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.
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F O R G O T T E N
F O U N D E R S
----------------------------------------
By Bruce E. Johansen
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Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois
and the Rationale for the
American Revolution
1 9 8 2
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
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It is now time for a destructive order to be reversed,
and it is well to inform other races that the aboriginal
cultures of North America were not devoid of beauty.
Futhermore, in denying the Indian his ancestral rights
and heritages the white race is but robbing itself.
America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a
Native School of thought.
-- Chief Luther Standing Bear
Lakota (Sioux)
Land of the Spotted Eagle
--------------------------------------------------------
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
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C H A P T E R O N E
A Composite Culture
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When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman
historians wrote with as little imagination as did the
European historians who have written of the white man's
conquest of America. . . .
-- Felix Cohen,
"Americanizing the White Man,"
American Scholar, 1952
--------------------------------------------------------
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.
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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
with the merchants of young, bustling Philadelphia. He believed
that hard work warmed God's heart or, as he wrote in Poor Richard
for 1736: "God helps those who help themselves."
Like any publisher of ambition, Franklin always kept a sharp
eye out for salable properties. During 1736, he had started
printing small books containing the proceedings of Indian treaty
councils. The treaties, one of the first distinctive forms of
indigenous American literature, sold quite well, which pleased
Franklin. Filling the seemingly insatiable appetite for
information about the Indians and the lands in which they lived
that existed at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, Franklin's
press turned out treaty accounts until 1762 when, journeying to
England to represent Pennsylvania in the royal court, he found
several English publishers in competition with him.
One warm summer day in 1744, Franklin was balancing the books
of his printing operation when Conrad Weiser, the Indian
interpreter and envoy to the Iroquois, appeared at his door with a
new treaty manuscript -- the official transcript of the recently
completed meeting between envoys from Pennsylvania, Virginia,
Maryland, and the sachems of the Six Nations confederacy at nearby
Lancaster. Weiser, an old friend of Franklin's, explained that
this was probably the most interesting and noteworthy treaty
account he had ever brought in for publication. At last, said
Weiser, the Iroquois had made a definite commitment toward the
Anglo-Iroquois alliance that Pennsylvania and other Colonial
governments had been seeking for more than ten years.
The Iroquois, explained Weiser, were being careful. If they
were to ally with the English, they wanted the colonials to unify
their management of the Indian trade, and to do something about
the crazy patchwork of diplomacy that resulted when each colony
handled its own affairs with the Iroquois.
Taking the handwritten manuscript from Weiser, Franklin sat at
his desk and quickly thumbed through it, reading a few passages,
bringing to life in his mind the atmosphere of the frontier
council. The treaty had two main purposes, Franklin surmised. The
first was to deal with a recurring problem: Indian complaints that
Englishmen, mostly Scotch-Irish frontiersmen, were moving onto
Indian land without permission, disrupting hunting and social
life. The second, and more important, objective was to polish the
covenant chain, to secure the alliance against the French.
The Iroquois party consisted of 245 chiefs, warriors, women,
and children. Weiser met the party outside Lancaster, throwing his
arms around his friend Canassatego who, at age sixty, was entering
his last years as speaker of the great council at Onondaga. Weiser
bid all the Iroquois welcome to Pennsylvania, joking in the
Iroquois language with the chiefs, who counted him as one of their
own, an adopted Mohawk who often traveled to Onondaga to sit in on
the councils of the league.
Weiser knew that the Iroquois expected their protocol to be
followed. As guests, this meant that they had a right to adequate
food and lodging after the long and tiring trip. Weiser promptly
ordered a steer killed for them. While the steer was being carved
into steaks, he purchased 300 pounds of flour, as well as other
provisions, charging all of it to the provincial government. He
treated the chiefs to "a glass of rum," and then another. The
chiefs, "desireous . . . to have one more dram which I could not
deny them," asked for more, and Weiser again bought drinks all
around. The next day, he entered on his expense ledger a
half-dozen sheep, 250 pounds of flour, bread, and "other
necessities."
The Iroquois delegates arrived at Lancaster's courthouse
Friday, June 22, 1744. A group of Colonial delegates, led by
George Thomas, Esq., were waiting with "Wine, Punch, Pipes and
Tobacco." The Colonial delegates "drank to the health of the Six
Nations" and then adjourned the meeting until Monday to give the
Iroquois an opportunity to rest.
For most of the next two weeks, the Iroquois and Colonial
delegates discussed the invasion by squatters of the eastern
slopes of the Appalachians. The delegates from Maryland and
Virginia attended because both colonies claimed the land in
question. Governor Thomas opened the first business session of the
council Monday, June 25, by observing that during a treaty council
at Philadelphia two years earlier, the Iroquois had requested a
meeting with the governors of Maryland and Virginia "concerning
some lands in the back parts of [those] Provinces which they claim
a right to from their Conquests over the Ancient Possessors, and
which have been settled by some of the Inhabitants of those
Governments [Maryland and Virginia] without their [Iroquois']
consent, or any purchase made from them." Thomas reported that "an
unfortunate skirmish" had taken place between colonists' militia
and war parties from the Six Nations in the disputed territory.
Thomas asserted that this problem ought to be solved because the
Iroquois were strategic to the British defense against the French
in North America: "by their Situation . . . if Friends [the
Iroquois] are capable of defending [Colonial] settlements; if
enemies, of making cruel Ravages upon them; if Neuters, they may
deny the French a passage through their country and give us timely
Notice of their designs."
The representatives of Maryland were not as conciliatory as
Thomas. Speaking to the Iroquois, they said:
The Great King of England, and his Subjects, have always
possessed the Province of Maryland free and undisturbed
from any Claim by the Six Nations for above one hundred
Years past, and your not saying anything to us before,
convinces us you thought you had no Pretence to any land
in Maryland; nor can we yet find out to what Lands, or
under what Title you make your Claim.
The Iroquois waited a day, until June 26, to reply, as was
their custom. The day's delay was meant to signal grave concern
over the issue at hand. In some cases, the delay was just a matter
of being polite; in this case, however, it was sincere. On Tuesday
afternoon, Canassatego rose before the assembly, assuming the
posture that had caused many colonists to compare him to their
imagined Roman and Greek ancestors. He said:
Brother, the Governor of Maryland,
When you mentioned the Affair of the Land Yesterday, you
went back to Old Times, and told us that you had been in
Possession of the Province of Maryland for above one
hundred Years; but what is one hundred Years in
comparison to the length of Time since our Claim began?
Since we came out of this ground? For we must tell you
that long before one hundred years our Ancestors came
out of this very ground, and their children have
remained here ever since. . . . You came out of the
ground in a country that lies beyond the Seas; there you
may have a just Claim, but here you must allow us to be
your elder Brethren, and the lands to[o] belong[ed] to
us before you knew anything of them.
Canassatego continued his argument, saying that some Europeans
assumed, in error, that the Indians would have perished "if they
had not come into the country and furnished us with Strowds and
Hatchets, and Guns, and other things necessary for the support of
Life." The Indians, the sachem reminded the colonists, "lived
before they came amongst us, and as well, or better, if we may
believe what our forefathers have taught us. We had then room
enough, and plenty of Deer, which was easily caught."
By July 2, the Iroquois had been given vague assurances by the
Colonial commissioners that the flow of settlers into the disputed
lands would be controlled as much as possible, a promise the
Colonial officials did not have the armed force to implement. A
few other matters that had precipitated conflict between the
Iroquois and the English, such as the murder of Indian trader John
Armstrong by the Delawares, were discussed. As the treaty council
entered its last few days, talk turned to cementing the alliance,
shining the covenant chain. Canassatego assured the Colonial
delegates that "we will take all the care we can to prevent an
enemy from coming onto British lands." To insure the continuance
of alliance, the sachem also suggested that the colonists put
their own house in order by combining into a single federal union.
Closing his final speech on July 4, 1744, Canassatego told the
assembled Iroquois and colonial commissioners:
Our wise forefathers established union and amity between
the Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has
given us great weight and authority with our neighboring
Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your
observing the same methods our wise forefathers have
taken you will acquire much strength and power;
therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with
one another.[1]
Governor Thomas's final response, which followed
Canassatego's, did not mention the sachems' proposal that the
colonies unite into a confederacy on the Iroquoian model. Thomas
also seemed to have missed Canassatego's assertion on June 26 that
the colonists ought to consider the Iroquois their elder brethren.
"We are all subjects, as well as you, of the great King beyond the
Water," Thomas said. The Iroquois, following their custom of
granting each speaker his say without interruption, did not
dispute Thomas's assertion, although Canassatego had made it clear
that they did not submit to the king's authority. The Iroquois
regarded themselves as independent, beholden to no European power.
They were, in fact, courted eagerly during the two decades before
1763 by both England and France.
The 1744 treaty, one of the more dramatic during this period,
impressed Franklin when the interpreter's record was delivered to
him a few weeks later. He printed 200 extra copies and sent them
to England. Within three years after he printed the proceedings of
the 1744 treaty, with Canassatego's advice on Colonial union,
Franklin became involved with Cadwallader Colden on the same
subject. A new edition of Colden's History of the Five Indian
Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America, first
published in 1727, was issued during 1747. Franklin was a frequent
correspondent with Colden at this time; both had similar interests
in politics, natural science, and Deism. They got on together well
and often until 1765 when Colden, then lieutenant governor of New
York, was burned in effigy for enforcing the Stamp Act.
Shortly after its publication in 1747, Franklin asked Colden
for a copy of his new edition, and read and appraised it for its
author. Franklin then began his own fervent campaign for a federal
union of the British colonies, a cause he did not forsake until
the United States was formed a quarter-century later.
Franklin requested a copy of Colden's book at a time when
alliance with the Iroquois was assuming a new urgency for
Pennsylvania. During 1747, French and Dutch privateers had raided
along the Delaware River, threatening Philadelphia itself for a
time. In response, Franklin organized a volunteer militia that
elected its own officers (a distinctly Iroquoian custom). The
militia grew year by year, repeatedly electing Franklin its
colonel until the British, worried about the growth of indigenous
armed forces in the colonies, ordered it disbanded in 1756.
Franklin thought enough of Colden's history to ask for fifty
copies to sell through his own outlets. Franklin did not, however,
approve of the fact that the book had been "puffed up" with "the
Charters &c of this Province, all under the Title of the History
of the Five Nations." Franklin deplored such padding, which he
called "a common Trick of Booksellers." Such puffery
notwithstanding, Franklin was concerned that one bookseller, by
the name of Read, was not giving Colden's work sufficient
advertising in Philadelphia. "In our last two Papers he has
advertis'd generally that he has a parcel of books to sell, Greek,
Latin, French and English, but makes no particular mention of the
Indian History; it is therefore no wonder that he has sold none of
them, as he told me a few days since." Franklin complained that no
one in Philadelphia except himself had read the book, and he
thought it "well wrote, entertaining and instructive" and "useful
to all those colonies who have anything to do with Indian
Affairs."
As early as 1750, Franklin recognized that the economic and
political interests of the British colonies were diverging from
those of the mother country. About the same time, he began to
think of forms of political confederation that might suit a dozen
distinct, often mutually suspicious, political entities. A federal
structure such as the Iroquois Confederacy, which left each state
in the union to manage its own internal affairs and charged the
confederate government with prosecuting common, external matters,
must have served as an expedient, as well as appealing, example.
As Franklin began to express his thoughts on political and
military union of the colonies, he was already attempting to tie
them together culturally, through the establishment of a postal
system and the American Philosophical Society, which drew to
Philadelphia the premier Euro-American scholars of his day.
During 1751, Franklin read a pamphlet written by Archibald
Kennedy titled "The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the
Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest Considered."
Kennedy, collector of customs and receiver general for the
province of New York at the time that he wrote the brochure,
maintained that alliance with the Iroquois was "of no small
importance to the trade of Great Britain, as to the peace and
prosperity of the colonies." Indian traders, called "a tribe of
harpies" by Kennedy, "have so abused, defrauded and deceived those
poor, innocent, well-meaning people." Kennedy asserted that fraud
in the Indian trade could be reduced if that trade were regulated
through a single Indian commissioner, instead of a different one
for each colony, which was the existing system. As with Kennedy,
so also with the Iroquois; they too much resented the behavior of
the traders. Canassatego had told the Colonial commissioners at
Lancaster in 1744 that the Indians would be poor "as long as there
are too many Indian traders among us." Resolution of this problem
was the key to maintaining the Anglo-Iroquois alliance in
Kennedy's opinion. The appointment of a single Indian commissioner
would also be a small step along the road to Colonial
confederation for mutual defense. The Iroquois had been advocating
a unified Colonial military command for at least seven years --
since Canassatego's speech to the 1744 Lancaster treaty. Under
Kennedy's scheme, each colony would have contributed men and money
to the common military force in proportion to its population.
Franklin was sent Kennedy's brochure by James Parker, his New
York City printing partner, from whose press it had been issued.
Following the reading of the brochure, Franklin cultivated
Kennedy's friendship; the two men consulted together on the Albany
Plan of Union (which included Kennedy's single-Indian agent idea).
At the Albany congress itself, Franklin called Kennedy "a
gentleman of great knowledge in Public Affairs."
After he read Kennedy's brochure, Franklin wrote to Parker
that "I am of the opinion, with the public-spirited author, that
securing the Friendship of the Indians is of the greatest
consequence for these Colonies." To Franklin, "the surest means of
doing it are to regulate the Indian Trade, so as to convince them
[the Indians] that they may have the best and cheapest Goods, and
the fairest dealings, with the English." Franklin also thought, in
agreement with Kennedy, that the colonists should accept the
Iroquois' advice to form a union in common defense under a common,
federal government:
And to unite the several Governments as to form a
strength that the Indians may depend on in the case of a
Rupture with the French, or apprehend great Danger from,
if they break with us. This union of the colonies, I
apprehend, is not to be brought about by the means that
have heretofore been used for that purpose.
Franklin then asked why the colonists found it so difficult to
unite in common defense, around common interests, when the
Iroquois had done so long ago. In context, his use of the term
"ignorant savages" seems almost like a backhanded slap at the
colonists, who may have thought themselves superior to the Indians
but who, in Franklin's opinion, could learn something from the Six
Nations about political unity:
It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of
Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme
for such an Union and be able to execute it in such a
manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears
indissoluble, and yet a like union should be
impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.
Within a year of reading Kennedy's brochure, Franklin, whose
role in Pennsylvania's Indian affairs was growing, prepared a
report on the expenses of the province's Indian agents. Part of
the report was sharply critical of Indian traders:
Some very unfit Persons are at present employed in that
business [the Indian trade]. We hope that the Governor
will enjoin the justices of the County Courts to be more
careful in the future whom they recommend for Licenses;
and whatever is thought further necessary to enforce the
Laws now being, for regulating the Indian Trade and
Traders, may be considered by the ensuing Assembly. . . .
Recognizing that the Indians' complaints about the conduct of
English traders had to be addressed if the Anglo-Iroquois alliance
was to be maintained, Franklin took a major step in his personal
life. During 1753 Franklin, who had heretofore only printed Indian
treaties, accepted an appointment by the Pennsylvania government
as one of the colony's commissioners at a meeting with the Six
Nations planned for later that year in Carlisle.
That appointment was no more than an official recognition of
what had already become obvious. Franklin had gradually emerged as
an important part of the British diplomatic offensive with the
Iroquois, an offensive that grew in activity until the conclusion
of the war with France in 1763. Pennsylvania alone spent 1259
pounds, 5 shillings, 11 pence on Indian affairs during 1750, and
about the same amount in 1751. Expenditures on Indian affairs had
increased from 13 pounds in 1734 to 143 pounds in 1735, and 303
pounds in 1744, the year of the Lancaster treaty council during
which Canassatego issued his challenge to the colonies to unite.
These figures indicate that Franklin, Kennedy, and Colden were not
alone in their insistence that an alliance with the Iroquois and
other Indians along the Northern frontier was important to the
security of the British colonies as against the French.
During the year before Franklin attended his first treaty
council in an official capacity, the possibility of conflict with
the French was accentuated by a French advance into the Ohio
Valley. During June 1752, French troops attacked the Indian town
of Pickawillany. The Pennsylvania Assembly voted 800 pounds in aid
for the attacked Indians, 600 of which was earmarked for
"necessities of life," a euphemism for implements of war. The
French continued to advance during the balance of the year; French
forces probed deeper into the territories of Indians allied with
the Iroquois, the allies to whom Canassatego had referred in his
final speech at the 1744 treaty conference. French forts were
erected at Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango.
James Hamilton's proclamation appointing Franklin, Richard
Peters, and Issac Norris to treat with the Indians at Carlisle
specifically mentioned the alliance with the Twightwees, allies of
the Iroquois who lived in the Ohio Valley, and who had been
attacked by the French during 1752. The treaty, which started
Franklin's distinguished diplomatic career, began November 1,
1753. An account of the treaty was printed and sold by Franklin's
press. The major subject of the Carlisle treaty was mutual defense
against the French. The Indians also brought up the behavior of
traders, especially regarding their distribution of rum among
Indians. The chiefs said they wanted such practices stopped.
Scarrooyady, an Iroquois who had assumed a leadership role
following the death of Canassatego during 1750, told the
commissioners:
Your traders now bring us scarce any Thing but Rum and
Flour. They bring us little Powder and Lead, or other
valuable Goods. The rum ruins us. We beg you would
prevent its coming in such Quantities, by regulating the
Traders. . . . We desire it be forbidden, and none sold
in the Indian Country.
"Those wicked Whiskey Sellers, when they have once got the Indians
in Liquor, make them sell their very Clothes from their Backs,"
Scarrooyady emphasized. Concluding their report to the provincial
government on the treaty council, Franklin, Peters, and Norris
advised that the sachem's advice be taken. "That the traders are
under no Bonds . . . and by their own Intemperance, unfair
Dealings and Irregularities will, it is to be feared, entirely
estrange the affections of the Indians from the English."
Franklin's opposition to the liquor trade was strengthened the
night following the formal conclusion of the treaty council, when
many of the Indians there became very drunk and disorderly,
yielding to the addictive qualities of the liquids that their
chiefs had deplored only a few days earlier.
Two stated desires of the Iroquois leadership -- that the
Indian trade be regulated along with the illegal movement of
settlers into the interior, and that the colonies form a federal
union -- figured importantly in Franklin's plans for the Albany
congress of 1754. Plans for this, the most important intercolonial
conference in the years before the last North American war with
France, were being made at the time of the Carlisle treaty
conference. The London Board of Trade wrote to the New York
provincial government September 18, 1753, directing all the
colonies that had dealings with the Iroquois to join in "one
general Treaty to be made in his Majesty's name." It was a move
that began, in effect, to bring about the unified management of
Indian affairs that Colden, Kennedy, Franklin, and the Iroquois
had requested. Similar letters were sent to all colonies that
shared frontiers with the Iroquois and their Indian allies, from
Virginia northward. Franklin was appointed to represent
Pennsylvania at the Albany congress.
The congress convened June 19, 1754, five days after its
scheduled opening because many of the Iroquois and some of the
Colonial commissioners arrived late. Sessions of the congress, as
well as some meetings with the Iroquois delegations, took place at
the Albany courthouse, in the midst of a town that straddled the
frontier between the English and the Mohawks, who maintained the
"eastern door" of the Iroquois longhouse. Albany at the time was
still dominated by the architecture of the Dutch, who had started
the town before the English replaced them.
The Albany congress met for two interconnected reasons: to
cement the alliance with the Iroquois against the French and to
formulate and ratify a plan of union for the colonies. Franklin,
well known among the Indians and a fervent advocate of Colonial
union, was probably the most influential individual at the
congress.
Among the Iroquois who attended the congress, Hendrick, who
was called Tiyanoga among the Iroquois, received a special
invitation from James de Lancy, acting governor of New York, to
provide information on the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy
to the Colonial delegates. De Lancy, appointed as chief executive
of the congress by the Crown, met Saturday, June 29, with Hendrick
and other Iroquois sachems. During that meeting, Hendrick held a
chain belt that had been given him by the Colonial delegates. He
made of the belt a metaphor for political union. "So we will use
our endeavors to add as many links to it as lyes within our
power," Hendrick said. "In the meantime we desire that you will
strengthen yourselves, and bring as many into this Covenant Chain
as you possibly can."
