The following is a complete on-line text-only reproduction, and is reprinted here with permission of the author. We are very grateful to Bruce Johansen for his generosity of spirit in allowing us to replicate this book. Hardcopy is available as a trade paperback for $9.95 from Harvard Common Press, 535 Albany Street, Boston, MA 02118. URLs to other formats listed at bottom. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- F O R G O T T E N F O U N D E R S ---------------------------------------- By Bruce E. Johansen ---------------------------------------- Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution 1 9 8 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------ G a m b i t I N C O R P O R A T E D, Publishers O F I P S W I C H M A S S A C H U S E T T S First Printing ------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 1982 by Bruce E. Johansen All rights reserved including the right to re- produce this book or parts thereof in any form. ------------------------------------- Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Johansen, Bruce E. (Bruce Elliott), 1950- Forgotten founders Bibliography Includes Index 1. Iroquois Indians -- Tribal government 2. Indians of North America -- Tribal government 3. Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790. 4. United States -- Politics and government -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 5. United States -- Politics and government -- Revolution, 1775-1783. I. Title. E99.I7J63 323.1'197 81-23726 ISBN 0-87645-111-3 AACR2 ------------------------------------------------------------ Printed in the United States of America. ----------------------------------------------------- For my parents, and for John Crazy Bear, a Seneca who breathed life into the Iroquois' Great Law of Peace for me ----------------------------------------------------- C O N T E N T S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE A Composite Culture CHAPTER TWO The Pre-Columbian Republic CHAPTER THREE "Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans" CHAPTER FOUR Such an Union CHAPTER FIVE Philosopher as Savage CHAPTER SIX Self-Evident Truths AFTERWORD BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Inside Book Jacket Book excerpts ------------------------------------------------------------------ FROM THE BACK COVER: 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------ A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Like most books, this one would never have been written without the encouragement, criticism, skepticism, and selfless devotion of many people. First among those people are the Indians who challenged me to find in the white man's archives documentary proof to buttress Indian oral history. Thanks go to John Crazy Bear, a Seneca whose ancestors helped make an American of Benjamin Franklin, and to Phil Lucas, who provided early help with research leads, as well as Vine Deloria, Jr., whose encouragement (not to mention his many books) helped inspire me. Thanks go also to Sheldon Harsel, Alex Edelstein, Vernon Carstensen, and Russel Barsh, as well as William E. Ames, all of the University of Washington, who provided invaluable criticism, and who were willing to listen to ideas for which other academics might have threatened to bust me down to a B.A. and hustle me off to the nut house. Roberto F. Maestas, a Chicano Pueblo, director of Seattle's El Centro de la Raza and compadre co-author of many years, also helped provide focus to the many drafts of this book. Alvin Josephy, Jr., also deserves many thanks for his criticisms and opinions of an early draft, as does Bruce Brown. Invaluable aid also was given by many librarians and archivists, some of whom work at the University of Washington Libraries, the New York City Public Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress (General Collection and Manuscript Division), the Department of Interior's Library, the Newberry Library, in Chicago, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives. Many thanks go also to my aunt and uncle, who put up this savage from the mountains of western America in a style to which he ought never to become accustomed in Washington, D.C., and to Judy Ruben, who ensured that I would stay alive on meager means on Manhattan Island, not an easy task these days. To all of you, and to Lovell Thompson and Mark Saxton of Gambit: you wouldn't be seeing this book if it weren't for your part in making it possible. -- B.E.J. ------------------------------------------------------------------ I N T R O D U C T I O N -------------------------------------------------------- It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed, and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty. Futhermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritages the white race is but robbing itself. America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a Native School of thought. -- Chief Luther Standing Bear Lakota (Sioux) Land of the Spotted Eagle -------------------------------------------------------- The seeds for this book were sown in my mind during a late-summer day in 1975, by a young American Indian whose name I've long since forgotten. As a reporter for the Seattle Times, I had been researching a series of articles on Washington State Indian tribes. The research took me to Evergreen State College in Olympia, where a young woman, an undergraduate in the American Indian studies program, told me in passing that the Iroquois had played a key role in the evolution of American democracy. The idea at first struck me as disingenuous. I considered myself decently educated in American history, and to the best of my knowledge, government for and by the people had been invented by white men in powdered wigs. I asked the young woman where she had come by her information. "My grandmother told me," she said. That was hardly the kind of source one could use for a newspaper story. I asked whether she knew of any other sources. "You're the investigative reporter," she said. "You find them." Back at the city desk, treed cats and petty crime were much more newsworthy than two-centuries-past revels in the woods the width of a continent away. For a time I forgot the meeting at Evergreen, but never completely. The woman's challenge stayed with me through another year at the Times, the writing of a book on American Indians, and most of a Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. I collected tantalizing shreds -- a piece of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin here, an allegation there. Individually, these meant little. Together, however, they began to assume the outline of a plausible argument that the Iroquois had indeed played a key role in the ideological birth of the United States, especially through Franklin's advocacy of federal union. Late in 1978, the time came to venture the topic for my Ph.D. dissertation in history and communications. I proposed an investigation of the role that Iroquois political and social thought had played in the thinking of Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Members of my supervisory committee were not enthusiastic. Doubtless out of concern for my academic safety, I was advised to test my water wings a little closer to the dock of established knowledge. The professors, however, did not deny my request. Rather, I was invited to flail as far out as I might before returning to the dock, colder, wetter, and presumably wiser. I plunged in, reading the published and unpublished papers of Franklin and Jefferson, along with all manner of revolutionary history, Iroquois ethnology, and whatever else came my way. Wandering through a maze of footnotes, I early on found an article by Felix Cohen, published in 1952. Cohen, probably the most outstanding scholar of American Indian law of his or any other age, argued the thesis I was investigating in the American Scholar. Like the Indian student I had encountered more than three years earlier, he seemed to be laying down the gauntlet -- providing a few enticing leads (summarized here in chapter one), with no footnotes or any other documentation. After several months of research, I found two dozen scholars who had raised the question since 1851, usually in the context of studies with other objectives. Many of them urged further study of the American Indians' (especially the Iroquois') contribution to the nation's formative ideology, particularly the ideas of federal union, public opinion in governance, political liberty, and the government's role in guaranteeing citizens' well-being -- "happiness," in the eighteenth-century sense. The most recent of these suggestions came through Donald Grinde, whose The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (1979) reached me in the midst of my research. Grinde summarized much of what had been written to date, reserving special attention for Franklin, and then wrote that "more needs to be done, especially if America continues to view itself as a distinct entity set apart from many of the values of Western civilization." He also suggested that such a study could help dissolve negative stereotypes that many Euro-Americans still harbor toward American Indians' mental abilities and heritage. By this time, I was past worrying whether I had a story to tell. The question was how to tell it: how to engage readers (the first of whom would be my skeptical professors) with history from a new angle; how to overcome the sense of implausibility that I had felt when the idea of American Indian contributions to the national revolutionary heritage was first presented to me. Immersion in the records of the time had surprised me. I had not realized how tightly Franklin's experience with the Iroquois had been woven into his development of revolutionary theory and his advocacy of federal union. To understand how all this had come to be, I had to remove myself as much as possible from the assumptions of the twentieth century, to try to visualize America as Franklin knew it. I would need to describe the Iroquois he knew, not celluloid caricatures concocted from bogus history, but well-organized polities governed by a system that one contemporary of Franklin's, Cadwallader Colden, wrote had "outdone the Romans." Colden was writing of a social and political system so old that the immigrant Europeans knew nothing of its origins -- a federal union of five (and later six) Indian nations that had put into practice concepts of popular participation and natural rights that the European savants had thus far only theorized. The Iroquoian system, expressed through its constitution, "The Great Law of Peace," rested on assumptions foreign to the monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders' impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois' law and custom upheld freedom of expression in political and religious matters, and it forbade the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women and the relatively equitable distribution of wealth. These distinctly democratic tendencies sound familiar in light of subsequent American political history -- yet few people today (other than American Indians and students of their heritage) know that a republic existed on our soil before anyone here had ever heard of John Locke, or Cato, the Magna Charta, Rousseau, Franklin, or Jefferson. To describe the Iroquoian system would not be enough, however. I would have to show how the unique geopolitical context of the mid-eighteenth century brought together Iroquois and Colonial leaders -- the dean of whom was Franklin -- in an atmosphere favoring the communication of political and social ideas: how, in essence, the American frontier became a laboratory for democracy precisely at a time when Colonial leaders were searching for alternatives to what they regarded as European tyranny and class stratification. Once assembled, the pieces of this historical puzzle assumed an amazingly fine fit. The Iroquois, the premier Indian military power in eastern North America, occupied a pivotal geographical position between the rival French of the St. Lawrence Valley and the English of the Eastern Seaboard. Barely a million Anglo-Americans lived in communities scattered along the East Coast, islands in a sea of American Indian peoples that stretched far inland, as far as anyone who spoke English then knew, into the boundless mountains and forests of a continent much larger than Europe. The days when Euro-Americans could not have survived in America without Indian help had passed, but the new Americans still were learning to wear Indian clothing, eat Indian corn and potatoes, and follow Indian trails and watercourses, using Indian snowshoes and canoes. Indians and Europeans were more often at peace than at war -- a fact missed by telescoped history that focuses on conflict. At times, Indian peace was as important to the history of the continent as Indian war, and the mid-eighteenth century was such a time. Out of English efforts at alliance with the Iroquois came a need for treaty councils, which brought together leaders of both cultures. And from the earliest days of his professional life, Franklin was drawn to the diplomatic and ideological interchange of these councils -- first as a printer of their proceedings, then as a Colonial envoy, the beginning of one of the most distinguished diplomatic careers in American history. Out of these councils grew an early campaign by Franklin for Colonial union on a federal model, very similar to the Iroquois system. Contact with Indians and their ways of ordering life left a definite imprint on Franklin and others who were seeking, during the prerevolutionary period, alternatives to a European order against which revolution would be made. To Jefferson, as well as Franklin, the Indians had what the colonists wanted: societies free of oppression and class stratification. The Iroquois and other Indian nations fired the imaginations of the revolution's architects. As Henry Steele Commager has written, America acted the Enlightenment as European radicals dreamed it. Extensive, intimate contact with Indian nations was a major reason for this difference. This book has two major purposes. First, it seeks to weave a few new threads into