend of Franklin's, Weiser ranked with Johnson in the esteem given him by the Iroquois. Canassatego and Weiser were particularly close, and when the Iroquois adopted him, the sachem said that "we divided him into two parts. One we kept for ourselves, and one we left to you." He was addressing "Brother Onas," the Iroquoian name for the Pennsylvania Colonial governor. During the 1744 Lancaster treaty, Canassatego saluted Weiser:

We hope that Tarachawagon [Weiser's Iroquois name] will be preserved by the good Spirit to a good old Age; when he is gone under Ground, it will be then time enough to look out for another, and no doubt that amongst so many Thousands as there are in the World, one such man may be found, who will serve both parties with the same Fidelity as Tarachawagon does; while he lives here there is no room to complain.
Weiser was the Iroquois' unofficial host at the 1744 Lancaster treaty. He bought them tobacco in hundred-pound sacks, found hats for many of the chiefs, and cracked jokes with Canassatego. Weiser also warned the colonists not to mock the Iroquois if they found the Indians' manners strange. He told the colonists that many of the Iroquois understood English, although they often pleaded ignorance of the language so that they could gather the colonists' honest appraisals of Indians and Indian society. When the Iroquois asked that rum-selling traders be driven from their lands, Weiser made a show by smashing some of the traders' kegs. When elderly Shickallemy became ill in 1747, Weiser dropped his official duties to care for the ailing sachem, and to make sure that blankets and food were delivered to his family during the winter.

The importance accorded treaty councils usually meant that the meetings would last at least two weeks, and sometimes longer. Most of the councils were held in the warmer season of the year, with June and July being the most favored months. It was during those months that oppressive heat and humidity enveloped the coastal cities and insects carried into them diseases such as malaria. It was a good time to retreat to the mountains -- to Lancaster or Albany, or Easton, all frequent sites for treaty councils.

At treaty councils, leaders of both Indian and Euro-American cultures mingled not only at official meetings, but at convivial, off-the-record sessions as well. The atmosphere was that of a meeting of statesmen from co-equal nations, by most accounts an excellent atmosphere for the exchange of ideas of all kinds. This was especially true during the quarter-century before 1763, when the Crown's need for Iroquois alliance enforced a respect for cultural practices that some of the more ethnocentric Colonial commissioners found distasteful. The treaty councils were the primary means not only for maintaining the Anglo-Iroquois alliance against the French, but for addressing matters, such as illegal land squatting, which often strained the alliance. Appeals by the Indians for Colonial commissioners to control the activities of their own citizens were standard fare at the opening of most treaty councils. Once such problems had been addressed, the parties got down to diplomacy. "Shining the covenant chain" was the metaphor most often used at the time for such activity.

The tone of the treaty councils was that of a peer relationship; the leaders of sovereign nations met to address mutual problems. The dominant assumptions of the Enlightenment, near its height during the mid-eighteenth century, cast Indians as equals in intellectual abilities and moral sense to the progressive Euro-American minds of the time. It was not until the nineteenth century that expansionism brought into its service the full flower of systematic racism that defined Indians as children, or wards, in the eyes of Euro-American law, as well as popular discourse.

Interest in treaty accounts was high enough by 1736 for a Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, to begin publication and distribution of them. During that year, Franklin published his first treaty account, recording the proceedings of a meeting in his home city during September and October of that year. During the next twenty-six years, Franklin's press produced thirteen treaty accounts. During those years, Franklin became involved to a greater degree in the Indian affairs of Pennsylvania. By the early 1750s, Franklin was not only printing treaties, but representing Pennsylvania as an Indian commissioner as well. It was his first diplomatic assignment. Franklin's attention to Indian affairs grew in tandem with his advocacy of a federal union of the colonies, an idea that was advanced by Canassatego and other Iroquois chiefs in treaty accounts published by Franklin's press as early as 1744. Franklin's writings indicate that as he became more deeply involved with the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, he picked up ideas from them concerning not only federalism, but concepts of natural rights, the nature of society and man's place in it, the role of property in society, and other intellectual constructs that would be called into service by Franklin as he and other American revolutionaries shaped an official ideology for the new United States. Franklin's intellectual interaction with Indian peoples began, however, while he was a Philadelphia printer who was helping to produce what has since been recognized as one of the few indigenous forms of American literature to be published during the Colonial period. In the century before the American Revolution, some fifty treaty accounts were published, covering forty-five treaty councils. Franklin's press produced more than a quarter of the total. These documents were one indication that a group of colonies occupied by transplanted Europeans were beginning to develop a new sense of themselves; a sense that they were not solely European, but American as well.