During the evening of July 8, the Iroquois' last in Albany, de
Lancy met again with Hendrick and other Iroquois. During this
meeting, which was open to the public, Hendrick remarked (as had
Canassatego ten years earlier) about the strength that
confederation brought the Iroquois. De Lancy replied: "I hope that
by this present [Plan of] Union, we shall grow up to a great
height and be as powerful and famous as you were of old." The week
before this exchange, the final draft of Franklin's plan of union
had been approved by delegates to the congress, after extensive
debate.
Debates over the plan had taken more than two weeks. On June
24, the Colonial delegates voted without dissent in support of
Colonial union that, said the motion voted on, "[is] absolutely
necessary for their [the colonies'] security and defense." A
committee was appointed to "prepare and receive Plans or Schemes
for the Union of the Colonies." Franklin was a member of that
committee. Thomas Hutchinson, a delegate from Massachusetts who
also served on the committee, later pointed to Franklin as the
major contributor to the plan of union that emerged from the
deliberations of the committee: "The former [the Albany plan] was
the projection of Dr. F[ranklin] and prepared in part before he
had any consultation with Mr. H[utchinson], probably brought with
him from Philadelphia."
Franklin had drawn up "Short Hints Toward a Scheme for Uniting
the Northern Colonies," which he mailed to Colden and James
Alexander for comment June 8, 1754, eleven days before the Albany
congress opened. The committee on which Franklin and Hutchinson
sat developed its own set of "short hints" by June 28, four days
after its first meeting. This list was basically similar to, and
appears to have developed from, Franklin's own list.
Delegates to the Albany congress debated the committee's
"short hints" on eight occasions between de Lancy's two meetings
with Hendrick. On July 9, the Iroquois having left town, Franklin
was asked to draw up a plan of union based on the previous two
weeks' discussions. Franklin's final draft was commissioned two
weeks to the day after his Pennsylvania Gazette published the
"Join or Die" cartoon, one of the first graphic editorials to
appear in an American newspaper, and a forceful statement in favor
of Colonial union.
During debates over the plan of union, Franklin cited
Kennedy's brochure and pointed to "the strength of the League
which has bound our Friends the Iroquois together in a common tie
which no crisis, however grave, since its foundation has managed
to disrupt." Recalling the words of Hendrick, Franklin stressed
the fact that the individual nations of the confederacy managed
their own internal affairs without interference from the Grand
Council. "Gentlemen," Franklin said, peering over the spectacles
he had invented, "I propose that all the British American colonies
be federated under a single legislature and a president-general to
be appointed by the Crown." He then posed the same rhetorical
question he had in the letter to Parker: if the Iroquois can do
it, why can't we?
The plan of union that emerged from Franklin's pen was a
skillful diplomatic melding of concepts that took into
consideration the Crown's demands for control, the colonists'
desires for autonomy in a loose union, and the Iroquois' stated
advocacy of a Colonial union similar to theirs in structure and
function. For the Crown, the plan provided administration by a
president-general, to be appointed and supported by the Crown. The
individual colonies were promised that they could retain their own
constitutions "except in the particulars wherein a change may be
directed by the said Act [the plan of union] as hereafter
follows."
The retention of internal sovereignty within the individual
colonies, politically necessary because of their diversity,
geographical separation, and mutual suspicion, closely resembled
the Iroquoian system. The colonies' distrust of one another and
the fear of the smaller that they might be dominated by the larger
in a confederation may have made necessary the adoption of another
Iroquoian device: one colony could veto the action of the rest of
the body. As in the Iroquois Confederacy, all "states" had to
agree on a course of action before it could be taken. Like the
Iroquois Great Council, the "Grand Council" (the name was
Franklin's) of the colonies under the Albany Plan of Union would
have been allowed to choose its own speaker. The Grand Council,
like the Iroquois Council, was to be unicameral, unlike the
two-house British system. Franklin favored one-house legislatures
during and later at the Constitutional Convention, and opposed the
imposition of a bicameral system on the United States.
Franklin's Albany Plan of Union provided for a different
number of representatives from each colony (from seven for
Virginia and Massachusetts Bay to two for New Hampshire and Rhode
Island) as the Iroquois system provided for differing numbers from
each of its five nations. This division of seats was based,
however, in rough proportion to population and contributions to a
common military force, while the Iroquois system was based more on
tradition. But the number of delegates to the proposed Colonial
Grand Council (forty-eight) closely resembled that of the Iroquois
Council (fifty). There is no documentary evidence, however, that
Franklin intended such a slavish imitation.
The legislature under the Albany plan was empowered to "raise
and pay Soldiers, and build Forts for the Defence of any of the
Colonies, and equip vessels of Force to guard the Coasts and
protect the Trade on the Oceans, Lakes and Great Rivers," but it
was not allowed to "impress men in any Colonies without the
consent of its Legislature." This clause strikes a middle ground
between the involuntary conscription often practiced in Europe at
the time and the traditional reliance of the Iroquois and many
other American Indian nations on voluntary military service.
The Albany plan also contained the long-sought unified
regulation of the Indian trade advocated by the Iroquois, Kennedy,
Colden, and Franklin:
That the President General with the advice of the Grand
Council hold and direct all Indian Treaties in which the
general interest or welfare of the Colonys may be
concerned; and make peace or declare war with the Indian
Nations. That they make such laws as they judge
necessary for regulating Indian Trade. That they make
all purchases from the Indians for the Crown. . . . That
they make new settlements on such purchases by granting
lands. . . .
The last part of this section aimed to stop, or at least slow, the
pellmell expansion of the frontier that resulted in settlers'
occupation of lands unceded by the Indian nations. Such poaching
was a constant irritant to the Iroquois; the subject of land
seizures had come up at every treaty council for at least two
decades before the Albany plan was proposed. Like the traders'
self-interested profiteering, the illegal taking of land by
frontiersmen was seen by Anglo-American leaders as a threat to the
Anglo-Iroquois alliance at a time when worsening diplomatic
relations with France made alliance with the Iroquois more vital.
The Albany Plan of Union gained Franklin general recognition
in the colonies as an advocate of Colonial union. The plan also
earned Franklin a position among the originators of the federalist
system of government that came to characterize the United States
political system. According to Clinton Rossiter, "Franklin made
rich contributions to the theory and practice of federalism . . .
he was far ahead of the men around him in abandoning
provincialism."[2] While the Iroquois and Franklin were ready for
a Colonial union, the legislatures of the colonies were not.
Following its passage by the Albany congress on July 10, 1754,
Franklin's plan died in the Colonial legislatures. The individual
colonies' governing bodies were not ready to yield even to the
limited Colonial government that Franklin proposed within his
definition of federalism: "Independence of each other, and
separate interests, tho' among a people united by common manners,
language and, I may say, religion . . ." Franklin showed his
dismay at the inability of the colonies to act together when he
said that "the councils of the savages proceeded with better order
than the British Parliament."
Franklin believed, at the time that his plan failed to win the
approval of the colonies, that its defeat would cost the British
their alliance with the Iroquois. "In my opinion, no assistance
from them [the Six Nations] is to be expected in any dispute with
the French 'till by a Compleat Union among our selves we are able
to support them in case they should be attacked," Franklin wrote,
before the Iroquois' willingness to maintain the alliance proved
him wrong. Although he was wrong in this regard, Franklin's
statement illustrates how important the Iroquois' prodding was in
his advocacy of a federal union for the colonies.
Franklin's plan was also rejected by the Crown, but for
reasons different from those of the Colonial legislatures. To the
British, the plan was too democratic. It gave the colonists too
much freedom at a time when the British were already sending
across the ocean spies who reported that far too many colonists
were giving entirely too much thought to possible independence
from Britain. Franklin already was under watch as a potential
troublemaker (hadn't he raised his own militia?).
The separate Colonial governments and the Crown had, in
effect, vetoed the plan of the Albany commissioners -- a veto
beyond which there could be no appeal. Nonetheless, the work of
the congress was not in vain.
Almost two decades would pass before the colonists -- inflamed
into union by the Stamp Act and other measures the British pressed
upon the colonies to help pay the Crown's war debts -- would take
Franklin's and Canassatego's advice, later epitomized in
Franklin's phrase: "We must all hang together or assuredly we
shall all hang separately." Returning to America from one of many
trips to England, Franklin would then repackage the Albany plan as
the Articles of Confederation. A Continental Congress would
convene, and word would go out to Onondaga that the colonists had
finally lit their own Grand Council fire at Philadelphia.
During 1774, colonists dressed as Mohawks dumped tea into
Boston Harbor to protest British economic imperialism. During the
spring of 1775, serious skirmishes took place at Lexington and
Concord. During August of the same year, commissioners from the
newly united colonies met with chiefs of the Six Nations at
Philadelphia in an effort to procure their alliance, or at least
neutrality, in the coming war with the British.
On August 25, the two groups smoked the pipe of peace and
exchanged the ritual words of diplomatic friendship. Following the
ceremonies, the Colonial commissioners told the Iroquois:
Our business with you, besides rekindling the ancient
council-fire, and renewing the covenant, and brightening
up every link of the chain is, in the first place, to
inform you of the advice that was given about thirty
years ago, by your wise forefathers, in a great council
which was held at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, when
Canassatego spoke to us, the white people, in these very
words.
The commissioners then repeated, almost word for word,
Canassatego's advice that the colonies form a federal union like
that of the Iroquois, as it had appeared in the treaty account
published by Franklin's press. The commissioners continued their
speech:
These were the words of Canassatego. Brothers, Our
forefathers rejoiced to hear Canassatego speak these
words. They sunk deep into our hearts. The advice was
good. It was kind. They said to one another: "The Six
Nations are a wise people, Let us hearken to them, and
take their counsel, and teach our children to follow
it." Our old men have done so. They have frequently
taken a single arrow and said, Children, see how easily
it is broken. Then they have taken and tied twelve
arrows together with a strong string or cord and our
strongest men could not break them. See, said they, this
is what the Six Nations mean. Divided, a single man may
destroy you; united, you are a match for the whole
world. We thank the great God that we are all united;
that we have a strong confederacy, composed of twelve
provinces. . . . These provinces have lighted a great
council fire at Philadelphia and sent sixty-five
counsellors to speak and act in the name of the whole,
and to consult for the common good of the people. . . .
-------------
1. This quotation and the associated narrative describing the
1744 treaty council is based on Franklin's account, published
in Carl Van Doren and Julian P. Boyd, eds., Indian Treaties
Printed by Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
Historical Society, 1938).
2. Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the
Tradition of Political Liberty (New York Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1953), p. 306.
------------------------------------------------------------------
C H A P T E R F I V E
Philosopher as Savage
--------------------------------------------------------
The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and
Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing
in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor
and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office . . .
and restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust them
[Indians] with what we call civil Society.
-- Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in Matthew
Wheelock, Reflections, Moral and Political
on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770
--------------------------------------------------------
When the news that the war with France had been won reached
Philadelphia, church bells and ceremonial cannon called the people
into the streets for the customary celebration. The city, now the
second largest in the British Empire with 20,000 people, was
entering its golden age as the commercial and political center of
the Atlantic Seaboard. Now, history seemed to promise it a role as
gem of an entire continent, or at least that small part of it
settled by Europeans and their descendants.
Benjamin Franklin, fifty-seven years old and four decades a
Philadelphian, was by 1763 unquestionably the city's first citizen.
Because of his diplomacy with the Iroquois, which helped procure
the victory his compatriots now celebrated, Franklin had gone to
London to represent the colony at the Royal Court. His wit and
wisdom, his talent for diplomacy and municipal organization, his
business talents and his scientific achievements -- all had earned
for Franklin a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. He was at
the peak of an enormously diverse and productive professional life.
Not long after the last bell chime of celebration had died
away, however, was there new trouble on the frontier, and new
problems for Franklin, who never lost the empathy for the Indians
he had acquired first by publishing treaty accounts, then by taking
part in treaty councils. Following the eviction of the French, the
Iroquois and their allies had lost their leverage as a balance of
power. The British now had them surrounded, at least in theory.
Hundreds, then thousands, of immigrants, most of them Scotch-Irish,
were moving through the passes of the Appalachians, into the Ohio
country, taking what seemed to them the just spoils of war. This
wasn't, however, French territory. Even by the Crown's law, it
still belonged to the Iroquois and their allies. As the illegal
migration continued, the covenant chain rusted badly.
British officials, who always kept a hawk's eye on the expense
accounts of their Indian agents, cut gift gifting drastically, even
for items (such as lead) on which many Indians had grown dependent.
Rumors ran through the Indian country that the Great Father across
the water was going to kill all the beaver, starve the Indians, and
make slaves of them. The younger warriors of many nations became
restless, ready to address the problem, even if it cost them their
lives. Canassatego, Hendrick, and Weiser, three among many who had
maintained the alliance, were dead. In the Grand Council at
Onondaga, the sachems argued and the confederacy quivered. In the
West, Pontiac fashioned his own alliance and went to war against
the squatters.
When the news reached the Pennsylvania frontier that Indians
were laying a track of blood through the Ohio Valley, a hunger for
revenge arose among the new settlers. They organized vigilante
groups and declared virtual secession from the Quaker capital.
There the assembly, without an army, was doing all it could in a
nonviolent way, to restrain the pellmell rush across the mountains
until land could be acquired by treaty. Without loyalty to or even
knowledge of the old understandings, the new settlers would neither
wait for diplomacy nor be bound by decrees.
On December 14, 1763, fifty-seven vigilantes from Paxton and
Donegal, two frontier towns, rode into Conestoga Manor, an Indian
settlement, and killed six of twenty Indians living there. Two
weeks later, more than 200 "Paxton Men" (as they were now called)
invaded Lancaster, where the remaining fourteen Conestoga Indians
had been placed in a workhouse for their own protection. Smashing
in the workhouse door as the outnumbered local militia looked on,
the Paxton Men killed the rest of the Conestoga band, leaving the
bodies in a heap within sight of the places where the
Anglo-Iroquois alliance had been cemented less than two decades
before.
The day before that massacre, Governor William Penn had relayed
to the Pennsylvania assembly reports that the Paxton Men's next
target would be Philadelphia itself, where they planned to
slaughter 140 Indians at Province Island. The governor, citing
"attacks on government," asked General Gage to delegate British
troops to his Colonial command. Penn also wrote hastily to William
Johnson, begging him to break the news of the massacres to the
Grand Council at Onondaga "by the properest method."
Franklin responded to the massacres with the most enraged piece
of penmanship ever to come off his press -- A Narrative of the Late
Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of
this Province, by Persons Unknown. The essay, published in late
January 1764, displayed a degree of entirely humorless anger that
Franklin rarely used in his writings:
But the Wickedness cannot be Covered, the Guilt will lie on the
Whole Land, till Justice is done on the Murderers. THE BLOOD OF THE
INNOCENT WILL CRY TO HEAVEN FOR VENGEANCE!
Franklin began his essay by noting that the Conestogas, a dying
remnant of the Iroquois confederacy, had been surrounded by
frontier settlements, and had dwindled to twenty people, "viz. 7
Men, 5 Women and 8 Children, Boys and Girls, living in Friendship
with their White Neighbors, who love them for their peaceable
inoffensive Behavior."
Listing most of the victims by name, Franklin wrote that many
had adopted the names of "such English persons as they particularly
esteem." He provided capsule biographies to show just how
inoffensive the Indians had been: "Betty, a harmless old woman and
her son, Peter, a likely young Lad."
As Franklin reconstructed the story, the Paxton Men had
gathered in the night, surrounding the village at Conestoga Manor,
then riding into it at daybreak, "firing upon, stabbing and
hatcheting to death" the three men, two women, and one young boy
they found. The other fourteen Indians were visiting white
neighbors at the time, some to sell brooms and baskets they had
made, others to socialize. After killing the six Indians, the
vigilantes "scalped and otherwise horribly mangled," them, then
burned the village to the ground before riding off in several
directions to foil detection.
Two weeks later, when the scene was repeated at the Lancaster
workhouse, the Indians, according to Franklin's account, "fell to
their Knees, protesting their Love of the English . . . and in this
Posture they all received the Hatchet. Men, Women, little Children
-- were every one inhumanely murdered -- in cold Blood!" While some
Indians might be "rum debauched and trader corrupted," wrote
Franklin, the victims of this massacre were innocent of any crime
against the English.
At considerable length, Franklin went on to reflect on the
qualities of savagery and civility, using the massacres to
illustrate his point: that no race had a monopoly on virtue. To
Franklin, the Paxton Men had behaved like "Christian White
Savages." He cried out to a just God to punish those who carried
the Bible in one hand and the hatchet in the other: "O ye unhappy
Perpetrators of this Horrid Wickedness!"
On February 4, a few days after Franklin's broadside hit the
streets, the assembly heard more reports that several hundred
vigilantes were assembling at Lancaster to march on Philadelphia,
and Province Island, to slaughter the Indians encamped there.
Governor Penn, recalling Franklin's talent at raising a volunteer
militia, hurried to the sage's three-story brick house on Market
Street at midnight. Breathlessly climbing the stairs, a retinue of
aides in tow, he humbly asked Franklin's help in organizing an
armed force to meet the assault from the frontier. To Franklin, the
moment was delicious, for eight years before Penn had been
instrumental in getting British authorities to order the abolition
of Franklin's volunteer militia.
During two days of frenzied activity, Franklin's house became
the military headquarters of the province. An impromptu militia of
Quakers was raised and armed, and Franklin traveled westward to the
frontier with a delegation to face down the frontier insurgents. As
Franklin later explained in a letter to Lord Kames, the Scottish
philosopher:
I wrote a pamphlet entitled A Narrative &c (which I think I sent
you) to strengthen the hands of our weak Government, by rendering
the proceedings of the rioters unpopular and odious. This had a
good effect, and afterwards when a great Body of them with Arms
march'd towards the Capital in defiance of the Government, with an
avowed resolution to put to death 140 Indian converts under its
protection, I form'd an Association at the Governor's request. . .
. Near 1,000 of the Citizens accordingly took arms; Governor Penn
made my house for some time his Head Quarters, and did everything
by my Advice.
While his timely mobilization may have saved the 140 Indians'
lives, the sage's actions drained his political capital among
whites, especially on the frontier.
Such actions "made myself many enemies among the populace,"
Franklin wrote. What Franklin called "the whole weight of the
proprietary interest" joined against him to "get me out of the
Assembly, which was accordingly effected in the last election. . .
." Franklin was sent off to England during early November 1764,
"being accompanied to the Ship, 16 miles, by a Cavalcade of three
Hundred of my friends, who filled our sails with their good
Wishes." A month later, Franklin began work as Pennsylvania's agent
to the Crown.
The rest of the decade was a time of instability on the
frontier. Franklin was in frequent correspondence with his son,
William Franklin, and with William Johnson, who kept the elder
Franklin posted on problems they encountered with squatters.
Johnson wrote to Franklin July 10, 1766: "I daily dread a Rupture
with the Indians occasioned by the Licentious Conduct of the
frontier Inhabitants who continue to Rob and Murder them." William
wrote to his father three days later: "There have been lately
several Murders of Indians in the different Provinces. Those
committed in this Province will be duly enquired into, and the
Murderers executed, as soon as found guilty. They are all
apprehended and secured in Gaol."
For the rest of his life, shuttling between America, England,
and France on various diplomatic assignments, Franklin continued to
develop his philosophy with abundant references to the Indian
societies he had observed so closely during his days as envoy to
the Six Nations. Franklin's combination of indigenous American
thought and European heritage earned him the title among his
contemporaries as America's first philosopher. In Europe, he was
sometimes called "the philosopher as savage."[1][1]
"Franklin could not help but admire the proud, simple life of
America's native inhabitants," wrote Conner in Poor Richard's
Politicks (1965). "There was a noble quality in the stories . . .
which he told of their hospitality and tolerance, of their oratory
and pride." Franklin, said Conner, saw in Indians' conduct "a
living symbol of simplicity and 'happy mediocrity . . .'
exemplifying essential aspects of the Virtuous Order." Depiction of
this "healthful, primitive morality could be instructive for
transplanted Englishmen, still doting on 'foreign Geegaws';
'happiness,' Franklin wrote, 'is more generally and equally
diffused among savages than in our civilized societies.'"
"Happy mediocrity" meant striking a compromise between the
overcivilization of Europe, with its distinctions between rich and
poor and consequent corruption, and the egalitarian, democratic
societies of the Indians that formed a counterpoint to European
monarchy. The Virtuous Order would combine both, borrowing from
Europe arts, sciences, and mechanical skills, taking from the
Indians aspects of the natural society that Franklin and others
believed to be a window on the pasts of other cultures, including
those from which the colonists had come. There is in the writings
of Franklin, as well as those of Jefferson, a sense of using the
Indian example to recapture natural rights that Europeans had lost
under monarchy. The European experience was not to be reconstructed
on American soil. Instead, Franklin (as well as Jefferson) sought
to erect an amalgam, a combination of indigenous American Indian
practices and the cultural heritage that the new Americans had
carried from Europe. In discussing the new culture, Franklin and
others drew from experience with native Americans, which was more
extensive than that of the European natural rights philosophers.