the tapestry of American revolutionary history, to begin the telling of a larger story that has lain largely forgotten, scattered around dusty archives, for more than two centuries. By arguing that American Indians (principally the Iroquois) played a major role in shaping the ideas of Franklin (and thus, the American Revolution) I do not mean to demean or denigrate European influences. I mean not to subtract from the existing record, but to add an indigenous aspect, to show how America has been a creation of all its peoples. In the telling, this story also seeks to demolish what remains of stereotypical assumptions that American Indians were somehow too simpleminded to engage in effective social and political organization. No one may doubt any longer that there has been more to history, much more, than the simple opposition of "savagery" and "civilization." History's popular writers have served us with many kinds of savages, noble and vicious, "good Indians" and "bad Indians," nearly always as beings too preoccupied with the essentials of the hunt to engage in philosophy and statecraft. This was simply not the case. Franklin and his fellow founders knew differently. They learned from American Indians, by assimilating into their vision of the future, aspects of American Indian wisdom and beauty. Our task is to relearn history as they experienced it, in all its richness and complexity, and thereby to arrive at a more complete understanding of what we were, what we are, and what we may become. -- Bruce E. Johansen Seattle, Washington July 1981 ------------------------------------------------------------------ C H A P T E R O N E A Composite Culture -------------------------------------------------------- When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. . . . -- Felix Cohen, "Americanizing the White Man," American Scholar, 1952 -------------------------------------------------------- After Christopher Columbus's first encounter with a continent that he initially mistook for India, North America became the permanent home of several markedly different cultural and ethnic groups. The "Age of Discovery" that Columbus initiated in 1492 was also an age of cultural interchange between the peoples of Europe and the Americas. Each learned from the other, borrowing artifacts -- and ideas. This traffic continues today. The result of such extensive communication across cultural lines has produced in contemporary North America a composite culture that is rich in diversity, and of a type unique in the world. The creation of this culture began with first contact -- possibly long before Columbus's landing. Fragments of pottery that resemble Japanese patterns have been found in present-day Equador, dated well before the birth of Christ. The Vikings left some tools behind in northeast North America. But while pottery, tools, and other things may be traced and dated, ideas are harder to follow through time. Thus, while the introduction of new flora, fauna, and tools has been given some study, the communication of ideas has been neglected. American Indians visited Europe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Squanto, a Wampanoag, one of several Indians kidnapped from their native land (the immigrants called it New England), visited England during 1614 and returned home in time to meet the somewhat bewildered Pilgrims, who arrived during the fall of 1620, unprepared for winter on a continent that, to them, was as new as it was forbidding. It was Squanto who surprised the Pilgrims by greeting them in English and who helped the new immigrants survive that first winter, a season that produced the first Thanksgiving. At that first feast, Indians provided the Europeans with turkey, one of the best-remembered examples of cultural interchange in United States popular history. For his role in acculturating these English subjects to a new land, Squanto has been called a Pilgrim father. During the years following the landing of the Pilgrims, American Indians contributed many foods to the diet of a growing number of Euro-Americans. By the twentieth century, almost half the world's domesticated crops, including the staples -- corn and white potatoes -- were first cultivated by American Indians. Aside from turkey, corn, and white potatoes, Indians also contributed manoic, sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, peppers, pumpkins, tomatoes, pineapples, the avocado, cacao (chocolate), chicle (a constituent of chewing gum), several varieties of beans, and at least seventy other domesticated food plants. Almost all the cotton grown in the United States was derived from varieties originally cultivated by Indians. Rubber, too, was contributed by native Americans. Several American Indian medicines also came into use among Euro-Americans. These included quinine, laxatives, as well as several dozen other drugs and herbal medicines. Euro-Americans adapted to their own needs many Indian articles of clothing and other artifacts such as hammocks, kayaks, canoes, moccasins, smoking pipes, dog sleds, and parkas. With the plants and artifacts came the Indian words used to describe them, and other features of what, to the Europeans, was a new land. Half the states in the United States of America today bear names first spoken among Indians; the thousands of words that entered English and other European languages from American Indian sources are too numerous even to list in this brief survey. Assertions have also been made that Indian contributions helped shape Euro-American folksongs, locations for railroads and highways, ways of dying cloth, war tactics, and even bathing habits. The amount of communication from Indians to Euro-Americans was all the more surprising because Indians usually made no conscious effort to convert the colonists to their ways. While Euro-Americans often used trade and gift giving to introduce, and later sell, products of their cultures to Indians, Euro-American adoption of Indian artifacts, unlike some of those from Euro-Americans to Indians, was completely voluntary. In the words of Max Savelle, scholar of the revolutionary period, Indian artifacts "were to contribute their own ingredients to the amalgam that was to be America's civilization." This influence was woven into the lives of Europeans in America despite the fact that Indians lacked organized means of propagation, but simply because they were useful and necessary to life in the New World. Unlike the physical aspects of this amalgam, the intellectual contributions of American Indians to Euro-American culture have only lightly, and for the most part recently, been studied by a few historians, anthropologists, scholars of law, and others. Where physical artifacts may be traced more or less directly, the communication of ideas may, most often, only be inferred from those islands of knowledge remaining in written records. These written records are almost exclusively of Euro-American origin, and often leave blind spots that may be partly filled only by records based on Indian oral history. Paul Bohanan, writing in the introduction of Beyond the Frontier (1967), which he coedited with Fred Plog, stressed the need to "tear away the veils of ethnocentricism," which he asserted have often kept scholars from seeing that peoples whom they had relegated to the category of "primitive" possessed "institutions as complex and histories as full as our own." A. Irving Hallowell, to make a similar point, quoted Bernard de Voto: Most American history has been written as if history were a function soley of white culture -- in spite of the fact that well into the nineteenth century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. Those of us who work in frontier history are repeatedly nonplussed to discover how little has been done for us in regard to the one force bearing on our field that was active everywhere. . . . American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all these affected white men and their societies.[1] To De Voto's assertion, Hallowell added: "Since most history has been written by the conquerers, the influence of the primitive people upon American civilization has seldom been the subject of dispassionate consideration." Felix Cohen, author of the Handbook of Indian Law, the basic reference book of his field, also advised a similar course of study and a similar break with prevailing ethnocentricism. Writing in the American Scholar (1952), Cohen said: When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. What the Roman historians did not see was that captive Greece would take captive conquering Rome and that Greek science, Greek philosophy and a Greek book, known as Septaugint, translated into the Latin tongue, would guide the civilized world and bring the tramp of pilgrim feet to Rome a thousand years after the last Roman regiment was destroyed. American historians, wrote Cohen, had too often paid attention to military victories and changing land boundaries, while failing to "see that in agriculture, in government, in sport, in education and in our views of nature and our fellow men, it is the first Americans who have taken captive their battlefield conquerers." American historians "have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," Cohen asserted. In his view, "The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man." Cohen's broad indictment does not include all scholars, nor all historians. The question of American Indian influence on the intellectual traditions of Euro-American culture has been raised, especially during the last thirty years. These questions, however, have not yet been examined in the depth that the complexity of Indian contributions warrant. To raise such questions is not to ignore, nor to negate, the profound influence of Europe on American intellectual development. It is, rather, to add a few new brush strokes to an as yet unfinished portrait. It is to explore the intellectual trade between cultures that has made America unique, built from contributions not only by Europeans and American Indians, but also by almost every other major cultural and ethnic group that has taken up residence in the Americas. What follows is only a first step, tracing the way in which Benjamin Franklin and some of his contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, absorbed American Indian political and social ideas, and how some of these ideas were combined with the cultural heritage they had brought from Europe into a rationale for revolution in a new land. There is a case to be made in that American Indian thought helped make that possible.[2] Comparison of the Iroquois' system of government with that of the new United States' began with Lewis Henry Morgan, known as the "father of American anthropology," who produced in 1851 the first systematic study of an American Indian social organization in his League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Following more than a decade of close association with the Iroquois, especially Ely Parker (the Seneca who helped arrange Morgan's adoption by the Iroquois), Morgan observed: Among the Indian nations whose ancient seats were within the limits of our republic, the Iroquois have long continued to occupy the most conspicuous position. They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organization and acquired a higher degree of influence than any race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru. Morgan likened the federalism of the Iroquois to that of the newly united British colonies: "The [six] nations sustained nearly the same relation to the [Iroquois] league that the American states bear to the Union. In the former, several oligarchies were contained within one, in the same manner as in the latter, several republics are embraced in one republic." Morgan also noted checks and balances in the Iroquoian system that acted to prevent concentration of power: "Their whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals." The Iroquois, according to Morgan, maximized individual freedom while seeking to minimize excess governmental interference in peoples' lives: "The government sat lightly upon the people who, in effect, were governed but little. It secured to each that individual independence which the Ho-de-no-sau-nee knew how to prize as well as the Saxon race; and which, amid all their political changes, they have continued to preserve." "The People of the Longhouse commended to our forefathers a union of colonies similar to their own as early as 1755," Morgan wrote. "They [the Iroquois] saw in the common interests and common speech of the colonies the elements for a confederation." Morgan believed that the Iroquois Confederacy contained "the germ of modern parliament, congress, and legislature." Morgan's major works have been widely reprinted in the United States and in several other countries during the century and a half since he first sat around the Iroquois Confederacy's council fire with his newly acquired brothers. In some of these editions, the idea of Iroquois influence on the formation of the United States' political and social system have been raised anew. Herbert M. Lloyd, in an introduction to the 1902 Dodd, Mead and Company edition of League of the Iroquois, wrote: Among all the North American peoples, there is none more worthy of study, by reason of their intellectual ability, the character of their institutions and the part they have played in history, than the Iroquois of the League. And, as it happens, this is the people which has longest been known to ourselves, which has been most closely observed by our writers and statesmen, and whose influence has been most strongly felt in our political constitution and in our history as colonies and nation. Lloyd continued: "In their ancient League the Iroquois presented to us a type of Federal Republic under whose roof and around whose council fire all people might dwell in peace and freedom. Our nation gathers its people from many peoples of the Old World, its language and its free institutions it inherits from England, its civilization and art from Greece and Rome, its religion from Judea -- and even these red men of the forest have wrought some of the chief stones in our national temple." In an early history of