Benjamin Franklin was one of a remarkable group who helped transform the mind of a group of colonies that were becoming a nation. It would be a nation that combined the heritages of two continents -- that of Europe, their ancestral home, and America, the new home in which their experiment would be given form and expression.








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E. B. O'Callaghan, ea., John R. Brodhead, esq., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed Parsons & Co., 1855), Vol. VI, p. 741.

C H A P T E R F O U R


Such an Union





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It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.

-- Benjamin Franklin to James Parker, 1751


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By 1744, Benjamin Franklin had lived in Philadelphia little more than two decades. Having fled what he regarded as Boston's spirit-crushing Puritan orthodoxy, Franklin's iconoclastic wit found a more comfortable home in Quaker Philadelphia. The city was only a quarter century old when Franklin arrived at the age of seventeen, a dirty, penniless young man looking for work as a printer's apprentice. During the two decades between his 1723 arrival and 1744, Franklin not only found work, but set up his own press, and prospered along with the Quaker capital. With 10,000 residents and a fertile hinterland much larger and more productive than Boston's, young Philadelphia already was approaching the older city in size.

By 1744, his thirty-eighth year, Franklin had a thriving printing business that published one of the largest newspapers in the colonies, the Pennsylvania Gazette, as well as Poor Richard's Almanack, which appeared annually. As the province's official printer, Franklin ran off his press all of Pennsylvania's paper money, state documents and laws, as well as job printing. As the postmaster, he had free access to the mails to distribute his publications. If a family, especially a Pennsylvania family, kept printed matter other than the Bible in the house, it was very likely that whatever it was -- newspaper, almanac or legal documents -- bore Franklin's imprint.

Franklin had done more for Philadelphia than fill its book stalls (one of which he owned) with literature. He had helped clean the city's streets and construct a drainage system unparalleled in its time; he had helped form a city fire department, a hospital, and a library; he would soon be testing electricity, and was already thinking of how it might be used for household lighting. While he detested religious orthodoxy (especially the Puritan variety) he shared one Puritan attribute with the merchants of young, bustling Philadelphia. He believed that hard work warmed God's heart or, as he wrote in Poor Richard for 1736: "God helps those who help themselves."

Like any publisher of ambition, Franklin always kept a sharp eye out for salable properties. During 1736, he had started printing small books containing the proceedings of Indian treaty councils. The treaties, one of the first distinctive forms of indigenous American literature, sold quite well, which pleased Franklin. Filling the seemingly insatiable appetite for information about the Indians and the lands in which they lived that existed at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, Franklin's press turned out treaty accounts until 1762 when, journeying to England to represent Pennsylvania in the royal court, he found several English publishers in competition with him.

One warm summer day in 1744, Franklin was balancing the books of his printing operation when Conrad Weiser, the Indian interpreter and envoy to the Iroquois, appeared at his door with a new treaty manuscript -- the official transcript of the recently completed meeting between envoys from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the sachems of the Six Nations confederacy at nearby Lancaster. Weiser, an old friend of Franklin's, explained that this was probably the most interesting and noteworthy treaty account he had ever brought in for publication. At last, said Weiser, the Iroquois had made a definite commitment toward the Anglo-Iroquois alliance that Pennsylvania and other Colonial governments had been seeking for more than ten years.

The Iroquois, explained Weiser, were being careful. If they were to ally with the English, they wanted the colonials to unify their management of the Indian trade, and to do something about the crazy patchwork of diplomacy that resulted when each colony handled its own affairs with the Iroquois.

Taking the handwritten manuscript from Weiser, Franklin sat at his desk and quickly thumbed through it, reading a few passages, bringing to life in his mind the atmosphere of the frontier council. The treaty had two main purposes, Franklin surmised. The first was to deal with a recurring problem: Indian complaints that Englishmen, mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, were moving onto Indian land without permission, disrupting hunting and social life. The second, and more important, objective was to polish the covenant chain, to secure the alliance against the French.