The American Indians' theory and practice affected Franklin's
observations on the need for appreciation of diverse cultures and
religions, public opinion as the basis for a polity, the nature of
liberty and happiness, and the social role of property. American
Indians also appear frequently in some of Franklin's scientific
writings. At a time much less specialized than the twentieth
century, Franklin and his associates (such as Colden and Jefferson)
did not think it odd to cross from philosophy to natural science to
practical politics.
Franklin's writings on American Indians were remarkably free of
ethnocentricism, although he often used words such as "savages,"
which carry more prejudicial connotations in the twentieth century
than in his time. Franklin's cultural relativism was perhaps one of
the purest expressions of Enlightenment assumptions that stressed
racial equality and the universality of moral sense among peoples.
Systematic racism was not called into service until a rapidly
expanding frontier demanded that enemies be dehumanized during the
rapid, historically inevitable westward movement of the nineteenth
century. Franklin's respect for cultural diversity did not reappear
widely as an assumption in Euro-American thought until Franz Boas
and others revived it around the end of the nineteenth century.
Franklin's writings on Indians express the fascination of the
Enlightenment with nature, the natural origins of man and society,
and natural (or human) rights. They are likewise imbued with a
search (which amounted at times almost to a ransacking of the past)
for alternatives to monarchy as a form of government, and to
orthodox state-recognized churches as a form of worship.
Franklin's sense of cultural relativism often led him to see
events from an Indian perspective, as when he advocated Colonial
union and regulation of the Indian trade at the behest of the
Iroquois. His relativism was expressed clearly in the opening lines
of an essay, "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,"
which may have been written as early as the 1750s (following
Franklin's first extensive personal contact with Indians) but was
not published until 1784.
Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which
we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.
. . . Perhaps, if we could examine the Manners of different Nations
with Impartiality, we should find no People so rude, as to be
without any Rules of Politeness; nor any so polite, as not to have
some Remains of Rudeness.
In this essay, Franklin also observed that "education" must be
measured against cultural practices and needs:
Having few artificial Wants, they [Indians] have abundance of
Leisure for Improvement by Conversation. Our laborious Manner of
Life, compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the
Learning, on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and
useless.
Franklin illustrated this point by recounting an exchange between
the commissioners of Virginia and the Iroquois at the 1744
Lancaster treaty council. The account of the treaty, written by
Conrad Weiser, reported that the Virginia commissioners asked the
Iroquois to send a few of their young men to a college in
Williamsburg (probably William and Mary) where "they would be well
provided for, and instructed in the Learning of the White People."
The Iroquois took the matter under advisement for a day (to be
polite, Franklin indicated) and answered the Virginia commissioners
July 4, the same day that Canassatego advised the colonists to form
a union. Canassatego answered for the Iroquois a few minutes after
his advice regarding the union:
We must let you know that we love our Children too well to send
them so great a Way, and the Indians are not inclined to give their
Children Learning. We allow it to be good, and thank you for your
Invitation; but our customs differing from yours, you will be so
good as to excuse us.
Franklin's essay was taken almost exactly from the 1744 treaty
account published by his Philadelphia press during that year; in
the essay, Franklin related that Canassatego told the commissioners
that his people had had experience with such proposals before.
"Several of our young people were formerly brought up at the
Colleges of the Northern Provinces," the sachem said. "They were
instructed in all your Sciences, but when they came back to us,
they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the
Woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. . . ." The young men
educated in Euro-American schools were "good for nothing,"
Canassatego asserted. In Franklin's account, Canassatego not only
turned down the commissioner's offer with polite firmness, but made
a counter-offer himself: "If the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us
a Dozen of their Sons, we will take great care of their Education,
instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."
Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages" shows an
appreciation of the Indian councils, which he had written were
superior in some ways to the British Parliament. "Having frequent
Occasion to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order
and Decency in conducting them. . . . The women . . . are the
Records of the Council . . . who take exact notice of what passes
and imprint it in their Memories, to communicate it to their
Children." Franklin also showed appreciation of the sharpness of
memory fostered by reliance on oral communication: "They preserve
traditions of Stipulations in Treaties 100 Years back; which, when
we compare with our writings, we always find exact." When a speaker
at an Indian council (the reference was probably to the Iroquois)
had completed his remarks, he was given a few minutes to recollect
his thoughts, and to add anything that might have been forgotten.
"To interrupt another, even in common Conversation, is reckon'd
highly indecent. How different this is to the conduct of a polite
British House of Commons, where scarce a day passes without some
Confusion, that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to Order."
Indian customs in conversation were reflected in Poor Richard for
1753, the year of Franklin's first diplomatic assignment, to
negotiate the Carlisle Treaty: "A pair of good Ears will drain dry
a Thousand Tongues." Franklin also compared this Indian custom
favorably with "the Mode of Conversation of many polite Companies
of Europe, where, if you do not deliver your Sentence with great
Rapidity, you are cut off in the middle of it by the impatient
Loquacity of those you converse with, and never suffer'd to finish
it!" Some white missionaries had been confused by Indians who
listened to their sermons patiently, and then refused to believe
them, Franklin wrote.
To Franklin, the order and decorum of Indian councils were
important to them because their government relied on public
opinion: "All their Government is by Counsel of the Sages; there is
no Force, there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or
inflict Punishment." Indian leaders study oratory, and the best
speaker had the most influence, Franklin observed. In words that
would be echoed by Jefferson, Franklin used the Indian model as an
exemplar of government with a minimum of governance. This sort of
democracy was governed not by fiat, but by public opinion and
consensus-creating custom:
All of the Indians of North America not under the dominion of the
Spaniards are in that natural state, being restrained by no laws,
having no Courts, or Ministers of Justice, no Suits, no Prisons, no
Governors vested with any Legal Authority. The Persuasion of Men
distinguished by Reputation of Wisdom is the only means by which
others are govern'd or rather led -- and the State of the Indians
was probably the first State of all Nations.
Franklin also compared the Indians' offers of free lodging and
food for visitors to the customs of Euro-Americans. The Iroquois
kept guest houses for travelers. This custom was contrasted by
Franklin with Indians' treatment in white towns. He recounted a
conversation between Conrad Weiser and Canassatego, who were close
friends. In that conversation, Canassatego said to Weiser:
If a white Man, in travelling thro' our country, enters one of our
cabins, we treat him as I treat you; we dry him if he is wet, we
warm him if he is cold, we give him Meat and Drink that he may
allay his Thirst and Hunger; and we spread soft furs for him to
rest and sleep on; we demand nothing in return. But, if I go to a
white man's house in Albany, and ask for Victuals and Drink, they
say "Where is your Money?" And if I have none, they say, "Get out,
you Indian Dog!"
Franklin was also given to affecting Indian speech patterns in
some of his writings, another indication that his respect for
diverse cultures enhanced his understanding of the Indians with
whom he often associated. In 1787, he described the American
political system in distinctly Iroquoian terms to an unnamed Indian
correspondent:
I am sorry that the Great Council Fire of our Nation is not now
burning, so that you cannot do your business there. In a few
months, the coals will be rak'd out of the ashes and will again be
kindled. Our wise men will then take the complaints . . . of your
Nation into consideration and take the proper Measures for giving
you Satisfaction.
Franklin was also fond of calling on the Great Spirit when he could
do so in appreciative company.
Religious self-righteousness and pomposity was a favorite
target of Franklin's pen, and he often used Indians to illustrate
the religious relativism that was basic to his own Deistic faith.
Deism, a religion that more than any other was prototypical of the
Enlightenment frame of mind, emphasized naturalism, natural man,
and rational inquiry, all of which finely complemented Franklin's
interests in Indian cultures. Like Colden before him and Jefferson
after him, Franklin often used his Deist beliefs to stress the
universality of moral sense among peoples, and to break down
ethnocentricity. Many of the people who were closest to the Indians
during this period were Deists; calling on the Great Spirit was not
at all out of character for them.
According to Alfred O. Aldridge (Benjamin Franklin and Nature's
God, 1967), Deism involved belief in the superiority of "natural
religion" as opposed to "the hollow formalism of Christianity."
Deism formed an ideal complement to the natural rights philosophy
that was so important in Enlightenment thought. According to
Aldridge, Franklin's early Articles of Belief (1728) showed that,
early in his life, many of his religious beliefs resembled those of
several American Indians. At that time, Franklin even accepted
polytheism. Although he later acknowledged monotheism, Franklin
never lost his critical eye toward conventional Christianity.
Aldridge found in Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages of
North America" an abundant satire of religious proselytizing and
economic imperialism.
In his "Remarks Concerning the Savages . . ." Franklin
described a Swedish minister who lectured a group of Susquehanah
Indians on the story of the creation, including "the Fall of our
first parents from eating an Apple, the coming of Christ to repair
the Mischief, his Miracles and Suffering &c." The Indians replied
that it was, indeed, bad to eat apples, when they could have been
made into cider. They then repaid the missionary's storytelling
favor by telling him their own creation story. The missionary was
aghast at this comparison of Christianity with what he regarded as
heathenism and, according to Franklin, replied: "What I delivered
to you are Sacred Truths, but what you tell me is mere Fable,
Fiction and Falsehood." The Indians, in turn, told the missionary
that he was lacking in manners:
My brother [the Indians told the missionary], it seems that your
friends have not done you Justice in your Education, that they have
not well instructed you in the Rules of Common Civility. You saw
that we, who understand and practice those Rules, believ'd all your
stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours?
In the same essay, Franklin commented on the use of religion as
a cover for economic exploitation. Again he used Canassatego, in
conversations related to Franklin by Weiser. According to Franklin,
Canassatego asked Weiser: "Conrad, you have lived long among the
white People, and know something of their Customs. I have sometimes
been to Albany and noticed that once in Seven Days they shut up
their shops and assemble in the Great House; tell me: what is it
for?"
Weiser was said by Franklin to have replied: "They meet there
to learn Good Things."
Canassatego had no doubt that the town merchants were hearing
"good things" in the church, but he doubted that all those good
things were purely religious. He had recently visited Albany to
trade beaver pelts for blankets, knives, powder, rum, and other
things. He asked a merchant, Hans Hanson, about trading, and Hanson
told the sachem that he couldn't talk business because it was time
for the meeting to hear good things in the great house. After the
merchants returned from the church, Canassatego found that all of
them had fixed the price of beaver at three shillings sixpence a
pound. "This made it clear to me, that my suspicion was right; and
that whatever they pretended of meeting to learn Good Things, the
real purpose was to consult how to cheat Indians in the Price of
Beaver," the sachem said, according to Franklin's account.
In Poor Richard for 1751, Franklin wrote: "To Christians bad
rude Indians we prefer/ 'Tis better not to know than knowing err."
Unlike Franklin, many English Deists had never seen an Indian, but
they, too, often assumed that "the American natives would have a
religion akin to Deism -- one based on the commonly observed
phenomena of nature and dedicated to the worship of Nature's God,"
Aldridge wrote. Franklin saw the similarity of his own faith to
that of Indians confirmed through personal experience. Deists, like
Franklin, who sought to return "to the simplicity of nature"
appeared to see things worth emulating in Indian societies.
Franklin's use of Canassatego, to twit conventional
Christianity, was not unique in his time. Satirists on both sides
of the Atlantic used the testaments of real or fictitious Indians
to deflate the righteousness of clerics; did the Indians not have
their own theories of the earth's origin?
Canassatego also figured importantly in an elaborate hoax
intended to ridicule conventional Christianity, which appeared in
the London Chronicle in June 1768. The hoax involved a review of a
nonexistent book, The Captivity of William Henry. The fake review
was not signed, so it is not possible to prove that Franklin wrote
it. Whoever did concoct the hoax knew quite a bit about Iroquois
society and customs, which made Franklin an obvious candidate. The
style of the hoax fits Franklin, but some rather obvious errors
point away from Franklin's authorship. For example, William Henry
was purportedly taken captive in 1755 when he met Canassatego, who,
in point of fact, had died in 1750. Regardless of its authorship,
the hoax illustrated the use that was made of Indians as a
counterpoint to conventional Christianity at the time. Such
publications tended to legitimatize religious pluralism.
As they sought a middle ground between the corrupting
overcivilization of Europe and the simplicity of the state of
nature in which they believed that many Indians lived, Franklin and
other Deists paid abundant attention to the political organization
of the Indians, especially the Iroquois, who were not only the best
organized Indian polity with which British Americans had contact,
but who were also allied with them. "Franklin had the conception of
an original, pre-political state of nature in which men were
absolutely free and equal -- a condition he thought admirably
illustrated among the American Indians," Eiselen wrote in
Franklin's Political Theories (1928). Franklin himself wrote:
"Their wants . . . [are] supplied by the spontaneous Productions of
Nature" and that they did not at all want to be "civilized."
This state of nature was eagerly sought by many
eighteenth-century Euro-Americans. To understand how many Europeans
left their own cultures to live with the Indians is to realize just
how permeable the frontier was. To those who remained behind, it
was often rumored that those who had gone over to the Indians had
been "captured." While some captives were taken, more often the
whites took up Indian life without compulsion. As Franklin wrote to
Peter Collinson May 9, 1753:
The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from
care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success
that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians. .
. . They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts,
Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in
natural understanding and yet they have never strewn any
inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn
any of our Arts.
While Indians did not seem to have much inclination to exchange
their culture for the Euro-American, many Euro-Americans appeared
more than willing to become Indians at this time:
When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our
language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his
relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no
perswading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only
to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that when white
persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the
Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their
Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with
them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become
disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are
necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of
escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming
them.
Franklin followed with an example. He had heard of a person who had
been "reclaimed" from the Indians and returned to a sizable estate.
Tired of the care needed to maintain such a style of life, he had
turned it over to his younger brother and, taking only a rifle and
a matchcoat, "took his way again to the Wilderness." Franklin used
this story to illustrate his point that "No European who has tasted
Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." Such
societies, wrote Franklin, provided their members with greater
opportunities for happiness than European cultures. Continuing, he
said:
The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and fashionable
Wants, the sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous plenty,
whereby so many are kept poor and distress'd for Want, the
Insolence of Office . . . the restraints of Custom, all contrive to
disgust them with what we call civil Society.
With so many white people willingly becoming associated with Indian
societies, it was not difficult for thoughts and customs practiced
behind the frontier to leak back into the colonies.
Franklin's interest in America's indigenous peoples was not
restricted to their social and political systems. Like many
European and American scientists of his time, Franklin was
interested in tracing the origins of these "natural men" who figure
so importantly in the thought of the Enlightenment. Since they were
believed to be living in a state that approximated the origins of
all peoples, Indians made fascinating objects of scientific study.
Franklin, an anthropologist before the discipline had a name,
engaged in the collection of Indian grammars, an activity practiced
on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century. By the
end of the century, missionaries, natural scientists, and others
had produced dozens of grammars in many Indian languages of varying
length and accuracy, one indication of the Enlightenment era's
intense fascination with the peoples of the New World. Thomas
Jefferson, George Washington, and others collected the grammars and
searched for words that might resemble concepts or phrases in
English, French, German, Welsh, Yiddish, or other European
languages. Many popular theories supposed that various Indian
tribes might have descended from the Welsh, or the Jews, or the
Celts, and linguistic ties were believed to support those theories.
As a scientist Franklin also vigorously opposed degeneracy
theories, an intellectual export from Europe. These theories were
developed to their highest form in France as a reaction to the myth
of the "Noble Savage," which flourished in the same nation at the
same time. According to the theory of degeneracy, America's climate
degraded all life forms that existed there. Plants, animals,
Indians, and transplanted Europeans were all said to be subject to
this debilitating influence. Franklin thought otherwise. In 1772,
he replied to assertions by de Pauw and Count de Buffon, writing to
an unnamed French friend: "Les Américains ne le cédent ni en force,
ni en courage, ni en d'esprit aux Européens." Franklin had too much
personal contact to accept either the conception of the Noble
Savage or the degeneracy argument. Unlike the Europeans who argued
over land and people most of them had never seen, Franklin knew
both well, and this knowledge produced in his writings about
America and American Indians a pragmatism that many Europeans
lacked.
"The savage," wrote de Buffon, "is feeble and has small organs
of generation. He has neither hair nor beard, and no ardor whatever
for his female." To de Buffon, Indians were also "less sensitive,
and yet more timid and cowardly . . . [with] no activity of mind."
If not forced to move in order to survive, Indians "will rest
stupidly . . . lying down for several days." Indians, wrote de
Buffon, "look upon their wives . . . only as beasts of burden." The
men, in de Buffon's analysis, lacked sexual capacity: "Nature, by
refusing him the power of love, has treated him worse and lowered
him deeper than any animal."
To Jefferson, de Buffon -- who had never seen America, nor the
Indians he wrote about -- presented a fat and inviting target.
Jefferson replied that no correlation existed between sexual ardor
and the amount of body hair on a man. "With them it is disgraceful
to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to hogs. They
therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears," Jefferson wrote.
He recounted Indians' bravery in war to refute de Buffon's
assertion that they were timid and cowardly, and he cited examples
of Indian oratory to show that America's natives were not mentally
deficient. While Jefferson believed that Indians' sexual equipment
and drive was not less than that of whites, he wondered whether
constant hunting and the Indians' diet might have diminished those
natural gifts. What raised such a question in his mind, Jefferson
did not say.
As with many scientific debates through the ages, the emotional
exchanges between Europeans and Americans over the degeneracy
theories reflected the political and social conflicts of the age.
In the writings of Franklin there seems to be an emerging awareness
of a distinctive American habit of mind, a sense that these
transplanted Europeans, himself included, were becoming something
not inferior to Europeans, but something very different. As the
debate over degeneracy theories was taking place, more and more
Americans were, like Franklin, coming to conclude that history and
dignity demanded the colonies become a separate nation. Franklin
more than once rushed to the defense of America and things
American. When British publishers derided American cuisine, he
hurried into print with a defense of American (Indian) corn,
replete with recipes. When French authors peddled fantasies about
the wildness of America and the savagery of its native inhabitants,
Franklin set up a press in Passy and issued from it essays on the
virtues of America and Americans, white and red.
During the decade after the Stamp Act, Franklin's writings
developed into an argument for American distinctiveness, a sense of
nationhood in a new land, a sense that an entirely new age was
dawning for the Americans who traced their roots to Europe. The new
nation would not be European, but American -- combining both
heritages to make a specifically different culture. Franklin and
his contemporaries, among whom one of the most articulate was
Jefferson, were setting out to invent a nation. Before they could
have a nation, however, they had to break with Britain, an act that
called for an intellectual backdrop for rebellion, and a rationale
for revolution.
-------------
1. See: Peter Gay, "Enlightenment Thought and the American
Revolution," in John R. Howe, Jr., ed., The Role of Ideology
in the American Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970), p. 48.
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C H A P T E R S I X
Self-Evident Truths
--------------------------------------------------------
I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians]
which live without government enjoy in their general
mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than
those who live under European governments.
-- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787
--------------------------------------------------------
Philadelphia became the intellectual nerve center of revolution in
the mid-1770s. The Continental Congress convened there. The
Declaration of Independence was drafted there, and first posted
there, six weeks before the news reached the royal court in London
at which it was directed. Philadelphia, the new capital of the new
confederacy -- its "Grand Council fire," as Franklin called the
city in some of his letters -- was becoming the commercial center
of Eastern North America. The city's stately public buildings gave
it an air of a capital beyond its years. When the Declaration of
Independence was first posted along its streets, the Quaker city
was not even a century old. Barely ninety years after the Penn
family's surveyors had first marked it out of the wilderness,
Philadelphia was surrounded by the mansions of merchants who had
helped make it the busiest port on the Atlantic Seaboard, as well
as the political and intellectual center of the colonies. The
mansions reclined in baronial style along the rivers that converged
at the commercial center, looking a little like English estates.
Beyond these patches of tamed greenery, Philadelphians looked
westward into the maw of a continent of immense size, which was to
their eyes at once wild, dark, and threatening, as well as a
possible source of riches beyond imagination. Rather suddenly, the
men and women who had peopled a few widely scattered English
colonies and stitched them together were faced with the task of
making a nation, in area larger by far than any in Western Europe.
