from each colony (from seven for Virginia and Massachusetts Bay to two for New Hampshire and Rhode Island) as the Iroquois system provided for differing numbers from each of its five nations. This division of seats was based, however, in rough proportion to population and contributions to a common military force, while the Iroquois system was based more on tradition. But the number of delegates to the proposed Colonial Grand Council (forty-eight) closely resembled that of the Iroquois Council (fifty). There is no documentary evidence, however, that Franklin intended such a slavish imitation.

The legislature under the Albany plan was empowered to "raise and pay Soldiers, and build Forts for the Defence of any of the Colonies, and equip vessels of Force to guard the Coasts and protect the Trade on the Oceans, Lakes and Great Rivers," but it was not allowed to "impress men in any Colonies without the consent of its Legislature." This clause strikes a middle ground between the involuntary conscription often practiced in Europe at the time and the traditional reliance of the Iroquois and many other American Indian nations on voluntary military service.

The Albany plan also contained the long-sought unified regulation of the Indian trade advocated by the Iroquois, Kennedy, Colden, and Franklin:

That the President General with the advice of the Grand Council hold and direct all Indian Treaties in which the general interest or welfare of the Colonys may be concerned; and make peace or declare war with the Indian Nations. That they make such laws as they judge necessary for regulating Indian Trade. That they make all purchases from the Indians for the Crown. . . . That they make new settlements on such purchases by granting lands. . . .
The last part of this section aimed to stop, or at least slow, the pellmell expansion of the frontier that resulted in settlers' occupation of lands unceded by the Indian nations. Such poaching was a constant irritant to the Iroquois; the subject of land seizures had come up at every treaty council for at least two decades before the Albany plan was proposed. Like the traders' self-interested profiteering, the illegal taking of land by frontiersmen was seen by Anglo-American leaders as a threat to the Anglo-Iroquois alliance at a time when worsening diplomatic relations with France made alliance with the Iroquois more vital.

The Albany Plan of Union gained Franklin general recognition in the colonies as an advocate of Colonial union. The plan also earned Franklin a position among the originators of the federalist system of government that came to characterize the United States political system. According to Clinton Rossiter, "Franklin made rich contributions to the theory and practice of federalism . . . he was far ahead of the men around him in abandoning provincialism."[2] While the Iroquois and Franklin were ready for a Colonial union, the legislatures of the colonies were not. Following its passage by the Albany congress on July 10, 1754, Franklin's plan died in the Colonial legislatures. The individual colonies' governing bodies were not ready to yield even to the limited Colonial government that Franklin proposed within his definition of federalism: "Independence of each other, and separate interests, tho' among a people united by common manners, language and, I may say, religion . . ." Franklin showed his dismay at the inability of the colonies to act together when he said that "the councils of the savages proceeded with better order than the British Parliament."

Franklin believed, at the time that his plan failed to win the approval of the colonies, that its defeat would cost the British their alliance with the Iroquois. "In my opinion, no assistance from them [the Six Nations] is to be expected in any dispute with the French 'till by a Compleat Union among our selves we are able to support them in case they should be attacked," Franklin wrote, before the Iroquois' willingness to maintain the alliance proved him wrong. Although he was wrong in this regard, Franklin's statement illustrates how important the Iroquois' prodding was in his advocacy of a federal union for the colonies.

Franklin's plan was also rejected by the Crown, but for reasons different from those of the Colonial legislatures. To the British, the plan was too democratic. It gave the colonists too much freedom at a time when the British were already sending across the ocean spies who reported that far too many colonists were giving entirely too much thought to possible independence from Britain. Franklin already was under watch as a potential troublemaker (hadn't he raised his own militia?).

The separate Colonial governments and the Crown had, in effect, vetoed the plan of the Albany commissioners -- a veto beyond which there could be no appeal. Nonetheless, the work of the congress was not in vain.

Almost two decades would pass before the colonists -- inflamed into union by the Stamp Act and other measures the British pressed upon the colonies to help pay the Crown's war debts -- would take Franklin's and Canassatego's advice, later epitomized in Franklin's phrase: "We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately." Returning to America from one of many trips to England, Franklin would then repackage the Albany plan as the Articles of Confederation. A Continental Congress would convene, and word would go out to Onondaga that the colonists had finally lit their own Grand Council fire at Philadelphia.

During 1774, colonists dressed as Mohawks dumped tea into Boston Harbor to protest British economic imperialism. During the spring of 1775, serious skirmishes took place at Lexington and Concord. During August of the same year, commissioners from the newly united colonies met with chiefs of the Six Nations at Philadelphia in an effort to procure their alliance, or at least neutrality, in the coming war with the British.

On August 25, the two groups smoked the pipe of peace and exchanged the ritual words of diplomatic friendship. Following the ceremonies, the Colonial commissioners told the Iroquois:

Our business with you, besides rekindling the ancient council-fire, and renewing the covenant, and brightening up every link of the chain is, in the first place, to inform you of the advice that was given about thirty years ago, by your wise forefathers, in a great council which was held at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, when Canassatego spoke to us, the white people, in these very words.
The commissioners then repeated, almost word for word, Canassatego's advice that the colonies form a federal union like that of the Iroquois, as it had appeared in the treaty account published by Franklin's press. The commissioners continued their speech:

These were the words of Canassatego. Brothers, Our forefathers rejoiced to hear Canassatego speak these words. They sunk deep into our hearts. The advice was good. It was kind. They said to one another: "The Six Nations are a wise people, Let us hearken to them, and take their counsel, and teach our children to follow it." Our old men have done so. They have frequently taken a single arrow and said, Children, see how easily it is broken. Then they have taken and tied twelve arrows together with a strong string or cord and our strongest men could not break them. See, said they, this is what the Six Nations mean. Divided, a single man may destroy you; united, you are a match for the whole world. We thank the great God that we are all united; that we have a strong confederacy, composed of twelve provinces. . . . These provinces have lighted a great council fire at Philadelphia and sent sixty-five counsellors to speak and act in the name of the whole, and to consult for the common good of the people. . . .







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C H A P T E R F I V E


Philosopher as Savage





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The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . and restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them [Indians] with what we call civil Society. --
Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in Matthew
Wheelock, Reflections, Moral and Political
on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770





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When the news that the war with France had been won reached Philadelphia, church bells and ceremonial cannon called the people into the streets for the customary celebration. The city, now the second largest in the British Empire with 20,000 people, was entering its golden age as the commercial and political center of the Atlantic Seaboard. Now, history seemed to promise it a role as gem of an entire continent, or at least that small part of it settled by Europeans and their descendants.

Benjamin Franklin, fifty-seven years old and four decades a Philadelphian, was by 1763 unquestionably the city's first citizen. Because of his diplomacy with the Iroquois, which helped procure the victory his compatriots now celebrated, Franklin had gone to London to represent the colony at the Royal Court. His wit and wisdom, his talent for diplomacy and municipal organization, his business talents and his scientific achievements -- all had earned for Franklin a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. He was at the peak of an enormously diverse and productive professional life.

Not long after the last bell chime of celebration had died away, however, was there new trouble on the frontier, and new problems for Franklin, who never lost the empathy for the Indians he had acquired first by publishing treaty accounts, then by taking part in treaty councils. Following the eviction of the French, the Iroquois and their allies had lost their leverage as a balance of power. The British now had them surrounded, at least in theory. Hundreds, then thousands, of immigrants, most of them Scotch-Irish, were moving through the passes of the Appalachians, into the Ohio country, taking what seemed to them the just spoils of war. This wasn't, however, French territory. Even by the Crown's law, it still belonged to the Iroquois and their allies. As the illegal migration continued, the covenant chain rusted badly.

British officials, who always kept a hawk's eye on the expense accounts of their Indian agents, cut gift gifting drastically, even for items (such as lead) on which many Indians had grown dependent. Rumors ran through the Indian country that the Great Father across the water was going to kill all the beaver, starve the Indians, and make slaves of them. The younger warriors of many nations became restless, ready to address the problem, even if it cost them their lives. Canassatego, Hendrick, and Weiser, three among many who had maintained the alliance, were dead. In the Grand Council at Onondaga, the sachems argued and the confederacy quivered. In the West, Pontiac fashioned his own alliance and went to war against the squatters.

When the news reached the Pennsylvania frontier that Indians were laying a track of blood through the Ohio Valley, a hunger for revenge arose among the new settlers. They organized vigilante groups and declared virtual secession from the Quaker capital. There the assembly, without an army, was doing all it could in a nonviolent way, to restrain the pellmell rush across the mountains until land could be acquired by treaty. Without loyalty to or even knowledge of the old understandings, the new settlers would neither wait for diplomacy nor be bound by decrees.

On December 14, 1763, fifty-seven vigilantes from Paxton and Donegal, two frontier towns, rode into Conestoga Manor, an Indian settlement, and killed six of twenty Indians living there. Two weeks later, more than 200 "Paxton Men" (as they were now called) invaded Lancaster, where the remaining fourteen Conestoga Indians had been placed in a workhouse for their own protection. Smashing in the workhouse door as the outnumbered local militia looked on, the Paxton Men killed the rest of the Conestoga band, leaving the bodies in a heap within sight of the places where the Anglo-Iroquois alliance had been cemented less than two decades before.

The day before that massacre, Governor William Penn had relayed to the Pennsylvania assembly reports that the Paxton Men's next target would be Philadelphia itself, where they planned to slaughter 140 Indians at Province Island. The governor, citing "attacks on government," asked General Gage to delegate British troops to his Colonial command. Penn also wrote hastily to William Johnson, begging him to break the news of the massacres to the Grand Council at Onondaga "by the properest method."

Franklin responded to the massacres with the most enraged piece of penmanship ever to come off his press -- A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown. The essay, published in late January 1764, displayed a degree of entirely humorless anger that Franklin rarely used in his writings:

But the Wickedness cannot be Covered, the Guilt will lie on the Whole Land, till Justice is done on the Murderers. THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WILL CRY TO HEAVEN FOR VENGEANCE!
Franklin began his essay by noting that the Conestogas, a dying remnant of the Iroquois confederacy, had been surrounded by frontier settlements, and had dwindled to twenty people, "viz. 7 Men, 5 Women and 8 Children, Boys and Girls, living in Friendship with their White Neighbors, who love them for their peaceable inoffensive Behavior."

Listing most of the victims by name, Franklin wrote that many had adopted the names of "such English persons as they particularly esteem." He provided capsule biographies to show just how inoffensive the Indians had been: "Betty, a harmless old woman and her son, Peter, a likely young Lad."

As Franklin reconstructed the story, the Paxton Men had gathered in the night, surrounding the village at Conestoga Manor, then riding into it at daybreak, "firing upon, stabbing and hatcheting to death" the three men, two women, and one young boy they found. The other fourteen Indians were visiting white neighbors at the time, some to sell brooms and baskets they had made, others to socialize. After killing the six Indians, the vigilantes "scalped and otherwise horribly mangled," them, then burned the village to the ground before riding off in several directions to foil detection.

Two weeks later, when the scene was repeated at the Lancaster workhouse, the Indians, according to Franklin's account, "fell to their Knees, protesting their Love of the English . . . and in this Posture they all received the Hatchet. Men, Women, little Children -- were every one inhumanely murdered -- in cold Blood!" While some Indians might be "rum debauched and trader corrupted," wrote Franklin, the victims of this massacre were innocent of any crime against the English.

At considerable length, Franklin went on to reflect on the qualities of savagery and civility, using the massacres to illustrate his point: that no race had a monopoly on virtue. To Franklin, the Paxton Men had behaved like "Christian White Savages." He cried out to a just God to punish those who carried the Bible in one hand and the hatchet in the other: "O ye unhappy Perpetrators of this Horrid Wickedness!"

On February 4, a few days after Franklin's broadside hit the streets, the assembly heard more reports that several hundred vigilantes were assembling at Lancaster to march on Philadelphia, and Province Island, to slaughter the Indians encamped there. Governor Penn, recalling Franklin's talent at raising a volunteer militia, hurried to the sage's three-story brick house on Market Street at midnight. Breathlessly climbing the stairs, a retinue of aides in tow, he humbly asked Franklin's help in organizing an armed force to meet the assault from the frontier. To Franklin, the moment was delicious, for eight years before Penn had been instrumental in getting British authorities to order the abolition of Franklin's volunteer militia.

During two days of frenzied activity, Franklin's house became the military headquarters of the province. An impromptu militia of Quakers was raised and armed, and Franklin traveled westward to the frontier with a delegation to face down the frontier insurgents. As Franklin later explained in a letter to Lord Kames, the Scottish philosopher:

I wrote a pamphlet entitled A Narrative &c (which I think I sent you) to strengthen the hands of our weak Government, by rendering the proceedings of the rioters unpopular and odious. This had a good effect, and afterwards when a great Body of them with Arms march'd towards the Capital in defiance of the Government, with an avowed resolution to put to death 140 Indian converts under its protection, I form'd an Association at the Governor's request. . . . Near 1,000 of the Citizens accordingly took arms; Governor Penn made my house for some time his Head Quarters, and did everything by my Advice.
While his timely mobilization may have saved the 140 Indians' lives, the sage's actions drained his political capital among whites, especially on the frontier.