the relations between Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois, William E. Griffis in 1891 advised further study of Iroquoian influence on the formation of the United States, especially Benjamin Franklin's role in this interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur C. Parker, son of the Ely Parker who had been close to Morgan, wrote in a preface to his version of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace: Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man and centuries before it became the clamor of the new America of the white invader. Who now shall call the Indians and Iroquois savages? A similar point of view was taken in 1918 by J. N. B. Hewitt, who not only suggested that the Iroquois influenced the formation of the United States, but that the Iroquois league also served as something of a prototype for the League of Nations. The Iroquois' Great Law of Peace, wrote Hewitt, "made a significant departure from the past in separating the conduct of military and civilian affairs." The confederacy, he continued, also recognized no state religion: "All forms of it [religion] were tolerated and practiced." The Iroquois polity separated the duties of civil chiefs and prophets, or other religious leaders. Hewitt also noted the elevated position of women in the Iroquois system of government. In 1930, Arthur Pound's Johnson of the Mohawks again introduced the possibility of intellectual communication: "With the possible exception of the also unwritten British Constitution deriving from the Magna Charta, the Iroquois Constitution is the longest-going international constitution in the world." Pound remarked at the "political sagacity" of the Iroquois, as well as the checks and balances built into the Iroquois league, which was structured in such a way that no action could be taken without the approval of all five represented Indian nations. It was Pound's belief that "in this constitution of the Five Nations are found practically all of the safeguards which have been raised in historic parliaments to protect home affairs from centralized authority." Carl Van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin, published in 1938, noted Franklin's admiration of the political system of the league, and suggested that his plans for a Colonial union, expressed first during the 1750s, owed some debt to the Iroquois. Franklin, Van Doren wrote, found no European model that was suitable for the needs of the colonies that he hoped to unite. In 1940 Clark Wissler asserted that "students of politics and government have found much to admire in the league [of the Iroquois]. There is some historical evidence that knowledge of the league influenced the colonists in their first attempts to form a confederacy and later to write a constitution."[3] Five years later, Frank G. Speck, finding the Iroquois "a decidedly democratic people,"[4] quoted Wissler to support his contention that the Iroquois played a role in the founding of the United States. Wissler mentioned advice, given by the Iroquois chief Canassatego at the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) treaty of 1744, to the effect that the colonists could benefit by forming a union along Iroquoian lines. By 1946, the nations of the world had established a second international organization and, as in 1918, attention was turned to the Iroquois in this regard. Paul A. W. Wallace, who devoted his scholarship to a study of the Iroquois, used quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the Preamble to the Constitution of the United Nations to open and close his book, the White Roots of Peace: I am Deganwidah, and with the Five Nations confederate lords I plant the tree of the Great Peace. . . . Roots have spread out from the Tree . . . and the name of these Roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace . . . they may trace the Roots to their source . . . and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree. . . . We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . . and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights . . . and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for law can be maintained . . . do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations. While Wallace's White Roots of Peace was principally an account of the traditional story of the creation of the Iroquois league, he also mentioned Franklin's attention to Iroquois political institutions and the possible role that this attention played in the founding of the United States. By 1952, suggestions of Iroquoian contributions to the evolution of the United States' political structure, as well as that of international bodies, had been "in the air" of Euro-American scholarship for more than a century. During that year, Felix Cohen began to develop the idea in the American Scholar. Cohen wrote that in their rush to "Americanize" the Indian, Euro-Americans had forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that they had themselves been influenced by Indian thought and action. To Cohen, American disrespect for established authority had Indian roots, as did the American penchant for sharing with those in need. In the Indian character resided a fierce individuality that rejected subjugation, together with a communalism that put the welfare of the whole family, tribe, or nation above that of individuals. "It is out of a rich Indian democratic tradition that the distinctive political ideals of American life emerged," Cohen wrote. "Universal suffrage for women as well as for men, the pattern of states within a state we call federalism, the habit of treating chiefs as servants of the people instead of as their masters . . ." Cohen ascribed at least in part to the "Indian" in our political tradition. To this, Cohen added: "The insistence that the community must respect the diversity of men and the diversity of their dreams -- all these things were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed." To support his assertion, Cohen offered an excerpt from a popular account of America that was circulated in England around 1776: "The darling passion of the American is liberty and that in its fullest extent; nor is it the original natives only to whom this passion is confined; our colonists sent thither seem to have imbibed the same principles."[5] "Politically, there was nothing in the Empires and kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to parallel the democratic constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, with its provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, and its suffrage for women as well as for men," Cohen continued. The influence of such ideas spread to Europe, where they played a part in Thomas More's Utopia. Cohen further asserted that "to John Locke, the champion of tolerance and the right of revolution, the state of nature and of natural equality to which men might appeal in rebellion against tyranny was set not in the remote dawn of history, but beyond the Atlantic sunset." Cohen also found the influence of Indian thought in Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, "and their various contemporaries." Anticipating the arguments of Charles Sanford nine years later, Cohen implied that many of the doctrines that played so crucial a role in the American Revolution were fashioned by European savants from observation of the New World and its inhabitants. These observations, packaged into theories, were exported, like the finished products made from raw materials that also traveled the Atlantic Ocean, back to America. The communication among American Indian cultures, Europe, and Euro-America thus seemed to involve a sort of intellectual mercantilism. The product of this intellectual traffic, the theories that played a role in rationalizing rebellion against England, may have been fabricated in Europe, but the raw materials from which they were made were, to Cohen, substantially of indigenous American origin. Cohen, continuing his synthesis of a hundred years of suggestions that Indian ideas helped shape America's and Europe's intellectual traditions, asserted that "the greatest teachers of American democracy have gone to school with the Indian." He mentioned Canassatego's advice to the colonists at the 1744 Lancaster treaty, and asserted that Benjamin Franklin had integrated this advice into his ideas favoring Colonial union seven years later. Cohen also asserted that Thomas Jefferson freely acknowledged his debt to the conceptions of liberty held by American Indians, and favorably compared the liberty he saw in Indian politics with the oppression of Europe in his time. Following publication of Cohen's article, suggestions that American Indian, and especially Iroquoian, thought had played some role in the genesis of a distinctly American conception of society and government became more numerous. In 1953, Ruth Underhill (Red Man's Continent) wrote that Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington all were familiar with the Iroquois polity, which, she said, "was the most integrated and orderly north of Mexico. Some have even thought that it gave suggestions to the American Constitution." Underhill also devoted some attention to the equality of women, and the political powers reserved for them, in the Iroquois structure. Like Wallace before her, Underhill also asserted similarity between the Iroquoian system and the modern United Nations. Both, she wrote, "dealt only with international concerns of peace and war." In 1955, Thomas R. Henry, in an account of the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, picked up Hewitt's suggestion of intercultural communication. Hewitt, wrote Henry, had used Canassatego's 1744 speech and a remembrance of it in a 1775 treaty council to support his assertion that the Six Nations had played a role in the formation of the United States. "J. N. B. Hewitt was firmly convinced that the League of the Iroquois was the intellectual progenitor of the United States." While acknowledging Hewitt's argument, Henry wrote that more research in the area needed to be done. A. Irving Hallowell in 1957 mentioned the subject of intellectual origins of the American republic in connection with the Iroquois, but did not delve into it. "It has been said that information about the organization and operation of the League of the Iroquois which Franklin picked up at various Indian councils suggested to him the pattern for a United States of America." He also advised more study of these suggestions. In 1960, author Edmund Wilson, having traveled to Iroquois country to research his book, Apologies to the Iroquois, heard an oral-history account from Standing Arrow, a Seneca, of the reliance that Franklin had placed on the Great Law of Peace. He did not pursue the subject in the book. In 1961, Charles Sanford's Quest for Paradise again raised the possibility of intellectual mercantilism. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, originator of the "Frontier Hypothesis" who found democracy inexplicably emerging from among the trees, Sanford stressed the effect of the New World's geography over its inhabitants, but he still found a few Indians in the forest that he characterized as a new Eden: The archetypical Adam, living in a state of nature was thus endowed by his creators, which included Thomas Jefferson, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The revolutionary doctrines which grew out of discoveries of the New World were first developed by European savants only to be borrowed by the American colonists and turned against Europe. In 1965, William Brandon wrote that more attention should be paid to "the effect of the Indian world on the changing American soul, most easily seen in the influence of the American Indian on European notions of liberty." Brandon asserted that the first British inter-Colonial union of any kind, the New England Confederation of 1643, came about "not only as a result of the Pequot War but possibly in some imitation of the many Indian confederacies . . . in aboriginal North America." The first formal inter-Colonial conference outside of New England, which took place in Albany in 1684, "was held at the urging of the Iroquois and to meet with Iroquois spokesmen," Brandon wrote.