Franklin had always lived in the city's center, and never moved
to the outskirts, even when his finances allowed. During the
debates that welded the colonies into a nation he remained in the
three-story brick house on Market Street that he had designed with
his wife, Deborah, before the conclusion of the war with France.
When the weather was fair, he could walk to Independence Hall. A
year after skirmishes at Lexington and Concord turned angry words
into armed rebellion, when the delegates to the Continental
Congress decided that a rationale for the revolution needed to be
put on paper, Franklin was the most likely candidate to write the
manifesto. He had just returned from a long and difficult trip to
the Ohio country, and had come down with gout. His three score and
ten years showing on him, Franklin declined invitations to write
the Declaration of Independence. He did join the drafting
committee, and eventually became Thomas Jefferson's major editor.
At the age of thirty-three, however, Jefferson was not at all
sure that he was equal to the task of telling the world why the
colonies were breaking with Britain. On June 11, 1776, when he was
asked by the Continental Congress to serve on a committee that
would draft the declaration, Jefferson asked to be excused from the
congress so that he could return to Williamsburg where he planned
to help write the Virginia Constitution. His request for a leave
denied, Jefferson asked John Adams, another member of the drafting
committee, to write the document. Adams refused.
"Why will you not?" Jefferson asked Adams. "You ought to do
it."
"Reasons enough," said Adams.
"What are your reasons?"
"First," said Adams, "you are a Virginian, and a Virginian
ought to appear at the head of this business. Second: I am
obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise.
Third: You can write ten times better than I can."
"Well," replied Jefferson, "If you are decided, I will do as
well as I can."
Adams respected Jefferson's "masterly pen." The young man from
Virginia brought with him to the Continental Congress what Adams
called "a reputation for literature, science and a happy talent for
composition. Writings of his "were remarkable for . . . peculiar
felicity of expression," in Adams's opinion. Like many talented
writers, Jefferson did not like to compose for committees. He
called changes made in his drafts by other delegates to the
Continental Congress "depredations."
While he didn't always welcome changes in his prose, Jefferson
easily accepted criticism and corrections from Franklin, who by
this time was regarded as an elder statesman in Europe as well as
in America. Franklin himself had learned, from long experience, the
trials attending composition of "papers to be reviewed by a public
body." Jefferson, who was learning the same, willingly submitted
his drafts to Franklin and Adams.
Between 1775 and 1791, when Franklin died, his political life
overlapped Jefferson's. He venerated the elderly sage, and
expressed his admiration frequently. Following Franklin at the post
of United States ambassador to France, Jefferson was often asked:
"Is it you, Sir, who replace Dr. Franklin?" Jefferson would reply:
"No one can replace him, Sir, I am just his successor."
"There appeared to me to be more respect and veneration attached to
the character of Doctor Franklin than to any other person in the
same country, foreign or native. . . . When he left Passy, it
seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch," Jefferson
recalled. Having admired Franklin so, it was not surprising that
where Franklin laid down an intellectual thread, Jefferson often
picked it up. Jefferson's writings clearly show that he shared
Franklin's respect for Indian thought. Both men represented the
Enlightenment frame of mind of which the American Indians seemed a
practical example. Both knew firsthand the Indian way of life. Both
shared with the Indian the wild, rich land out of which the Indian
had grown. It was impossible that that experience should not have
become woven into the debates and philosophical musings that gave
the nation's founding instruments their distinctive character. In
so far as the nation still bears these marks of its birth, we are
all "Indians" -- if not in our blood, then in the thinking that to
this day shapes many of our political and social assumptions.
Jefferson's declaration expressed many of these ideas:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed. That, when any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter
or abolish it.
The newly united colonies had assumed "among the Powers of the
earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature
and Nature's God entitle them," Jefferson wrote. The declaration
was being made, he said, because "a decent respect for the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation."
There were few ideas in the declaration (outside of the long
list of wrongs committed by the Crown) that did not owe more than a
little to Franklin's and Jefferson's views of American Indian
societies. In drawing sanction for independence from the laws of
nature, Jefferson was also drawing from the peoples beyond the
frontiers of the new nation who lived in what late
eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers believed to be a state of
nature. The "pursuit of happiness" and the "consent of the
governed" were exemplified in Indian polities to which Jefferson
(like Franklin) often referred in his writings. The Indian in
Jefferson's mind (as in Franklin's) served as a metaphor for
liberty.
Jefferson wrote to Edward Carrington January 16, 1787:
The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is
to give them full information of their affairs thro' the public
papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the
whole mass of the people. The basis of our government being the
opinion of the people, our very first object should be to keep that
right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a
government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I
should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. . . . I am
convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without
government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree
of happiness than those who live under European governments.
Echoing Franklin's earlier comment, Jefferson looked across the
frontier and found societies where social cohesion was provided by
consensus instead of by the governmental apparatus used to maintain
control in Europe. Among the Indians, wrote Jefferson, "Public
opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully
as laws ever did anywhere." The contrast to Europe was obvious:
"Under presence of governing, they have divided their nations into
two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true
picture of Europe." Returning to America, Jefferson concluded:
"Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their
attention." To Jefferson, public opinion among the Indians was an
important reason for their lack of oppressive government, as well
as the egalitarian distribution of property on which Franklin had
earlier remarked. Jefferson believed that without the people
looking over the shoulder of their leaders, "You and I, the
Congress, judges and governors shall all become wolves." The
"general prey of the rich on the poor" could be prevented by a
vigilant public.
Jefferson believed that freedom to exercise restraint on their
leaders, and an egalitarian distribution of property secured for
Indians in general a greater degree of happiness than that to be
found among the superintended sheep at the bottom of European class
structures. Jefferson thought a great deal of "happiness," a word
which in the eighteenth century carried connotations of a sense of
personal and societal security and well-being that it has since
lost. Jefferson thought enough of happiness to make its pursuit a
natural right, along with life and liberty. In so doing, he dropped
"property," the third member of the natural rights trilogy
generally used by followers of John Locke.
Jefferson's writings made it evident that he, like Franklin,
saw accumulation of property beyond that needed to satisfy one's
natural requirements as an impediment to liberty. To place
"property" in the same trilogy with life and liberty, against the
backdrop of Jefferson's views regarding the social nature of
property, would have been a contradiction, Jefferson composed some
of his most trenchant rhetoric in opposition to the erection of a
European-like aristocracy on American soil. To Jefferson, the
pursuit of happiness appears to have involved neither the
accumulation of property beyond basic need, nor the sheer pursuit
of mirth. It meant freedom from tyranny, and from want, things not
much in abundance in the Europe from which many of Jefferson's
countrymen had so recently fled. Jefferson's writings often
characterized Europe as a place from which to escape -- a corrupt
place, where wolves consumed sheep regularly, and any uncalled for
bleating by the sheep was answered with a firm blow to the head.
Using [2]the example of the man who left his estate to return
to the simplicity of nature, carrying only his rifle and matchcoat
with him, Franklin indicated that the accumulation of property
brought perils as well as benefits. Franklin argued that the
state's power should not be used to skew the distribution of
wealth, using Indian society, where "hunting is free for all," as
an exemplar:
Private property . . . is a Creature of Society, and is subject to
the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require
it, even to its last Farthing, its contributors therefore to the
public Exingencies are not to be considered a Benefit on the
Public, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honor and
Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or
as payment for a just Debt.
"The important ends of Civil Society, and the personal Securities
of Life and Liberty, these remain the same in every Member of the
Society," Franklin continued. He concluded: "The poorest continues
to have an equal Claim to them with the most opulent, whatever
Difference Time, Chance or Industry may occasion in their
Circumstances."
Franklin used examples from Indian societies rather explicitly
to illustrate his conception of property and its role in society:
All property, indeed, except the savage's temporary cabin, his bow,
his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary
for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public
Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating
Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of
limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is
necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly
deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is
the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and
who may, by other Laws dispose of it.
Franklin, a believer in simplicity and "happy mediocrity,"
thought that an overabundance of possessions inhibited freedom
because social regulation was required to keep track of what
belonged to whom, and to keep greed from developing into antisocial
conflict. He also opposed the use of public office for private
profit. If officials were to serve the people rather than exploit
them, they should not be compensated for their public service,
Franklin stated during debate on the Constitution. "It may be
imagined by some that this is a Utopian idea, and that we can never
find Men to serve in the Executive Department without paying them
well for their Services. I conceive this to be a mistake," Franklin
said. On August 10, 1787, also during debate on the Constitution,
Franklin opposed property qualifications for election to Congress.
So fervent was his opposition to the use of public office for
private gain that Franklin wrote in a codacil to his will, "In a
democratical state there ought to be no offices of profit."
As well as using Indians as exemplars of their concepts of
property, Franklin and other Colonial leaders usually held a rather
high intellectual regard for the Indians' own property rights.
Without adequate military force, however, they were unable to check
the continuing movement of Euro-Americans onto land that had not
been ceded by the various Indian nations. In his Administration of
the Colonies, a text widely used for instruction of Colonial
officials during the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Pownall argued
that neither the Pope, nor any other European sovereign, had a
right to give away Indian land without their consent.
"The lands [of America] did not belong to the Crown, but to the
Indians, of whom the Colonists either purchased them at their own
Expence, or conquered them without Assistance from Britain,"
Franklin wrote in the margin of an anonymous pamphlet, "The True
Constitutional Means for Putting an End to the Disputes Between
London and the American Colonies," published in London during 1769.
Franklin was replying to an assertion in the brochure that the
colonists occupied America "by the bounty of the Crown." A year
later, Franklin made a similar point, writing in the margin of
Wheelock's Reflections, Moral and Political, on Great Britain and
Her Colonies: "The British Nation has no original Property in the
Country of America. It was purchas'd by the first Colonists of the
Natives, the only Owners. The Colonies [are] not created by
Britain, but by the colonists themselves."
By supporting the Indians' claim of original title, Franklin
and other advocates of independence undercut Britain's claim to the
colonies. A popular argument at the time was that if Britain had a
right to assert a claim to America under European law because
English people settled there, then Germany had a right to claim
England because the Angles and Saxons, Germanic peoples, colonized
the British territory. To Franklin, the colonies belonged to the
colonists, and what the colonists had not bought from the Indians
(or, in some cases, seized in war) belonged to the native
peoples.[3][1]
In Franklin's mind, there appeared to be no contradiction
between orderly expansion of settlement and support of Indian needs
for a homeland and sustenance. Looking westward into what he
believed to be a boundless forest, Franklin assumed that the
Indians would always have land enough to live as they wished. He
thought that the continent was so vast that Europeans would not
settle the breadth of it for a thousand years. Although both were
scientists, technological innovators and politicians, neither
Franklin nor Jefferson saw the technological changes or the
increase in European immigration that would sweep across the
continent in less than a century.
While he didn't forsee the speed of expansion, Franklin was
troubled by the greed that he did see emerging in America, a huge
and rich table laden with riches, seemingly for the taking. "A rich
rogue is like a fat hog, who never does good 'til he's dead as a
log," he wrote in Poor Richard for 1733. In the same edition, he
also wrote: "The poor have little, beggars none; the rich too much,
enough, not one."
Like Franklin, Jefferson defined property not as a natural
right, but as a civil right, bestowed by society and removable by
it. To Jefferson and Franklin natural rights were endowed (as the
declaration put it) by the Creator, not by kings or queens or
legislators or governors. Civil rights were decreed or legislated.
As Jefferson wrote to William Short, property is a creature of
society:
While it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of
property is derived from Nature at all . . . it is considered by
those who have seriously considered the subject, that no one has,
of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land . . .
[which] . . . is the property for the moment of him who occupies
it, but when he relinquishes that occupation, the property goes
with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given
late in the progress of society.
Societies that gave undue emphasis to protection of property
could infringe on the peoples' rights of life, liberty, and
happiness. According to Jefferson: "Whenever there is, in any
country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that
the laws of property have been so extended as to violate natural
right." At the opposite end of Jefferson's intellectual spectrum
stood the Indian societies of eastern North America that, in spite
of minimal government that impressed Jefferson, had different laws
or customs encouraging the accumulation of material wealth.
Jefferson, although he retained a vague admiration for this form of
"primitive communism" until late in his life, acknowledged that
such a structure could not be laid atop a European, or a
European-descended, society: "Indian society may be best, but it is
not possible for large numbers of people."
While some aspects of Indian society were admirable but
impractical, Jefferson found many aspects of European cultures
deplorable but likely to be emulated in America if the people and
their leaders did not take care to resist them. Jefferson
acknowledged late in his life that "a right of property is founded
in our natural wants," but he remained, to his death, adamantly
opposed to concentration of wealth. The European aristocracy, based
as it was on inherited wealth, was called "artificial" by
Jefferson. "Provisions . . . to prevent its ascendancy should be
taken in America," he wrote. Jefferson was not opposed to what he
called "natural aristocracy," based on merit rather than inherited
wealth; but against the artificial aristocracy he could sharpen his
pen in a manner reserved for few other subjects: "Do not be
frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the
croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people,"
Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval July 12, 1812. One turn of
Jefferson's pen characterized European society as one of riders and
horses, another as wolves and sheep, still another as hammer and
anvil. There was to be more to Jefferson's American amalgam than a
pale imitation of Europe.
From Paris during 1785, Jefferson wrote: "You are perhaps
curious to know how this new scene has struck a savage from the
mountains of America."[4][2] The words recalled characterizations
of Franklin by Europeans as the philosopher as savage. Both men,
confronting the world from which their ancestors had come, fully
realized how much America and its native inhabitants had changed
them. Jefferson's reception of the Old World was not warm:
I find the general state of humanity here most deplorable. The
truth of Voltaire's observation, offers itself perpetually, that
every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil. It is a true
picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter,
and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds
of the damned trampled under their feet. While the great mass of
the people are thus suffering under physical and moral oppression .
. . compare it with that degree of happiness which is enjoyed in
America, by every class of people.
Europe had a few compensations, such as a lack of public
drunkenness, and fine architecture, painting, and music, wrote
Jefferson. All this, however, did not reduce class differences, nor
spread the happiness of which Jefferson was so enamored.
As he had removed references to property from his critique of a
French bill of rights, Jefferson offered other suggestions for
reducing the disparity between classes that he saw there. One such
suggestion was a very steep schedule of progressive taxation.
Back in America, the revolution had helped to absolve the new
country of what emerging aristocracy it had. Many of them moved to
Canada. About a year after he wrote the Declaration of
Independence, Jefferson wrote to Franklin:
The people seem to have laid aside the monarchial, and taken up the
republican government, with as much ease as would have attended
their throwing off of an old, and putting on a new suit of clothes.
Not a single throe has attended this important transformation. A
half-dozen aristocratical gentlemen, agonizing under the loss of
preeminence, have sometimes ventured their sarcasms on our
political metamorphosis. They have been thought fitter objects of
pity, than of punishment.
America, fusing the native peoples' state of nature and
Europe's monarchial state into a unique, agrarian civilization,
evolved its own institutions, and its own interests, distinct from
either the Indian or the European. Late in his life, Jefferson
wrote to President James Monroe that "America, North and South, has
a set of interests distinct from those of Europe, and peculiarly
her own."
Statements of Jefferson's such as that in his letter to Monroe
and others like it were much later to be called into service by
expansionists eager to justify their hunger for land and the
lengths to which it drove them. In Jefferson's lifetime, however,
they expressed the perceptions of a developing national identity
vis-à-vis Europe. European scholarship, according to Jefferson,
had produced no books that could be used as comprehensive guides to
the kind of civil government he sought to erect in America: "There
does not exist a good elementary work on the organization of
society into civil government; I mean a work which presents one
good and comprehensive view of the system of principles on which
such an organization should be founded, according to the rights of
nature." The same idea had been expressed in slightly different
words many years earlier by Franklin.
Most of all, Jefferson loathed monarchy, the state that laid
heavily across the backs of the people. As late as 1800, a quarter
century after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson
was given to such statements as: "We have wonderful rumors here.
One that the king of England is dead!" Comparing the oppression of
the monarchial states he found in Europe with the way American
Indians maintained social cohesion in their societies, Jefferson
wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: "Insomuch as it were made
a question of whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too
much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to the
greater evil, one who has seen both conditions of existence would
pronounce it to be the last; and that the sheep are happier of
themselves, than under the care of the wolves."
Both Franklin and Jefferson believed that power provided
temptations to corruption (to which European leaders had long ago
succumbed) and that to keep the same thing from happening in
America required mechanisms by which the people kept watch on their
leaders to make sure that they remained servants, and did not yield
to a natural inclination to become hammer to the popular anvil.
Public opinion became central to the maintenance of liberty -- a
notion contrary to European governance of their day, but very
similar to the Iroquois confederacy, where the war chiefs sat in
the Grand Council with the express purpose of reporting back to the
people on the behavior of their leaders.
Jefferson described the role of public opinion in American
Indian society in Notes on Virginia. His description was remarkably
similar to Franklin's. The native Americans, Jefferson wrote, had
not
Submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power and shadow of
government. The only controls are their manners, and the moral
sense of right and wrong. . . . An offence against these is
punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the
cause is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it
concerns.
"Imperfect as this species of coercion may seem, crimes are very
rare among them," Jefferson continued. Recapitulating Colden's
remarks, as well as Franklin's, Jefferson developed his thought:
"The principles of their society forbidding all compulsion, they
are led by duty and to enterprise by personal influence and
persuasion." Sharing with other founders of America the
Enlightenment assumption that Indian societies (at least those as
yet uncorrupted by Europeans) approximated a state of nature,
Jefferson questioned the theory advanced by supporters of monarchy
that government originated in a patriarchial, monarchial form.
Having studied Indian societies, such as the Iroquois, which were
matrilineal and democratic, Jefferson speculated that:
There is an error into which most of the speculators on government
have fallen, and which the well-known state of society of our
Indians ought, before now, to have corrected. In their hypothesis
of the origin of government, they suppose it to have commenced in
the patriarchial or monarchial form. Our Indians are evidently in
that state of nature which has passed the association of a single
family, and not yet submitted to authority of positive laws, or any
acknowledged magistrate.
Public opinion, freedom of action and expression, and the
consent of the governed played an important role in Jefferson's
perception of Indian societies. The guideline that Jefferson drew
from the Indian example (and which he earnestly promoted in the
First Amendment) allowed freedom until it violated another's
rights: "Every man, with them, is perfectly free to follow his own
inclinations. But if, in doing this, he violates the rights of
another, if the case be slight, he is punished by the disesteem of
society or, as we say, public opinion; if serious, he is tomahawked
as a serious enemy." Indian leaders relied on public opinion to
maintain their authority: "Their leaders influence them by their
character alone; they follow, or not, as they please him whose
character for wisdom or war they have the highest opinion."
While public opinion was useful in keeping elected leaders from
assuming the role of wolves over sheep, public opinion also was
recognized by Jefferson as a safety valve. To repress it would
invite armed revolution by a public alienated from its leaders.
Jefferson could hardly deny a public insistent on overthrowing its
leaders. Their right to do so was expressed in his Declaration of
Independence. Writing to W. S. Smith November 17, 1787, Jefferson
refuted assertions of some Europeans that America was suffering
from anarchy:
What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not
warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to facts, pardon and pacify them. . . . The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Displaying a rationality that had yet to be tested by tyrants'
manipulation of public opinion, Jefferson wrote in 1801; "It is
rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and
the individual who disagrees with it ought to examine well his own
opinion." At least until he became President, and found the wrath
of opinion directed at him from time to time, Jefferson expressed
almost a naive faith in the wisdom of public opinion. Jefferson
believed that states should be small in size to allow public
opinion to function most efficiently. Leaders ought to be subject
to impeachment; the entire governmental system could be impeached
by force of arms if the people thought fit to do so. Public opinion
could be called upon, in the Indians' fashion, to raise an army.
Like that of the Iroquois, Jefferson's concept of popular
consent allowed for impeachment of officials who offended the
principles of law; also similar to the Indian conception, Jefferson
spoke and wrote frequently that the least government was the best.
Jefferson objected when boundaries for new states were drawn so as
to make them several times larger than some of the original
colonies:
This is reversing the natural order of things. A tractable people
may be governed in large bodies but, in proportion as they depart
from this character, the extent of their government must be less.
We see into what small divisions the Indians are obliged to reduce
their societies.