Such actions "made myself many enemies among the populace," Franklin wrote. What Franklin called "the whole weight of the proprietary interest" joined against him to "get me out of the Assembly, which was accordingly effected in the last election. . . ." Franklin was sent off to England during early November 1764, "being accompanied to the Ship, 16 miles, by a Cavalcade of three Hundred of my friends, who filled our sails with their good Wishes." A month later, Franklin began work as Pennsylvania's agent to the Crown.

The rest of the decade was a time of instability on the frontier. Franklin was in frequent correspondence with his son, William Franklin, and with William Johnson, who kept the elder Franklin posted on problems they encountered with squatters. Johnson wrote to Franklin July 10, 1766: "I daily dread a Rupture with the Indians occasioned by the Licentious Conduct of the frontier Inhabitants who continue to Rob and Murder them." William wrote to his father three days later: "There have been lately several Murders of Indians in the different Provinces. Those committed in this Province will be duly enquired into, and the Murderers executed, as soon as found guilty. They are all apprehended and secured in Gaol."

For the rest of his life, shuttling between America, England, and France on various diplomatic assignments, Franklin continued to develop his philosophy with abundant references to the Indian societies he had observed so closely during his days as envoy to the Six Nations. Franklin's combination of indigenous American thought and European heritage earned him the title among his contemporaries as America's first philosopher. In Europe, he was sometimes called "the philosopher as savage."[1]

"Franklin could not help but admire the proud, simple life of America's native inhabitants," wrote Conner in Poor Richard's Politicks (1965). "There was a noble quality in the stories . . . which he told of their hospitality and tolerance, of their oratory and pride." Franklin, said Conner, saw in Indians' conduct "a living symbol of simplicity and 'happy mediocrity . . .' exemplifying essential aspects of the Virtuous Order." Depiction of this "healthful, primitive morality could be instructive for transplanted Englishmen, still doting on 'foreign Geegaws'; 'happiness,' Franklin wrote, 'is more generally and equally diffused among savages than in our civilized societies.'"

"Happy mediocrity" meant striking a compromise between the overcivilization of Europe, with its distinctions between rich and poor and consequent corruption, and the egalitarian, democratic societies of the Indians that formed a counterpoint to European monarchy. The Virtuous Order would combine both, borrowing from Europe arts, sciences, and mechanical skills, taking from the Indians aspects of the natural society that Franklin and others believed to be a window on the pasts of other cultures, including those from which the colonists had come. There is in the writings of Franklin, as well as those of Jefferson, a sense of using the Indian example to recapture natural rights that Europeans had lost under monarchy. The European experience was not to be reconstructed on American soil. Instead, Franklin (as well as Jefferson) sought to erect an amalgam, a combination of indigenous American Indian practices and the cultural heritage that the new Americans had carried from Europe. In discussing the new culture, Franklin and others drew from experience with native Americans, which was more extensive than that of the European natural rights philosophers. The American Indians' theory and practice affected Franklin's observations on the need for appreciation of diverse cultures and religions, public opinion as the basis for a polity, the nature of liberty and happiness, and the social role of property. American Indians also appear frequently in some of Franklin's scientific writings. At a time much less specialized than the twentieth century, Franklin and his associates (such as Colden and Jefferson) did not think it odd to cross from philosophy to natural science to practical politics.

Franklin's writings on American Indians were remarkably free of ethnocentricism, although he often used words such as "savages," which carry more prejudicial connotations in the twentieth century than in his time. Franklin's cultural relativism was perhaps one of the purest expressions of Enlightenment assumptions that stressed racial equality and the universality of moral sense among peoples. Systematic racism was not called into service until a rapidly expanding frontier demanded that enemies be dehumanized during the rapid, historically inevitable westward movement of the nineteenth century. Franklin's respect for cultural diversity did not reappear widely as an assumption in Euro-American thought until Franz Boas and others revived it around the end of the nineteenth century. Franklin's writings on Indians express the fascination of the Enlightenment with nature, the natural origins of man and society, and natural (or human) rights. They are likewise imbued with a search (which amounted at times almost to a ransacking of the past) for alternatives to monarchy as a form of government, and to orthodox state-recognized churches as a form of worship.

Franklin's sense of cultural relativism often led him to see events from an Indian perspective, as when he advocated Colonial union and regulation of the Indian trade at the behest of the Iroquois. His relativism was expressed clearly in the opening lines of an essay, "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America," which may have been written as early as the 1750s (following Franklin's first extensive personal contact with Indians) but was not published until 1784.

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs. . . . Perhaps, if we could examine the Manners of different Nations with Impartiality, we should find no People so rude, as to be without any Rules of Politeness; nor any so polite, as not to have some Remains of Rudeness.
In this essay, Franklin also observed that "education" must be measured against cultural practices and needs:

Having few artificial Wants, they [Indians] have abundance of Leisure for Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of Life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the Learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.
Franklin illustrated this point by recounting an exchange between the commissioners of Virginia and the Iroquois at the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. The account of the treaty, written by Conrad Weiser, reported that the Virginia commissioners asked the Iroquois to send a few of their young men to a college in Williamsburg (probably William and Mary) where "they would be well provided for, and instructed in the Learning of the White People." The Iroquois took the matter under advisement for a day (to be polite, Franklin indicated) and answered the Virginia commissioners July 4, the same day that Canassatego advised the colonists to form a union. Canassatego answered for the Iroquois a few minutes after his advice regarding the union:

We must let you know that we love our Children too well to send them so great a Way, and the Indians are not inclined to give their Children Learning. We allow it to be good, and thank you for your Invitation; but our customs differing from yours, you will be so good as to excuse us.
Franklin's essay was taken almost exactly from the 1744 treaty account published by his Philadelphia press during that year; in the essay, Franklin related that Canassatego told the commissioners that his people had had experience with such proposals before. "Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces," the sachem said. "They were instructed in all your Sciences, but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. . . ." The young men educated in Euro-American schools were "good for nothing," Canassatego asserted. In Franklin's account, Canassatego not only turned down the commissioner's offer with polite firmness, but made a counter-offer himself: "If the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take great care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."

Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages" shows an appreciation of the Indian councils, which he had written were superior in some ways to the British Parliament. "Having frequent Occasion to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order and Decency in conducting them. . . . The women . . . are the Records of the Council . . . who take exact notice of what passes and imprint it in their Memories, to communicate it to their Children." Franklin also showed appreciation of the sharpness of memory fostered by reliance on oral communication: "They preserve traditions of Stipulations in Treaties 100 Years back; which, when we compare with our writings, we always find exact." When a speaker at an Indian council (the reference was probably to the Iroquois) had completed his remarks, he was given a few minutes to recollect his thoughts, and to add anything that might have been forgotten. "To interrupt another, even in common Conversation, is reckon'd highly indecent. How different this is to 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." Indian customs in conversation were reflected in Poor Richard for 1753, the year of Franklin's first diplomatic assignment, to negotiate the Carlisle Treaty: "A pair of good Ears will drain dry a Thousand Tongues." Franklin also compared this Indian custom favorably with "the Mode of Conversation of many polite Companies of Europe, where, if you do not deliver your Sentence with great Rapidity, you are cut off in the middle of it by the impatient Loquacity of those you converse with, and never suffer'd to finish it!" Some white missionaries had been confused by Indians who listened to their sermons patiently, and then refused to believe them, Franklin wrote.

To Franklin, the order and decorum of Indian councils were important to them because their government relied on public opinion: "All their Government is by Counsel of the Sages; there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment." Indian leaders study oratory, and the best speaker had the most influence, Franklin observed. In words that would be echoed by Jefferson, Franklin used the Indian model as an exemplar of government with a minimum of governance. This sort of democracy was governed not by fiat, but by public opinion and consensus-creating custom:

All of the Indians of North America not under the dominion of the Spaniards are in that natural state, being restrained by no laws, having no Courts, or Ministers of Justice, no Suits, no Prisons, no Governors vested with any Legal Authority. The Persuasion of Men distinguished by Reputation of Wisdom is the only means by which others are govern'd or rather led -- and the State of the Indians was probably the first State of all Nations.
Franklin also compared the Indians' offers of free lodging and food for visitors to the customs of Euro-Americans. The Iroquois kept guest houses for travelers. This custom was contrasted by Franklin with Indians' treatment in white towns. He recounted a conversation between Conrad Weiser and Canassatego, who were close friends. In that conversation, Canassatego said to Weiser:

If a white Man, in travelling thro' our country, enters one of our cabins, we treat him as I treat you; we dry him if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, we give him Meat and Drink that he may allay his Thirst and Hunger; and we spread soft furs for him to rest and sleep on; we demand nothing in return. But, if I go to a white man's house in Albany, and ask for Victuals and Drink, they say "Where is your Money?" And if I have none, they say, "Get out, you Indian Dog!"
Franklin was also given to affecting Indian speech patterns in some of his writings, another indication that his respect for diverse cultures enhanced his understanding of the Indians with whom he often associated. In 1787, he described the American political system in distinctly Iroquoian terms to an unnamed Indian correspondent:

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 kindled. Our wise men will then take the complaints . . . of your Nation into consideration and take the proper Measures for giving you Satisfaction.
Franklin was also fond of calling on the Great Spirit when he could do so in appreciative company.

Religious self-righteousness and pomposity was a favorite target of Franklin's pen, and he often used Indians to illustrate the religious relativism that was basic to his own Deistic faith. Deism, a religion that more than any other was prototypical of the Enlightenment frame of mind, emphasized naturalism, natural man, and rational inquiry, all of which finely complemented Franklin's interests in Indian cultures. Like Colden before him and Jefferson after him, Franklin often used his Deist beliefs to stress the universality of moral sense among peoples, and to break down ethnocentricity. Many of the people who were closest to the Indians during this period were Deists; calling on the Great Spirit was not at all out of character for them.

According to Alfred O. Aldridge (Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God, 1967), Deism involved belief in the superiority of "natural religion" as opposed to "the hollow formalism of Christianity." Deism formed an ideal complement to the natural rights philosophy that was so important in Enlightenment thought. According to Aldridge, Franklin's early Articles of Belief (1728) showed that, early in his life, many of his religious beliefs resembled those of several American Indians. At that time, Franklin even accepted polytheism. Although he later acknowledged monotheism, Franklin never lost his critical eye toward conventional Christianity. Aldridge found in Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" an abundant satire of religious proselytizing and economic imperialism.

In his "Remarks Concerning the Savages . . ." Franklin described a Swedish minister who lectured a group of Susquehanah Indians on the story of the creation, including "the Fall of our first parents from eating an Apple, the coming of Christ to repair the Mischief, his Miracles and Suffering &c." The Indians replied that it was, indeed, bad to eat apples, when they could have been made into cider. They then repaid the missionary's storytelling favor by telling him their own creation story. The missionary was aghast at this comparison of Christianity with what he regarded as heathenism and, according to Franklin, replied: "What I delivered to you are Sacred Truths, but what you tell me is mere Fable, Fiction and Falsehood." The Indians, in turn, told the missionary that he was lacking in manners:

My brother [the Indians told the missionary], it seems that your friends have not done you Justice in your Education, that they have not well instructed you in the Rules of Common Civility. You saw that we, who understand and practice those Rules, believ'd all your stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours?
In the same essay, Franklin commented on the use of religion as a cover for economic exploitation. Again he used Canassatego, in conversations related to Franklin by Weiser. According to Franklin, Canassatego asked Weiser: "Conrad, you have lived long among the white People, and know something of their Customs. I have sometimes been to Albany and noticed that once in Seven Days they shut up their shops and assemble in the Great House; tell me: what is it for?"

Weiser was said by Franklin to have replied: "They meet there to learn Good Things."

Canassatego had no doubt that the town merchants were hearing "good things" in the church, but he doubted that all those good things were purely religious. He had recently visited Albany to trade beaver pelts for blankets, knives, powder, rum, and other things. He asked a merchant, Hans Hanson, about trading, and Hanson told the sachem that he couldn't talk business because it was time for the meeting to hear good things in the great house. After the merchants returned from the church, Canassatego found that all of them had fixed the price of beaver at three shillings sixpence a pound. "This made it clear to me, that my suspicion was right; and that whatever they pretended of meeting to learn Good Things, the real purpose was to consult how to cheat Indians in the Price of Beaver," the sachem said, according to Franklin's account.

In Poor Richard for 1751, Franklin wrote: "To Christians bad rude Indians we prefer/ 'Tis better not to know than knowing err." Unlike Franklin, many English Deists had never seen an Indian, but they, too, often assumed that "the American natives would have a religion akin to Deism -- one based on the commonly observed phenomena of nature and dedicated to the worship of Nature's God," Aldridge wrote. Franklin saw the similarity of his own faith to that of Indians confirmed through personal experience. Deists, like Franklin, who sought to return "to the simplicity of nature" appeared to see things worth emulating in Indian societies.