The Iroquois party consisted of 245 chiefs, warriors, women, and children. Weiser met the party outside Lancaster, throwing his arms around his friend Canassatego who, at age sixty, was entering his last years as speaker of the great council at Onondaga. Weiser bid all the Iroquois welcome to Pennsylvania, joking in the Iroquois language with the chiefs, who counted him as one of their own, an adopted Mohawk who often traveled to Onondaga to sit in on the councils of the league.

Weiser knew that the Iroquois expected their protocol to be followed. As guests, this meant that they had a right to adequate food and lodging after the long and tiring trip. Weiser promptly ordered a steer killed for them. While the steer was being carved into steaks, he purchased 300 pounds of flour, as well as other provisions, charging all of it to the provincial government. He treated the chiefs to "a glass of rum," and then another. The chiefs, "desireous . . . to have one more dram which I could not deny them," asked for more, and Weiser again bought drinks all around. The next day, he entered on his expense ledger a half-dozen sheep, 250 pounds of flour, bread, and "other necessities."

The Iroquois delegates arrived at Lancaster's courthouse Friday, June 22, 1744. A group of Colonial delegates, led by George Thomas, Esq., were waiting with "Wine, Punch, Pipes and Tobacco." The Colonial delegates "drank to the health of the Six Nations" and then adjourned the meeting until Monday to give the Iroquois an opportunity to rest.

For most of the next two weeks, the Iroquois and Colonial delegates discussed the invasion by squatters of the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. The delegates from Maryland and Virginia attended because both colonies claimed the land in question. Governor Thomas opened the first business session of the council Monday, June 25, by observing that during a treaty council at Philadelphia two years earlier, the Iroquois had requested a meeting with the governors of Maryland and Virginia "concerning some lands in the back parts of [those] Provinces which they claim a right to from their Conquests over the Ancient Possessors, and which have been settled by some of the Inhabitants of those Governments [Maryland and Virginia] without their [Iroquois'] consent, or any purchase made from them." Thomas reported that "an unfortunate skirmish" had taken place between colonists' militia and war parties from the Six Nations in the disputed territory. Thomas asserted that this problem ought to be solved because the Iroquois were strategic to the British defense against the French in North America: "by their Situation . . . if Friends [the Iroquois] are capable of defending [Colonial] settlements; if enemies, of making cruel Ravages upon them; if Neuters, they may deny the French a passage through their country and give us timely Notice of their designs."

The representatives of Maryland were not as conciliatory as Thomas. Speaking to the Iroquois, they said:

The Great King of England, and his Subjects, have always possessed the Province of Maryland free and undisturbed from any Claim by the Six Nations for above one hundred Years past, and your not saying anything to us before, convinces us you thought you had no Pretence to any land in Maryland; nor can we yet find out to what Lands, or under what Title you make your Claim.
The Iroquois waited a day, until June 26, to reply, as was their custom. The day's delay was meant to signal grave concern over the issue at hand. In some cases, the delay was just a matter of being polite; in this case, however, it was sincere. On Tuesday afternoon, Canassatego rose before the assembly, assuming the posture that had caused many colonists to compare him to their imagined Roman and Greek ancestors. He said:

Brother, the Governor of Maryland,
When you mentioned the Affair of the Land Yesterday, you went back to Old Times, and told us that you had been in Possession of the Province of Maryland for above one hundred Years; but what is one hundred Years in comparison to the length of Time since our Claim began? Since we came out of this ground? For we must tell you that long before one hundred years our Ancestors came out of this very ground, and their children have remained here ever since. . . . You came out of the ground in a country that lies beyond the Seas; there you may have a just Claim, but here you must allow us to be your elder Brethren, and the lands to[o] belong[ed] to us before you knew anything of them.
Canassatego continued his argument, saying that some Europeans assumed, in error, that the Indians would have perished "if they had not come into the country and furnished us with Strowds and Hatchets, and Guns, and other things necessary for the support of Life." The Indians, the sachem reminded the colonists, "lived before they came amongst us, and as well, or better, if we may believe what our forefathers have taught us. We had then room enough, and plenty of Deer, which was easily caught."