Jefferson's writings indicate that he did not expect, nor
encourage, Americans to be tractable people. Least of all did he
expect them to submit to involuntary conscription for unjustified
wars. Freedom from such was the natural order of things. Franklin
showed a similar inclination in Poor Richard for 1734: "If you ride
a horse, sit close and tight. If you ride a man, sit easy and
light."
Franklin, Jefferson, and others in their time who combined
politics and natural history intensively studied the history and
prehistory of northwestern Europe as it had been before the coming
of the Romans. Like the Celts and other tribal people of Germany
and the British Isles who had lived, according to Jefferson, in
societies that functioned much like the Indian polities he had
observed in his own time: "The Anglo-Saxons had lived under customs
and unwritten laws based upon the natural rights of man. . . ." The
monarchy was imposed on top of this natural order, Jefferson
argued. In so doing, according to Chinard, Jefferson "went much
farther than any of the English political thinkers in his
revindication of Saxon liberties." To Charles Sanford (The Quest
for Paradise, 1961), America and its inhabitants represented to
many Europeans a recapitulation of the Garden of Eden; to Henry
Steele Commager, the Enlightenment mind assumed that "only man in a
state of nature was happy. Man before the Fall." To English whigs,
as well as to Franklin and Jefferson, government by the people was
the wave of the past, as well as the future. Augmented by
observation of Indian peoples who lived with a greater degree of
happiness than peoples in Europe, this belief gave powerful force
to the argument that the American Revolution was reclaiming rights
that Americans, Englishmen, and all other peoples enjoyed by fiat
of nature, as displayed by their ancestory -- American Indian and
European.
English radicals and American patriots traded these ideas
freely across the Atlantic during the revolutionary years. One
example of this intellectual trade was Tom Paine, who came to
America at Franklin's invitation and within three years of his
arrival was sitting around a council fire with the Iroquois,
learning to speak their language and enjoying himself very much.
Paine attended a treaty council at Easton during 1777, in order to
negotiate the Iroquois' alliance, or at least neutrality, in the
Revolutionary War. According to Samuel Edwards, a biographer of
Paine, he was "fascinated by them." Paine quickly learned enough of
the Iroquois' language so that he no longer needed to speak through
an interpreter.
It was not long before Paine, like Jefferson and Franklin, was
contrasting the Indians' notions of property with those of the
Europe from which he had come. Paine not only demoted property from
the roster of natural rights and made of it a mere device of civil
society, but also recognized benefits in the Indians' communal
traditions:
To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is
necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of
man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America.
There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human
misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns
and streets of Europe.
Poverty, wrote Paine 1795, "is a thing created by what is called
civilization." "Civilization, or that which is so called, has
operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent,
and the other more wretched, than would ever have been the lot of
either in a natural state," Paine concluded. Despite the appeal of
a society without poverty, Paine believed it impossible "to go from
the civilized to the natural state."
The rationale for revolution that was formulated in
Philadelphia during those humid summer days of 1776 threw down an
impressive intellectual gauntlet at the feet of Europe's
monarchies, especially the British Crown. Franklin, Jefferson, and
the others who drafted the Declaration of Independence were saying
that they were every inch the equal of the monarchs who would
superintend them, and that the sheep of the world had a natural
right to smite the wolves, a natural right guaranteed by nature, by
the precedent of their ancestors, and by the abundant and pervasive
example of America's native inhabitants. The United States'
founders may have read about Greece, or the Roman Republic, the
cantons of the Alps, or the reputed democracy of the tribal Celts,
but in the Iroquois and other Indian confederacies they saw, with
their own eyes, the self-evidence of what they regarded to be
irrefutable truths.
Wars are not won soley by eloquence and argument, however. Once
he had recovered from the gout, Franklin recalled his talents at
organizing militias and threw himself into the practical side of
organizing an armed struggle for independence. He marshaled
brigades that went house to house with appeals for pots, pans, and
curtain weights, among other things, which would be melted down to
provide the revolutionary army with ammunition. The colonists set
to work raising a volunteer army in the Indian manner (much as
Franklin had organized his Philadelphia militia almost three
decades earlier), using Indian battle tactics so well suited to the
forests of eastern North America. George Washington had studied
guerrilla warfare during the war with France, and when the British
sent soldiers over the ocean ready for set-piece wars on flat
pastures manicured like billiard tables, their commanders wailed
that Washington's army was just not being fair -- shooting from
behind trees, dispersing and returning to civilian occupations when
opportunity or need called. A British Army report to the House of
Commons exclaimed, in exasperation, "The Americans won't stand and
fight!"
Having failed to adapt to a new style of war in a new land, the
British never exactly lost the war, but like another world power
that sent its armies across an ocean two centuries later, they
decided they could not win a war without fronts, without
distinction between soldiers and civilians. America would have its
independence.
Meeting in Paris to settle accounts during 1783, the diplomats
who redrew the maps sliced the Iroquois Confederacy in half,
throwing a piece to the United States, and another to British
Canada. The heirs to some of the Great Law of Peace's most precious
principles ignored the Iroquois' protestations that they, too, were
sovereign nations, deserving independence and self-determination. A
century of learning was coming to a close. A century and more of
forgetting -- of calling history into service to rationalize
conquest -- was beginning.
-------------
1. While Franklin used Indians' concepts of property to
illustrate his own, and while he frequently supported
Indians' rights against those of illegal squatters, Franklin
was also involved in the land business. In Franklin's mind,
it was the illegal taking of land that was objectionable.
Legal usurpation, by treaty or even sometimes by military
conquest, did not offend his sense of justice. In 1754, the
same year that Franklin lobbied the Iroquois' cause by
advocating a union of the colonies, he also drew up a plan
for settling the Ohio country, which was at that time
occupied by Indian allies of the Iroquois (Labaree and
Willcox, Franklin Papers, 5:456). Peace between the English
and the Iroquois was good for more than alliance against the
French; it also made land speculation easier and much less
dangerous, as long as the land was acquired with some form of
payment and Indian consent. In 1768, Sir William Johnson,
Franklin's son William and other Colonial officials who had
close ties to the Iroquois, such as George Croghan, worked
intensively for Anglo-Iroquois amity at the Fort Stanwix
treaty conference. All of them were negotiating large land
purchases. Franklin at the time was lobbying for the
purchases in England, where he worked as a Colonial agent
with the Crown (Ibid, 10:38-39; James Sullivan, et al., The
Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: University
of the State of New York, 1921-1965), 6:129). According to
Clarence W. Alvord, Indian war threats were sometimes
invented or blown out of proportion during this period in
order to get the Crown's attention directed toward
peacekeeping, which would make land purchases easier (Alvord,
The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (Cleveland: Arthur
H. Clark Co., 1917), pp. 345-358). Franklin was involved in
other land business as well, especially plans to settle the
Ohio country (Labaree and Willcox, Franklin Papers,
17:135-136).
2. H. A. Washington, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York:
John C. Riker, 1854), Vol. 1, p. 444.
------------------------------------------------------------------
A F T E R W O R D
--------------------------------------------------------
The Indians presented a reverse image of European
civilization which helped America establish a national
identity that was neither savage nor civilized.
-- Charles Sanford, The Quest for Paradise, 1961
--------------------------------------------------------
From the beginning of European contact with the Americas, a kind of
intellectual mercantilism seemed to take shape. Like the economic
mercantilism that drew raw materials from the colonies, made
manufactured goods from them in Europe, and then sold the finished
products back to America, European savants drew the raw material of
observation and perception from America, fashioned it into
theories, and exported those theories back across the Atlantic.
What role, it may be asked, did these observations of America and
its native inhabitants play in the evolution of Enlightenment
thought in Europe? "The Indians," wrote Charles Sanford with credit
to Roy Harvey Pearce, "presented a reverse image of European
civilization which helped America establish a national identity
which was neither savage nor civilized." How true was this also of
Europe itself? During the researching of the foregoing study, the
author came across shreds of evidence which, subsequently not
followed because they fell outside the range of the study, indicate
that European thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
and others may have drawn from America and its native inhabitants
observations on natural society, natural law, and natural rights,
packaged them into theories, and exported them back to America,
where people such as Franklin and Jefferson put them into practice
in construction of their American amalgam.
In The Quest for Paradise, Sanford drew a relation between
American Indians' conception of property and that expressed by
Thomas More in his Utopia. Paul A. W. Wallace also likened the
Iroquois' governmental structure to that of Utopia. Work could be
done that would begin with the basis laid by Sanford, Robert F.
Berkhofer, and Roy Harvey Pearce, which would examine how Europeans
such as Locke and other seventeenth and eighteenth-century
philosophers integrated observation and perception of American
Indians into theories of natural rights. Michael Kraus (The
Atlantic Civilization, 1949) wrote that during this period,
anthropology was strongly influencing the development of political
theory: "[Thomas] Hobbes and Locke, especially, show a familiarity
with the social structure of the American Indians which they used
to good purpose. Each of the English political scientists wrote in
a period of crisis and in search of a more valid ordering of
society. . . . The American Indian was believed to have found many
of the answers." If such intellectual intercourse did, in fact
occur, how did the Europeans get their information? How accurate
was it? What other non-Indian precedents did they use in
formulating their theories? How were these theories exported back
to America, which, as Commager observed, acted the Enlightenment
that Europe dreamed? Berkhofer quoted Locke as having written: "In
the beginning, all the world was America." According to Berkhofer,
Locke believed that men could live in reason and peace without
European-style government; Berkhofer implied that Locke saw proof
of this, as Jefferson and Franklin did, in the societies of the
American Indians. Koch wrote that the English radicals of the
eighteenth century were "students and advocates" of the American
cause. Franklin, with his rich, firsthand knowledge of Indians and
their societies, was well known in England before he began work
there in the 1750s. Gillespie wrote that England had been suffused
with influences from America, material as well as intellectual, as
part of its rapid overseas expansion of empire. Gillespie noted
Indian influences in More's Utopia and in Hobbes's Leviathan.
Gillespie also found similar relationships in Locke's writings.
In France, reports of Indian societies traveled to the home
country through the writings of Jesuit missionaries, among other
channels. How might such writings have influenced the conceptions
of natural rights and law developed by Rousseau and others? Frank
Kramer has described how some ideas were transmitted home from New
France. As the Indians' societies became a point of reference for
natural rights theorists in England, so did conceptions of the
"Noble Savage" in France. More study needs to be done to document
how these ideas, and others, made their way across the Atlantic and
into the intellectual constructs of Rousseau and others who helped
excite the French imagination in the years preceding the revolution
of 1789.
Carried into the nineteenth century, study could be given to
whether American Indian ideas had any bearing on the large number
of social and political reform movements that developed during the
1830s and 1840s in the "burned over district" of western New York.
That area had been the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy a hundred
years earlier, when Colden was writing his history of the Iroquois.
Do the origins of the anti-slavery movement, of women's rights, and
religions such as Mormonism owe anything to the Iroquois?
Two contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and Frederich
Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were drawing on the
Indian models to support their theories of social evolution. As had
Franklin and Jefferson a century before, Marx and Engels paid
particular attention to the lack of state-induced coercion and the
communal role of property that operated in the Iroquois
Confederacy.
Marx read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been
published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at
least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Ancient Society was
Morgan's last major work; his first book-length study had been The
League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a
close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil War
officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others, Morgan was an
adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, he and
Engels were studying the important anthropologists of their time.
Morgan was one of them.
Marx's notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the text,
with little extraneous comment. What particularly intrigued Marx
about the Iroquois was their democratic political organization, and
how it was meshed with a communal economic system -- how, in short,
economic leveling was achieved without coercion.
During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an
insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant health
problems had eroded his ability to organize and synthesize what he
had read. After Marx died, Engels inherited his notes and, in 1884,
published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
subtitled In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The book
sold well; it had gone through four editions in German by 1891.
Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He wrote that Morgan's
account of the Iroquois Confederacy "substantiated the view that
classless communist societies had existed among primitive peoples,"
and that these societies had been free of some of the evils, such
as class stratification, that he associated with industrial
capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to depict
Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and anvil.
To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important
because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization
of a society which, as yet, knows no state." Jefferson had also
been interested in the Iroquois' ability to maintain social
consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels
described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American
revolutionaries had a century earlier:
Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police,
without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without
prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by
the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run
communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal
property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the
households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated
machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor
and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their
responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war.
All are free and equal -- including the women.
Concern for the depredations of human rights by state power is
no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth century.
American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars of those rights,
today often petition the United Nations for redress of abuses
committed by the United States government, whose founding
declarations often ring hollow in ears so long calloused by the
thundering horsehooves of Manifest Destiny and its modern
equivalents. One may ask what the United Nations' declarations of
human rights owe to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the
following excerpts from the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948), and place them next to
the Great Law of Peace, and the statements Franklin and other
American national fathers adapted from experience with American
Indian nations:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward
one another in a spirit of brotherhood. ([5]Article 1)
Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of person.
([6]Article 3)
Everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and
religion. ([7]Article 18)
Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and religion.
([8]Article 19)
. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of
governments . . . ([9]Article 21)
Looking across the frontier, as well as across the Atlantic,
looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars, history poses many
tantalizing questions. The thesis that American Indian thought
played an important role in shaping the mind of European America,
and of Europe itself, is bound to incite controversy, a healthy
state of intellectual affairs at any time in history, our own
included. The argument around which this book is centered is only
one part of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand
it, to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait jacket
of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but we do not learn
from, peoples and cultures markedly different from our own.
Fortunately, there are fresh winds stirring. Dr. Jeffry Goodman
has started what one reviewer called a "civil war" in archaeology.
Dr. Henry Dobyns's mathematically derived estimate that 90 million
Indians lived in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus has
also stirred debate. There is a sense that we are only beginning to
grasp the true dimensions of American history to which Europeans
have been personal witness only a few short centuries. The
Europeans who migrated here are still learning the history of their
adopted land, and that of the peoples who flourished here (and who
themselves are today rediscovering their own magnificent pasts). In
a very large sense we are only now beginning to rediscover the
history that has been passed down in tantalizing shreds, mostly
through the oral histories of Indian nations that have survived
despite the best efforts of some Euro-Americans to snuff out Indian
languages, cultures, and the land base that gives all sustenance.
History in its very essence is rediscovery, and we are now
relearning some of the things that Benjamin Franklin and others of
our ancestors had a chance to see, feel, remark at, and integrate
into their view of the world.
The United States was born during an era of Enlightenment that
recognized the universality of humankind, a time in which minds and
borders were opened to the new, the wondrous, and the unexpected.
It was a time when the creators of a nation fused the traditions of
Europe and America, appreciating things that many people are only
now rediscovering -- the value of imagery and tradition shaped by
oral cultures that honed memory and emphasized eloquence, that made
practical realities of democratic principles that were still the
substance of debate (and, to some, heresy) in Europe. In its zest
for discovery, the Enlightenment mind absorbed Indian traditions
and myth, and refashioned it, just as Indians adopted the ways of
European man. In this sense, we are all heirs to America's rich
Indian heritage.
Like the eighteenth-century explorers who looked westward from
the crests of the Appalachians, we too stand at the edge of a
frontier of another kind, wondering with all the curiosity that the
human mind can summon what we will find over the crest of the hill
in the distance, or around the bend in the river we have yet to see
for the first time. What will America teach us next?
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
________________________________________________________________
A Note on the Bibliography
With a view to rendering some assistance to the interested
reader, this bibliography has been divided into five sections:
sources concerned with the subject as a whole, those more
specifically concerned with the Iroquois culture, two sections
concerned respectively with sources reflecting Franklin's and
Jefferson's contact with the Indians, and a final section of
sources useful, chiefly, in the writing of the afterword.
These sections are further subdivided into primary and
secondary sources and into published and unpublished material.
For the benefit of readers who wish to know if a certain author
has been consulted, a separate index of authors' names will be
found at the end of the bibliography.
__________________________________________________________________
General Background
__________________________________________________________________
FINDING AIDS
Freeman, John F. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American
Indian in the Library of the American Philosophical Society.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1965.
* Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) New York City.
"Indian Notes and Monographs, No. 49." New York: Museum of the
American Indian, 1957.
* Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) New York City.
List of Publications of the Museum of the American Indian. 9th
ed. New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1957.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Articles and Other Short Monographs
_______. "Our Indian Heritage." Life, July 2, 1971.
* Ackernecht Edwin H. "White Indians." Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 15(1944):8-26.
* Brandon, William. "American Indians and American History."
American West, Spring 1965, pp. 14-26.
* Cohen, Felix. "Americanizing the White Man." American Scholar
21:2(1952):177-191.
* Cook, S.F. "Demographic Consequences of European Contact With
Primitive Peoples." Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Sciences 237(1945):107-111.
* Edwards, Everett E. "The Contributions of American Indians to
Civilization." Minnesota History 15:3(1934):255-272.
* Ewers, John C. "When Red and White Men Meet." Western Historical
Quarterly 2:2(1971):133-150.
* Fenton, William N. "Contacts Between Iroquois Herbalism and
Colonial Medicine." Smithsonian Institution Report. [1941].
Washington, DC. Government Printing Office, 1941.
* Fife, Austin E. "The Pseudo-Indian Folksongs of the Anglo-American
and French Canadian." Journal of American Folklore 67(1954).
* Frachtenberg, Leo J. "Our Indebtedness to the American Indian."
Wisconsin Archeologist 14: 2(1915):64-69.
* Gibson, A.M. "Sources for Research on the American Indian."
Ethnohistory 7:2(1962):121-136.
* Hallowell, A. Irving. "The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of
the Indian on American Culture." Edited by Walker D. Wyman and
Clifton B. Kroeber. The Frontier in Perspective. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press 1957
* _______. "The Impact of the American Indian on American Culture."
American Anthropologist. New Series 59:2(1957):201-207.
* Hayes, Carlton J.H. "The American Frontier -- Frontier of What?"
American Historical Review 51:1(1946):199-216.
* Hofstadter, Richard. "Turner and the Frontier Myth." American
Scholar 18:3(1949):433-443.
* Kramer, Lucy M. "Indian Contributions to American Culture."
Indians Yesterday and Today. Washington, D.C.: United States
Department of Interior, (1941).
* Larrabee, Edward M. "Recurrent Themes and Sequences in North
American Indian-European Culture Contact." American Philosophical
Transactions Society 66:7(1976).
* Miller, Walter B. "Two Concepts of Authority." American
Anthropologist. New Series 62:2(1955):271-289.
* Morey, Sylvester M. "American Indians and Our Way of Life." Myron
Proceedings Institute: Adelphi College 13(1961):4-28.
* Safford, William E. "Our Heritage from the American Indians."
Smithsonian Institution Annual Report. [1926]. Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1927.
* Stirling, Matthew W. "America's First Settlers: The Indians."
National Geographic, November 1937, p. 535.
* Wall, Stewart L. "Indians: First Americans, First Ecologists." The
American Way, May 1971, pp. 8-12.
Books and Longer Monographs
Armstrong, Virginia. I Have Spoken: American History Through the
Eyes of American Indians. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971.
* Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the
American Indian From Columbus to the Present. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf 1977.
* Bohannan, Paul and Fred Plog, eds. Beyond the Frontier: Social
Process and Cultural Change. New York: American Museum of Natural
History, 1967.
* Carter, E. Russell. The Gift is Rich. New York: Friendship Press,
1955.
* Chamberlin, J.E. The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Toward
Native Americans. New York: Seabury Press, 1975
* Cohen, Lucy Kramer, ed. The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of
Felix S. Cohen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
* Cohen, Morris R. and Cohen, Felix S. Readings in Jurisprudence and
Legal Philosophy. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1951.
* Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972.
* Forbes, Jack. The Indian in America's Past. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.
* Gillespie, James E. The Influence of Overseas Expansion on England
to 1700. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920.
* Hanke, Lewis. Aristotle and the American Indian: A Study in Race
Prejudice in the Modern World [1950]. Bloomington; Indiana
University Press, 1975.
* James, George W. What the White Race May Learn from the Indian.
Chicago: Forbes & Co., 1908.
* Johansen, Bruce E. and Roberto Maestas. Wasi'chu: The Continuing
Indian Wars. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.
* Kramer, Frank R. Voices in the Valley. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1964.
* Lips, Julian. The Savage Hits Back. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1937.
* Locke Alain and Bernhard J. Stern, eds. When Peoples Meet: A Study
in Race and Culture contacts. New York: Hinds, Hayden and
Eldredge, 1946.
* Pruca, Francis Paul. American Indian Policy in the Formative
Years. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.
* Quimby, George Irving. Indian Culture and European Trade Goods:
The Archeology of the Historic Period in the Western Great Lakes
Region. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.