[6] He also described accounts by Peter Martyr, the first historian of the New World, which enthusiastically told of the Indians' liberty, the absence of crime and jails, and the greed that accompanied a societal emphasis on private property. Martyr and other Europeans of his time wondered whether, in Brandon's words, the Indians lived "in that golden world of which the ancients had spoken so much." Out of such imagery came the myth of the Noble Savage, another product of the intellectual mercantilism that seemed to accompany its economic counterpart across the Atlantic Ocean. Out of such imagery, too, came the assumption that Indians, at least those Indians still uncorrupted by European influences, lived in the original state of all societies and that, by observing them, the new arrivals from Europe could peer through a living window on their own pasts. To many who had recently escaped poverty, or fled tyranny in Europe, this was a vision of the past that must have carried no small amount of appeal. During 1967, C. Elmore Reaman's work on the Iroquois' role in the conflict between the British and French during the mid-eighteenth century again raised the possibility of Iroquoian influence on the founding of the United States: "Any race of people who provided the prototype for the Constitution of the United States, and whose confederacy has many of the aspects of the present-day United Nations, should be given their rightful recognition." Reaman supported his assertion by quoting from a speech given by Richard Pilant on Iroquoian studies at McMaster University April 6, 1960: "Unlike the Mayas and Incas to the south, the Longhouse People developed a democratic system of government which can be maintained [to be] a prototype for the United States and the United Nations. Socially, the Six Nations met the sociologist's test of higher cultures by having given a preferred status to women." Reaman added that the Iroquois league, in his estimation, "was a model social order in many ways superior to the white man's culture of the day. . . . Its democratic form of government more nearly approached perfection than any that has been tried to date. It is claimed by many that the framers of the United States of America copied from these Iroquois practices in founding the government of the United States." This material was based on Hewitt's work. Throughout the next few years, a thread of interest in the Iroquois' communication of political ideas to the new United States continued to run through literature in this area of history. In 68, Allan W. Eckert wrote: The whites who were versed in politics at this time [c. 1750] had every reason to marvel at this form of Indian government. Knowledge of the league's success, it is believed, strongly influenced the colonies in their own initial efforts to form a union and later to write a Constitution. In 1971, Helen A. Howard borrowed part of Wallace's White Roots of Peace, including the paired quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the United Nations' Constitution, to raise the question of Iroquoian intellectual influence. During the same year, Mary E. Mathur's Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin asserted that the plan of union that Franklin proposed at the Albany congress (1754) more closely resembled the Iroquoian model than the British. Mathur placed major emphasis on an appearance by Hendrick, an Iroquois statesman, at the congress. She also asserted, but did not document, reports that Felix Cohen had read accounts written by British spies shortly before the Revolutionary War that blamed the Iroquois and other Indians' notions of liberty for the colonists' resistance to British rule. A European, Elemire Zolla, in 1973 recounted Horatio Hale's belief, published in The Iroquois Book of Rites, that democracy sprang mainly from Indian origins. Zolla also recounted Edmund Wilson's encounter with Standing Arrow and the Senecas. In 1975, J. E. Chamberlin's The Harrowing of Eden noted that "it is generally held that the model of the great Iroquois [Six Nations] Confederacy was a significant influence on both the Albany plan and the later Articles of Confederation." In a footnote to that reference, Chamberlin wrote that the Iroquois had also exerted influence on Karl Marx and Frederich Engels through Lewis H. Morgan. Engels, having read Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Light of the Researchers of Lewis Henry Morgan (1884), which contained an intricate account of the Iroquoian polity that most directly examined the league's ability to maintain social cohesion without an elaborate state apparatus. The Iroquois, wrote Engels, provided a rare example of a living society that "knows no state."[7] Francis Jennings's finely detailed work, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1975), closed a discussion that noted Euro-Americans' perceptions of Indians' liberty with a sweeping statement: "What white society owes to Indian society, as much as to any other source, is the mere fact of its existence." Donald A. Grinde in 1979 collected much of what had been written about the subject of Iroquoian intellectual interaction with English-speaking Euro-Americans. While his The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation was mostly a military and diplomatic account of the Iroquois' role during the time period around the American Revolution, it also contained most of the published evidence in secondary sources on this topic. Grinde reserved special attention for the interaction of Franklin and Jefferson with the Iroquois, and urged more study of the matter: "More needs to be done. Especially if America continues to view itself as a distinct entity set apart from many of the values of Western Civilization." Grinde also stated that such study could help dissolve negative stereotypes that many Euro-Americans harbor about American Indians' heritage. The negation of stereotypes is important to this investigation because to study the intellectual contributions of American Indians to European and American thought, one must to some degree abolish the polarity of the "civilized" and the "savage" that much of our history (not to mention popular entertainment) has drilled into us. We must approach the subject ready to be surprised, as our ancestors were surprised when they were new to America. We must be ready to acknowledge that American Indian societies were as thoughtfully constructed and historically significant to our present as the Romans, the Greeks, and other Old World peoples. What follows is only a beginning. The Iroquois were not the only American Indians to develop notions of federalism, political liberty, and democracy long before they heard of the Greeks or the Magna Charta. Benjamin Franklin was not the only Euro-American to combine his own heritage with what he found in his new homeland. And the infant United States was not the only nation whose course has been profoundly influenced by the ideas of the Indians, the forgotten cofounders of our heritage. ------------- 1. A. Irving Hallowell, "The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of the Indian on American Culture," in Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, eds., The Frontier in Perspective (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 230. 2. Henry Steele Commager discusses this theme in The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977). 3. Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States: Four Centuries of Their History and Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940), pp. 112-113. 4. See: Frank G. Speck, "The Iroquois, A Study in Cultural Evolution" (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bulletin 23, October 1945). 5. Felix Cohen, "Americanizing the White Man," American Scholar 21: 2 (1952), p. 181. 6. William Brandon, "American Indians and American History," American West 13 (1965), p. 24. 7. Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 527. ------------------------------------------------------------------ C H A P T E R T W O The Pre-Columbian Republic -------------------------------------------------------- The chiefs of the League of Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skins shall be seven spans . . . their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the League. . . . -- The Great Law of Peace, Paragraph 24, Akwesasne Notes version, 1977 Mohawk Nation, New York -------------------------------------------------------- When the Iroquois Confederacy was formed, no Europeans were present with clocks and a system for telling time before and after the birth of Christ. Since ideas, unlike artifacts, cannot be carbon dated or otherwise fixed in unrecorded time, the exact date that the Senecas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, and Cayugas stopped battling one another and formed a federal union will never be known. It is known, however, that around 1714 the Tuscaroras, a kindred Indian nation, moved northward from what is presently the Carolinas to become the sixth national member of the confederacy. A wide range of estimates exist for the founding date of the confederacy. Iroquoian sources, using oral history and recollections of family ancestries (the traditional methods for marking time through history), have fixed the origin date at between 1000 and 1400 A.D.; Euro-American historians have tended to place the origin of the Iroquois league at about 1450. By an Iroquois account, Cartier made his first appearance among the Iroquois during the life of the thirty-third presiding chief of the league. The presiding chief (Atotarho was the name of the office) held a lifetime appointment unless he was impeached for violating the Great Law of Peace. The Iroquois who use this method of tracing the league's origin place the date at between 1000 and 1100. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca, used Iroquoian recall of family lines and lifespans to estimate the founding date at 1390. Paul A. W. Wallace, a student of the Iroquois who has written extensively about them, estimated the founding date of the league at 1450. This is only a sample of the attempts that have been made to solve an unsolvable riddle. At whatever date the confederacy was formed, it came at the end of several generations of bloody and divisive warfare between the five nations that joined the league. According to the Iroquois' traditional account, the idea of a federal union was introduced through Deganwidah, a Huron who lived in what is now eastern Ontario. Deganwidah was unsuited himself to propose the idea not only because of his non-Iroquoian ancestry, but also because he stuttered so badly that he could scarcely talk. He would have had the utmost difficulty in presenting his idea to societies where oratory was prized. And writing, aside from the pictographs of the wampum belts, was not used. Deganwidah, wandering from tribe to tribe trying to figure ways to realize his dream of ending war among them all, met Hiawatha, who agreed to speak for him. Hiawatha (a man far removed from Longfellow's poetic creation) undertook long negotiations with leaders of the warring Indian nations and, in the end, produced a peace along the lines of Deganwidah's vision. This peace was procured, and maintained, through the constitution of the league, the Great Law of Peace (untranslated: Kaianerekowa). The story of the Great Law's creation is no less rich in history and allegory than the stories of cultural origin handed down by European peoples, and is only briefly summarized here. The Great Law of Peace was not written in English until about 1880 when Seth Newhouse, a Mohawk, transcribed it. By this time, many of the traditional sachems of the league, worried that the wampum belts that contained the Great Law's provisions might be lost or stolen, sought a version written in English. One such translation was compiled by Arthur C. Parker. In recent years, the text of the Great Law has been published in several editions by Akwesasne Notes, a journal for "native and natural peoples" published on the Mohawk Nation. The substance of all these written translations is similar, although wording varies at some points. The text of the Great Law begins with the planting of the Tree of the Great Peace; the great white pine -- from its roots to its spreading branches -- serves throughout the document as a metaphor for the unity of the league. The tree, and the principal council fire of the confederacy, were located on land of the Onondaga Nation, at the center of the confederacy, the present site of Syracuse, New York. From the Tree of the Great Peace Roots have spread out . . . one to the north, one to the west, one to the east and one to the south. These are the Great White Roots and their nature is peace and strength. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and shall make this known to the statesmen of the League, they may trace back the roots to the tree. If their minds are clean and they are obedient and promise to obey the wishes of the Council of the League, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves. This opening provision complements the adoption laws of the confederacy, which contained no bars on the basis of race or national origin. Nor did the Great Law prohibit dual citizenship; several influential Anglo-Americans, emissaries from the Colonial governments, including William Johnson and Conrad Weiser, were given full citizenship in the confederacy. Both men took part in the deliberations of the Grand Council at Onondaga. Following paragraphs three and four, which outlined procedural matters such as the calling of meetings and maintenance of the council fire, the Great Law began to outline a complex system of checks and balances on the power of each nation against that of the others. The Great Law ensured that no measure (such as a declaration of war) would be enacted by the Council of the League without the consent of all five represented nations, each of which would first debate the question internally: The council of the Mohawks shall be divided into three parties . . . the first party shall listen only to the discussion of the second and third parties and if an error is made, or the proceeding irregular, they are to call attention to it, and when the case is right and properly decided by the two parties, they shall confirm the decision and refer the case to the Seneca statesmen for their decision. When the Seneca statesmen have decided in accord with the Mohawk statesmen, the case or question shall be referred to the Cayuga and Oneida statesmen on the opposite side of the house. After a question had been debated by the Mohawks, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas on both sides of the "house," it was passed to the Onondagas, the firekeepers, for their decision. The Great Law provided that every Onondaga statesman or his deputy be present in council and that all agree with the majority "without unwarrantable dissent." Decisions, when made, had to be unanimous. If Atotarho, or other chiefs among the Onondaga delegation were absent, the council could only decide on matters of small importance. If the decision of the "older brothers" (Senecas and Mohawks) disagreed with that of the "younger brothers" (Cayugas and Oneidas), the Onondagas were charged with breaking the tie. If the four nations agreed, the Onondagas were instructed by the Great Law to confirm the decision. The Onondagas could, however, refuse to confirm a decision given them by the other four nations, and send it back for reconsideration. If the four nations rendered the same decision again, the Onondagas had no other course but to confirm it. This decision-making process somewhat resembled that of a two-house congress in one body, with the "older brothers" and "younger brothers" each comprising a side of the house. The Onondagas filled something of an executive role, with a veto that could be overriden by the older and younger brothers in concert.