By July 2, the Iroquois had been given vague assurances by the Colonial commissioners that the flow of settlers into the disputed lands would be controlled as much as possible, a promise the Colonial officials did not have the armed force to implement. A few other matters that had precipitated conflict between the Iroquois and the English, such as the murder of Indian trader John Armstrong by the Delawares, were discussed. As the treaty council entered its last few days, talk turned to cementing the alliance, shining the covenant chain. Canassatego assured the Colonial delegates that "we will take all the care we can to prevent an enemy from coming onto British lands." To insure the continuance of alliance, the sachem also suggested that the colonists put their own house in order by combining into a single federal union. Closing his final speech on July 4, 1744, Canassatego told the assembled Iroquois and colonial commissioners:

Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another.[1]

Governor Thomas's final response, which followed Canassatego's, did not mention the sachems' proposal that the colonies unite into a confederacy on the Iroquoian model. Thomas also seemed to have missed Canassatego's assertion on June 26 that the colonists ought to consider the Iroquois their elder brethren. "We are all subjects, as well as you, of the great King beyond the Water," Thomas said. The Iroquois, following their custom of granting each speaker his say without interruption, did not dispute Thomas's assertion, although Canassatego had made it clear that they did not submit to the king's authority. The Iroquois regarded themselves as independent, beholden to no European power. They were, in fact, courted eagerly during the two decades before 1763 by both England and France.

The 1744 treaty, one of the more dramatic during this period, impressed Franklin when the interpreter's record was delivered to him a few weeks later. He printed 200 extra copies and sent them to England. Within three years after he printed the proceedings of the 1744 treaty, with Canassatego's advice on Colonial union, Franklin became involved with Cadwallader Colden on the same subject. A new edition of Colden's History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America, first published in 1727, was issued during 1747. Franklin was a frequent correspondent with Colden at this time; both had similar interests in politics, natural science, and Deism. They got on together well and often until 1765 when Colden, then lieutenant governor of New York, was burned in effigy for enforcing the Stamp Act.

Shortly after its publication in 1747, Franklin asked Colden for a copy of his new edition, and read and appraised it for its author. Franklin then began his own fervent campaign for a federal union of the British colonies, a cause he did not forsake until the United States was formed a quarter-century later.

Franklin requested a copy of Colden's book at a time when alliance with the Iroquois was assuming a new urgency for Pennsylvania. During 1747, French and Dutch privateers had raided along the Delaware River, threatening Philadelphia itself for a time. In response, Franklin organized a volunteer militia that elected its own officers (a distinctly Iroquoian custom). The militia grew year by year, repeatedly electing Franklin its colonel until the British, worried about the growth of indigenous armed forces in the colonies, ordered it disbanded in 1756.

Franklin thought enough of Colden's history to ask for fifty copies to sell through his own outlets. Franklin did not, however, approve of the fact that the book had been "puffed up" with "the Charters &c of this Province, all under the Title of the History of the Five Nations." Franklin deplored such padding, which he called "a common Trick of Booksellers." Such puffery notwithstanding, Franklin was concerned that one bookseller, by the name of Read, was not giving Colden's work sufficient advertising in Philadelphia. "In our last two Papers he has advertis'd generally that he has a parcel of books to sell, Greek, Latin, French and English, but makes no particular mention of the Indian History; it is therefore no wonder that he has sold none of them, as he told me a few days since." Franklin complained that no one in Philadelphia except himself had read the book, and he thought it "well wrote, entertaining and instructive" and "useful to all those colonies who have anything to do with Indian Affairs."

As early as 1750, Franklin recognized that the economic and political interests of the British colonies were diverging from those of the mother country. About the same time, he began to think of forms of political confederation that might suit a dozen distinct, often mutually suspicious, political entities. A federal structure such as the Iroquois Confederacy, which left each state in the union to manage its own internal affairs and charged the confederate government with prosecuting common, external matters, must have served as an expedient, as well as appealing, example. As Franklin began to express his thoughts on political and military union of the colonies, he was already attempting to tie them together culturally, through the establishment of a postal system and the American Philosophical Society, which drew to Philadelphia the premier Euro-American scholars of his day.