* Readers Digest. "Our Fascinating Indian Heritage." Pleasantville,
N.Y.: Readers Digest Association, 1979.
* Saum, Lewis 0. The Fur Trader and the Indian. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1965.
* Sheehan, Bernhard. Seeds of Extinction. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1973.
* Vogel, Virgil J. This Country Was Ours. New York: Harper & Row,
1972.
* _______. The Indian in American History. Chicago: Integrated
Education Associates, 1968.
* Wilson, Edmund. Apologies to the Iroquois. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy, 1960.
* Wright, Lewis B. Culture on the Moving Frontier. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1955.
* Yawser, Rose N. The Indian and the Pioneer: An Historical
Perspective. Syracuse, N.Y.: C.W. Bardeen, 1893.
* Zolla, Elemire. The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the
American Indian. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
__________________________________________________________________
The Iroquois and Early Colonial Contact
__________________________________________________________________
FINDING AIDS
Brown, Jessie Louise P. A Bibliography of the Iroquois Indians. M.A.
thesis, Columbia University, 1903.
* Dockstader, Frederick J. The American Indian in Graduate Studies:
A Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations. New York: Museum of
the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1957.
* Fenton, William N. "A Calendar of Manuscript Materials Relating to
the History of the Six Nations or Iroquois in Depositories Outside
Philadelphia 1750-1850." Proceedings. American Philosophical
Society 97:5(1957):578-595.
* Freeman, John F. A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American
Indian in the Library of the American Philosophical Society.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966.
* Snyderman, George S. "A Preliminary Survey of American Indian
Manuscripts in Repositories of the Philadelphia Area."
Proceedings. American Philosophical Society 97:5(1957):596-610.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Published Primary Sources
* _______. The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse People.
Rooseveltown, N.Y.: Akwesasne Notes and Mohawk Nation, 1977.
* Bartram, John. A Journey from Pensilvania to Onondage in 1743.
Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1973.
* _______. Travels in Pennsilvania and Canada [1751]. Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966.
* Colden, Cadwallader. The History of the Five Indian Nations
Depending on the Province of New York in America. [1727 and 1747].
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958.
* _______. The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada. [1765].
New York: New Amsterdam Book Co., 1902.
* _______. The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden. Collections
of the New York Historical Society. 1917-1923 and 1934-1935.
* Cusick, David. Ancient History of the Six Nations. Lockport, N.Y.:
Niagara County Historical Society 1824.
* Fenton, William N., ed. Parker on the Iroquois. Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 1968.
* Heckewelder, John. History, Manners and Customs of the Indian
Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring
States. [1819]. New York: Arno Press, 1971.
* Johnston, Charles M., ed. The Valley of the Six Nations. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1964.
* Leder, Lawrence H., ed. The Livingston Indian Records 1666-1725.
Gettysburg Penn.: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1956.
* Morgan, Lewis Henry. League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois.
[1851]. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902.
* _______. (Shenandoah). "Letters on the Iroquois." American Review
(1847): February, pp. 8-18; March, pp. 242-256, May, pp. 447-461.
* Proctor, Thomas. Narrative of a Journey of Col. Thomas Proctor to
the Indians of the Northwest. In Pennsylvania Archives, Second
Series, vol. 44:551-662.
* Schoolcraft, Henry R. Algic Researches: Comprising Inquiries
Respecting the Mental Characteristics of North American Indians.
New York: Harper & Bros., 1859.
* _______. The American Indians: Their History, Culture and
Prospects. Buffalo N.Y.: Rochester, Wanzer & Co., 1851.
* _______. Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the
History, Conditions and Prospects of the Indians in the United
States. 6 vols. Philadelphia: Lipppincott, Grambo, 1851-1857.
* _______. Personal Memoirs of Thirty Years With the Indian Tribes
on the American Frontiers . . . A.D. 1812 to A.D. 1842.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1851.
* _______. Notes on the Iroquois or Contributions to the Statistics,
Aboriginal History, Antiquities and General Ethnology of Western
New York. New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1846.
* Smith, William, Jr. A History of the Province of New York. Edited
by Michael Kammen. [2 vols.: 1751 and 1824]. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972.
* Snowden, James R. The Cornplanter Memorial: Published by Order of
the Legislature of Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, Penn.: Singerly &
Myers, State Printers, 1867.
* Weiser, Conrad. Narrative of a Journey from Tulpehocken, in
Pennsylvania, to Onondago, the Headquarters of the Six Nations of
Indians . . . in 1737. Philadelphia: J. Pennington, 1853.
Unpublished Primary Sources
Fadden, Ray. Iroquois Past and Present in the State of New York. [
1949]. Typescript, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
* Hewitt, J. N. B. "A Constitutional League of Peace in the Stone
Age of America: The League of the Iroquois and its Constitution."
[1918]. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution.
* _______. "Constitution of the Iroquois League." No date.
Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives. Smithsonian
Institution.
* _______. "The Constitution of the Five Nations." [1916].
Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution.
* _______. "The Founding of the League of the Five Nations by
Deganawidah." No Date. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
* _______. "Status of Women in the Iroquois Polity Before 1784."
[1933]. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution.
* Newhouse, Seth. "Constitution of the Five Nations' Indian
Confederation." [1880]. Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
* _______. Cosmology of De-ka-na-wi-da's Government. [1885].
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
* Parker, Arthur C. "The American Indian, the Government and the
Country." [1915]. New York City Public Library.
* Shea, J.G. "Sketch of the History of the Iroquois." [1896].
Washington, D.C.: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian
Institution.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Published Primary Sources
ARTICLES AND OTHER SHORT MONOGRAPHS
* Bauman, Robert F. "Claims vs. Realities: The Anglo-Iroquois
Partnership." Northwest Ohio Quarterly 32:2(1960):87-101.
* Beauchamp, William M. "Morovian Journals Relating to Central New
York 1745-1766." Syracuse, N.Y.: Onondaga Historical Association,
1916.
* Blau, Harold. "Historical Factors in Onondaga Iroquois Cultural
Stability." Ethnohistory 12:2(1965):250-258.
* Carse, Mary R. "The Mohawk Iroquois." Bulletin of the
Archeological Society of Connecticut 23(1942):3-53.
* Decker, George P. "Must the Peaceful Iroquois Go?" Rochester,
N.Y.: Lewis H. Morgan Chapter, 1928.
* Fenton, William N. "Collecting Materials for a Political History
of the Six Nations." Proceedings American Philosophical Society
93:3(1949):233-238.
* _______. "Seth Newhouse's Traditional History and Constitution of
the Iroquois Confederacy." Proceedings American Philosophical
Society 93:3(1949):141-158.
* _______. "Locality as a Basic Factor in the Development of
Iroquois Social Structure." Bulletin Bureau of American Ethnology
149(1952).
* Hayes, Carlton J.H. "The American Frontier -- Frontier of What?"
American Historical Review 51:2(1946):199-216.
* Howard, Helen A. "Hiawatha -- Cofounder of an Indian United
Nations." Journal of the West 10:3(1971):428-438.
* Jacobs, Wilbur R. "Wampum: The Protocol of Indian Diplomacy."
William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 4:3(1949):596-604.
* Morgan William T. "The Five Nations and Queen Anne." Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 13(1927):169-189.
* Root, Elihu. "The Iroquois and the Struggle for America: Address
on the Tercentennial Celebration of the Discovery of Lake
Champlain, Plattsburg, N.Y., July 7, 1909." Washington, D.C.:
Sudwarth Printing Co., 1909.
* Schlesinger, Arthur M. "Liberty Tree: A Genealogy." New England
Quarterly 25(1952):435-458.
* Sherman, Daniel. "The Six Nations: An Address Delivered Before the
Chataqua Society, Jamestown, N.Y., January 29, 1855." New York: no
publisher, 1855.
* Speck, Frank G. "The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution."
Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bulletin
23, October, 1945.
* Tooker, Elizabeth. "Northern Iroquian Sociopolitical
Organization." American Anthropologist 72:1(1970):90-96.
* Wallace, Paul A.W. "The Return of Hiawatha." New York State
History 39(1948):385-403.
* Wintemberg, William J. "Distinguishing Characteristics of Algonkin
and Iroquoian Cultures." Canadian Department of Mines, National
Museum of Canada Annual Report [1929], pp. 65-124.
* Wroth, Lawrence C. "The Indian Treaty as Literature." Yale Review
7(1927-1928):749-766.
BOOKS AND LONGER MONOGRAPHS
* _______. The History of Brant, Ontario . . . Early Settlers . . .
History of the Six Nations. Toronto: Warner, Beers & Co., 1883.
* _______. The Influence of the Iroquois on the History and
Archeology of the Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania and Adjacent
Region. Wilkes-Barre, Penn.: Wyoming Historical and Geological
Society, 1911.
* Beauchamp, William M. A History of the New York Iroquois, Now
Commonly Called the Six Nations. Port Washington, N.Y.: I.J.
Friedman, 1962.
* Blanchard, Rufus. The Iroquois Confederacy. Chicago: R. Blanchard,
1902.
* Brodhead, John R. History of the State of New York. 2 vols. New
York. Harper & Bros., 1871.
* Carr, Lucien. The Social and Political Position of Women Among The
Huron-Iroquois Tribes. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1884.
* Donohue, Thomas. The Iroquois and the Jesuits. Buffalo, N.Y.:
Buffalo Catholic Publishing Co., 1895.
* Fadden, Ray (Aren Akweks). The Formation of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee
or League of the Five Nations. Hogansburg, N.Y.: Akwesasne
Counsellor Organization, 1948.
* Fenton, William N. Symposium on Local Diversity in Iroquois
Culture. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951.
* Hale, Horatio E. The Iroquois Book of Rites. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1963.
* Huntington, Ellsworth. The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of
Aboriginal America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921.
* Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism
and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975.
* Johnson, Anna C. The Iroquois, or the Bright Side of Indian
Character. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1855.
* Kimm, Silas C. The Iroquois: A History of the Six Nations of New
York. Middleburgh N.Y.: P.W. Danforth, 1900.
* Klein, Milton, The Politics of Diversity: Essays in the History of
Colonial New York. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974.
* Kriegal, Leonard. Edmund Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1971.
* Leder, Lawrence H. Robert Livingston 1654-1728 and the Politics of
Colonial New York. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1961.
* Marsden, Michael T. A Selected Annotated Edition of Henry
Schoolcraft's Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years With
the Indian Tribes of North America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling
Green University, 1972.
* Morgan, Edmund S. The Mirror of the Indian: An Exhibition of Books
and Other Source Materials. Providence, R.I.: The Associates of
the John Carter Brown Library, 1958.
* Moultrop, Samuel P. Iroquois. Rochester, N.Y.: E. Hart, 1901.
* Parker, Arthur C. An Analytical History of the Seneca Indians.
Rochester, N.Y.: Lewis H. Morgan Chapter, 1926.
* _______. The Life of General Ely S. Parker. Buffalo, N.Y.: Buffalo
Historical Society Publications, 1905.
* Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian
and the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1965.
* Reaman, G. Elmore. Trail of the Iroquois Indians: How the Iroquois
Saved Canada for the British Empire. New York: Barnes & Noble,
1967.
* Ritchie, William A. Indian History of New York State. Albany: New
York State Museum, 1953.
* Ruttenber, E.M. The History of the Indian Tribes of Hudson's
River. [1872]. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971.
* Strickland, Edward D. Iroquois Past and Present. Buffalo: A.M.S.
Press, 1901.
* Trelease, Allen W. Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The
Seventeenth Century. [1960]. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat
Press, 1971.
* Tooker, Elizabeth, ed. Iroquois Culture, History and Prehistory:
Proceedings of a Conference on Iroquois Research, Glens Falls,
N.Y., 1965. Albany: New York State Education Department, 1967.
* Underhill, Ruth M. Red Man's Continent: A History of the Indians
in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
* Vanderwerth, W. Indian Oratory. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1971.
* Wallace, Paul A.W. Indians in Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, Penn.: The
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1961.
* _______. The White Roots of Peace. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1946.
* Wissler, Clark. Indians of the United States: Four Centuries of
Their History and Culture. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953.
Unpublished Secondary Sources
THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Aquila, Richard. The Iroquois Restoration: A Study of Iroquois
Power, Politics and Relations With Indians and Whites. Ph.D.
dissertation, Ohio State University, 1961.
* Bramson, Emily K. New York State and the Iroquois Indians. M.A.
thesis, Columbia University, 1940.
* Bridge, Beatrice M. The Influence of the Iroquois on the
Development of New France. M.A. thesis, Saskatchewan University,
1938.
* Clarke-Smith, Linda. Primitive Women: A Study of Women Among
Tribes of Australia and the Iroquois Confederacy. M.A. thesis,
Columbia University 1907.
* Clingan, Dorothy E. The Iroquois Confederacy 1682-1690. M.A.
thesis, Yale University, 1934.
* Coogan, John E. The Eloquence of Our American Indians. Ph.D.
dissertation St. Louis University, 1923.
* Foley, Dennis. An Ethnographic Analysis of the Iroquois. Ph.D.
dissertation, State University of New York at Albany, 1955.
* Gerken, Walter D. The Relation of the Iroquois in the Struggle
Between the French and the English in North America. M.A. thesis,
Columbia University, 1902.
* Jaffe, Herman J. The Iroquois Confederacy in the Wars of the
Iroquois. M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1961.
* MacLeod, William C. The Origin of the State Reconsidered in the
Light of the Data of Aboriginal North America. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1924.
* Newell, William B. Crime and Justice Among the Iroquois Indians.
M.A. thesis University of Pennsylvania, 1934.
* Noon, John A. The League of the Iroquois on Grand River: An
Acculturation Study in Government and Law. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1942.
* Preska, Margaret R. Speech Communication in the Iroquois
Confederacy. M.A. thesis, Pennsylvania State University 1961.
* Reynolds, Wynn R. Persuasive Speaking of the Iroquois at Treaty
Councils 1678-1776: A Study of Techniques as Evidenced in the
Official Transcripts of the Interpreters' Translations. Ph.D.
dissertation, Columbia University, 1957.
* Richards, Cara E. The Role of Iroquois Women: A Study of the
Onondaga Reservation. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University,
1957.
* Walsh, Joseph. The Iroquois Confederacy: Unresolved Dilemma of
American History. M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1965.
* Wardy, Ben Z. Iroquoian Government. M.A. thesis, The New School
1956.
__________________________________________________________________
Benjamin Franklin
__________________________________________________________________
FINDING AIDS
Bridgewater, Dorothy. "Notable Additions to the Franklin
Collection." Yale University Library Gazette 20(1945):21-28.
* Bell, Whitfield J., Jr. and Murphy D. Smith. Guide to the Archives
and Manuscript Collections of the American Philosophical Society.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1966.
* Day, Richard E., ed. Calendar of Sir William Johnson Manuscripts
in the New York State Library, Albany. Albany: State of New York,
1909.
* De Puy, Henry F. A Bibliography of the English Colonial Treaties
With the Indians. New York: Lenox Club, 1917.
* Ford, Paul L. Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by or
Relating to Benjamin Franklin. [1889]. Boston: Mitford House,
1972.
* Franklin, Benjamin. A Register and Index of his Papers in the
Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress
Manuscript Division, 1973.
* Hayes, I.M., ed. Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin in
the Library of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1908.
* Lingelbach, William E. "Benjamin Franklin's Papers in the American
Philosophical Society," Proceedings. American Philosophical
Society 99(1955):359-380.
COLLECTED WORKS
* Bigelow, John, ed. The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin. 10
vols. New York: J.P. Putnam's Sons, 1887-1889.
* Jorgenson, Chester E. and Frank L. Mott. Benjamin Franklin:
Representative Selections. New York: Hill & Wang, 1962.
* Labaree, Leonard and William B. Willcox, eds. The Papers of
Benjamin Franklin. 21 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950-1978.
* Sparks, Jared. The Works of Benjamin Franklin. 10 vols. Boston:
Tappan & Whittemore, 1840.
* Sullivan, James, et. al The Papers of Sir William Johnson. 14
vols. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921-1965.
PRIMARY SOURCES
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_______. "Journal of the Proceedings Held at Albany in 1754."
Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3rd series, Vol.
5:5-74.
* _______. "Journal of the Treaty Held at Philadelphia in August,
1775, With the Six Nations by the Commissioners of the Twelve
United Colonies." Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 3rd
series, Vol. 5:75-100.
* _______. Several Conferences Between . . . Quakers . . . and
Deputies from the Six Nations. New Castle Upon Tyne, Penn: 1.
Thompson & Co., 1756.
* _______. An Account of Conferences Held and Treaties Made by Major
General Sir William Johnson, Bart, and the Chief Sachems and
Warriors of the Six Nations, etc. London: A. Millar, 1756.
* Atkinson, Theodore. "Accounts of the Albany Conference of 1754."
Ed. by Beverly McAnear. Mississippi Valley Historical Review
39(1953):727-746.
* Bartram, John. Observations . . . Made in His Travels from
Pensilvania to Onondaga, Oswego and the Lake Ontario. London: no
publisher, 1751.
* _______. Observations on the Inhabitants . . . and Other Matters .
. . Made by Mr. John Bartram, in His Travels from Pensilvania to
Onondaga, Oswego and the Lake Ontario, in Canada. London: no
publisher, 1753.
* Carver, Jonathan. Travels Through the Interior Parts of North
America With a Concise History. . . of the Indians. London: no
publisher, 1778.
* _______. Three Years' Travels Through the Interior Parts of North
America in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768. Philadelphia: Joseph
Crukhart, 1792.
* Douglass, William. A Summary, Historical and Political, of the
British Settlements in North America. 2 vols. London: R.J.
Dodsley, 1760.
* Farrand, Max. The Records of the Constitutional Convention of
1787. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911.
* Hazard, Samuel, ed. Pennsylvania Archives. Philadelphia: Joseph
Severns & Co., 1852.
* Hopkins, Stephen A. A True Representation of the Plan Formed at
Albany in 1754 for Uniting all the British Northern Colonies.
Rhode Island Historical Tracts No 9. Providence: Rhode Island
Historical Society, 1880.
* Hunter, John Dunn. Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of
North America. [1824]. New York: Schocken, 1973.
* Kennedy, Archibald. Serious Considerations on the Present State of
the Affairs of the Northem Colonies. New York: R. Griffiths, 1754.
* _______. The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship
of the Indians to the British Interest Considered. New York: James
Parker, 1751.
* _______. Serious Advice to the Inhabitants of the Northern
Colonies on the Present Situation of Affairs. New York: A.
Kennedy, 1755.
* Marshe, Witham. Journal of the Treaty Held With the Six Nations by
the Commissioners of Maryland and Other Provinces at Lancaster in
1744. Massachusetts Historical Society Collections 1800. Vol.
7:171-201. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1801.
* O'Callaghan, E.B., ed., Documentary History of the State of New
York. Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1849. Volume 1.
* _______. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York.
Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1855. Volume 6.
* Pennsylvania, State of. Minutes of the Provincial Council of
Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1852.
* Pownall, Thomas. Considerations Toward a General Plan of Measures
for the English Provinces. New York: Parker & Weyman, 1756.
* _______. The Administration of the Colonies. 4th ed. London: J.
Walter, 1768.
* Tilghman, Tench. Memoir of Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman. [1876]. New
York: Arno Press, 1971.
* Van Doren, Carl and Julian P. Boyd, eds. Indian Treaties Printed
by Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical
Society, 1938.
* Van Doren, Carl. Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and
Richard Jackson. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
1947.
* _______. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiographical Writings. New York:
The Viking Press, 1945.
* Wraxall Peter. An Abridgement of the Indian Affairs . . .
1678-1751. Ed. by Charles H. McIlwain. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1915.
Unpublished Primary Sources
_______. Account of a Meeting of the Commissioners of Indian
Affairs, August 9, 1745. American Philosophical Society.
* Atkinson, Theodore. Memo Book of My Journey as One of the
Commissioners to the Six Nations, 1754. Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.
* Croghan, George. "Journal -- April 3 to November 18, 1759."
American Philosophical Society.
* _______. "Journal Relating to a Meeting With the Indians."
American Philosophical Society.
* Franklin, Benjamin. "Remarks on the Plan for Regulating the Indian
Trade 65-1766." Library of Congress.
* _______. "Memorandum of a Conference With the Indians at Carlisle,
September 26 1753." American Philosophical Society..
* _______. "Talk to the Old Chief." [June 30, 1787]. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division.
* _______. "To the Beloved Woman." [June 30, 1787]. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division.