Franklin's use of Canassatego, to twit conventional Christianity, was not unique in his time. Satirists on both sides of the Atlantic used the testaments of real or fictitious Indians to deflate the righteousness of clerics; did the Indians not have their own theories of the earth's origin?

Canassatego also figured importantly in an elaborate hoax intended to ridicule conventional Christianity, which appeared in the London Chronicle in June 1768. The hoax involved a review of a nonexistent book, The Captivity of William Henry. The fake review was not signed, so it is not possible to prove that Franklin wrote it. Whoever did concoct the hoax knew quite a bit about Iroquois society and customs, which made Franklin an obvious candidate. The style of the hoax fits Franklin, but some rather obvious errors point away from Franklin's authorship. For example, William Henry was purportedly taken captive in 1755 when he met Canassatego, who, in point of fact, had died in 1750. Regardless of its authorship, the hoax illustrated the use that was made of Indians as a counterpoint to conventional Christianity at the time. Such publications tended to legitimatize religious pluralism.

As they sought a middle ground between the corrupting overcivilization of Europe and the simplicity of the state of nature in which they believed that many Indians lived, Franklin and other Deists paid abundant attention to the political organization of the Indians, especially the Iroquois, who were not only the best organized Indian polity with which British Americans had contact, but who were also allied with them. "Franklin had the conception of an original, pre-political state of nature in which men were absolutely free and equal -- a condition he thought admirably illustrated among the American Indians," Eiselen wrote in Franklin's Political Theories (1928). Franklin himself wrote: "Their wants . . . [are] supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature" and that they did not at all want to be "civilized."

This state of nature was eagerly sought by many eighteenth-century Euro-Americans. To understand how many Europeans left their own cultures to live with the Indians is to realize just how permeable the frontier was. To those who remained behind, it was often rumored that those who had gone over to the Indians had been "captured." While some captives were taken, more often the whites took up Indian life without compulsion. As Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson May 9, 1753:

The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians. . . . They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never strewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts.
While Indians did not seem to have much inclination to exchange their culture for the Euro-American, many Euro-Americans appeared more than willing to become Indians at this time:

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
Franklin followed with an example. He had heard of a person who had been "reclaimed" from the Indians and returned to a sizable estate. Tired of the care needed to maintain such a style of life, he had turned it over to his younger brother and, taking only a rifle and a matchcoat, "took his way again to the Wilderness." Franklin used this story to illustrate his point that "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." Such societies, wrote Franklin, provided their members with greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures. Continuing, he said:

The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and fashionable Wants, the sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress'd for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . the restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them with what we call civil Society.

With so many white people willingly becoming associated with Indian societies, it was not difficult for thoughts and customs practiced behind the frontier to leak back into the colonies.

Franklin's interest in America's indigenous peoples was not restricted to their social and political systems. Like many European and American scientists of his time, Franklin was interested in tracing the origins of these "natural men" who figure so importantly in the thought of the Enlightenment. Since they were believed to be living in a state that approximated the origins of all peoples, Indians made fascinating objects of scientific study. Franklin, an anthropologist before the discipline had a name, engaged in the collection of Indian grammars, an activity practiced on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. By the end of the century, missionaries, natural scientists, and others had produced dozens of grammars in many Indian languages of varying length and accuracy, one indication of the Enlightenment era's intense fascination with the peoples of the New World. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and others collected the grammars and searched for words that might resemble concepts or phrases in English, French, German, Welsh, Yiddish, or other European languages. Many popular theories supposed that various Indian tribes might have descended from the Welsh, or the Jews, or the Celts, and linguistic ties were believed to support those theories.

As a scientist Franklin also vigorously opposed degeneracy theories, an intellectual export from Europe. These theories were developed to their highest form in France as a reaction to the myth of the "Noble Savage," which flourished in the same nation at the same time. According to the theory of degeneracy, America's climate degraded all life forms that existed there. Plants, animals, Indians, and transplanted Europeans were all said to be subject to this debilitating influence. Franklin thought otherwise. In 1772, he replied to assertions by de Pauw and Count de Buffon, writing to an unnamed French friend: "Les Américains ne le cédent ni en force, ni en courage, ni en d'esprit aux Européens." Franklin had too much personal contact to accept either the conception of the Noble Savage or the degeneracy argument. Unlike the Europeans who argued over land and people most of them had never seen, Franklin knew both well, and this knowledge produced in his writings about America and American Indians a pragmatism that many Europeans lacked.

"The savage," wrote de Buffon, "is feeble and has small organs of generation. He has neither hair nor beard, and no ardor whatever for his female." To de Buffon, Indians were also "less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly . . . [with] no activity of mind." If not forced to move in order to survive, Indians "will rest stupidly . . . lying down for several days." Indians, wrote de Buffon, "look upon their wives . . . only as beasts of burden." The men, in de Buffon's analysis, lacked sexual capacity: "Nature, by refusing him the power of love, has treated him worse and lowered him deeper than any animal."

To Jefferson, de Buffon -- who had never seen America, nor the Indians he wrote about -- presented a fat and inviting target. Jefferson replied that no correlation existed between sexual ardor and the amount of body hair on a man. "With them it is disgraceful to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to hogs. They therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears," Jefferson wrote. He recounted Indians' bravery in war to refute de Buffon's assertion that they were timid and cowardly, and he cited examples of Indian oratory to show that America's natives were not mentally deficient. While Jefferson believed that Indians' sexual equipment and drive was not less than that of whites, he wondered whether constant hunting and the Indians' diet might have diminished those natural gifts. What raised such a question in his mind, Jefferson did not say.

As with many scientific debates through the ages, the emotional exchanges between Europeans and Americans over the degeneracy theories reflected the political and social conflicts of the age. In the writings of Franklin there seems to be an emerging awareness of a distinctive American habit of mind, a sense that these transplanted Europeans, himself included, were becoming something not inferior to Europeans, but something very different. As the debate over degeneracy theories was taking place, more and more Americans were, like Franklin, coming to conclude that history and dignity demanded the colonies become a separate nation. Franklin more than once rushed to the defense of America and things American. When British publishers derided American cuisine, he hurried into print with a defense of American (Indian) corn, replete with recipes. When French authors peddled fantasies about the wildness of America and the savagery of its native inhabitants, Franklin set up a press in Passy and issued from it essays on the virtues of America and Americans, white and red.

During the decade after the Stamp Act, Franklin's writings developed into an argument for American distinctiveness, a sense of nationhood in a new land, a sense that an entirely new age was dawning for the Americans who traced their roots to Europe. The new nation would not be European, but American -- combining both heritages to make a specifically different culture. Franklin and his contemporaries, among whom one of the most articulate was Jefferson, were setting out to invent a nation. Before they could have a nation, however, they had to break with Britain, an act that called for an intellectual backdrop for rebellion, and a rationale for revolution.








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See: Peter Gay, "Enlightenment Thought and the American Revolution," in John R. Howe, Jr., ed., The Role of Ideology in the American Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 48.

C H A P T E R S I X


Self-Evident Truths





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I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.

-- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787


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Philadelphia became the intellectual nerve center of revolution in the mid-1770s. The Continental Congress convened there. The Declaration of Independence was drafted there, and first posted there, six weeks before the news reached the royal court in London at which it was directed. Philadelphia, the new capital of the new confederacy -- its "Grand Council fire," as Franklin called the city in some of his letters -- was becoming the commercial center of Eastern North America. The city's stately public buildings gave it an air of a capital beyond its years. When the Declaration of Independence was first posted along its streets, the Quaker city was not even a century old. Barely ninety years after the Penn family's surveyors had first marked it out of the wilderness, Philadelphia was surrounded by the mansions of merchants who had helped make it the busiest port on the Atlantic Seaboard, as well as the political and intellectual center of the colonies. The mansions reclined in baronial style along the rivers that converged at the commercial center, looking a little like English estates. Beyond these patches of tamed greenery, Philadelphians looked westward into the maw of a continent of immense size, which was to their eyes at once wild, dark, and threatening, as well as a possible source of riches beyond imagination. Rather suddenly, the men and women who had peopled a few widely scattered English colonies and stitched them together were faced with the task of making a nation, in area larger by far than any in Western Europe.

Franklin had always lived in the city's center, and never moved to the outskirts, even when his finances allowed. During the debates that welded the colonies into a nation he remained in the three-story brick house on Market Street that he had designed with his wife, Deborah, before the conclusion of the war with France. When the weather was fair, he could walk to Independence Hall. A year after skirmishes at Lexington and Concord turned angry words into armed rebellion, when the delegates to the Continental Congress decided that a rationale for the revolution needed to be put on paper, Franklin was the most likely candidate to write the manifesto. He had just returned from a long and difficult trip to the Ohio country, and had come down with gout. His three score and ten years showing on him, Franklin declined invitations to write the Declaration of Independence. He did join the drafting committee, and eventually became Thomas Jefferson's major editor.

At the age of thirty-three, however, Jefferson was not at all sure that he was equal to the task of telling the world why the colonies were breaking with Britain. On June 11, 1776, when he was asked by the Continental Congress to serve on a committee that would draft the declaration, Jefferson asked to be excused from the congress so that he could return to Williamsburg where he planned to help write the Virginia Constitution. His request for a leave denied, Jefferson asked John Adams, another member of the drafting committee, to write the document. Adams refused.

"Why will you not?" Jefferson asked Adams. "You ought to do it."

"Reasons enough," said Adams.

"What are your reasons?"

"First," said Adams, "you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Third: You can write ten times better than I can."

"Well," replied Jefferson, "If you are decided, I will do as well as I can."

Adams respected Jefferson's "masterly pen." The young man from Virginia brought with him to the Continental Congress what Adams called "a reputation for literature, science and a happy talent for composition. Writings of his "were remarkable for . . . peculiar felicity of expression," in Adams's opinion. Like many talented writers, Jefferson did not like to compose for committees. He called changes made in his drafts by other delegates to the Continental Congress "depredations."

While he didn't always welcome changes in his prose, Jefferson easily accepted criticism and corrections from Franklin, who by this time was regarded as an elder statesman in Europe as well as in America. Franklin himself had learned, from long experience, the trials attending composition of "papers to be reviewed by a public body." Jefferson, who was learning the same, willingly submitted his drafts to Franklin and Adams.

Between 1775 and 1791, when Franklin died, his political life overlapped Jefferson's. He venerated the elderly sage, and expressed his admiration frequently. Following Franklin at the post of United States ambassador to France, Jefferson was often asked: "Is it you, Sir, who replace Dr. Franklin?" Jefferson would reply: "No one can replace him, Sir, I am just his successor."

"There appeared to me to be more respect and veneration attached to the character of Doctor Franklin than to any other person in the same country, foreign or native. . . . When he left Passy, it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch," Jefferson recalled. Having admired Franklin so, it was not surprising that where Franklin laid down an intellectual thread, Jefferson often picked it up. Jefferson's writings clearly show that he shared Franklin's respect for Indian thought. Both men represented the Enlightenment frame of mind of which the American Indians seemed a practical example. Both knew firsthand the Indian way of life. Both shared with the Indian the wild, rich land out of which the Indian had grown. It was impossible that that experience should not have become woven into the debates and philosophical musings that gave the nation's founding instruments their distinctive character. In so far as the nation still bears these marks of its birth, we are all "Indians" -- if not in our blood, then in the thinking that to this day shapes many of our political and social assumptions. Jefferson's declaration expressed many of these ideas:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.
The newly united colonies had assumed "among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them," Jefferson wrote. The declaration was being made, he said, because "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

There were few ideas in the declaration (outside of the long list of wrongs committed by the Crown) that did not owe more than a little to Franklin's and Jefferson's views of American Indian societies. In drawing sanction for independence from the laws of nature, Jefferson was also drawing from the peoples beyond the frontiers of the new nation who lived in what late eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers believed to be a state of nature. The "pursuit of happiness" and the "consent of the governed" were exemplified in Indian polities to which Jefferson (like Franklin) often referred in his writings. The Indian in Jefferson's mind (as in Franklin's) served as a metaphor for liberty.

Jefferson wrote to Edward Carrington January 16, 1787:

The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro' the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, our very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. . . . I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.
Echoing Franklin's earlier comment, Jefferson looked across the frontier and found societies where social cohesion was provided by consensus instead of by the governmental apparatus used to maintain control in Europe. Among the Indians, wrote Jefferson, "Public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere." The contrast to Europe was obvious: "Under presence of governing, they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe." Returning to America, Jefferson concluded: "Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention." To Jefferson, public opinion among the Indians was an important reason for their lack of oppressive government, as well as the egalitarian distribution of property on which Franklin had earlier remarked. Jefferson believed that without the people looking over the shoulder of their leaders, "You and I, the Congress, judges and governors shall all become wolves." The "general prey of the rich on the poor" could be prevented by a vigilant public.