During 1751, Franklin read a pamphlet written by Archibald Kennedy titled "The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest Considered." Kennedy, collector of customs and receiver general for the province of New York at the time that he wrote the brochure, maintained that alliance with the Iroquois was "of no small importance to the trade of Great Britain, as to the peace and prosperity of the colonies." Indian traders, called "a tribe of harpies" by Kennedy, "have so abused, defrauded and deceived those poor, innocent, well-meaning people." Kennedy asserted that fraud in the Indian trade could be reduced if that trade were regulated through a single Indian commissioner, instead of a different one for each colony, which was the existing system. As with Kennedy, so also with the Iroquois; they too much resented the behavior of the traders. Canassatego had told the Colonial commissioners at Lancaster in 1744 that the Indians would be poor "as long as there are too many Indian traders among us." Resolution of this problem was the key to maintaining the Anglo-Iroquois alliance in Kennedy's opinion. The appointment of a single Indian commissioner would also be a small step along the road to Colonial confederation for mutual defense. The Iroquois had been advocating a unified Colonial military command for at least seven years -- since Canassatego's speech to the 1744 Lancaster treaty. Under Kennedy's scheme, each colony would have contributed men and money to the common military force in proportion to its population.

Franklin was sent Kennedy's brochure by James Parker, his New York City printing partner, from whose press it had been issued. Following the reading of the brochure, Franklin cultivated Kennedy's friendship; the two men consulted together on the Albany Plan of Union (which included Kennedy's single-Indian agent idea). At the Albany congress itself, Franklin called Kennedy "a gentleman of great knowledge in Public Affairs."

After he read Kennedy's brochure, Franklin wrote to Parker that "I am of the opinion, with the public-spirited author, that securing the Friendship of the Indians is of the greatest consequence for these Colonies." To Franklin, "the surest means of doing it are to regulate the Indian Trade, so as to convince them [the Indians] that they may have the best and cheapest Goods, and the fairest dealings, with the English." Franklin also thought, in agreement with Kennedy, that the colonists should accept the Iroquois' advice to form a union in common defense under a common, federal government:

And to unite the several Governments as to form a strength that the Indians may depend on in the case of a Rupture with the French, or apprehend great Danger from, if they break with us. This union of the colonies, I apprehend, is not to be brought about by the means that have heretofore been used for that purpose.
Franklin then asked why the colonists found it so difficult to unite in common defense, around common interests, when the Iroquois had done so long ago. In context, his use of the term "ignorant savages" seems almost like a backhanded slap at the colonists, who may have thought themselves superior to the Indians but who, in Franklin's opinion, could learn something from the Six Nations about political unity:

It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.
Within a year of reading Kennedy's brochure, Franklin, whose role in Pennsylvania's Indian affairs was growing, prepared a report on the expenses of the province's Indian agents. Part of the report was sharply critical of Indian traders:

Some very unfit Persons are at present employed in that business [the Indian trade]. We hope that the Governor will enjoin the justices of the County Courts to be more careful in the future whom they recommend for Licenses; and whatever is thought further necessary to enforce the Laws now being, for regulating the Indian Trade and Traders, may be considered by the ensuing Assembly. . . .
Recognizing that the Indians' complaints about the conduct of English traders had to be addressed if the Anglo-Iroquois alliance was to be maintained, Franklin took a major step in his personal life. During 1753 Franklin, who had heretofore only printed Indian treaties, accepted an appointment by the Pennsylvania government as one of the colony's commissioners at a meeting with the Six Nations planned for later that year in Carlisle.

That appointment was no more than an official recognition of what had already become obvious. Franklin had gradually emerged as an important part of the British diplomatic offensive with the Iroquois, an offensive that grew in activity until the conclusion of the war with France in 1763. Pennsylvania alone spent 1259 pounds, 5 shillings, 11 pence on Indian affairs during 1750, and about the same amount in 1751. Expenditures on Indian affairs had increased from 13 pounds in 1734 to 143 pounds in 1735, and 303 pounds in 1744, the year of the Lancaster treaty council during which Canassatego issued his challenge to the colonies to unite. These figures indicate that Franklin, Kennedy, and Colden were not alone in their insistence that an alliance with the Iroquois and other Indians along the Northern frontier was important to the security of the British colonies as against the French.