* _______. "To Gov. Sevier, from Philadelphia." [June 30, 1787].
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
* _______. "To the Cornstalk, Cherokee." [June 30, 1787]. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division.
* _______. "To Count de Buffon." [November 19, 1787]. Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division.
* Horsfield, Timothy. [1708-1773, Justice of the Peace, Bethlehem,
Pa.] Papers, 1733-1771. 2 vols. American Philosophical Society.
* Library of Congress. Colonial Office Records, Group 5. Indian
Treaties 1748-1763.
* _______. Public Records Office (War office) Collections 34, 38,
39. Sir William Johnson Papers.
* Misc. Manuscripts on Indian Affairs 1737-1775. 5 vols. American
Philosophical Society.
* Wallace, Paul A.W. Benjamin Franklin's Fingerprints. [1953].
American Philosophical Society.
* Weiser, Conrad. "Letter to James Logan." [October 15, 1747].
American Philosophical Society.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Published Secondary Sources
ARTICLES AND SHORT MONOGRAPHS
* Aldridge, Alfred 0. "Franklin's Letter on Indians and Germans."
Proceedings. American Philosophical Society 90:4(1947):391-395.
* _______. "Franklin's Deistical Indians." Proceedings. American
Philosophical Society 90:4(1947):398-410.
* Becker, Carl. "Benjamin Franklin." Dictionary of American
Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931 6:585-598.
* Billington, R.A. "The Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768." New York
History 25(1944):182-194.
* Eddy, George S. "The Franklin Library." Proceedings. American
Antiquarian Society 34(1924):208-226.
* Gipson, Lawrence H. "Thomas Hutchinson and the Framing of the
Albany Plan of Union of 1754." Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography (1950):5-35.
* _______. "The Drafting of the Albany Plan of Union: A Problem in
Semantics." Pennsylvania History 26(1959):290-316.
* Hallowell, A. Irving. "The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of
the Indian on American Culture." Edited by Walker D. Lyman and
Clifton B. Kroeber. The Frontier in Perspective. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.
* Hamilton, Milton W. "Myths and Legends of Sir William Johnson."
New York History 34(1953):3-26.
* McLaughlin, Andrew C. "The Background of American Federalism."
American Political Science Review 12(1918):215-240.
* Matthews, Lois K. "Benjamin Franklin's Plans for a Colonial
Union." American Political Science Review 8(1014):393-412.
* Olson, Alson G. "The British Government and Colonial Union 1754."
William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 17(1960):22-23.
* Ranney, John C. "The Bases of American Federalism." William and
Mary Quarterly 3rd series 3(1946):1-35.
BOOKS AND LONGER MONOGRAPHS
* Aldridge, Alfred 0. Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967.
* _______. Benjamin Franklin: Philosopher and Man. Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott, 1965.
* Beauchamp, William M. The Life of Conrad Weiser. Syracuse:
Onondaga County Historical Association, 1925.
* Brewster, William. The Pennsylvania and New York Frontier 1720 to
1783. Philadelphia: George S. MacManus Co., 1954.
* Buell, Augustus C. Sir William Johnson. New York: Appleton & Co.,
1903.
* Conner, Paul W. Poor Richard's Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and
the New American Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
* Crane, Verner W. Benjamin Franklin: Englishman and American.
Providence R.I.: Brown University, 1936.
* _______. Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People. Edited by Oscar
Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1954.
* _______. Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press 1950.
* Eckert, Allan W. Wilderness Empire: A Narrative. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1969.
* Eiselen, Malcolm R. Franklin's Political Theories. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928.
* Fox, Edith M. Land Speculation in the Mohawk County. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1949.
* Flexner, James T. Mohawk Baronet: Sir William Johnson of New York.
New York: Harper & Bros., 1959.
* Gipson, Lawrence H. Zones of International Friction: The Great
Lakes Frontier, Canada, India 1748-1754. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1942.
* Gooch, George P. The History of English Democratic Ideas in the
Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, England: The University Press,
1898.
* Graeff, Arthur D. Conrad Weiser: Pennsylvania Peacemaker.
Allentown, Pa.: German Folklore Society, no date.
* Griffis, William E. Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations. New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891.
* Hamilton, Milton W. Sir William Johnson: Colonial American
1715-1763. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976.
* Henry, Thomas R. Wilderness Messiah: The Story of Hiawatha and the
Iroquois. New York: Bonanza Books, 1955.
* Howe John R., ed. The Role of Ideology in the American Revolution.
New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970.
* Huntington, Ellsworth. The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of
Aboriginal America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921.
* Jacobs, Wilbur. Wilderness Politics and Indian Gifts: The Northern
Colonial Frontier 1748-1763. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1950.
* Judd, Jacob and Irwin Polisbook, eds. Aspects of Early New York
Society and Politics. Tarrytown, N.Y.: Sleepy Hollow Restoration,
1974.
* Ketcham, Ralph L., ed. The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin.
New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
* Keys, Alice M. Cadwallader Colden: A Representative Eighteenth
Century Official. New York: Columbia University Press, 1906.
* Kraus, Michael. The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth Century
Origins. New York: Russell & Russell, 1949.
* Leach, Douglas E. The Northern Colonial Frontier 1607-1763. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston 1966.
* Merritt, Richard L. Symbols of American Community 1735-1775. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
* Newbold, Robert C. The Albany Congress and Plan of Union of 1754.
New York: Vantage Press, 1955.
* Osgood, Herbert L. The American Colonies in the Eighteenth
Century. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.
* Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian
and the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1965.
* Pound, Arthur. Johnson of the Mohawks. New York: Macmillan, 1930.
* Richter, Conrad. The Light in the Forest. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1957.
* Sanford, Charles L., ed. Benjamin Franklin and the American
Character. Boston: D. C. Heath Co., 1955.
* Savelle, Max. Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.
* _______. The Diplomatic History of the Canadian Boundary
1749-1763. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.
* _______. Empires to Nations: Expansion in America 1713-1824.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974.
* Seymour, Flora W. Lords of the Valley: Sir William Johnson and His
Mohawk Brothers. New York: Longman, Green & Co., 1930.
* Stourzh, Gerald. Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy.
[1954] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
* Thwaites, Reuben G. Early Western Travels 1748-1846. Cleveland:
Arthur H. Clarke, 1904. Vol. 1.
* Van Doren, Carl. Benjamin Franklin. New York: The Viking Press,
1938.
* Volwiler, Albert T. George Croghan and the Western Movement
1741-1782. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1926.
* Wainwright, Nicholas B. George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
* Wallace, Paul A. W. Conrad Weiser: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
* Walton, Joseph S. Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy of
Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: George H. Jacobs Co., 1900.
* Ward, Harry M. Unite or Die: Intercolony Relations 1690-1763. Port
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971.
* Zolla, Elemire. The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the
American Indian. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Unpublished Secondary Sources
THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Bain, Florence D. The Political Theory of Benjamin Franklin. M.A.
thesis, University of Washington, 1927.
* Gatke, Robert M. Plans of American Colonial Union 1643-1754. Ph.D.
dissertation, American University, 1925.
* Graeff, Arthur D. Conrad Weiser -- Interpreter. M.A. thesis,
Temple University, 1932.
* Maggs, Helen L. Sir William Johnson's Role in the French and
Indian War. M.A. thesis, Syracuse University, 1942.
* Mathur, Mary E. The Iroquois in Time and Space: A Native American
Nationalistic Movement. Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Wisconsin, 1971.
* Miles, Richard D. The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1948.
* Morais, Herbert M. Deism in Eighteenth Century America. Ph.D.
dissertation, Columbia University, 1934.
__________________________________________________________________
Thomas Jefferson
__________________________________________________________________
FINDING AIDS
Hill, Edward E., ed. Preliminary Inventory of the Records of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Washington, D.C.: National Archives,
1965.
* Michigan, University of. William L. Clements Library. Thomas
Jefferson: 1743-1943; A Guide to Rare Books, Maps and Manuscripts
Exhibited at the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, Mich.: William
L. Clements Library,
* National Archives. Documents Relating to the Negotiation of
Ratified and Unratified Treaties With Various Indian Tribes
1801-1869. Washington D.C.: National Archives, 1965.
* _______. Letters Received by the Secretary of War Relating to
Indian Affairs 1800-1823. Washington, D.C.: National Archives,
1965.
* _______. Letters Sent by the Secretary of War Relating to Indian
Affairs 1800-1824. Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1965.
* _______. Misc. Letters Sent by the General Land Office 1796-1889.
Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1965.
* _______. Papers of the Continental Congress 1774-1789. Washington,
D.C.: National Archives, 1965.
* _______. Special Files of the Office of Indian Affairs 1807-1904.
Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1965.
* Thurlow, Constance E. and Francis L. Berkeley, eds. The Jefferson
Papers of the University of Virginia. Charlottesville, Va.:
University of Virginia Library, 1950.
* United States of America. Department of State. Calendar of the
Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.:
Department of State, 1895.
* Virginia, University of. Guide to the Manuscript Edition of the
Jefferson Papers of the University of Virginia 1732-1828.
Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia, 1977.
COLLECTED WORKS
* Boyd, Julian P., ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950 1974.
* Ford, Paul L., ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York: J.
P. Putnam's Sons, 1892-1899.
* Lipscomb, Andrew A. and Albert E. Bergh, eds. The Writings of
Thomas Jefferson. Washington, D.C.: Jefferson Memorial Associates,
1903.
* Washington, H.A., ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 9 vols.
New York: John C. Riker, 1853-1854.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Published Primary Sources
_______. A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections Against
Separating from the Rebellious Colonies. Being The Concluding
Tract of the Dean of Gloucester on the Subject of American
Affairs. Gloucester, England: R. Raikes, 1776.
* Black, Nancy B. and Bette S. Weidman. White on Red: Images of the
American Indian. Port Washington N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976.
* Bland, Richard. An Inquiry into the Rights of the British
Colonies. Williamsburg, Va.: Appeals Press, 1776.
* Cherokee Nation. Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation.
Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation: Cherokee Nation Printers, 1852.
* Chinard, Gilbert, ed. The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928.
* _______. The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and du Pont de
Nemours. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931.
* _______. The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repository of
his Ideas on Government. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1926.
* Council on Interracial Books for Children. Chronicles of American
Indian Protest. New York: Council on Interracial Books for
Children, 1979.
* Foner, Philip S. The Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York:
Willey Book Company, 1944.
* Forbes, Jack B. The Indian in America's Past. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964.
* Ford, Worthington C. Some Jefferson Correspondence 1775-1787.
Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1902.
* Library of Congress. Some Papers Laid Before the Continental
Congress 1776, Taken from Volumes 4 Through 6 of the Journals of
the Continental Congress Issued by the Library of Congress.
Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905.
* Mullet, Charles F., ed. "Some Political Writings of James Otis."
University of Missouri Studies. 4 July and October, 1929.
* Padover, Saul K. Thomas Jefferson on Democracy. New York:
Appleton-Century Co., 1939.
* Sowerby, E. Millicent, ed. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas
Jefferson. 5 vols. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress,
1952-1959.
* Vogel, Virgil J. This Country Was Ours: Documentary History of the
American Indian. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
* Washhurn, Wilcomb. The Indian and the White Man. New York:
University Press, 1964.
Unpublished Primary Sources
Jefferson, Thomas. "To the Brothers of the Delaware and Shawnee
Nations." [Feb. 10, 1801]. Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.
* _______. "To the Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation." [November 24,
1792]. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To the Chiefs of the Choctaw Nation." [March 13, 1805].
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To the Chiefs of the Creek Nation." [Nov. 1, 1805].
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* -- . "To the Chiefs of the Shawnees." [Jan 10, 1809]. Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Chickasaw Nation." [March 7, 1805]. Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Choctaw Indians." [Dec. 13, 1807]. Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Choctaw Nation." [Dec. 17, 1807]. Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "Contents of an Act Concerning Intercourse With the
Indian Tribes." [Jan 13, 1793]. Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.
* _______. "To Cornplanter." [Feb. 11, 1803]. Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Deputies of the Cherokees." [Jan. 9, 1809].
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "Extract From a Speech by the Commissioners of the United
States to the Chiefs of the Cherokees at Southwest Point." [Sept.
4, 1801]. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Handsome Lake." [Feb. 12, 1803]. Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.
* _______. "To Indian Affairs Commissioners." [Sept. 16, 1801].
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To My Children, Chiefs of the Upper Cherokees." [May 4,
1808]. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To My Friends and Children, Chiefs of the Foxes, Sacs. .
. ." [No date]. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "To My Friends and Children, Chiefs of the Cherokee
Nation." [Jan. 10, 1806]. Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.
* _______. "Report of the Secretary of State on Chickasaw and
Cherokee Lands." [Feb. 16, 1793]. Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.
* _______. "To Shawnee Indian Nation." [Feb. 19, 1807]. Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.
* _______. "A Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western
Country." [1792]. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Published Secondary Sources
ARTICLES AND SHORT MONOGRAPHS
* Bailyn, Bernard. "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in
Eighteenth Century America." American Historical Review
62(1962):339-351.
* Conway, Moncure D. The Life of Thomas Paine. 2 vols. New York:
J.P. Putnam's Sons, 1908.
* Doriman, Joseph. "The Economic Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson."
Political Science Quarterly 55(1940):98-121.
* Dumbauld, Edward. The Declaration of Independence and What it
Means Today. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.
* Eckert, Allan W. Wilderness Empire: A Narrative. Boston: Little,
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* Edwards, Samuel, REBEL: A Biography of Tom Paine. New York:
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* Harmon, George D. Sixty Years of Indian Affairs 1789-1850. Chapel
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* Hawke, David F. Paine. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
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* Huntington, Ellsworth. The Red Man's Continent: A Chronicle of
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* Kimball, Marie. Jefferson The Road to Glory. New York:
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BOOKS AND LONGER MONOGRAPHS
* Beard, Charles A. Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. New
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History uf Political Ideas. New York: Peter Smith, 1940.
* Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the
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* Bowers, Claude G. The Young Jefferson 1743-1789. Cambridge, Mass.:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1945.
* Boyd, Julian P. The Declaration of Independence: Evolution of the
Text. . . . Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. 1943.
* Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1974.
* Brown, John P. Old Frontier: Story of the Cherokee Indians from
Earliest Times to the Date of Their Removal in 1838. Kingsport,
Tenn.: Southern Publishing, 1938.
* Chinard, Gilbert. Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1939.
* Colbourn, H. Trevor. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the
Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
* Commager, Henry S. The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and
America Realized the Enlightenment. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1977.
* Jones, Howard. Tah-jah-jute, or Logan, the Mingo Chief. . . .
Circleville, Ohio: No publisher, 1937.
* Koch, Adrienne. The American Enlightenment The Shaping of the
American Experiment and a Free Society. New York: George
Braziller, 1965.
* _______. Power, Morals and the Founding Fathers: Essays in the
Interpretation of the American Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1961.
* _______., and William Peden, eds. The Life and Selected Writings
of Thomas Jefferson. New York: The Modern Library/Random House,
1944.
* _______. The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1957.
* Lynd, Staughton. The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism.
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* McIlwain, Charles H. The American Revolution: A Constitutional
Interpretation. New York: Macmillan, 1924.
* Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and his Time. 4 vols. Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1948-1974.
* May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
* Milling, Chapman J. Red Carolinians. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1940
* Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic 1763-1789. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1956.
* Mullet, Charles F. Fundamental Law and the American Revolution
1760-1776. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.
* Palmer, R. R. The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political
History of Europe and America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1959.
* Pearce, Roy H. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and
the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1965.
* Ritchie, David G. Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political
and Ethical Conceptions. New York: Macmillan, 1895.
* Rossiter, Clinton. The Political Thought of the American
Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1953.
* Royce, Charles C. The Cherokee Nation of Indians. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Co., 1975.
* Sanford, Charles. The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American
Moral Imagination. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961.
* Sheehan, Bernhard. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy
and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1973.
* Skeen, Carl E. Jefferson and the West 1798-1808. Columbus, Ohio:
Ohio State Museum, 1960.
* Straus, Oscar S. The Origins of the Republican Form of Government
in the United States. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1911.
* Van Doren, Carl. The Story of the Making and Ratifying of the
Constitution of the United States. New York: The Viking Press,
1948.
* Wain, John, ed. An Edmund Wilson Celebration. Oxford, England:
Phaidon Press Ltd., 1978.
* Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Indian in America. New York: Harper &
Row, 1975.
* Watson, Thomas E. The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson. New
York: D. Appleton & Co., 1908.
* Wills, Gary. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.
* Wiltse, Charles M. The Jeffersonian Tradition in American
Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.
* Wright, Benjamin F. American Interpretations of Natural Law: A
Study in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1931.
* Wright, Edmond, ed. Causes and Consequences of the American
Revolution. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.
* Zolla, Elemire. The Writer and the Shaman: A Morphology of the
American Indian. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.
Unpublished Secondary Sources
THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Dai, Shen Yu. The Democratic Philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and
Mencius. M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1949.
* Hatch, Ethel S. Tom Paine's Contribution to Democracy. M.A.
thesis, University of Washington, 1918.
* King, Arnold K. Thomas Paine in America 1774-1787. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Chicago, 1951.
* Morais, Herbert M. Deism in Eighteenth Century America. Ph.D.
dissertation, Columbia University, 1934.
__________________________________________________________________
Afterword
__________________________________________________________________
* Barnett, H. G. Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1953.
* Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. The White Man's Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1978.
* Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1974.
* Bryson, Lyman. The Communication of Ideas. New York: Harper &
Bros., 1948.
* Engels, Frederich. "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State." Marx and Engels, Selected Works. New York:
International Publishers, 1968.
* Gipson, Lawrence H. The Coming of the Revolution 1763-1775. New
York: Harper & Bros., 1954.
* Hallowell, A. Irving. "The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of
the American Indian on American Culture." Edited by Walker D.
Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber. The Frontier in Perspective.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.
* Koch, Adrienne. The American Enlightenment The Shaping of the
American Experiment and a Free Society. New York: George
Braziller, 1965.
* _______. The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1957.
* Kraus, Michael. The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth Century
Origins. New York: Russell & Russell, 1949.
* Lynd, Staughton. The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism.
New York: Pantheon, 1968.
* Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society. New York: Henry Holt, 1877.
* Mullet, Charles F. Fundamental Law and the American Revolution
1760-1776. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.
* Palmer, R.R. The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History
of Europe and America 1760-1800. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1959.
* Pearce, Roy H. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and
the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1965.
* Prosser, Michael H., ed. Intercommunication Among Nations and
Peoples. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
* Rabinowitz, Richard. "At Jefferson's Feet." The Nation, March 31,
1979 pp. 342-344.
* Sanford, Charles. The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American
Moral Imagination. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961.
* Sullivan, James. "The Antecedents of the Declaration of
Independence." American Historical Association Annual Report.
[1902]. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
(1903)1:65-86.
* Turner, Frederick J. The Frontier in American History. [1920]. New
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947.
* Wallace, Paul A. W. Conrad Weiser: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
* Wright, Benjamin F. American Interpretations of Natural Law: A
Study in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1931.
* Zikmund, Joseph. The Peloponnesian League and the Iroquois
Confederacy: A Comparative Study of Two Interstate Organizations.
Ph.D. dissertation, Chicago University, 1950.
------------------------------------------------------------------
I N D E X
of names cited in the
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
[The index has been included verbatim from the original book.