[1] Paragraph 14 of the Great Law provided that the speaker for any particular meeting of the council would be elected by acclamation from either the Mohawks, Senecas, or Onondagas. The Great Law also provided for changes to the Great Law, by way of amendment: If the conditions which arise at any future time call for an addition to or a change of this law, the case shall be carefully considered and if a new beam seems necessary or beneficial, the proposed change shall be decided upon and, if adopted, shall be called "added to the rafters." The next major section of the Great Law concerned the rights, duties, and qualifications of statesmen. The chiefs who sat on the council were elected in two ways. Traditionally, they were nominated by the women of each extended family holding title (in the form of special wampum strings) to a chiefship. Increasingly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chiefs were elected outside this hereditary structure on the basis of their leadership qualities. In order to keep his office, a chief had to abide by several rules, most of which were written into the Great Law. A chief could not, for example, refuse to attend meetings of the council. After one warning by the women who had nominated him, a chief who continued to ignore council meetings was removed. More seriously, a chief could be removed from the council if it became "apparent . . . [that he] . . . has not in mind the welfare of the people, or [if he] disobeys the rules of the Great Law. . . ." Complaints about the conduct of chiefs could be brought before the council by "the men and women of the league, or both acting jointly," and communicated to the accused through the war chiefs who, in peacetime, often acted as the peoples' monitors on the other chiefs in council. An erring chief, after three warnings, would be removed by the war chiefs if complaints continued and the erring chief did not mend his ways. One of the most serious offenses of which a chief could be accused was murder. The sanctions against this crime may have been made as stringent as they were because blood feuds were a major problem before Deganwidah united the Iroquois. If a chief of the League of Five Nations should commit murder, the other chiefs of the nation shall assemble at the place where the corpse lies and prepare to depose the criminal chief. If it is impossible to meet at the scene of the crime the chiefs shall discuss the matter at the next council of their nation and request their war chief to depose the chief guilty of the crime, to "bury" his women relatives and to transfer the chieftanship title to a sister family. The reference to burial was figurative; the law provided that a chief guilty of murder would not only lose his own title, but deprive his entire extended family of the right to be represented on the council. In addition, a chief guilty of murder was banished from the confederacy. Certain physical and mental defects, such as idiocy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, or impotency could also cause a chief's dismissal from office, although the Great Law provided that "in cases of extreme necessity," the chief could continue to exercise his rights in council. While holding membership on the confederate council, the Great Law provided that a chief should be tolerant and attentive to constituent criticism: The chiefs of the League of Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skins shall be seven spans, which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive action and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the League. With endless patience, they shall carry out their duty. Their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodging in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation. Paragraph 35 of the Great Law outlined provisions for election of "pine-tree chiefs" -- those who held membership in the council because of their special abilities, rather than the hereditary titles of their extended families. The name "pine-tree chief" was given to such individuals because they were said to have sprung, like the Great White Pine under which the council met. While the pine sprang from the earth, the pine-tree chiefs sprang from the body of the people. The nomination to the council came directly from the chiefs sitting on it. A pine-tree chief could not be officially deposed, as could the hereditary chiefs, for violating the Great Law. If such a chief lost the confidence of the people, however, the Great Law told them to "be deaf to his voice and his advice." Like other civil chiefs, the pine-tree chiefs could not name their successors; nor could they carry their titles to the grave. The Great Law provided a ceremony for removing the title from a dying chief. One war chief from each of the five represented nations also sat on the confederate council along with the hereditary and pine-tree chiefs. These chiefs were elected from the eligible sons of the female families holding title to the head chieftainship in each of the five nations. The war chiefs in peacetime acted as the peoples' eyes and ears in the council, carrying messages to and from the council and constituents. In wartime, these chiefs raised fighting forces, a task that often took no small amount of eloquence, since there was no enforced draft, and warriors had to be convinced that a cause was worth fighting for. It was also the duty of the war chief to lay questions of the people (other societies might call them petitions) before the Council of the League. War chiefs, like civil chiefs, could be recalled from office if they violated the Great Law's standards of leadership. To prevent factions within the confederacy, Deganwidah and his confederates built into it a system of clans that overlapped each nations' political boundaries. The clans bore such names as Great Bear, Turtle, Deer Pigeon, Hawk, and Wild Potatoes. Each member of a particular clan recognized as a relative others of the same clan, even if they lived in different nations of the league. The clan structure and the system of checks and balances kept one nation from seeking to dominate others and helped to insure that consensus would arise from decisions of the council. Checks and balances were evident between the sexes, as well. Although the members of the Grand Council were men, most of them had been nominated by the women of their respective extended families. Women also were considered to be the allocators of resources, and descent was matrilineal. Surely the first reference to a "United Nations" in American history occurred in paragraph 61 of the Great Law. A concept of national self-determination is expressed in paragraph 84, which allowed conquered non-Iroquoian nations, or those which peacefully accepted the Great Law, to continue their own system of internal government as long as it refrained from making war on other nations. Paragraph 98 confirmed the people's right to seek redress from the Grand Council through their respective war chiefs. Paragraph 99 guaranteed freedom of religion. Paragraph 107 denied entry to the home by those not authorized to do so by its occupants. The Great Law was not wholly unwritten before its transcription into English during the late nineteenth century. Its provisions were recorded on wampum belts that were used during council meetings whenever disputes arose over procedure, or over the provisions of the law itself. Wampum was also used to record many other important events, such as contracts and other agreements. A contemporary source credits the belts with use "to assist the memory."[2] "When a subject is of very great importance the belt is very wide and so on -- if a Mohawk makes a promise to another, he gives him one of these belts -- his word is irrevocable & they do not consider anything a greater reproach [than a] . . . word not binding," the same source recorded. Contrary to popular assumption many Indian cultures, the Iroquois among them, used some forms of written communication. These forms were only rarely appreciated by eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. In addition to its use as an archive (usually kept by senior sachems), wampum also served as a medium of exchange. It had a definite value among the Iroquois and other Indians in relation to deerskins, beaver pelts, and (after extensive contact with Euro-Americans) British coins. Fashioned from conch and clam shells in the shape of beads, wampum was sewn into intricate patterns on hides. Each design had a different meaning, and understanding of the designs' meaning was indispensable to the conduct of Iroquoian diplomacy, as it was the lingua franca for conduct between nations (Indian to Indian and Indian to European) in North America for more than a century. To do diplomatic business with the Iroquois, the British and French envoys had to learn how wampum was used. When the occasion called for giving, they should expect to get a string (often called a "strand" in treaty accounts) or a belt of wampum. A strand -- beads strung on yard-long leather strips tied at one end -- signified agreement on items of small importance, but still worth noting. Belts, often six feet long and up to two feet wide, were reserved for important items. The Iroquois dealt with the English and French only under their own diplomatic code, a way of reminding the Europeans that they were guests on the Indians' continent, which they called "Turtle Island." Euro-American diplomats who came to council without a sufficient supply of wampum strands and belts to give, or one who failed to understand the message of one or more belts, could make or break alliances at a time when the Iroquois' powerful confederacy and its Indian allies constituted the balance of power between the English and French in North America. On a continent still very lightly settled with Europeans -- islands of settlement in a sea of Indian nations -- it behooved diplomatic suitors to know the difference between a peace and a war belt. It also helped to have Indian allies as guides through what Europeans regarded as a limitless and trackless wilderness. Without Indian help (on both sides) the Colonial wars in North America might have taken a great deal longer than they did. Without Indian guides, the armies would have had a much harder time finding one another, except by accident. During the 1730s and 1740s, the British Crown decided that if it was to stem the French advance down the western side of the Appalachians, alliance with the Iroquois was imperative. The French advance south from the Saint Lawrence Valley and north from Louisiana threatened to hem the English between the mountains and the Atlantic. And so the peace belt went out in a diplomatic offensive that would end in France's defeat two decades later. To win the Iroquois, the British envoys had to deal with the Iroquois on their own terms, as distasteful as this may have been to some of the more effete diplomats. They would find themselves sitting cross-legged around council fires many miles from the coastal cities, which Indian sachems refused to visit except on the most compelling business, fearing disease and the temptations of alcohol, as well as possible attacks by settlers along the way. In order to cement the alliance, the British sent Colonial envoys who usually reported directly to the various provincial governors, one of whom was Benjamin Franklin, to the frontier and beyond. This decision helped win North America for the British -- but only for a time. In the end, it still cost them the continent, or at least the better part of it. The Colonial delegates passed more than wampum over the council fires of the treaty summits. They also came home with an appetite for something that many proper colonials, and most proper British subjects, found little short of heresy. They returned with a taste for natural rights -- life, liberty, and happiness -- that they saw operating on the other side of the frontier. These observations would help mold the political life of the colonies, and much of the world, in the years to come. ------------- 1. The Tuscaroras had no voting rights after they joined the confederacy during the early eighteenth century. 2. New York State Library Ms. #13350-51, reprinted in Charles M. Johnston, ea., The Valley of the Six Nations: A Collection of Documents on Indian Lands of the Great River (Toronto. The University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 28-29. Note that the wampum belts, used in this fashion, served as a set of symbols used to retain and convey meaning. Like the Aztecs (who kept tax records and other written materials), the Iroquois were not illiterate. Written communication evolved to fit specialized needs, and its utilization was restricted to a minority, not unlike the use of writing in Europe before the invention of the printing press. ------------------------------------------------------------------ C H A P T E R T H R E E "Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans" -------------------------------------------------------- The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow no kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories. -- Cadwallader Colden, 1727 -------------------------------------------------------- By the mid-eighteenth century, when alliance with the Six Nations became an article of policy with the British Crown, English colonists had been living in North America for little more than a century. The colonies comprised a thin ribbon of settlement from a few miles north of Boston to a few miles south of Charleston. Barely a million people all told, the British colonists looked westward across mountains that seemed uncompromisingly rugged to English eyes, into the maw of a continent that they already knew was many times the size of their ancestral homeland. How much larger, no one at that time really knew. No one knew exactly how wide the forests might be, how far the rivers might reach, or what lay beyond them. There was a widespread belief that the Pacific Ocean lay out there, somewhere. The map makers settled for blank spaces and guesses. Across the mountains were the homelands of Indian confederacies -- the Iroquois to the northwest, the Cherokees to the Southwest, and others -- which outnumbered the colonists and whose warriors had proved themselves tactically, if not technologically, equal to the British army on American ground. And there were the French, sliding southward along