During the year before Franklin attended his first treaty council in an official capacity, the possibility of conflict with the French was accentuated by a French advance into the Ohio Valley. During June 1752, French troops attacked the Indian town of Pickawillany. The Pennsylvania Assembly voted 800 pounds in aid for the attacked Indians, 600 of which was earmarked for "necessities of life," a euphemism for implements of war. The French continued to advance during the balance of the year; French forces probed deeper into the territories of Indians allied with the Iroquois, the allies to whom Canassatego had referred in his final speech at the 1744 treaty conference. French forts were erected at Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango.

James Hamilton's proclamation appointing Franklin, Richard Peters, and Issac Norris to treat with the Indians at Carlisle specifically mentioned the alliance with the Twightwees, allies of the Iroquois who lived in the Ohio Valley, and who had been attacked by the French during 1752. The treaty, which started Franklin's distinguished diplomatic career, began November 1, 1753. An account of the treaty was printed and sold by Franklin's press. The major subject of the Carlisle treaty was mutual defense against the French. The Indians also brought up the behavior of traders, especially regarding their distribution of rum among Indians. The chiefs said they wanted such practices stopped. Scarrooyady, an Iroquois who had assumed a leadership role following the death of Canassatego during 1750, told the commissioners:

Your traders now bring us scarce any Thing but Rum and Flour. They bring us little Powder and Lead, or other valuable Goods. The rum ruins us. We beg you would prevent its coming in such Quantities, by regulating the Traders. . . . We desire it be forbidden, and none sold in the Indian Country.
"Those wicked Whiskey Sellers, when they have once got the Indians in Liquor, make them sell their very Clothes from their Backs," Scarrooyady emphasized. Concluding their report to the provincial government on the treaty council, Franklin, Peters, and Norris advised that the sachem's advice be taken. "That the traders are under no Bonds . . . and by their own Intemperance, unfair Dealings and Irregularities will, it is to be feared, entirely estrange the affections of the Indians from the English." Franklin's opposition to the liquor trade was strengthened the night following the formal conclusion of the treaty council, when many of the Indians there became very drunk and disorderly, yielding to the addictive qualities of the liquids that their chiefs had deplored only a few days earlier.

Two stated desires of the Iroquois leadership -- that the Indian trade be regulated along with the illegal movement of settlers into the interior, and that the colonies form a federal union -- figured importantly in Franklin's plans for the Albany congress of 1754. Plans for this, the most important intercolonial conference in the years before the last North American war with France, were being made at the time of the Carlisle treaty conference. The London Board of Trade wrote to the New York provincial government September 18, 1753, directing all the colonies that had dealings with the Iroquois to join in "one general Treaty to be made in his Majesty's name." It was a move that began, in effect, to bring about the unified management of Indian affairs that Colden, Kennedy, Franklin, and the Iroquois had requested. Similar letters were sent to all colonies that shared frontiers with the Iroquois and their Indian allies, from Virginia northward. Franklin was appointed to represent Pennsylvania at the Albany congress.

The congress convened June 19, 1754, five days after its scheduled opening because many of the Iroquois and some of the Colonial commissioners arrived late. Sessions of the congress, as well as some meetings with the Iroquois delegations, took place at the Albany courthouse, in the midst of a town that straddled the frontier between the English and the Mohawks, who maintained the "eastern door" of the Iroquois longhouse. Albany at the time was still dominated by the architecture of the Dutch, who had started the town before the English replaced them.

The Albany congress met for two interconnected reasons: to cement the alliance with the Iroquois against the French and to formulate and ratify a plan of union for the colonies. Franklin, well known among the Indians and a fervent advocate of Colonial union, was probably the most influential individual at the congress.