Jefferson believed that freedom to exercise restraint on their leaders, and an egalitarian distribution of property secured for Indians in general a greater degree of happiness than that to be found among the superintended sheep at the bottom of European class structures. Jefferson thought a great deal of "happiness," a word which in the eighteenth century carried connotations of a sense of personal and societal security and well-being that it has since lost. Jefferson thought enough of happiness to make its pursuit a natural right, along with life and liberty. In so doing, he dropped "property," the third member of the natural rights trilogy generally used by followers of John Locke.

Jefferson's writings made it evident that he, like Franklin, saw accumulation of property beyond that needed to satisfy one's natural requirements as an impediment to liberty. To place "property" in the same trilogy with life and liberty, against the backdrop of Jefferson's views regarding the social nature of property, would have been a contradiction, Jefferson composed some of his most trenchant rhetoric in opposition to the erection of a European-like aristocracy on American soil. To Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness appears to have involved neither the accumulation of property beyond basic need, nor the sheer pursuit of mirth. It meant freedom from tyranny, and from want, things not much in abundance in the Europe from which many of Jefferson's countrymen had so recently fled. Jefferson's writings often characterized Europe as a place from which to escape -- a corrupt place, where wolves consumed sheep regularly, and any uncalled for bleating by the sheep was answered with a firm blow to the head.

Using the example of the man who left his estate to return to the simplicity of nature, carrying only his rifle and matchcoat with him, Franklin indicated that the accumulation of property brought perils as well as benefits. Franklin argued that the state's power should not be used to skew the distribution of wealth, using Indian society, where "hunting is free for all," as an exemplar:

Private property . . . is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors therefore to the public Exingencies are not to be considered a Benefit on the Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or as payment for a just Debt.
"The important ends of Civil Society, and the personal Securities of Life and Liberty, these remain the same in every Member of the Society," Franklin continued. He concluded: "The poorest continues to have an equal Claim to them with the most opulent, whatever Difference Time, Chance or Industry may occasion in their Circumstances."

Franklin used examples from Indian societies rather explicitly to illustrate his conception of property and its role in society:

All property, indeed, except the savage's temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it.
Franklin, a believer in simplicity and "happy mediocrity," thought that an overabundance of possessions inhibited freedom because social regulation was required to keep track of what belonged to whom, and to keep greed from developing into antisocial conflict. He also opposed the use of public office for private profit. If officials were to serve the people rather than exploit them, they should not be compensated for their public service, Franklin stated during debate on the Constitution. "It may be imagined by some that this is a Utopian idea, and that we can never find Men to serve in the Executive Department without paying them well for their Services. I conceive this to be a mistake," Franklin said. On August 10, 1787, also during debate on the Constitution, Franklin opposed property qualifications for election to Congress. So fervent was his opposition to the use of public office for private gain that Franklin wrote in a codacil to his will, "In a democratical state there ought to be no offices of profit."

As well as using Indians as exemplars of their concepts of property, Franklin and other Colonial leaders usually held a rather high intellectual regard for the Indians' own property rights. Without adequate military force, however, they were unable to check the continuing movement of Euro-Americans onto land that had not been ceded by the various Indian nations. In his Administration of the Colonies, a text widely used for instruction of Colonial officials during the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Pownall argued that neither the Pope, nor any other European sovereign, had a right to give away Indian land without their consent.

"The lands [of America] did not belong to the Crown, but to the Indians, of whom the Colonists either purchased them at their own Expence, or conquered them without Assistance from Britain," Franklin wrote in the margin of an anonymous pamphlet, "The True Constitutional Means for Putting an End to the Disputes Between London and the American Colonies," published in London during 1769. Franklin was replying to an assertion in the brochure that the colonists occupied America "by the bounty of the Crown." A year later, Franklin made a similar point, writing in the margin of Wheelock's Reflections, Moral and Political, on Great Britain and Her Colonies: "The British Nation has no original Property in the Country of America. It was purchas'd by the first Colonists of the Natives, the only Owners. The Colonies [are] not created by Britain, but by the colonists themselves."

By supporting the Indians' claim of original title, Franklin and other advocates of independence undercut Britain's claim to the colonies. A popular argument at the time was that if Britain had a right to assert a claim to America under European law because English people settled there, then Germany had a right to claim England because the Angles and Saxons, Germanic peoples, colonized the British territory. To Franklin, the colonies belonged to the colonists, and what the colonists had not bought from the Indians (or, in some cases, seized in war) belonged to the native peoples.[1]

In Franklin's mind, there appeared to be no contradiction between orderly expansion of settlement and support of Indian needs for a homeland and sustenance. Looking westward into what he believed to be a boundless forest, Franklin assumed that the Indians would always have land enough to live as they wished. He thought that the continent was so vast that Europeans would not settle the breadth of it for a thousand years. Although both were scientists, technological innovators and politicians, neither Franklin nor Jefferson saw the technological changes or the increase in European immigration that would sweep across the continent in less than a century.

While he didn't forsee the speed of expansion, Franklin was troubled by the greed that he did see emerging in America, a huge and rich table laden with riches, seemingly for the taking. "A rich rogue is like a fat hog, who never does good 'til he's dead as a log," he wrote in Poor Richard for 1733. In the same edition, he also wrote: "The poor have little, beggars none; the rich too much, enough, not one."

Like Franklin, Jefferson defined property not as a natural right, but as a civil right, bestowed by society and removable by it. To Jefferson and Franklin natural rights were endowed (as the declaration put it) by the Creator, not by kings or queens or legislators or governors. Civil rights were decreed or legislated. As Jefferson wrote to William Short, property is a creature of society:

While it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from Nature at all . . . it is considered by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no one has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land . . . [which] . . . is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes that occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.
Societies that gave undue emphasis to protection of property could infringe on the peoples' rights of life, liberty, and happiness. According to Jefferson: "Whenever there is, in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so extended as to violate natural right." At the opposite end of Jefferson's intellectual spectrum stood the Indian societies of eastern North America that, in spite of minimal government that impressed Jefferson, had different laws or customs encouraging the accumulation of material wealth. Jefferson, although he retained a vague admiration for this form of "primitive communism" until late in his life, acknowledged that such a structure could not be laid atop a European, or a European-descended, society: "Indian society may be best, but it is not possible for large numbers of people."

While some aspects of Indian society were admirable but impractical, Jefferson found many aspects of European cultures deplorable but likely to be emulated in America if the people and their leaders did not take care to resist them. Jefferson acknowledged late in his life that "a right of property is founded in our natural wants," but he remained, to his death, adamantly opposed to concentration of wealth. The European aristocracy, based as it was on inherited wealth, was called "artificial" by Jefferson. "Provisions . . . to prevent its ascendancy should be taken in America," he wrote. Jefferson was not opposed to what he called "natural aristocracy," based on merit rather than inherited wealth; but against the artificial aristocracy he could sharpen his pen in a manner reserved for few other subjects: "Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people," Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval July 12, 1812. One turn of Jefferson's pen characterized European society as one of riders and horses, another as wolves and sheep, still another as hammer and anvil. There was to be more to Jefferson's American amalgam than a pale imitation of Europe.

From Paris during 1785, Jefferson wrote: "You are perhaps curious to know how this new scene has struck a savage from the mountains of America."[2] The words recalled characterizations of Franklin by Europeans as the philosopher as savage. Both men, confronting the world from which their ancestors had come, fully realized how much America and its native inhabitants had changed them. Jefferson's reception of the Old World was not warm:

I find the general state of humanity here most deplorable. The truth of Voltaire's observation, offers itself perpetually, that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet. While the great mass of the people are thus suffering under physical and moral oppression . . . compare it with that degree of happiness which is enjoyed in America, by every class of people.
Europe had a few compensations, such as a lack of public drunkenness, and fine architecture, painting, and music, wrote Jefferson. All this, however, did not reduce class differences, nor spread the happiness of which Jefferson was so enamored.

As he had removed references to property from his critique of a French bill of rights, Jefferson offered other suggestions for reducing the disparity between classes that he saw there. One such suggestion was a very steep schedule of progressive taxation.

Back in America, the revolution had helped to absolve the new country of what emerging aristocracy it had. Many of them moved to Canada. About a year after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:

The people seem to have laid aside the monarchial, and taken up the republican government, with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off of an old, and putting on a new suit of clothes. Not a single throe has attended this important transformation. A half-dozen aristocratical gentlemen, agonizing under the loss of preeminence, have sometimes ventured their sarcasms on our political metamorphosis. They have been thought fitter objects of pity, than of punishment.
America, fusing the native peoples' state of nature and Europe's monarchial state into a unique, agrarian civilization, evolved its own institutions, and its own interests, distinct from either the Indian or the European. Late in his life, Jefferson wrote to President James Monroe that "America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly her own."

Statements of Jefferson's such as that in his letter to Monroe and others like it were much later to be called into service by expansionists eager to justify their hunger for land and the lengths to which it drove them. In Jefferson's lifetime, however, they expressed the perceptions of a developing national identity vis-à-vis Europe. European scholarship, according to Jefferson, had produced no books that could be used as comprehensive guides to the kind of civil government he sought to erect in America: "There does not exist a good elementary work on the organization of society into civil government; I mean a work which presents one good and comprehensive view of the system of principles on which such an organization should be founded, according to the rights of nature." The same idea had been expressed in slightly different words many years earlier by Franklin.

Most of all, Jefferson loathed monarchy, the state that laid heavily across the backs of the people. As late as 1800, a quarter century after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was given to such statements as: "We have wonderful rumors here. One that the king of England is dead!" Comparing the oppression of the monarchial states he found in Europe with the way American Indians maintained social cohesion in their societies, Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: "Insomuch as it were made a question of whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to the greater evil, one who has seen both conditions of existence would pronounce it to be the last; and that the sheep are happier of themselves, than under the care of the wolves."

Both Franklin and Jefferson believed that power provided temptations to corruption (to which European leaders had long ago succumbed) and that to keep the same thing from happening in America required mechanisms by which the people kept watch on their leaders to make sure that they remained servants, and did not yield to a natural inclination to become hammer to the popular anvil. Public opinion became central to the maintenance of liberty -- a notion contrary to European governance of their day, but very similar to the Iroquois confederacy, where the war chiefs sat in the Grand Council with the express purpose of reporting back to the people on the behavior of their leaders.

Jefferson described the role of public opinion in American Indian society in Notes on Virginia. His description was remarkably similar to Franklin's. The native Americans, Jefferson wrote, had not

Submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power and shadow of government. The only controls are their manners, and the moral sense of right and wrong. . . . An offence against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the cause is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns.
"Imperfect as this species of coercion may seem, crimes are very rare among them," Jefferson continued. Recapitulating Colden's remarks, as well as Franklin's, Jefferson developed his thought: "The principles of their society forbidding all compulsion, they are led by duty and to enterprise by personal influence and persuasion." Sharing with other founders of America the Enlightenment assumption that Indian societies (at least those as yet uncorrupted by Europeans) approximated a state of nature, Jefferson questioned the theory advanced by supporters of monarchy that government originated in a patriarchial, monarchial form. Having studied Indian societies, such as the Iroquois, which were matrilineal and democratic, Jefferson speculated that:

There is an error into which most of the speculators on government have fallen, and which the well-known state of society of our Indians ought, before now, to have corrected. In their hypothesis of the origin of government, they suppose it to have commenced in the patriarchial or monarchial form. Our Indians are evidently in that state of nature which has passed the association of a single family, and not yet submitted to authority of positive laws, or any acknowledged magistrate.
Public opinion, freedom of action and expression, and the consent of the governed played an important role in Jefferson's perception of Indian societies. The guideline that Jefferson drew from the Indian example (and which he earnestly promoted in the First Amendment) allowed freedom until it violated another's rights: "Every man, with them, is perfectly free to follow his own inclinations. But if, in doing this, he violates the rights of another, if the case be slight, he is punished by the disesteem of society or, as we say, public opinion; if serious, he is tomahawked as a serious enemy." Indian leaders relied on public opinion to maintain their authority: "Their leaders influence them by their character alone; they follow, or not, as they please him whose character for wisdom or war they have the highest opinion."

While public opinion was useful in keeping elected leaders from assuming the role of wolves over sheep, public opinion also was recognized by Jefferson as a safety valve. To repress it would invite armed revolution by a public alienated from its leaders. Jefferson could hardly deny a public insistent on overthrowing its leaders. Their right to do so was expressed in his Declaration of Independence. Writing to W. S. Smith November 17, 1787, Jefferson refuted assertions of some Europeans that America was suffering from anarchy:

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Displaying a rationality that had yet to be tested by tyrants' manipulation of public opinion, Jefferson wrote in 1801; "It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and the individual who disagrees with it ought to examine well his own opinion." At least until he became President, and found the wrath of opinion directed at him from time to time, Jefferson expressed almost a naive faith in the wisdom of public opinion. Jefferson believed that states should be small in size to allow public opinion to function most efficiently. Leaders ought to be subject to impeachment; the entire governmental system could be impeached by force of arms if the people thought fit to do so. Public opinion could be called upon, in the Indians' fashion, to raise an army.