the spine of the mountains, establishing forts as close as Pittsburgh, their soldiers and trappers building the bases of empire along the rivers that laced the inland forests. The British decision to seek the Iroquois' favor set in motion historical events that were to make North America a predominantly English-speaking continent. These events also, paradoxically, provided an opportunity for learning, observation, and reflection which in its turn gave the nation-to-be a character distinct from England and the rest of Europe, and which thus helped make the American Revolution possible. The diplomatic approach to the Iroquois came at a time when the transplanted Europeans were first beginning to sense that they were something other than Europeans, or British subjects. Several generations had been born in the new land. The English were becoming, by stages, "Americans" -- a word that had been reserved for Indians. From the days when the Puritans came to build their city on a hill there had been some feeling of distinction, but for a century most of the colonists had been escapees from Europe, or temporary residents hoping to extract a fortune from the new land and return, rich gentlemen all, to the homeland. After a century of settlement, however, that was changing. From the days of Squanto's welcome and the first turkey dinner, the Indians had been contributing to what was becoming a new amalgam of cultures. In ways so subtle that they were often ignored, the Indians left their imprint on the colonists' eating habits, the paths they followed, the way they clothed themselves, and the way they thought. The Indians knew how to live in America, and the colonists, from the first settlers onward, had to learn. When the British decided to send some of the colonies' most influential citizens to seek alliance with the Iroquois, the treaty councils that resulted provided more than an opportunity for diplomacy. They enabled the leading citizens of both cultures to meet and mingle on common and congenial ground, and thus to learn from each other. The pervasiveness and influence of these contacts has largely been lost in a history that, much like journalism, telescopes time into a series of conflicts -- conquistadorial signposts on the way west. Lost in this telescoping of history has been the intense fascination that the unfolding panorama of novelty that was America held for the new Americans -- a fascination that was shipped eastward across the Atlantic to Spain, France, Britain, and Germany in hundreds of travel narratives, treaty accounts, and scientific treatises, in a stream that began with Columbus's accounts of the new world's wonders and persisted well into the nineteenth century. The observations and reports that flooded booksellers of the time were often entirely speculative. Travel was very difficult, and what explorers could not reach, they often imagined. "A traveler'" wrote Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard for 1737, "should have a hog's nose, a deer's legs and an ass's back" -- testimony to the rugged nature and agonizingly slow pace of overland travel by stage or horse at a time when roads were virtually nonexistent outside of thickly settled areas, and when motorized transport was unknown. If crossing the ocean was an exercise in hardship, crossing the boundless continent was even more difficult. For the few people who did it (or tried) and who could read and write, there was a market: the boundaries of popular curiosity were as limitless as the continent seemed to be. That curiosity was matched by an equal array of ornate speculations on what lay beyond the next bend in this river or that, or beyond the crest of such and such a mountain. What new peoples were to be found? What new and exotic plants and animals? Were there cities of gold? Mountains two miles high? Giants and Lilliputians? The speculations assumed a degree of vividness not unlike twentieth-century musings over the character of possible life on the planets. The first systematic English-language account of the Iroquois' social and political system was published in 1727, and augmented in 1747, by Cadwallader Colden, who, in the words of Robert Waite, was regarded as "the best-informed man in the New World on the affairs of the British-American colonies." A son of Reverend Alexander Colden, a Scottish minister, Colden was born February 17, 1688, in Ireland. He arrived in America at age twenty-two, five years after he was graduated from the University of Edinburgh. Shortly after his arrival in America, Colden began more than a half century of service in various offices of New York Colonial government. His official career culminated in 1761 with an appointment as lieutenant governor of the colony. In addition to political duties, Colden carried on extensive research in natural science. He also became close to the Iroquois, and was adopted by the Mohawks. In a preface to his History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America, Colden wrote that his account was the first of its kind in English: Though every one that is in the least acquainted with the affairs of North-America, knows of what consequence the Indians, commonly known to the people of New-York by the name of the Five Nations, are both in Peace and War, I know of no accounts of them published in English, but what are meer [sic] Translations of French authors. Colden found the Iroquois to be "barbarians" because of their reputed tortures of captives, but he also saw a "bright and noble genius" in these Indians' "love of their country," which he compared to that of "the greatest Roman Hero's." "When Life and Liberty came in competition, indeed, I think our Indians have outdone the Romans in this particular. . . . The Five Nations consisted of men whose Courage and Resolution could not be shaken." Colden was skeptical that contact with Euro-Americans could improve the Iroquois: "Alas! we have reason to be ashamed that these Infidels, by our Conversation and Neighborhood, have become worse than they were before they knew us. Instead of Vertues, we have only taught them Vices, that they were entirely free of before that time. The narrow Views of private interest have occasioned this." Despite his condemnation of their reputed cruelty toward some of their captives, Colden wrote that Euro-Americans were imitating some of the Iroquois' battle tactics, which he described as the art of "managing small parties." The eastern part of the continent, the only portion of North America that the colonists of the time knew, was, in Colden's words, "one continued Forrest," which lent advantage to Iroquoian warfare methods. Such methods would later be put to work against British soldiers in the American Revolution. Colden also justified his study within the context of natural science: "We are fond of searching into remote Antiquity to know the manners of our earliest progenitors; if I be not mistaken, the Indians are living images of them." The belief that American Indian cultures provided a living window on the prehistory of Europe was not Colden's alone. This assumption fueled curiosity about American Indian peoples on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean throughout the eighteenth century. Colden's was one of the first widely circulated observations of this sort, which compared Indians, especially the Iroquois, to the Romans and the Greeks, as well as other peoples such as the Celts and the Druids. Looking through this window on the past, it was believed that observation of Indian cultures could teach Europeans and Euro-Americans about the original form of their ancestors' societies -- those close to a state of nature that so intrigued the thought of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Colden, elaborating, wrote: The present state of the Indian Nations exactly shows the most Ancient and Original Condition of almost every Nation; so, I believe that here we may with more certainty see the original form of all government, than in the most curious Speculations of the Learned; and that the Patriarchal and other Schemes in Politicks are no better than Hypotheses in Philosophy, and as prejudicial to real Knowledge. The original form of government, Colden believed, was similar to the Iroquois' system, which he described in some detail. This federal union, which Colden said "has continued so long that the Christians know nothing of the original of it," used public opinion extensively: Each nation is an absolute Republick by itself, govern'd in all Publick affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems of Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gained by and consists wholly in the opinions of the rest of the Nation in their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force Upon any of their People. Honour and Esteem are their principal Rewards, as Shame and being Despised are their Punishments. The Iroquois' military leaders, like the civilian sachems, "obtain their authority . . . by the General Opinion of their Courage and Conduct, and lose it by a Failure in those Vertues," Colden wrote. He also observed that Iroquois leaders were generally regarded as servants of their people, unlike European kings, queens, and other members of a distinct hierarchy. It was customary, Colden observed, for Iroquois sachems to abstain from material things while serving their people, in so far as was possible: Their Great Men, both Sachems [civil chiefs] and captains [war chiefs] are generally poorer than the common people, for they affect to give away and distribute all the Presents or Plunder they get in their Treaties or War, so as to leave nothing for themselves. If they should be once suspected of selfishness, they would grow mean in the opinion of their Country-men, and would consequently lose their authority. Colden used the words of Monsieur de la Poterie, a French historian, to summarize his sentiments about the Iroquois' system of society and government: When one talks of the Five Nations in France, they are thought, by a common mistake, to be meer Barbarians, always thirsting after human blood; but their True Character is very different. They are as Politick and Judicious as well can be conceiv'd. This appears from their management of the Affairs which they transact, not only with the French and the English, but likewise with almost all the Indian Nations of this vast continent. Like Colden, French writers sometimes compared the Iroquois to the Romans. Three years before Colden published his History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America in its 1727 edition, a line drawing from a book by the Frenchman Joseph Francois Lafitau purported to illustrate an Iroquois council meeting. As was rather apparent from the drawing, the artist had never seen a meeting. In the drawing, a chief was shown standing, holding a wampum belt. He and other Iroquois sitting around him in a semicircle wore white, toga-like garments and sandals. Their hair was relatively short and curly, in the Roman fashion. The chiefs were shown sitting against a background that did not look at all like the American woodland, but more like the rolling, almost treeless Roman countryside. Accounts of Indian (especially Iroquoian) life and society, especially those by Colden, enjoyed a lively sale on both sides of the Atlantic. Other eighteenth-century writers compared the Iroquois to counterparts of Old Testament life; James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775) "prefers simple Hebraic-savage honesty to complex British civilized corruption." Indians, wrote Adair, were governed by the "plain and honest law of nature . . . ": Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty; and when there is equality of condition, manners and privileges, and a constant familiarity in society, as prevails in every Indian nation, and through all our British colonies, there glows such a cheerfulness and warmth of courage in each of their breasts, as cannot be described. Iroquoian notions of personal liberty also drew exclamations from Colden, who wrote: The Five Nations have such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories. They never make any prisoner a slave, but it is customary among them to make a Compliment of Naturalization into the Five Nations; and, considering how highly they value themselves above all others, this must be no small compliment . . . The Great Law provided for adoption of those prisoners willing to accept its provisions. For those who did not, there awaited the possible death by torture that Colden had deplored. The Iroquois' extension of liberty and political participation to women surprised some eighteenth-century Euro-American observers. An unsigned contemporary manuscript in the New York State Library reported that when Iroquois men returned from hunting, they turned everything they had caught over to the women. "Indeed, every possession of the man except his horse & his rifle belong to the woman after marriage; she takes care of their Money and Gives it to her husband as she thinks his necessities require it," the unnamed observer wrote. The writer sought to refute assumptions that Iroquois women were "slaves of their husbands." "The truth is that Women are treated in a much more respectful manner than in England & that they possess a very superior power; this is to be attributed in a very great measure to their system of Education." The women, in addition to their political power and control of allocation from the communal stores, acted as communicators of culture between generations. It was they who educated the young. Another matter that surprised many contemporary observers was the Iroquois' sophisticated use of oratory. Their excellence with the spoken word, among other attributes, often caused Colden and others to compare the Iroquois to the Romans and Greeks. The French use of the term Iroquois to describe the confederacy was itself related to this oral tradition; it came from the practice of ending their orations with the two words hiro and kone. The first meant "I say" or "I have said" and the second was an exclamation of joy or sorrow according to the circumstances of the speech. The two words, joined and made subject to French