Among the Iroquois who attended the congress, Hendrick, who was called Tiyanoga among the Iroquois, received a special invitation from James de Lancy, acting governor of New York, to provide information on the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy to the Colonial delegates. De Lancy, appointed as chief executive of the congress by the Crown, met Saturday, June 29, with Hendrick and other Iroquois sachems. During that meeting, Hendrick held a chain belt that had been given him by the Colonial delegates. He made of the belt a metaphor for political union. "So we will use our endeavors to add as many links to it as lyes within our power," Hendrick said. "In the meantime we desire that you will strengthen yourselves, and bring as many into this Covenant Chain as you possibly can."

During the evening of July 8, the Iroquois' last in Albany, de Lancy met again with Hendrick and other Iroquois. During this meeting, which was open to the public, Hendrick remarked (as had Canassatego ten years earlier) about the strength that confederation brought the Iroquois. De Lancy replied: "I hope that by this present [Plan of] Union, we shall grow up to a great height and be as powerful and famous as you were of old." The week before this exchange, the final draft of Franklin's plan of union had been approved by delegates to the congress, after extensive debate.

Debates over the plan had taken more than two weeks. On June 24, the Colonial delegates voted without dissent in support of Colonial union that, said the motion voted on, "[is] absolutely necessary for their [the colonies'] security and defense." A committee was appointed to "prepare and receive Plans or Schemes for the Union of the Colonies." Franklin was a member of that committee. Thomas Hutchinson, a delegate from Massachusetts who also served on the committee, later pointed to Franklin as the major contributor to the plan of union that emerged from the deliberations of the committee: "The former [the Albany plan] was the projection of Dr. F[ranklin] and prepared in part before he had any consultation with Mr. H[utchinson], probably brought with him from Philadelphia."

Franklin had drawn up "Short Hints Toward a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies," which he mailed to Colden and James Alexander for comment June 8, 1754, eleven days before the Albany congress opened. The committee on which Franklin and Hutchinson sat developed its own set of "short hints" by June 28, four days after its first meeting. This list was basically similar to, and appears to have developed from, Franklin's own list.

Delegates to the Albany congress debated the committee's "short hints" on eight occasions between de Lancy's two meetings with Hendrick. On July 9, the Iroquois having left town, Franklin was asked to draw up a plan of union based on the previous two weeks' discussions. Franklin's final draft was commissioned two weeks to the day after his Pennsylvania Gazette published the "Join or Die" cartoon, one of the first graphic editorials to appear in an American newspaper, and a forceful statement in favor of Colonial union.

During debates over the plan of union, Franklin cited Kennedy's brochure and pointed to "the strength of the League which has bound our Friends the Iroquois together in a common tie which no crisis, however grave, since its foundation has managed to disrupt." Recalling the words of Hendrick, Franklin stressed the fact that the individual nations of the confederacy managed their own internal affairs without interference from the Grand Council. "Gentlemen," Franklin said, peering over the spectacles he had invented, "I propose that all the British American colonies be federated under a single legislature and a president-general to be appointed by the Crown." He then posed the same rhetorical question he had in the letter to Parker: if the Iroquois can do it, why can't we?

The plan of union that emerged from Franklin's pen was a skillful diplomatic melding of concepts that took into consideration the Crown's demands for control, the colonists' desires for autonomy in a loose union, and the Iroquois' stated advocacy of a Colonial union similar to theirs in structure and function. For the Crown, the plan provided administration by a president-general, to be appointed and supported by the Crown. The individual colonies were promised that they could retain their own constitutions "except in the particulars wherein a change may be directed by the said Act [the plan of union] as hereafter follows."

The retention of internal sovereignty within the individual colonies, politically necessary because of their diversity, geographical separation, and mutual suspicion, closely resembled the Iroquoian system. The colonies' distrust of one another and the fear of the smaller that they might be dominated by the larger in a confederation may have made necessary the adoption of another Iroquoian device: one colony could veto the action of the rest of the body. As in the Iroquois Confederacy, all "states" had to agree on a course of action before it could be taken. Like the Iroquois Great Council, the "Grand Council" (the name was Franklin's) of the colonies under the Albany Plan of Union would have been allowed to choose its own speaker. The Grand Council, like the Iroquois Council, was to be unicameral, unlike the two-house British system. Franklin favored one-house legislatures during and later at the Constitutional Convention, and opposed the imposition of a bicameral system on the United States.

Franklin's Albany Plan of Union provided for a different number of representatives