Like that of the Iroquois, Jefferson's concept of popular consent allowed for impeachment of officials who offended the principles of law; also similar to the Indian conception, Jefferson spoke and wrote frequently that the least government was the best. Jefferson objected when boundaries for new states were drawn so as to make them several times larger than some of the original colonies:

This is reversing the natural order of things. A tractable people may be governed in large bodies but, in proportion as they depart from this character, the extent of their government must be less. We see into what small divisions the Indians are obliged to reduce their societies.
Jefferson's writings indicate that he did not expect, nor encourage, Americans to be tractable people. Least of all did he expect them to submit to involuntary conscription for unjustified wars. Freedom from such was the natural order of things. Franklin showed a similar inclination in Poor Richard for 1734: "If you ride a horse, sit close and tight. If you ride a man, sit easy and light."

Franklin, Jefferson, and others in their time who combined politics and natural history intensively studied the history and prehistory of northwestern Europe as it had been before the coming of the Romans. Like the Celts and other tribal people of Germany and the British Isles who had lived, according to Jefferson, in societies that functioned much like the Indian polities he had observed in his own time: "The Anglo-Saxons had lived under customs and unwritten laws based upon the natural rights of man. . . ." The monarchy was imposed on top of this natural order, Jefferson argued. In so doing, according to Chinard, Jefferson "went much farther than any of the English political thinkers in his revindication of Saxon liberties." To Charles Sanford (The Quest for Paradise, 1961), America and its inhabitants represented to many Europeans a recapitulation of the Garden of Eden; to Henry Steele Commager, the Enlightenment mind assumed that "only man in a state of nature was happy. Man before the Fall." To English whigs, as well as to Franklin and Jefferson, government by the people was the wave of the past, as well as the future. Augmented by observation of Indian peoples who lived with a greater degree of happiness than peoples in Europe, this belief gave powerful force to the argument that the American Revolution was reclaiming rights that Americans, Englishmen, and all other peoples enjoyed by fiat of nature, as displayed by their ancestory -- American Indian and European.

English radicals and American patriots traded these ideas freely across the Atlantic during the revolutionary years. One example of this intellectual trade was Tom Paine, who came to America at Franklin's invitation and within three years of his arrival was sitting around a council fire with the Iroquois, learning to speak their language and enjoying himself very much. Paine attended a treaty council at Easton during 1777, in order to negotiate the Iroquois' alliance, or at least neutrality, in the Revolutionary War. According to Samuel Edwards, a biographer of Paine, he was "fascinated by them." Paine quickly learned enough of the Iroquois' language so that he no longer needed to speak through an interpreter.

It was not long before Paine, like Jefferson and Franklin, was contrasting the Indians' notions of property with those of the Europe from which he had come. Paine not only demoted property from the roster of natural rights and made of it a mere device of civil society, but also recognized benefits in the Indians' communal traditions:

To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets of Europe.
Poverty, wrote Paine 1795, "is a thing created by what is called civilization." "Civilization, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would ever have been the lot of either in a natural state," Paine concluded. Despite the appeal of a society without poverty, Paine believed it impossible "to go from the civilized to the natural state."

The rationale for revolution that was formulated in Philadelphia during those humid summer days of 1776 threw down an impressive intellectual gauntlet at the feet of Europe's monarchies, especially the British Crown. Franklin, Jefferson, and the others who drafted the Declaration of Independence were saying that they were every inch the equal of the monarchs who would superintend them, and that the sheep of the world had a natural right to smite the wolves, a natural right guaranteed by nature, by the precedent of their ancestors, and by the abundant and pervasive example of America's native inhabitants. The United States' founders may have read about Greece, or the Roman Republic, the cantons of the Alps, or the reputed democracy of the tribal Celts, but in the Iroquois and other Indian confederacies they saw, with their own eyes, the self-evidence of what they regarded to be irrefutable truths.

Wars are not won soley by eloquence and argument, however. Once he had recovered from the gout, Franklin recalled his talents at organizing militias and threw himself into the practical side of organizing an armed struggle for independence. He marshaled brigades that went house to house with appeals for pots, pans, and curtain weights, among other things, which would be melted down to provide the revolutionary army with ammunition. The colonists set to work raising a volunteer army in the Indian manner (much as Franklin had organized his Philadelphia militia almost three decades earlier), using Indian battle tactics so well suited to the forests of eastern North America. George Washington had studied guerrilla warfare during the war with France, and when the British sent soldiers over the ocean ready for set-piece wars on flat pastures manicured like billiard tables, their commanders wailed that Washington's army was just not being fair -- shooting from behind trees, dispersing and returning to civilian occupations when opportunity or need called. A British Army report to the House of Commons exclaimed, in exasperation, "The Americans won't stand and fight!"

Having failed to adapt to a new style of war in a new land, the British never exactly lost the war, but like another world power that sent its armies across an ocean two centuries later, they decided they could not win a war without fronts, without distinction between soldiers and civilians. America would have its independence.

Meeting in Paris to settle accounts during 1783, the diplomats who redrew the maps sliced the Iroquois Confederacy in half, throwing a piece to the United States, and another to British Canada. The heirs to some of the Great Law of Peace's most precious principles ignored the Iroquois' protestations that they, too, were sovereign nations, deserving independence and self-determination. A century of learning was coming to a close. A century and more of forgetting -- of calling history into service to rationalize conquest -- was beginning.








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While Franklin used Indians' concepts of property to illustrate his own, and while he frequently supported Indians' rights against those of illegal squatters, Franklin was also involved in the land business. In Franklin's mind, it was the illegal taking of land that was objectionable. Legal usurpation, by treaty or even sometimes by military conquest, did not offend his sense of justice. In 1754, the same year that Franklin lobbied the Iroquois' cause by advocating a union of the colonies, he also drew up a plan for settling the Ohio country, which was at that time occupied by Indian allies of the Iroquois (Labaree and Willcox, Franklin Papers, 5:456). Peace between the English and the Iroquois was good for more than alliance against the French; it also made land speculation easier and much less dangerous, as long as the land was acquired with some form of payment and Indian consent. In 1768, Sir William Johnson, Franklin's son William and other Colonial officials who had close ties to the Iroquois, such as George Croghan, worked intensively for Anglo-Iroquois amity at the Fort Stanwix treaty conference. All of them were negotiating large land purchases. Franklin at the time was lobbying for the purchases in England, where he worked as a Colonial agent with the Crown (Ibid, 10:38-39; James Sullivan, et al., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921-1965), 6:129). According to Clarence W. Alvord, Indian war threats were sometimes invented or blown out of proportion during this period in order to get the Crown's attention directed toward peacekeeping, which would make land purchases easier (Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1917), pp. 345-358). Franklin was involved in other land business as well, especially plans to settle the Ohio country (Labaree and Willcox, Franklin Papers, 17:135-136).

H. A. Washington, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: John C. Riker, 1854), Vol. 1, p. 444.

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The Indians presented a reverse image of European civilization which helped America establish a national identity that was neither savage nor civilized. --
Charles Sanford, The Quest for Paradise, 1961





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From the beginning of European contact with the Americas, a kind of intellectual mercantilism seemed to take shape. Like the economic mercantilism that drew raw materials from the colonies, made manufactured goods from them in Europe, and then sold the finished products back to America, European savants drew the raw material of observation and perception from America, fashioned it into theories, and exported those theories back across the Atlantic. What role, it may be asked, did these observations of America and its native inhabitants play in the evolution of Enlightenment thought in Europe? "The Indians," wrote Charles Sanford with credit to Roy Harvey Pearce, "presented a reverse image of European civilization which helped America establish a national identity which was neither savage nor civilized." How true was this also of Europe itself? During the researching of the foregoing study, the author came across shreds of evidence which, subsequently not followed because they fell outside the range of the study, indicate that European thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and others may have drawn from America and its native inhabitants observations on natural society, natural law, and natural rights, packaged them into theories, and exported them back to America, where people such as Franklin and Jefferson put them into practice in construction of their American amalgam.

In The Quest for Paradise, Sanford drew a relation between American Indians' conception of property and that expressed by Thomas More in his Utopia. Paul A. W. Wallace also likened the Iroquois' governmental structure to that of Utopia. Work could be done that would begin with the basis laid by Sanford, Robert F. Berkhofer, and Roy Harvey Pearce, which would examine how Europeans such as Locke and other seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophers integrated observation and perception of American Indians into theories of natural rights. Michael Kraus (The Atlantic Civilization, 1949) wrote that during this period, anthropology was strongly influencing the development of political theory: "[Thomas] Hobbes and Locke, especially, show a familiarity with the social structure of the American Indians which they used to good purpose. Each of the English political scientists wrote in a period of crisis and in search of a more valid ordering of society. . . . The American Indian was believed to have found many of the answers." If such intellectual intercourse did, in fact occur, how did the Europeans get their information? How accurate was it? What other non-Indian precedents did they use in formulating their theories? How were these theories exported back to America, which, as Commager observed, acted the Enlightenment that Europe dreamed? Berkhofer quoted Locke as having written: "In the beginning, all the world was America." According to Berkhofer, Locke believed that men could live in reason and peace without European-style government; Berkhofer implied that Locke saw proof of this, as Jefferson and Franklin did, in the societies of the American Indians. Koch wrote that the English radicals of the eighteenth century were "students and advocates" of the American cause. Franklin, with his rich, firsthand knowledge of Indians and their societies, was well known in England before he began work there in the 1750s. Gillespie wrote that England had been suffused with influences from America, material as well as intellectual, as part of its rapid overseas expansion of empire. Gillespie noted Indian influences in More's Utopia and in Hobbes's Leviathan. Gillespie also found similar relationships in Locke's writings.

In France, reports of Indian societies traveled to the home country through the writings of Jesuit missionaries, among other channels. How might such writings have influenced the conceptions of natural rights and law developed by Rousseau and others? Frank Kramer has described how some ideas were transmitted home from New France. As the Indians' societies became a point of reference for natural rights theorists in England, so did conceptions of the "Noble Savage" in France. More study needs to be done to document how these ideas, and others, made their way across the Atlantic and into the intellectual constructs of Rousseau and others who helped excite the French imagination in the years preceding the revolution of 1789.

Carried into the nineteenth century, study could be given to whether American Indian ideas had any bearing on the large number of social and political reform movements that developed during the 1830s and 1840s in the "burned over district" of western New York. That area had been the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy a hundred years earlier, when Colden was writing his history of the Iroquois. Do the origins of the anti-slavery movement, of women's rights, and religions such as Mormonism owe anything to the Iroquois?

Two contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were drawing on the Indian models to support their theories of social evolution. As had Franklin and Jefferson a century before, Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the lack of state-induced coercion and the communal role of property that operated in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Marx read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Ancient Society was Morgan's last major work; his first book-length study had been The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil War officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others, Morgan was an adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, he and Engels were studying the important anthropologists of their time. Morgan was one of them.

Marx's notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the text, with little extraneous comment. What particularly intrigued Marx about the Iroquois was their democratic political organization, and how it was meshed with a communal economic system -- how, in short, economic leveling was achieved without coercion.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant health problems had eroded his ability to organize and synthesize what he had read. After Marx died, Engels inherited his notes and, in 1884, published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, subtitled In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The book sold well; it had gone through four editions in German by 1891. Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He wrote that Morgan's account of the Iroquois Confederacy "substantiated the view that classless communist societies had existed among primitive peoples," and that these societies had been free of some of the evils, such as class stratification, that he associated with industrial capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to depict Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and anvil.

To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state." Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois' ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.
Concern for the depredations of human rights by state power is no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth century. American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars of those rights, today often petition the United Nations for redress of abuses committed by the United States government, whose founding declarations often ring hollow in ears so long calloused by the thundering horsehooves of Manifest Destiny and its modern equivalents. One may ask what the United Nations' declarations of human rights owe to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the following excerpts from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948), and place them next to the Great Law of Peace, and the statements Franklin and other American national fathers adapted from experience with American Indian nations:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1)
Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of person. (Article 3)

Everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (Article 18)

Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and religion. (Article 19)

. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of governments . . . (Article 21)

Looking across the frontier, as well as across the Atlantic, looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars, history poses many tantalizing questions. The thesis that American Indian thought played an important role in shaping the mind of European America, and of Europe itself, is bound to incite controversy, a healthy state of intellectual affairs at any time in history, our own included. The argument around which this book is centered is only one part of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand it, to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait jacket of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but we do not learn from, peoples and cultures markedly different from our own.