pronunciation, became Iroquois. The English were often exposed to the Iroquois' oratorical skills at eighteenth-century treaty councils. Wynn R. Reynolds in 1957 examined 258 speeches by Iroquois at treaty councils between 1678 and 1776 and found that the speakers resembled the ancient Greeks in their primary emphasis on ethical proof. Reynolds suggested that the rich oratorical tradition may have been further strengthened by the exposure of children at an early age to a life in which oratory was prized and often heard. More than curiosity about an exotic culture that was believed to be a window on a lost European past, drew Euro-Americans to the Iroquois. There were more immediate and practical concerns, such as the Iroquois' commanding military strength, their role in the fur trade, their diplomatic influence among other Indians and the Six Nations' geographical position astride the only relatively level pass between the mountains that otherwise separated British and French settlement in North America. During the eighteenth century, English Colonial settlement was moving inland, along the river valleys. Only a few hundred miles west of what was then the frontier outpost of Albany, the French were building forts north and west of the Great Lakes. The French, constantly at war with England during this period, were also penetrating the Mississippi Valley. Between the English and the French stood the Iroquois and their allies, on land that stretched, northeast to southwest, along nearly the entire frontier of the British colonies. Before 1763, when the French were expelled from North America by the British and their Iroquois allies, the Six Nations enjoyed considerable diplomatic leverage, which was exploited with skill. The Iroquois' geographical position was important at a time when communication was limited to the speed of transportation, and the speed of transportation on land was limited to that of a man or woman on horseback. The Iroquois controlled the most logical transportation route between the coast and the interior, a route through which the Erie Canal was built in the early nineteenth century. Although the pass controlled by the Iroquois was relatively level compared to the land around it, the area was still thickly wooded. It was part of a wilderness that seemed so vast to the Euro-Americans that many of them assumed that Indians would always have a place in which to hunt, no matter how much of Europe's excess population crossed the Atlantic. The rivalry between the British and French was on Colden's mind as he wrote the introduction to the 1747 edition of his History of the Five Indian Nations: The former part of this history was written at New-York in the year 1727, on Occasion of a Dispute which then happened, between the government of New-York and some Merchants. The French of Canada had the whole Fur Trade with the Western Indians in their Hands, and were supplied with their Woollen Goods from New-York. Mr. Burnet, who took more Pains to be Informed of the Interest of the People he was set over, and of making them useful to their Mother Country than Plantation Governors usually do, took the Trouble of Perusing all the Registers of the Indian Affairs on this occasion. He from thence conceived of what Consequences the Fur Trade with the Western Indians was of to Great Britain . . . the Manufactures depending on it. The Iroquois had not only the best route for trade and other transport, but also plenty of beaver. Colden recognized that to whom went the beaver might go the victory in any future war between France and Britain in North America. The mid-eighteenth century was a time when two nations could not join in battle unless they occupied neighboring real estate. The Iroquois' position indicated to Colden that their friendship, as well as business relations, must be procured if the English were to gain an advantage over the French: He [Burnet] considered what influence this trade had on the numerous nations of Indians living on this vast continent of North America, and who surround the British Colonies; and what advantage it might be if they were influenced by the English in case of a war with France, and how prejudicial, on the other hand, if they were directed by the French Counsels. The New York legislature soon recognized this reasoning, and acted to channel trade from the French to the English, Colden wrote. Such steps were not uncommon in the economic cold war between England and France during the middle of the century. The drawing up of sides that Colden advised was but another small step along the road to the final conflict in North America between these two European Colonial powers. As with the building of empires before and since the eighteenth century, trade and the flag often traveled in tandem, and economic conflict preceded overt military warfare. Robert Newbold (The Albany Congress and Plan of Union, 1955) assigned the competition for diminishing stocks of beaver a central role in the conflict between the British and French empires in North America during this period. To Colden, trade with the Six Nations also presented an opportunity to mix and mingle with the Indians, and to convert them to the British Colonial interest: I shall only add that Mr. Burnet's scheme had the desired effect: The English have gained the Trade which the French, before that, had with the Indians to the Westward of New York; and whereas, before that time, a very inconsiderable number of men were employed in the Indian Trade Abroad. Now above three hundred men are employed at the Trading House at Oswego alone, and the Indian trade has since that time yearly increased so far, that several Indian nations come now every summer to trade there, whose Names were not so much as known by the English before. As Colden had noted in his essay, the British were assembling a wide-ranging program of trade and diplomatic activity to insure that in any future war the Iroquois' powerful confederacy would side with them. Although, when the continent and its history are taken as a whole, the French were better at mixing with Indians and securing their alliance, at this particular time and in this place the English had the upper hand. This was accomplished through a series of adroit diplomatic moves, many of which were performed with the help of a group of men who, although English in background, were at home with the Iroquois as well. The importance of the British alliance with the Iroquois was enhanced not only by the Six Nations' strategic position and military strength, but also by the Iroquois' diplomatic influence with many of the Indian nations of eastern North America. English and American writers remarked at the Iroquois' diplomatic and military power as early as 1687, when Governor Dongan of New York wrote that the Iroquois "go as far as the South Sea, the North West Passage and Florida to warr." The Iroquois did more than wage war; they were renowned in peacetime as traders, and as orators who traveled the paths that linked Indian nations together across most of eastern North America. When the English colonists had business with Indians in Ohio, and other parts of the Mississippi Valley, they often consulted the Iroquois. Clark Wissler classified many of the Indian nations situated around the Six Nations, including the Cherokees to the south, as members of the "Iroquois Family." The Iroquois' language was the language of diplomacy among Indians along much of the English Colonial frontier. These nations often contributed to, and borrowed from, practices of others. There is evidence that the Iroquoian form of government was imitated by other Indian nations. One way that the English acted to maintain their alliance with the Iroquois, noted previously, was trade. The giving of gifts, an Indian custom, was soon turned by the English to their own ends. Gift giving was used by the English to introduce to Indians, and to invite their dependence on, the produce of England's embryonic industrial revolution. The English found it rather easy to outdo the French, whose industries were more rudimentary at the time, in gift giving. The Iroquois -- premier military, political, and diplomatic figures on the frontier -- were showered with gifts. By 1744, the English effort was bearing fruit. At a treaty council during that year, Canassatego, the Iroquois chief, told Colonial commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia: The Six Nations have a great Authority and Influence over the sundry tribes of Indians in alliance with the French, and Particularly the Praying Indians, formerly a part with ourselves, who stand in the very gates of the French, and to shew our further Care, we have engaged these very Indians, and other Indian allies of the French for you. They will not join the French against you. They have agreed with us before we set out. We have put the spirit of Antipathy against the French in those People. Our Interest is very Considerable with them, and many other [Indian] Nations, and as far as it ever extends, we shall use it for your service. During the 1744 treaty conference, the British commissioners traded with the Iroquois goods they held to be worth 220 pounds sterling and 15 shillings, including 200 shirts, four duffle blankets, forty-seven guns, one pound of vermillion, 1000 flints, four dozen Jews Harps, 202 bars of lead, two quarters shot, and two half-barrels of gun powder. The preponderance of military items indicated the strength of the alliance, and the expectation of hostilities with the French, against whom Canassatego had pledged the Iroquois' aid. Although some of the older chiefs complained that the Indians ought to make do with their traditional clothes, foods, and weapons, the British gifts and trade items apparently were eagerly accepted. The accommodating English even established a separate gift-presentation ceremony for the chiefs, who were forbidden by the Great Law to take their share from the officially presented gifts until other tribal members had picked them over. The English were not giving because they were altruistic; by showering the Iroquois with gifts, the English not only helped secure their alliance, but also made the Indians dependent on some of England's manufactures, thus creating new markets for the Crown. If, for example, the Iroquois took up European arms and laid down their traditional weapons, they also became dependent on a continuing supply of powder and lead. According to Jacobs, the British skillfully interwove the political and military objectives of imperialism with the economic objectives of mercantilism. Much of the gift giving took place at treaty councils. Historically these meetings were some of the most important encounters of the century. By cementing an alliance with the Iroquois, the British were determining the course of the last in a series of Colonial wars with France in North America. The councils were conducted with solemnity befitting the occasion, a style that shows through their proceedings, which were published and widely read in the colonies and in Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, the only way to carry on serious diplomatic business was face to face. There were, of course, no telephones, no telegraph, and no shuttle diplomacy. Where it existed at all, mail service was slow, expensive, and often unreliable. It often took a letter as long to get from Boston to Charleston as from either city to London -- at least a month, more likely six weeks, depending on the weather and other unpredictable circumstances. On the English Colonial side of the table (or the council fire) sat such notables as Benjamin Franklin, his son William, William Johnson, Conrad Weiser, and Colden. The Iroquois' most eloquent sachems often spoke for the Six Nations, men such as Canassatego, Hendrick, and Shickallemy. These, and other lesser-known chiefs, were impressive speakers and adroit negotiators. Canassatego was praised for his dignity and forcefulness of speech and his uncanny understanding of the whites. At the 1744 treaty council, Canassatego reportedly carried off "all honors in oratory, logical argument, and adroit negotiation," according to Witham Marshe, who observed the treaty council. Marshe wrote afterward that "Ye Indians seem superior to ye commissioners in point of sense and argument." His words were meant for Canassatego. An unusually tall man in the days when the average height was only slightly over five feet, Canassatego was well muscled, especially in the legs and chest, and athletic well past his fiftieth year. His size and booming voice, aided by a commanding presence gave him what later writers would call charisma -- conversation stopped when he walked into a room. Outgoing to the point of radiance, Canassatego, by his own admission, drank too much of the white man's rum, and when inebriated was known for being unflatteringly direct in front of people he disliked. Because of his oratory, which was noted for both dignity and power, Canassatego was the elected speaker of the Grand Council at Onondaga during these crucial years. Shickallemy was known among his own people as Swatane. As the Onondaga council's main liaison with the Shawnees, Conestogas, and Delawares, he was frequently in contact with the governments of Pennsylvania and New York, whose agents learned early that if they had business with these allied nations, they had business with Shickallemy, who handled their "European Affairs." Unlike many of the Iroquois chiefs, he was not a great orator. He was known for being a gentleman and a statesman -- sensitive enough to deal with the Iroquois Indian allies, but also firm enough to deal with the whites beyond the frontier. In 1731, Governor Gordon of Pennsylvania gave to Shickallemy one of the first British Colonial messages ' seeking alliance against the French. In the swath of wooded hills that lay between the colonies and the governing seat of the Iroquois league, it was Shickallemy's sign -- that of the turtle, his clan -- that guaranteed safe passage to all travelers, British and Indian. In the Iroquoian language his name meant "the enlightener," and when he died in 1749, one year before Canassatego's death, word went out all through the country, on both sides of