Fortunately, there are fresh winds stirring. Dr. Jeffry Goodman has started what one reviewer called a "civil war" in archaeology. Dr. Henry Dobyns's mathematically derived estimate that 90 million Indians lived in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus has also stirred debate. There is a sense that we are only beginning to grasp the true dimensions of American history to which Europeans have been personal witness only a few short centuries. The Europeans who migrated here are still learning the history of their adopted land, and that of the peoples who flourished here (and who themselves are today rediscovering their own magnificent pasts). In a very large sense we are only now beginning to rediscover the history that has been passed down in tantalizing shreds, mostly through the oral histories of Indian nations that have survived despite the best efforts of some Euro-Americans to snuff out Indian languages, cultures, and the land base that gives all sustenance. History in its very essence is rediscovery, and we are now relearning some of the things that Benjamin Franklin and others of our ancestors had a chance to see, feel, remark at, and integrate into their view of the world.

The United States was born during an era of Enlightenment that recognized the universality of humankind, a time in which minds and borders were opened to the new, the wondrous, and the unexpected. It was a time when the creators of a nation fused the traditions of Europe and America, appreciating things that many people are only now rediscovering -- the value of imagery and tradition shaped by oral cultures that honed memory and emphasized eloquence, that made practical realities of democratic principles that were still the substance of debate (and, to some, heresy) in Europe. In its zest for discovery, the Enlightenment mind absorbed Indian traditions and myth, and refashioned it, just as Indians adopted the ways of European man. In this sense, we are all heirs to America's rich Indian heritage.

Like the eighteenth-century explorers who looked westward from the crests of the Appalachians, we too stand at the edge of a frontier of another kind, wondering with all the curiosity that the human mind can summon what we will find over the crest of the hill in the distance, or around the bend in the river we have yet to see for the first time. What will America teach us next?

THE GREAT LAW OF PEACE
Article 24*

The chiefs of the League of Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skin 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.


* As translated in Akwesasne Notes, 1977

my people

Culture

According to some accounts, before the coming of the Europeans, the Cherokee were forced to migrate to the southern Appalachians from the northwest after a defeat at the hands of the Iroquois and Delaware. Some Delaware traditions also support this, but the Iroquois have no memories of such a conflict. While there is probably some historical basis, it is difficult to imagine a tribe as large and powerful as the Cherokee being forced to move anywhere, although they may have lost some territory in the north to the Susquehannock, Erie, or Delaware. Considering their language differences with other Iroquian groups, the Cherokee probably have been a distinct group for a considerable period. It seems more reasonable to assume that the Cherokee had occupied their mountain homeland for a long time before the arrival of the Europeans.
At the time of contact, the Cherokee were a settled, agricultural people living in approximately 200 fairly, large villages. The typical Cherokee town consisted of 30 to 60 houses and a large council house. Homes were usually wattle and daub, a circular framework interwoven with branches (like an upside-down basket) and plastered with mud. The entire structure was partially sunken into ground. In later periods, log cabins (one door with smokehole in the bark-covered roof) became the general rule. The large council houses were frequently located on mounds from the earlier Mississippian culture, although the Cherokee themselves did not build mounds during the historic period. Used for councils, general meetings, and religious ceremonies, the council houses were also the site of the sacred fire, which the Cherokee had kept burning from time immemorial.

Like other Iroquian peoples, kinship and membership in seven matrilineal clans were determined through the mother, although the women's role never achieved the importance that it enjoyed among the Iroquois League in New York. In most ways, the Cherokee more closely resembled the Creek and other southeastern tribes, including the celebration of the Busk, or Green Corn festival. Agriculture relied heavily on the "three sisters" (corn, beans, and squash), supplemented by hunting and the gathering of wild plants. Cherokee villages were largely independent in daily matters, with the whole tribe only coming together for ceremonies or times of war. Leadership was divided according the circumstances: "red" chiefs during war and "white" chiefs in times of peace.

The Cherokee were the only Iroquian-speaking member of the five Civilized Tribes of the southeast United States. Although it is difficult to ascertain what privilege in treatment they received for being classified as "civilized", their achievements were remarkable and accomplished almost entirely through their own efforts. During the early 1800s, the Cherokee adopted their government to a written constitution. They established their own courts and schools, and achieved a standard of living that was the envy of their white neighbors. Particularily noteworthy was the invention of written language by Sequoyah (George Gist) in 1821. Utilizing an ingenious alphabet of 86 characters, almost the entire Cherokee Nation became literate within a few years. A Cherokee newspaper, the Phoenix, began publication in the native language in February, 1828. Prominent Cherokees are too numerous to list but include Senator Robert Owen and Will Rogers. Despite all they have endured, the Cherokee level of education and living standard ranks among the highest of all Native American tribes.


History

The Desoto expedition is believed to have made the first European contact in 1540 when they met the "Chalaque" on the Tennessee River. Although Pardo revisited the area in 1566 and the Spanish maintained a small mining and smelting operation in the area until 1690, the Cherokee's location in the interior mountains kept them relatively isolated until after the settlement of Virginia in 1609. By 1629 English traders had worked their way west into the Appalachians and met the Cherokee. Contact became continuous with the founding of the Carolina colonies. Virginian Abraham Wood tried unsuccessfully to maintain his trade monopoly with the Cherokee and sent two men, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, to the Cherokee Overhill capital at Echota in 1673, but the following year a group of Cherokee met with rival Carolina traders along the upper Savannah River. A treaty with South Carolina followed in 1684 beginning a steady trade in deerskins and Indian slaves. Although contact was limited initially to white traders, important changes began to occur within the Cherokee as a result. Leadership shifted from priest to warrior, and warriors became hunters for profit.
Increasing dependence on trade goods also drew the Cherokee to the British as allies in their wars against the French and Spanish between 1689 and 1763. Cherokee relations with their neighbors were not always friendly before contact. They raided Spanish settlements in Florida during 1673 and fought the coastal tribes of the Carolinas, but European trade and competition aggravated these rivalries and destabilized the region. By 1680 most of the tribes had gotten their first firearms, and the Cherokee had fortified their larger villages. Constant fighting with the Catawba erupted in the east followed by a growing friction with the Creek and Choctaw to the south. To the west there was a traditional hostility with the Chickasaw (also a British ally). To the north, the struggle between the French, Dutch, and English in the fur trade started the Beaver Wars and a period of conquest by the Iroquois League which spread across the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley.

In 1660 large groups of Shawnee were driven south by the Iroquois. The Cherokee allowed one group to settle in South Carolina and serve as a buffer between them and the Catawba. Other Shawnee were permitted to locate in the Cumberland Basin of Tennessee for a similar purpose against the Chickasaw. This self-serving hospitality was to earn the Cherokee nothing but grief. The Iroquois never forgot an enemy, and the Shawnee presence brought them south in raids against both the Shawnee and the Cherokee. Meanwhile, the Shawnee were becoming dangerous. In 1692 a Shawnee raid to capture slaves for trade with the English destroyed a major Cherokee village while its warriors were absent on a winter hunt. While both tribes still had common enemies (Iroquois, Catawba, and Chickasaw), this treachery destroyed any trust or friendship that had existed between the Cherokee and Shawnee. The following year a Cherokee delegation visited Charlestown demanding more firearms to fight their enemies. The situation had become so dangerous by 1705 that North Carolina was urging South Carolina to curtail the trade in Native American slaves or face a massive uprising.

Actually, warfare between allies and trading partners did not serve British interests, so they encouraged the peace that was finally arranged between the Cherokee and Iroquois in 1706. This respite allowed Cherokee warriors in 1708 to join the Catawba and Alibamu in an attack against the Mobile in southern Mississippi who were serving as middlemen for the new French trading posts in the region. 300 Cherokee warriors also served with the South Carolina army of Colonel James Moore against the Tuscarora in 1713, although some of the Lower Cherokee joined the Yamasee during the general uprising against the Carolinas in 1715. Peaceful relations resumed afterwards, and the Cherokee received a large quantity of guns and ammunition in exchange for their allegiance. However, the peace with the Iroquois collapsed when the League attempted to dominate the Cherokee through the Covenant Chain(See Iroquois). When the Cherokee refused to comply with Iroquois demands, the raiding resumed.

Never forgetting the treachery of the Shawnee treachery in 1692, the Cherokee decided to rid themselves of their now-unwelcome guests. To do this, they allied with the Chickasaw (enemies with similar feelings about the Shawnee) to inflict a major defeat in 1715 on the Shawnee of the Cumberland Basin. The Chickasaw alliance and war with the Shawnee brought the Cherokee to the attention of the French and their Algonquin allies north of the Ohio River. The result was a steady stream of war parties directed south against them. The Cherokee were in the dubious position of fighting the pro-British Iroquois and the pro-French Algonquin at the same time, but they held their own, despite devastating smallpox epidemics in 1738 and 1753 which killed almost half of them. The epidemics were also devastating to the Cherokee priests who, unable to cure the disease, lost most of their remaining influence. A second Chickasaw alliance in 1745 forced the remaining Shawnee north across the Ohio River and then succeeded in defeating the French-allied Choctaw in 1750.

Meanwhile, a treaty, signed in 1721 and thought to be the first land cession by the Cherokee, regulated trade and established a boundary between the Cherokee and the British settlements. Despite this agreement, settlement from the Carolinas was rapidly invading the lands of the Lower Cherokee east of the Appalachians and tempting the Cherokee to switch their loyalty to the French. This option had become available to them after the French made peace with the Alibamu and built a trading post at Fort Toulouse near Montgomery, Alabama in 1717. French traders were also reaching the Overhill Cherokee by following the Cumberland River from its mouth near the Ohio. The Chickasaw, however, still made travel on the Tennessee River by the French far too dangerous. All of this trade could easily have tied the Cherokee to the French if they had been able to compete with the British, but they could not. French goods were generally inferior and more expensive, and the British had the naval power to blockade Canada in times of war (King George's War 1744-48) and halt the supply.

More important, the British valued their alliance with the Cherokee and worked hard to maintain it. Colonel George Chicken was sent by the British government in 1725 to regulate Cherokee trade and prevent the possibility of their turning to the French. He was followed by Sir Alexander Cuming who visited the major Cherokee towns and convinced them to select a single chief to represent them with the British. Cuming even escorted a Cherokee delegation to England for an audience with George II. In the treaty signed at Charleston in 1743, the Cherokee not only made peace with the Catawba, but promised to trade only with the British. Two years later, the Cherokee also concluded a peace with the Wyandot (an important French ally north of the Ohio), only to learn that the Wyandot and other French tribes were secretly plotting to break free from the French trade monopoly. At this point, the Cherokee apparently decided the French would not be an improvement over the British. While the French were permitted to build a trading post in their homeland, this was a close as the Cherokee ever came to changing sides. However, the British still had serious doubts about Cherokee loyalty.

Pressed to acquire new land to compensate for their growing loses to white settlement, the Cherokee and Creek were almost forced into a war with each other (1752-55). At stake was control of a hunting territory in northern Georgia which the two tribes had formerly shared. After the decisive battle at Taliwa (1755), the Cherokee emerged as the winner, and this new territory probably allowed them to support the British at the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1755-63). Although the Cherokee signed a treaty in 1754 confirming their alliance and allowing the construction of British forts in their territory to defend the colonies, the lingering suspicion remained they were sympathetic to the French. Incidents between Cherokee and white settlers during 1758 were hastily covered over by another treaty, but the cooperation collapsed in 1759. Almost 100 Cherokee accompanying a Virginia expedition against the Ohio Shawnee lost their provisions while crossing a river and were abandoned by their white "allies." Angry at this treatment, the Cherokee helped themselves to some of the Virginians' horses and were attacked. After killing more than twenty Cherokee, the Virginians scalped and mutilated the bodies. They later collected a bounty for the scalps.

While their chiefs rushed to arrange restitution to "cover the dead," outraged Cherokee warriors launched a series of retaliatory raids against outlying settlements. Blaming French intrigue rather than Virginia treachery, Governor Littleton of South Carolina raised an 1,100 man army and marched on the lower Cherokee settlements. Stunned to discover the British were attacking them, the lower Cherokee chiefs quickly agreed to peace. Two warriors accused of murder were handed over for execution, and 29 chiefs were surrendered as hostages at Fort Prince George on British suspicions of their hostile intentions. Satisfied with these arrangements, Littleton left, but the Cherokee were furious. His army had barely reached Charleston when the Cherokee War (1760-62) exploded with full fury. Settlers were massacred at Long Canes, and a militia unit was mauled near Broad River. In February of 1760, the Cherokee attacked Fort Prince George in attempt to free the hostages, killing the fort's commander from ambush. The fort's new commander promptly executed the hostages and fought off the assault Fort 96 also withstood an attack, but lesser outposts were not so fortunate, and the war quickly expanded beyond Littleton's resources.

He appealed for help from Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander in North America (who despised Indians, friend or foe). With the French defeated, the entire British army in North America was available for use against the Cherokee. In May Amherst sent 1,200 Highlanders and Royals under Colonel Montgomery to the area. Montgomery's approach to Indian warfare: no male prisoners, but spare women and small children. The war did not go well for the British. After burning several abandoned lower Cherokee towns, Montgomery met with ambush and defeat when he attempted to push deeper into Cherokee territory. After a long siege, Fort Loudon in eastern Tennessee fell during August, and the garrison was massacred. In early 1761, the incompetent Montgomery was replaced by Colonel James Grant. Ignoring Cherokee attempts to make peace, Grant enlisted the help of Catawba scouts in June, and soon afterwards his 2,600 man army captured 15 middle Cherokee towns and destroyed the food the Cherokee needed for the coming winter. Faced with starvation if the war continued, the Cherokee signed a treaty with the South Carolina in September that ceded most of their eastern lands in the Carolinas. A second treaty was signed with Virginia in November. The Cherokee maintained their part of the agreement and did not participate in the Pontiac uprising (1763) but did suffer another smallpox epidemic that year. They still benefited somewhat when the rebellion forced the stunned British government to temporarily halt all new settlement west of the Appalachians. Within a few years, colonial demands forced the British to reverse this policy, and begin negotiations with the Iroquois. Land cessions by the Iroquois at the Fort Stanwix (1768) opened large sections west of the Appalachians to settlement. Their generosity also included land in West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky claimed by the Cherokee, and this forced the British to negotiate new boundaries with the Cherokee at the Treaty of Hard Labor (1768).

CHEROKEE HISTORY
Part Two
(revised 2.28.96)
As white settlers poured across the mountains, the Cherokee tried once again to compensate themselves with territory taken by war with a neighboring tribe. This time their intended victim was the Chickasaw, but this was a mistake. Anyone who tried to take something from the Chickasaw regretted it, if he survived. After eleven years of sporadic warfare ended with a major



defeat at Chickasaw Oldfields (1769), the Cherokee gave up and began to explore the possibility of new alliances to resist the whites. Both the Cherokee and Creek attended the 1770 and 1771 meetings with the Ohio tribes at Sciota but did not participate in Lord Dunnmore's War (1773-74) because the disputed territory was not theirs. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British government scrambled to appease the colonists and negotiate treaties with the Cherokee ceding land already taken from them by white settlers. To this end, all means, including outright bribery and extortion, were employed: Lochaber Treaty (1770); and the Augusta Treaty (1773) ceding 2 million acres in Georgia to pay for debts to white traders. For the same reasons as the Iroquois cession of Ohio in 1768, the Cherokee tried to protect their homeland from white settlement by selling land they did not really control. In the Watonga Treaty (1774) and the Overhill Cherokee Treaty (Sycamore Shoals) (1775), they sold all of eastern and central Kentucky to the Transylvania Land Company (Henderson Purchase).
Despite the fact that these agreements were a clear violation of existing British law, they were used later to justify the American takeover of the region. The Shawnee also claimed these lands but, of course, were never consulted. With the Iroquois selling the Shawnee lands north of the Ohio, and the Cherokee selling the Shawnee lands south, where could they go? Not surprisingly, the Shawnee stayed and fought the Americans for 40 years. Both the Cherokee and Iroquois were fully aware of the problem they were creating. After he had signed, a Cherokee chief reputedly took Daniel Boone aside to say, "We have sold you much fine land, but I am afraid you will have trouble if you try to live there."

Not all of the Cherokee honored these agreements. Cui Canacina (Dragging Canoe) and the Chickamauga refused and kept raiding the new settlements. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the Cherokee received requests from the Mohawk, Shawnee, and Ottawa to join them against the Americans, but the majority of the Cherokee decided to remain neutral in the white man's war.



The Chickamauga, however, were at war with the Americans and formed an alliance with the Shawnee. Both tribes had the support of British Indian agents who were still living among them (often with native wives) and arranging trade. During 1775 the British began to supply large amounts of guns and ammunition and offer bounties for American scalps. In July, 1776, 700 Chickamauga attacked two American forts in North Carolina: Eaton's Station and Ft. Watauga. Both assaults failed, but the raids set off a series of attacks by other Cherokee and the Upper Creek on frontier settlements in Tennessee and Alabama.

The frontier militia organized in response made little effort to distinguish between hostile and neutral Cherokee, except to notice that neutrals were easier to find. During September the Americans destroyed more than 36 Cherokee towns killing every man, woman and child they could find. Unable to resist, the Cherokee in 1777 asked for peace. The Treaties of DeWitt's Corner (May) and Long Island (or Holston) (July) were signed at gunpoint and forced the Cherokee to cede almost all of their remaining land in the Carolinas. Although this brought peace for two years, the Chickamauga remained hostile and renewed their attacks against western settlements in Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky during 1780. After more fighting, the second Treaty of Long Island of Holston (July 1781) confirmed the 1777 cessions and then took more Cherokee land.

Through all of this, the Chickamauga fought on but were forced to retreat slowly northward, until by 1790 they had joined forces with the Shawnee in Ohio. After the initial Indian victories of Little Turtle's War (1790-94), most of the Ohio Chickamauga returned south and settled near the Tennessee River in central Tennessee and northern Alabama. From here, they had the unofficial encouragement of the Spanish governments of Florida and Louisiana and began to attack nearby American settlements. One of these incidents almost killed a young Nashville attorney/land speculator named Andrew Jackson, which may explain his later attitude regarding the Cherokee.

Dragging Canoe died in 1792, but a new round of violence exploded that year with the American settlements in central Tennessee and northern Alabama. After two years of fighting with Tennessee militia, support from other Cherokee declined, and the Chickamauga's resolve began to weaken. Following the American victory at Fallen Timbers (1794), the last groups of the Ohio Chickamauga returned to Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Spanish government had decided to settle its border disputes with the United States by diplomatic means and ended its covert aid to the Cherokee. After a final battle near Muscle Shoals in Alabama, the Chickamauga realized it was impossible stop the Americans by themselves. By 1794 large groups of Chickamauga had started to cross the Mississippi and settle with the Western Cherokee in Spanish Arkansas. The migration was complete by 1799, and open warfare between the Cherokee and Americans ended.

The Keetoowah (Western Cherokee or Old Settlers) had their origin with a small group of pro-French Cherokee which relocated to northern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri after the French defeat by the British in 1763. The Spanish welcomed them and granted land. Towards the end of the American Revolution in 1782, they were joined a group of pro-British Cherokee. With the migration of the Chickamauga (1794-99), the Keetoowah became formidable and a threat to the Osage who originally claimed the territory. Cherokee and Osage warfare was fairly common in 1803 when the United States gained control of the area through the Louisiana Purchase. With continued migration, the Western Cherokee steadily gained at the expense of the Osage, and by 1808 over 2,000 Cherokee were established in northern Arkansas.

The Turkey Town treaty (1817) was the first formal recognition of the Western Cherokee by the United States. Under its terms, 4,000 Cherokee ceded their lands in Tennessee in exchange for a reservation with the Western Cherokee in northwest Arkansas. With this new immigration during 1818-19, the number of Western Cherokee swelled to over 6,000. However, the Osage continued to object to the Cherokee presence, and the Americans were forced to build Fort Smith (1817) and Fort Gibson (1824) to maintain peace. White settlers of the Arkansas territory were soon demanding the removal of both the Cherokee and Osage. In 1828 the Western Cherokee agreed to exchange their Arkansas lands for a new location in Oklahoma. The boundaries were finally determined in 1833, although it took until 1835 to get the Osage to agree.

Meanwhile, the Cherokee homeland in the east was rapidly being whittled away by American settlement reflected by a series of treaties: Hopewell 1785; Holston 1791; Philadelphia 1794; Tellico 1798, 1804, 1805, and 1806. The final cession of ten million acres in 1806 by Doublehead (Chuquilatague) outraged many of the Cherokee and resulted in his assassination as a traitor by the faction led by Major Ridge (Kahnungdatlageh -"the man who walks the mountain top"). A new, mixed-blood leadership of Ridge and John Ross (Guwisguwi - blue eyes and 1/8 Cherokee) seized control determined not to yield any more of the Cherokee homeland while introducing major cultural changes. With a unity made possible by the departure of the more traditional Cherokee to Arkansas, in less than 30 years the Cherokee underwent the most remarkable adaptation to white culture of any Native American people. By 1817 the clan system of government had been replaced by an elected tribal council. A new capital was established at New Echota in 1825, and a written constitution modeled after that of the United States was added two years later.

Many Cherokee became prosperous farmers with comfortable houses, beautiful cultivated fields, and large herds of livestock. Christian missionaries arrived by invitation, and Sequoia invented an alphabet that gave them a written language and overnight made most of the Cherokee literate. They published a newspaper, established a court system, and built schools. An inventory of Cherokee property in 1826 revealed: 1,560 black slaves. 22,000 cattle, 7,600 horses, 46,000 swine, 2,500 sheep, 762 looms, 2,488 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,942 plows, 10 sawmills, 31 grist mills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton machines, 18 schools, and 18 ferries. Although the poor Cherokee still lived in simple log cabins, Chief John Ross had a $10,000 house designed by a Philadelphia architect. In fact, many Cherokee were more prosperous and 'civilized' than their increasingly envious white neighbors.

Although the leadership of the eastern Cherokee steadfastly maintained their independence and land base, they felt it was important to reach an accommodation with the Americans. They refused Tecumseh's requests for Indian unity in 1811, ignored a call for war from the Red Stick Creek in 1813, and then fought as American allies during the Creek War (1813-14). 800 Cherokee under Major Ridge were with Jackson's army at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, and according one account, a Cherokee warrior saved Jackson's life during the battle. If Jackson was grateful, he never allowed it to show. At the Fort Jackson Treaty ending the war (1814), Jackson demanded huge land cessions from both the Cherokee and Creek. As allies, the Cherokee must have been stunned at this treatment, and reluctantly agreed only after a series of four treaties signed during 1816 and 1817.

The Cherokee government afterwards became even more determined not to surrender any more land, but things were moving against them. In 1802 Cherokee land had been promised by the federal government to the state of Georgia which afterwards refused to recognize either the Cherokee Nation or its land claims. By 1822 Georgia was pressing Congress to end Cherokee title within its boundaries. $30,000 was eventually appropriated as payment but refused. Then bribery was attempted but exposed, and the Cherokee responded with a law prescribing death for anyone selling land to whites without permission.

With the election of Jackson as president in 1828, the Cherokee were in serious trouble. Gold was discovered that year on Cherokee land in northern Georgia, and miners swarmed in. Indian removal to west of the Mississippi had been suggested as early as 1802 by Thomas Jefferson and recommended by James Monroe in his final address to Congress in 1825. With Jackson's full support, the Indian Removal Act was introduced in Congress in 1829. There it met serious opposition from Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay who were able to delay passage until 1830. Meanwhile, Jackson refused to enforce the treaties which protected the Cherokee homeland from encroachment. During the two years following his election, Georgia unilaterally extended its laws to Cherokee territory, dividing up Cherokee lands by lottery, and stripping the Cherokee of legal protection. Georgia citizens were free to kill, burn, and steal. With the only alternative a war which would result in annihilation, John Ross decided to fight for his people's rights in the United States courts.

The Cherokee won both cases brought before the Supreme Court: Cherokee Nation vs Georgia (1831) and Worcester vs Georgia(1832), but the legal victories were useless. Jackson's answer: "Justice Marshall has made his decision. Let him enforce it." Without federal interference, Georgia and Tennessee began a reign of terror using arrest, murder and arson against the Cherokee. Ross was arrested, and the offices of the Cherokee Phoenix burned in May, 1834. The mansion of the wealthiest Cherokee, Joseph Vann, was confiscated by the Georgia militia, and the Moravian mission and school was converted into a militia headquarters. When Ross travelled to Washington to protest, Jackson refused to see him. Instead overtures were made to Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and nephew Elias Boudinot (Buck Oowatie), editor of the Phoenix (Cherokee newspaper). The hopelessness of the situation finally convinced these men to sign the Treaty of New Echota (December, 1835) surrendering the Cherokee Nation's homeland in exchange for $5,000,000, seven million acres in Oklahoma, and an agreement to remove within two years.

Known as the Treaty Party (Ridgites), only 350 of 17,000 Cherokee actually endorsed the agreement. Threatened by violence from their own people, they and 2,000 family members quickly gathered their property and left for Oklahoma. The treaty was clearly a fraud, and a petition of protest with 16,000 Cherokee signatures was dispatched to Washington to halt ratification. After violent debate, Jackson succeeded in pushing it through the Senate during May by the margin of a single vote. The Cherokee Nation was doomed. For the next two years, Ross tried every political and legal means to stop the removal, but failed. When the deadline arrived in May, 1838, 7,000 soldiers under General Winfield Scott (virtually the entire American Army) moved into the Cherokee homeland. The Cherokee found that their reward for 'taking the white manÕs road' was to be driven from their homes at gunpoint. It was the beginning of the Nunadautsun't or 'the trail where we cried.' History would call it the Trail of Tears.