the frontier, that a lamp had gone out. Shickallemy's life illustrated just how permeable the frontier could be during the eighteenth century. Born a Frenchman, he was taken prisoner at an early age by the Iroquois. He was later adopted by them and eventually elevated to membership in the Grand Council of the Confederacy as a pine-tree chief. Shickallemy, as an Iroquois chief, cultivated the friendship of the British colonists, and tried to pass this affection to his children, the youngest son of whom was Logan, who turned against the Euro-Americans only after most of his family was murdered by land squatters in 1774. Logan's speech after the murders was published by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia and passed on, from there, to millions of nineteenth-century school children through McGuffy's Readers. Hendrick's Iroquois name was Tiyanoga. Like Canassatego, he was described as one who could combine traditional Iroquoian dignity with forcefulness and brutal frankness when occasion called. The principal chief of the Mohawks, his warriors guarded the "eastern door" of the Iroquois longhouse, through which most diplomats and traders passed. Hendrick, like Canassatego, was described as an eloquent speaker. "No one equalled his force and eloquence," wrote Milton W. Hamilton. Hendrick, like some of the other chiefs, was fluent in English, but rarely spoke the language at treaty councils or in other contact with Euro-Americans. He apparently enjoyed eavesdropping on colonists' comments about the ignorant Indians who surely, they thought, couldn't understand what they were saying. Hendrick was a close friend of Sir William Johnson; it was this relationship, more than any other individual bond, which kept the Iroquois allied with the English until the French were expelled from the continent in 1763. If it is surprising to find on the Indian side of the table sachems bearing names usually associated with European nobles, it may be just as surprising to find on the English side men who had absorbed so much of Indian life that they were at home on both sides of the frontier. During the period when the English and Iroquois were allied, these men -- English and Iroquois -- mixed and mingled freely, sitting in each other's councils, and living each other's lives. Probably the most important Englishman on the frontier was Sir William Johnson, Baronet. Johnson may have been one of the men Franklin had in mind when he wrote that English Colonial society had trouble maintaining its hold on many men once they had tasted Indian life. An unidentified friend of Johnson's wrote of him: Something in his natural temper responds to Indian ways. The man holding up a spear he has just thrown, upon which a fish is now impaled; the man who runs, with his toes turned safely inward, through a forest where a greenhorn could not walk, the man sitting silent, gun on knee, in a towering black glade, watching by candle flame for the movement of antlers toward a tree whose bark has already been streaked by the tongues of deer; the man who can read a bent twig like an historical volume -- this man is William Johnson, and he has learned all these skills from the Mohawks.[1] If Franklin was the most influential single individual at the Albany congress, Johnson was not far behind. It was Johnson who persuaded the reluctant Iroquois to attend the congress, and who helped maintain an alliance that was often strained severely by conflicts over land, as well as the colonists' refusal to unite in face of the French threat. Johnson was characterized by the Mohawks at the Albany congress as "our lips and our tongue and our mouth." Johnson often dressed as an Iroquois, led war parties, sat on the Great Council of the league at times, and pursued Mohawk women relentlessly. His freelance sexual exploits were legend on both sides of the Atlantic; Johnson was said to have fathered a hundred Mohawk children. Such accounts have been disputed, but it is relatively certain that he fathered at least eight children among the Mohawks. The Mohawks did not seem to mind his fecundity; they did not worry about dilution of their gene pool because racial ethnocentricity was not widely practiced in Iroquoian culture. In fact, the Mohawks at the time appreciated Johnson's contributions because their population had been depleted by war, and since theirs was a matrilineal society, every child he bore became a Mohawk. The shade of one's skin meant less to the Mohawks than whether one accepted the laws of the Great Peace, which contained no racial bars to membership in the Six Nations. Johnson's sexual exploits sometimes met with wry reproval from some of his white friends. Peter Wraxall, a former aide to Johnson, wrote to him after hearing that he was suffering from syphilis: "I thank God the pain in your breast is removed. I hope your cough will soon follow. As to the rest, you deserve the scourge and I won't say I pity you." Johnson dealt extensively and maintained a close friendship with Colden. He also was a close friend of Hendrick, with whom he could speak fluent Iroquois. If the two men wished, they could also communicate in English, since Hendrick spoke it well, although he rarely spoke the language at treaty councils. The experiences of Johnson, who was at least as comfortable among the Iroquois as he was among the English (his knowledge of England came from Iroquois chiefs who had been there) illustrates how permeable the Anglo-Iroquois frontier was at this crucial juncture in Colonial history. Perhaps the most important Pennsylvania colonial at the treaty councils was Conrad Weiser, a Mohawk by adoption who supplied many of the treaty accounts which Franklin published. A close friend of Franklin's, Weiser ranked with Johnson in the esteem given him by the Iroquois. Canassatego and Weiser were particularly close, and when the Iroquois adopted him, the sachem said that "we divided him into two parts. One we kept for ourselves, and one we left to you." He was addressing "Brother Onas," the Iroquoian name for the Pennsylvania Colonial governor. During the 1744 Lancaster treaty, Canassatego saluted Weiser: We hope that Tarachawagon [Weiser's Iroquois name] will be preserved by the good Spirit to a good old Age; when he is gone under Ground, it will be then time enough to look out for another, and no doubt that amongst so many Thousands as there are in the World, one such man may be found, who will serve both parties with the same Fidelity as Tarachawagon does; while he lives here there is no room to complain. Weiser was the Iroquois' unofficial host at the 1744 Lancaster treaty. He bought them tobacco in hundred-pound sacks, found hats for many of the chiefs, and cracked jokes with Canassatego. Weiser also warned the colonists not to mock the Iroquois if they found the Indians' manners strange. He told the colonists that many of the Iroquois understood English, although they often pleaded ignorance of the language so that they could gather the colonists' honest appraisals of Indians and Indian society. When the Iroquois asked that rum-selling traders be driven from their lands, Weiser made a show by smashing some of the traders' kegs. When elderly Shickallemy became ill in 1747, Weiser dropped his official duties to care for the ailing sachem, and to make sure that blankets and food were delivered to his family during the winter. The importance accorded treaty councils usually meant that the meetings would last at least two weeks, and sometimes longer. Most of the councils were held in the warmer season of the year, with June and July being the most favored months. It was during those months that oppressive heat and humidity enveloped the coastal cities and insects carried into them diseases such as malaria. It was a good time to retreat to the mountains -- to Lancaster or Albany, or Easton, all frequent sites for treaty councils. At treaty councils, leaders of both Indian and Euro-American cultures mingled not only at official meetings, but at convivial, off-the-record sessions as well. The atmosphere was that of a meeting of statesmen from co-equal nations, by most accounts an excellent atmosphere for the exchange of ideas of all kinds. This was especially true during the quarter-century before 1763, when the Crown's need for Iroquois alliance enforced a respect for cultural practices that some of the more ethnocentric Colonial commissioners found distasteful. The treaty councils were the primary means not only for maintaining the Anglo-Iroquois alliance against the French, but for addressing matters, such as illegal land squatting, which often strained the alliance. Appeals by the Indians for Colonial commissioners to control the activities of their own citizens were standard fare at the opening of most treaty councils. Once such problems had been addressed, the parties got down to diplomacy. "Shining the covenant chain" was the metaphor most often used at the time for such activity. The tone of the treaty councils was that of a peer relationship; the leaders of sovereign nations met to address mutual problems. The dominant assumptions of the Enlightenment, near its height during the mid-eighteenth century, cast Indians as equals in intellectual abilities and moral sense to the progressive Euro-American minds of the time. It was not until the nineteenth century that expansionism brought into its service the full flower of systematic racism that defined Indians as children, or wards, in the eyes of Euro-American law, as well as popular discourse. Interest in treaty accounts was high enough by 1736 for a Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, to begin publication and distribution of them. During that year, Franklin published his first treaty account, recording the proceedings of a meeting in his home city during September and October of that year. During the next twenty-six years, Franklin's press produced thirteen treaty accounts. During those years, Franklin became involved to a greater degree in the Indian affairs of Pennsylvania. By the early 1750s, Franklin was not only printing treaties, but representing Pennsylvania as an Indian commissioner as well. It was his first diplomatic assignment. Franklin's attention to Indian affairs grew in tandem with his advocacy of a federal union of the colonies, an idea that was advanced by Canassatego and other Iroquois chiefs in treaty accounts published by Franklin's press as early as 1744. Franklin's writings indicate that as he became more deeply involved with the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, he picked up ideas from them concerning not only federalism, but concepts of natural rights, the nature of society and man's place in it, the role of property in society, and other intellectual constructs that would be called into service by Franklin as he and other American revolutionaries shaped an official ideology for the new United States. Franklin's intellectual interaction with Indian peoples began, however, while he was a Philadelphia printer who was helping to produce what has since been recognized as one of the few indigenous forms of American literature to be published during the Colonial period. In the century before the American Revolution, some fifty treaty accounts were published, covering forty-five treaty councils. Franklin's press produced more than a quarter of the total. These documents were one indication that a group of colonies occupied by transplanted Europeans were beginning to develop a new sense of themselves; a sense that they were not solely European, but American as well. Benjamin Franklin was one of a remarkable group who helped transform the mind of a group of colonies that were becoming a nation. It would be a nation that combined the heritages of two continents -- that of Europe, their ancestral home, and America, the new home in which their experiment would be given form and expression. ------------- 1. E. B. O'Callaghan, ea., John R. Brodhead, esq., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed Parsons & Co., 1855), Vol. VI, p. 741. ------------------------------------------------------------------ C H A P T E R F O U R Such an Union -------------------------------------------------------- It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies. -- Benjamin Franklin to James Parker, 1751 -------------------------------------------------------- By 1744, Benjamin Franklin had lived in Philadelphia little more than two decades. Having fled what he regarded as Boston's spirit-crushing Puritan orthodoxy, Franklin's iconoclastic wit found a more comfortable home in Quaker Philadelphia. The city was only a quarter century old when Franklin arrived at the age of seventeen, a dirty, penniless young man looking for work as a printer's apprentice. During the two decades between his 1723 arrival and 1744, Franklin not only found work, but set up his own press, and prospered along with the Quaker capital. With 10,000 residents and a fertile hinterland much larger and more productive than Boston's, young Philadelphia already was approaching the older city in size. By 1744, his thirty-eighth year, Franklin had a thriving printing business that published one of the largest newspapers in the colonies, the Pennsylvania Gazette, as well as Poor Richard's Almanack, which appeared annually. As the province's official printer, Franklin ran off his press all of Pennsylvania's paper money, state documents and laws, as well as job printing. As the postmaster, he had free access to the mails to distribute his publications. If a family, especially a Pennsylvania family, kept printed matter other than the Bible in the house, it was very likely that whatever it was -- newspaper, almanac or legal documents -- bore Franklin's imprint. Franklin had done more for Philadelphia than fill its book stalls (one of which he owned) with literature. He had helped clean the city's streets and construct a drainage system unparalleled in its time; he had helped form a city fire department, a hospital, and a library; he would soon be testing electricity, and was already thinking of how it might be used for household lighting. While he detested religious orthodoxy (especially the Puritan variety) he shared one Puritan attribute