Forced to abandon most of their property, the Cherokee were herded into hastily-built stockades at Rattlesnake Springs near Chattanooga. Little thought had been given to these, and in the crowded and unsanitary conditions, measles, whooping cough and dysentery took a terrible toll throughout the summer. After most of the Cherokee had been collected, relocation by boat began in August, but drought had made Tennessee River unusable. At this point Cherokee desperation contributed to the disaster. Not wishing to remain until spring in the lethal conditions at Rattlesnake Springs, Ross petitioned the government to allow the Cherokee to manage their own removal.

Permission was delayed until October. When it finally came, several large groups of Cherokee departed into the face of an approaching winter. They were marched west without adequate shelter, provisions, or food. The soldiers were under orders to move quickly and did little to protect them from whites who attacked and robbed the Cherokee of what little they had left. Two-thirds were trapped in southern Illinois by ice on the Mississippi and forced to remain for a month without shelter or supplies. As many as 4,000, including the wife of John Ross, died enroute. Many had to be left unburied beside the road.

Some Cherokee avoided the removal. Under the provisions of the 1817 and 1819 treaties, 400 Qualia of Chief Yonaguska who lived in North Carolina were United States citizens and owned their land individually. Not members of the Cherokee Nation, they were not subject to removal and allowed to stay. Several hundred Cherokee escaped and hid in the mountains. The army used other Cherokee to hunt them. Tsali and two of his sons were captured and executed after they had killed a soldier trying to capture them. In 1842 the army gave up the effort, and the fugitive Cherokee were allowed to remain in an "unofficial" status. Formal recognition came in 1848 when Congress agreed to recognize the Eastern Cherokee provided North Carolina would do likewise. Currently there are more than 8,000 Eastern Cherokee who living in the mountains of western North Carolina. The Echota Cherokee Tribe in Alabama is another group descended from individual Cherokee landowners protected from removal by the 1817 and 1819 treaties.

At the same time as the Trail of Tears, another group of Cherokee was being forcibly removed to Oklahoma ...from Texas. In 1807, after the Louisiana Purchase, the Spanish government was nervously watching the American expansion towards Texas and requested a number of tribes to resettle in eastern Texas as a buffer against the Americans. The first Cherokee settlement in the region was at Lost Prairie in 1819, and it received a land grant in 1822. After the successful revolt by the Texans in 1835, a treaty confirming the Cherokee title failed ratification in the Texas legislature during 1836 despite the strong support of President Sam Houston. White Texans pressed for the removal, and in July of 1839 three Texas regiments attacked the Cherokee of Chief Bowl and forced them across the Red River into Oklahoma. The irony of the Cherokee situation in Oklahoma in 1839 should not be lost. No matter what course chosen: war, accommodation, surrender, or flight; their fate had been the same.

Of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Creek, Choctaw and Seminole received similar treatment during removal, although the Chickasaw had foreseen what was coming and prepared better. Following removal, all had major problems, but the Cherokee had the most bitter internal divisions. Gathered together for the first time in 50 years, the Cherokee in Oklahoma were ready for civil war during the spring of 1839. 6,000 Western Cherokee (Old Settlers) from Arkansas and Texas had been living there since 1828 and defending themselves from the Osage, Kiowa, Wichita, and Comanche. They had maintained their traditional government of three chiefs without written laws. Suddenly 14,000 Eastern Cherokee (New Settlers) arrived in their midst with an elaborate government, court system, and a written constitution, but the newcomers were bitterly divided between 2,000 Ridgites (Treaty Party) and 12,000 Rossites who had just lost 4,000 of their people on the Trail of Tears.

Violence was not long in coming. On June 22, Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were murdered. Stand Watie, Boudinot's brother and Major Ridge's nephew, was the only leader of the Treaty Party to escape. The assassinations effectively silenced the Treaty Party, but the hatreds endured. This left only two contending groups: west and east. The Western Cherokee refused to accept any of the new changes, while the more numerous Eastern Cherokee considered themselves superior and would not compromise. The first meeting of these factions failed to reach agreement. At a second meeting, Ross could only obtain the signature of one western chief but proceeded anyway to organize a government. However, the majority of the western Cherokee and the Treaty Party refused to recognize it. For the next six years there was civil war over borders and jurisdiction.

The situation became so bad that Congress proposed dividing the Cherokee into two tribes. This was incentive enough for the Cherokee to set aside their differences and unite under the Cherokee Nation, an accomplishment recognized by treaty with the United States in 1846. The wounds from removal and reunification never healed completely, but the Cherokee adjusted well enough to enjoy what they consider to have been their golden age during the 1850s. On the eve of the Civil War in 1861, the Cherokee Nation was controlled by a wealthy, mixed-blood minority which owned black slaves and favored the South. The vast majority of the Cherokee did not have slaves, lived simple lives and could have cared less about the white man's war, especially the Old Settlers. John Ross leaned towards the South, but mindful of the divisions within the Cherokee, refused the early offers by Albert Pike to join the Confederacy. When Union soldiers withdrew during the summer of 1861, the Confederate army occupied the Indian Territory. The Cherokee Nation voted to secede from the United States in August, 1861, and a formal treaty was signed at the Park Hill home of John Ross between the Cherokee Nation and the new Confederate government. Four years later, this agreement was to cost them very dearly.

Americans are usually surprised to learn that the Civil War was bitterly contested between the Native Americans in Oklahoma. For the Cherokee, it was very much a war of brother against brother. 3,000 Cherokee (usually New Settlers) enlisted in the Confederate army while 1,000(Old Settlers) fought for the Union. In the east 400 North Carolina Cherokee, virtually every able bodied man, served the South. Cherokee Civil War Units included: First Cherokee Mounted Rifles (First Arkansas Cherokee); First Cherokee Mounted Volunteer (Watie's Regiment, Cherokee Mounted Volunteers); Second Regiment, Cherokee Mounted Rifles, Arkansas; First Regiment, Cherokee Mounted Riflemen; First Squadron, Cherokee Mounted Volunteers (Holt's Squadron); Second Cherokee Mounted Volunteers (Second Regiment,Cherokee Mounted Rifles or Riflemen); and Cherokee Regiment(Special Service).

Cherokee units fought at Wilson Creek (1861) and Pea Ridge (1862). There were few large battles in Oklahoma, but these were brutal. In November 1861, a combined force of 1,400 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Texas cavalry commanded by Colonel Douglas Cooper attacked a refugee column of 4,000 pro-Union Creek trying to reach safety in Kansas. Over 700 refugees were killed during the three day battle before reason took hold. After two assaults against the Creek, the Cherokee refused to participate in a third and withdrew. Meanwhile the Cherokee allegiance to the Confederacy faltered. Following the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, John Ross switched sides to the Union. Actually Ross allowed himself to be captured in 1862 and spent the rest of the war in Philadelphia. John Drew's Mounted Rifle regiment also deserted and was reorganized as a regiment in the Union army, but other Cherokee units under Stand Watie remained loyal to the Confederacy.

The fighting in Oklahoma degenerated into the same vicious guerilla warfare that prevailed among the white settlers of Kansas and Missouri. Stand Watie, who became a Confederate general, was a leader of the Treaty Party and personally hated John Ross. After Ross switched in 1862 and went east, Stand Watie was elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in August. He captured the Cherokee capital at Tahlequah and ordered Ross' home burned. The fighting produced hatreds that, added to the earlier differences, endured long after the war was over. Many Oklahoma Indians fled north to escape the fighting. Kansas eventually had more than 7,000 refugees from the Indian Territory which it could not house or feed. Many froze to death or starved. Heavily involved in the fighting throughout the war, the Cherokee Nation lost more than 1/3 of its population. No state, north or south, even came close to this. On June 23, 1865, Stand Watie was the last Confederate general to surrender his command to the United States.

Afterwards, the victorious federal government remembered the services of General Stand Watie to the Confederacy. It also remembered the 1861 vote by the Cherokee legislature to secede from the United States. These provided the excuse to invalidate all previous treaties between the Cherokee and United States. John Ross died in 1866, and in new treaties imposed in 1866 and 1868, large sections of Cherokee lands were taken for railroad construction, white settlement (1889), or the relocation of other tribes. The Cherokee Nation never recovered to the prosperity it had enjoyed before the Civil War. As railroads were built across Cherokee lands, outlaws discovered that the Indian territory, especially the Cherokee Nation, was a sanctuary from federal and state laws. Impoverished by the war, the Cherokee also began to lease lands to white tenant farmers. By 1880, whites outnumbered the Indians in the Indian Territory.

In 1885 a well-intentioned, but ill-informed, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts decided that holding of land in common was delaying the progress of Indians towards "civilization." Forming an alliance with western Congressmen who wish to exploit Indian treaty lands, he secured passage of the General Allotment(Dawes) Act in 1887 which ultimately cost Native Americans 2/3 of their remaining land base. The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma were exempt from allotment, but came under tremendous pressure to accept it. Until the 1880s, cattle from the Chisholm and Texas trails routinely grazed on the lands of the Cherokee Outlet before going to the Kansas railheads. The Cherokee earned a good income from this enterprise until it was halted without explanation by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1890. It should also be noted that the Oklahoma Territory was organized that same year from the western half of the Indian Territory, and there may have been some connection! After the Cherokee were forced to sell, the land was made available for white settlement.

The Dawes commission attempted to get the Five Tribes to accept allotment in 1893, but they refused. This led to the passage of the Curtis Act (1895) which dissolved tribal governments and forced allotment during 1901. Grafting(swindles) of Indian lands became a massive and unofficially sanctioned form of theft in Oklahoma. Of the original seven million acres granted the Cherokee in the New Echota Treaty, the Cherokee Nation kept less than 1/3 of 1 percent. As compensation, the Cherokee became citizens in 1901 and were finally allowed to vote. An attempt by the Five Tribes to form their own state of Sequoyah in eastern Oklahoma failed in 1905, and the Cherokee Nation was officially dissolved on March 3, 1906. The following year Oklahoma was admitted as the 46th state. The present government of the Cherokee Nation was formed in 1948 after passage of the Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorganization Act (1934). In 1961 the Cherokee Nation was awarded $15,000,000 by the U.S. Claims Commission for lands of the Cherokee Outlet.

these last pages give great insite as to how some of the founding faithers were able to see and use and blend this country together, may future and present governors do the same!

i'm at an impass right now searching for more on indian life and culture, but i'll keep this going as long as i can, for those who have or are enjoying this information - i bid you to also find things to place here and help grow this post, my thnx in advance.

caution there is much dis-info on native americans so be cautious when searching sites for true info.

sorry - just trying to keep it on my topics list

Interesting nothing from the former Rattlesnake School of Turtle island, later renamed the Twisted Hairs Metis Medicine Society... you might do well to read about the Eight Great Powers... in fact we all could, but that would mean stepping outside the comfort zone and many are not prepared for the next step...

Well that is informative my lady, would you care to add to the knowledge here please? it sounds most facnating. -

http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.1.RED%20ELK.htm
http://www.homelodge.org/lineage.htm
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/OL070391.html

"Not all 'heyokas' are indigenous peoples, many are living among modern society. Modern day heyokas are charged to live as witnesses against the corruption of the Fourth World and to assist the shift into the Fifth World, as planetary midwifes."

"Another kind of medicine man is the heyoka, the sacred clown.

"To us a clown is somebody sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary. Fooling around, a clown is really performing a spiritual ceremony. He has a power, it comes from the Thunder beings, not the animals on earth.

"It is very simple to become a heyoka, all you have to do is dream about the lightning, the Thunderbirds, you do this and when you wake up in the morning, you are a heyoka, there is nothing you can do about it.

"It is not easy to be a heyoka. It is even harder to have one in the family. ... the wise old people know that heyokas are thunder-dreamers, that the Thunder beings commanded them to act in a silly way.

"The heyokas get their power from the wakinyan, the sacred flying ones, the Thunderbirds. These Thunderbirds are the wakan oyate - the spirit nation. If the Thunder-beings want to put their power on earth, they send a dream to a man, a vision about thunder and lightning. By this dream they appoint him to work his power for them in a human way.

This is what makes him a heyoka. Every dream which has some symbol of the thunder powers in it will make you into a heyoka.

"A clown's work is sacred, it's a medicine man's job."

John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
Lame Deer Seeker of Visions
The Life of a Sioux Medicine Man (1972)

*** Problems are solved by using a different mindset ***
Anyone who thinks differently is usually ridiculed for thinking outside the box.... but the First Nations and "Native" American Indians may have been onto something... only to be cattled up and put into the reservation boxes...

Prayers for us all...

Very enlightning my lady -

I will read your info in detail and post what ithink is most rewarding - if you would like to do it of course be my guest. i appreciate all the help i can get -

Most welcome Tribo.... it's a hard job for one... enlightening is one word for it for sure...

thnx Trinite - are you native american blood?