Although page numbers have no meaning here, it was felt the
subjects noted here would be useful as reference. The original
chapter page numbers are listed below to facilitate
cross-referencing --ratitor]
General Background 129
The Iroquois and Early Colonial Contact 131
Benjamin Franklin 137
Thomas Jefferson 142
Afterword 148
Ackernecht, Edwin H., 129
Aldridge, Alfred 0., 139, 140
Aquilla, Richard, 136
Armstrong, Virginia, 130
Atkinson, Theodore, 139
Bailyn, Bernard, 145
Bain, Florence D., 142
Barnett, H. G., 148
Bartram, John, 132, 138
Bauman, Robert F., 133
Beard, Charles A., 146
Beauchamp, William M., 133, 134, 140
Becker, Carl, 140, 146
Bell, Whitfield J. Jr., 137
Berkhofer, Robert F., 130, 146, 148
Bigelow, John, 137
Billington, R. A. 140
Black, Nancy B., 143
Blanchard, Rulus, 134
Bland, Richard, 143
Blau, Harold, 133
Bohannan, Paul, 130
Bowers, Claude G., 146
Boyd, Julian P., 143, 146
Bramson, Emily K., 130
Brandon, William, 129
Brewster, William, 140
Bridge, Beatrice, M., 136
Bridgewater, Dorothy, 137
Brodhead, John R., 134
Brodie, Fawn M., 148
Brown, Jessie Louise P., 131
Brown, John P., 146
Bryson, Lyman, 148
Buell, Augustus C., 140
Carr, Lucien, 134
Carse, Mary R., 133
Carter, E. Russell, 130
Carver, Jonathan, 138
Chamberlin, J. E., 130
Chinard, Gilbert, 143, 146
Clarke-Smith, Linda, 136
Clingan, Dorothy E., 136
Cohen, Felix, 129
Cohen, Lucy Kramer, 130
Cohen, Morris R., 130
Colbourn, H. Trevor, 146
Colden, Cadwallader, 132
Commager, Henry Steele, 146
Conner, Paul W., 140
Conway, Moncure D., 145
Coogan, John E., 136
Cook, S. F., 129
Crane, Verner W., 140
Croghan, George, 139
Crosby, Alfred W., 130
Cusick, David, 132
Dai, Shen Yu, 148
Day, Richard E., 137
Decker, George P., 134
DePuy, Henry F., 137
Dockstader, Frederick J., 131
Donohue Thomas, 134
Dorfman Joseph, 145
Douglass William, 138
Dumbauid, Edward, 145
Eckert, Alan W., 145
Eddy, George S., 140
Edwards, Everett E., 129
Edwards, Samuel, 145
Eiselen, Malcolm R., 140
Engels, Frederich, 148
Ewers, John C., 129
Fadden, Ray, 133, 135
Farrand, Max, 138
Fenton, William N., 129, 131, 132, 134, 135
Fife, Austin, E., 129
Flexner, James T., 140
Foley, Dennis, 136
Forbes, Jack, 130, 144
Ford, Paul L., 137, 143
Ford, Worthington C., 144
Foner, Philip S., 144
Fox, Edith M., 140
Frachtenberg, Leo J., 129
Franklin, Benjamin, 137, 139
Freeman, John F., 129, 131
Ganter, Herbert L., 145
Gatke, Robert M., 142
Grken, Walter D., 136
Gibson, A. M., 129
Gillespie, James, E., 130
Gipson, Lawrence H., 140, 141, 145, 148
Gooch, Gorge P. 141
Graeff, Arthur D. 141, 142
Graymont, Barbara, 145
Griffis, William E., 141
Grinde, Donald A. Jr., 145
Hagan, William T., 145
Hale, Horatio E., 135
Hallowell, A. Irving, 130, 140, 148
Hamilton, Milton W., 140, 141
Hanke, Lewis, 130
Harmon, Gorge D., 145
Hatch, Ethel S., 148
Hawke, David F., 145
Hayes, Carlton, J. H., 130, 134
Hayes, I. M., 137
Hazard, Samuel, 138
Heckewelder, John, 132
Henry, Thomas R., 141
Hewitt, J. N. B., 133
Hill, Edward E., 142
Hofstadter, Richard, 130
Hopkins, Stephen A., 138
Horsfield, Timothy, 139
Howard, Helen A., 134
Howe, John R. Jr., 141, 145
Hunter, John Dunn, 138
Huntington, Ellsworth, 141, 146
Jacob, John J., 146
Jacobs, Wilbur R., 134, 141
Jaffee, Herman J., 136
James, Gorge W., 131
Jefferson, Thomas, 144, 146
Jennings, Francis, 135
Jensen, Merrill, 146
Johansen, Bruce E., 131
Johnson, Anna C., 135
Johnston, Charles M., 132
Jones, Howard, 146
Jorgenson, Chester E., 137
Judd, Jacob, 141
Kennedy, Archibald, 138
Ketcham, Ralph L., 141
Keys, Alice M., 141
Kimball, Marie, 146
Kimm, Silas C., 135
King, Amold K., 148
Klein, Milton, 135
Koch, Adrienne, 146, 147, 148
Kramer, Frank R., 131
Kramer, Lucy W., 130
Kraus, Michael, 141, 148
Kriegal, Leonard, 137
Labaree, Leonard, 137
Larrabee, Edward M., 130
Leach, Douglas E., 141
Leder Lawrence H., 132, 135
Lingeibach, William E., 137
Lips, Julian, 131
Lipscomb, Andrew A., 143
Locke, Alain, 131
Lynd, Staughton, 147, 148
Mcllwain, Charles H., 147
McLaughlin, Andrew C., 140
MacLeod, William C., 136
Maestas, Roberto, 131
Maggs, Helen L., 142
Malone, Dumas, 147
Marsden, Michael T., 135
Marshe, Witham, 138
Mathur, Mary E., 142
Matthews, Lois K., 140
May, Henry F., 147
Merritt, Richard L., 141
Miles, Richard D., 142
Miller, Walter, B., 130
Milling, Chapman J., 147
Morais, Herbert M., 142, 148
Morey, Sylvester M., 130
Morgan, Edmund S., 135
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 132, 148
Morgan, William T., 134
Moultrop, Samuel P., 135
Mullet, Charles F., 144, 147, 148
Newbold, Robert C., 141
Newell, William B., 136
Newhouse, Seth, 133
Noon, John A., 136
O'CaDaghan, E. B., 138
Olson, Alson G., 140
Osgood, Herbert L., 141
Padover, Saul K., 144
Palmer, R. R., 147, 149
Parker, Arthur C., 133, 135
Pearce, Roy Harvey, 147, 149
Persinger, C. E., 146
Pound Arthur, 141
Pownail, Thomas, 138
Preska, Margaret R., 136
Proctor, Thomas, 132
Prosser, Michael H., 149
Pruca, Francis Paul, 131
Quimby, Gorge Irving, 131
Rabinowitz, Richard, 149
Ranney, John C., 140
Reaman, G. Elmore, 135
Red Jacket, 146
Reynolds, Wynn R., 136
Richards, Cara E., 136
Richter, Conrad, 141
Ritchie, David G., 147
Ritchie, William A., 135
Root Elibu, 134
Rossiter, Clinton, 147
Royce, Charles C., 147
Ruttenber, E. M., 135
Safford, William E. 130
Sanford, Charles, L., 141, 147, 148
Saum, Lewis 0., 131
Savelle, Max 141
Schlesinger, Arthur M., 134
Schoolcraft, Henry R., 132, 133
Seymour, Flora W., 141
Shea, J.G., 133
Sheehan, Bernhard, 131, 147
Sherman, Daniel, 134
Skeen, Carl E., 147
Smith, William Jr., 133
Snowden, James R., 133
Snyderman, Gorge S., 131
Sowerby, E. Millicent, 144
Sparks, Jared, 137
Speck, Frank G., 134
Steele, Oliver G., 146
Stirling, Matthew W., 130
Stourzh, Grald, 141
Straus, Oscar S., 147
Strickland, Edward D., 135
Sullivan, James, 137, 146, 149
Thurlow, Constance E., 143
Thwaites, Reuben, G., 142
Tilgham, Tench, 138
Tooker, Elizabeth, 134, 135
Trelease, Allen W., 135
Turner, Frederick J., 149
Udall Stewart L., 130
Underhill, Ruth M., 135
Van Doren, Carl, 138, 139, 142, 149
Vanderwerth, W., 135
Vogel, Virgil J., 131, 144
Volwiler, Albert T., 142
Wain, John, 147
Wainwright, Nicholas B., 142
Wallace, Paul A. W., 134, 136, 139, 142, 149
Walsh, Joseph, 136
Walton, Joseph S., 142
Ward, Harry M., 142
Wardy, Ben Z., 136
Washburn, Wilcomb E., 144, 147
Washington, H. A., 143
Watson, Thomas E., 147
Weiser, Conrad, 133, 139
Wills, Gary, 147
Wilson, Edmund, 131
Wiltse, Charles M., 147
Wintemberg, William J., 134
Wissler, Clark, 136
Wraxall, Peter, 139
Wright, Benjamin F., 148, 149
Wright, Edmond, 148
Wright, Lewis B., 131
Wroth, Lawrence C., 134
Yawser, Rose N., 131
Zikmund, Joseph, 149
Zolla, Elemire, 131, 142, 148
------------------------------------------------------------------
I N D E X
[The index has been included verbatim from the original book.
Although page numbers have no meaning here, it was felt the
subjects noted are useful as a reference. The original chapter page
numbers are listed below to facilitate cross-referencing --ratitor]
INTRODUCTION xi
CHAPTER ONE A Composite Culture 3
CHAPTER TWO The Pre-Columbian Republic 21
CHAPTER THREE "Our Indians Have Outdone the Romans" 33
CHAPTER FOUR Such an Union 56
CHAPTER FIVE Philosopher as Savage 77
CHAPTER SIX Self-Evident Truths 98
AFTERWORD 119
BIBLIOGRAPHY 127
ADAIR, James
History of the American Indians (1775), quoted, 40.
ADAMS, John
Mentioned, 15. Refuses Jefferson's request to write
Declaration of Independence, 100. Admires Thomas
Jefferson's "masterly pen," 100. Edits Thomas
Jefferson's declaration, 100.
AKWESASNE NOTES (Mohawk journal)
Publisher of Great Law of Peace, 21, 23.
ALBANY, New York
As frontier outpost, 42, 69. As frequent site of treaty
councils, 53. Courthouse, 69, Dutch architecture in,
69. Canassatego visits, 90.
ALBANY CONGRESS, ALBANY PLAN OF UNION, 65.
Franklin on Archibald Kennedy at, 65. Iroquois' issues
at, 68. Benjamin Franklin represents Pennsylvania at.
Proceedings, 69-76. Purposes of meeting, 69. Approval
of Benjamin Franklin's plan of union, 70, 72. Debate on
Albany plan, 70-71. Provisions of Albany plan 71-73.
Similar to Iroquois system, 72. Rejected by Colonial
Assemblies, 74. As basis for Benjamin Franklin's
Articles of Confederation, 75.
ALDRIDGE, ALFRED 0.
On Benjamin Franklin and Deism, 89.
ALEXANDER, James
And Albany plan, 70.
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Benjamin Franklin and, 64.
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Mentioned, xvi, 34, 54.
Role of Iroquois thought in, 14-15.
Indian battle tactics in, 37.
Upper classes flee, 110.
Natural rights and, 115.
ANGLES, 106.
ANGLO-SAXONS
Jefferson, natural rights of, 115.
ARMSTRONG, John (Indian trader)
Murdered by Delawares, 61.
ATOTARHO (Office of chief sachem, Iroquois Confederacy), 22,
25.
BERKHOFER, Robert F.
Quotes John Locke, 120.
BRITAIN, BRITISH (See also: England, English)
Mentioned, 34, 35.
"Cold war" with France, 44-45.
Source of immigration, 34.
Trade with Iroquois, Lancaster treaty (1744), 46, 47.
Motivations of trade, gifts, 47.
Rivalry with France, 59.
Iroquois deny King's authority, 62.
War with France, 66.
Parliament compared to Indian councils, 74.
Rejects Albany plan, 74.
Spies watch Benjamin Franklin, 74.
Taxes inflame colonists, 75.
Evict French from North America (1763), 77.
Agents cut gift-giving, 78.
Separation of America from, 97.
Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson study history of, 115.
Soldiers' tactics unsuited to America, 117-118.
BOAS, Franz
And cultural relativism, 84.
BOHANAN, Paul
Cited, 6.
BOSTON
Mentioned, 33, 47.
Benjamin Franklin flees as youth, 56.
BOSTON TEA PARTY
Tea dumpers dressed as Mohawks, 75
BOYD, Julian P.
Indian treaties printed by Benjamin Franklin, 62f.
BRANDON, William
Cited, 16.
BRITISH CONSTITUTION
Mentioned, 11.
BRITISH CROWN
Pursues Iroquois alliance, 31, 33, 42, 53.
Imposes Colonial taxes, 75.
And Iroquois title, 78.
Ownership of America debated, 106-107.
BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS
Benjamin Franklin compares to Indian councils, 86-87.
In Declaration of Independence, 102.
Challenged by American ideas, 117.
BUFFALO BILL, 121.
de BUFFON, Count
95.
Propounds degeneracy theories, 95.
CANADA
Aristocrats flee from American Revolution, 110.
Mentioned, 118.
CANASSATEGO
Mentioned, 49, 79.
At Lancaster treaty (1744), 12, 14, 46-64, 67, 86.
On effects of European gifts, 46-47.
Pledges alliance with English, 46, 61.
Personal sketch, 48.
Speaker of Grand Council, 48.
Oratory, 48.
Death (1750), 49, 69.
Friendship with Conrad Weiser, 52, 88, 90.
Salutes Weiser at Lancaster treaty (1744), 52.
Urges Colonial union, 54, 60 (quoted), 75-76, 85-86.
Refutes Maryland land claims, 59-60.
Criticizes Indian traders, 64.
Recalled by Hendrick (1754), 70.
Advice on union recalled by colonists (1775), 75-76.
On English education, 86.
Recalled by Benjamin Franklin, 88.
On Christianity, 89 90.
CARLISLE, Pennsylvania
Treaty council at (1753), 66, 87.
Issues at 1753 council, 66-67.
CARRINGTON, Edward
Letter from Jefferson, 98, 102.
CARTIER
First contact with Iroquois, z2.
CATO
Mentioned, xiv.
CAYUGAS
Mentioned, 21.
Role in Grand Council, 24.
CELTS
Relation to Indians debated, 94
Studied by Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, 115.
Tribal democracy of, 117.
CHAMBERLIN, J. E., The Harrowing of Eden (1975)
Cited, 19.
CHARLESTON, South Carolina
Mentioned, 33, 47
CHEROKEES
Geographical position, 33-34.
CHINARD, Gilbert
On Jefferson: Saxon liberties,
CHRISTIANITY
Indians as counterpart to, 91.
Canassatego on, 91, 92.
COHEN, Felix
"Americanizing the White Man," 3, 7, 13, 14-15.
Indians' democratic traditions, 13.
Role of women, Indian cultures, 13, 19.
Indian governments' federalism, 13-14.
COLDEN, Rev. Alexander
Father of Cadwallader Colden, 36.
COLDEN, Cadwallader
"Indians have outdone the Romans," xiv, 36-37, 39, 41, 84.
Iroquois and liberty, 33.
On Iroquois sociopolitical system, 36.
Sketch of life, 36.
Indians as "living images" of European ancestors, 37.
Iroquois and use of public opinion, 38, 112.
Mentioned, 121.
Iroquois and political liberty, 40.
Need for alliance with Iroquois, 41, 42, 67.
Importance of fur trade, 43.
Political purposes of trade with Indians, 44-45.
Participant in treaty councils, 47.
Relations with William Johnson, 51.
As Deist, 89.
Correspondence with Benjamin Franklin: Colonial union,
62-63.
And Albany plan, 69.
Urges regulation of Indian trade, 73.
COLLINSON, Peter
Letter from Benjamin Franklin, 92-93.
COLUMBUS, Christopher
Mentioned, 3, 13.
Voyage narratives, 35.
COMMAGER, Henry Steele
Cited, xvi, 8f.
On state of nature and happiness, 112.
On Enlightenment thought, 120.
CONCORD, Massachusetts
Battle of (1775), 75, 99.
CONTINENTAL CONGRESS
Mentioned, 75.
And Declaration of Independence, 8-100.
Jefferson requested to author declaration, 100.
Jefferson's reputation at, 100.
Conestoga manor, Pennsylvania, CONESTOGA INDIANS
Indians attacked at (1763), 79.
Indians attacked at Lancaster, 79.
Remnant of Iroquois, 80.
Massacre described by Benjamin Franklin, 80.
CONSTITUTION, United States
Mentioned, 15, 17, 18.
Benjamin Franklin on, 105.
CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, United States
Benjamin Franklin at, 72.
CONSTITUTION, Virginia
Jefferson and, 100.
CROGHAN, George
Land interests, Ohio Valley, 107f.
CUSTER BATTLE, 121.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Posted in Philadelphia, 98.
Jefferson authors, 110, 111.
Ideas in, 102, 108, 117.
And right of revolution, 118.
DEER PIGEON (Iroquois Clan), 28.
And Cadwallader Colden, 62.
And Benjamin Franklin, 62-63, 89.
Description of, 89.
As "natural religion," 89-90.
And universal moral sense, 89.
And Indian thought, 92.
DEGANWIDAH (Founder of Iroquois Confederacy), 12, 22, 26.
DELAWARE INDIANS
Murder of John Armstrong, Indian trader, 61.
DOBYNS, Henry
Estimates of Indian populations, 124.
DONEGAL, Pennslyvania
Vigilantes attack Indians (1763),
DONGAN, New York governor
On Iroquois military prowess, 45.
DUTCH
Privateers raid near Philadelphia, 63.
EASTON, Pennsylvania
As site of treaty councils, 53.
Treaty council at (1777)
ECKERT, Allan W.
Cited, 18.
EDWARDS, Samuel
Biographer of Tom Paine, 116.
EISELEN, Malcolm R.
Benjamin Franklin, Indians and state if nature, 92.
ENGELS, Frederich
And Lewis Henry Morgan, 19.
Mentioned, 121.
On Indian societies,121-123.
Inherits Marx's notes, 122.
Writes Origin of the Family . . . , 122.
Cites Morgan, 122.
On property among Iroquois, 123.
Iroquois as stateless society, 123.
ENGLAND, ENGLISH (See also: Britain, British)
Visit of Squanto (1614), 4.
Political motivations of Indian gifts, 45.
Rivalry with France, 30, 31, 34, 46, 51, 53.
Benjamin Franklin as Colonial representative in, 57, 82.
Conflicts with Iroquois: land claims, 59.
Natural rights theories in, 121.
FIVE NATIONS (See also: Six Nations, Iroquois)
Liberty noted: Colden, 33.
Society described: Colden, 36.
Unity, described by Canassatego, 61-62.
Albany plan and, 72-73.
FORT STANWIX
Treaty council at (1768), 107f.
FRANCE, FRENCH
As source of immigration, 35.
Rivalry with English, 30, 31, 34, 46, 51, 53, 58, 60.
Builds forts in Ohio Valley, 42.
Economic "cold war" with England, 44.
Seeks alliance with Iroquois, 62.
Privateers raid near Philadelphia (1747), 63.
War with Britain, 66-67.
British alliances against, 66.
Attacks Pickawillany, 66.
Attacks Twightwees (1752), 66.
Loss of war with Britain, 77-78.
Benjamin Franklin in, 82.
FRANKLIN, Benjamin
Use of Iroquois as political model, xiv-xv, 8, 10, 12-13,
15, 20.
Mentioned, xii, xiii, 120, 122, 124.
Admiration of Iroquois, 11.
Albany Plan of Union and, 18, 68.
Pennsylvania representative at congress, 69. Influence
at congress, 69. Plan approved by congress, 70.
Provisions of plan, 70-71. Diplomatic context, 71.
Plan rejected by Colonial assemblies, 73-74. Plan and
Iroquois alliance, 79.
Travel conditions, 35.
Involved in treaty councils, 47.
In Iroquois diplomacy, 31.
Appeal of Indian life, 50, 92-93.
Friendship with Conrad Weiser, 52, 58.
Begins printing treaty accounts, 54,
Becomes Indian commissioner, 54.
And Iroquois ideas, 54.
On Iroquois union, 56.
Youth in Boston, 56.
Establishes Pennsylvania Gazette, Poor Richard's
Almanack, 57.
Prints Lancaster treaty account (1744), 62.
Correspondence with Colden: Colonial union, 63.
Organizes Philadelphia militia, 63.
Requests Colden's book, 63.
Colonial interests diverge from Britain, 63-64.
On federal character of Iroquois confederation, 64.
American Philosophical Society, postal service as Colonial
ties, 64.
Relations with Archibald Kennedy, 64.
Correspondence with James Parker, 56, 65.
Urges regulation of Indian trade, 64.
Urges Colonial union, 65-69.
Cites Iroquois union, 65.
Reads report on Indian agents, 66.
Urges regulation of traders, 66, 73.
Begins diplomatic career as Indian envoy (1753), 66-67,
77.
In context of British policy, 66.
Urges alliance with Iroquois, 66.
Indians abuse alcohol, 68.
Publishes "Join or Die" cartoon, 71.
Cites Kennedy's brochure, 71.
Recalls Hendrick, 71.
Favors one-house legislature, 72.
Recognized as advocate of union, 73, 74/
And federalism, 73.
Compares Indian councils to British parliament, 74.
Iroquois' prodding for union, 74.
Spied on by British, 74.
And Articles of Confederation, 75.
On Indians' distaste for class society, 76, 103.
As Philadelphia's first citizen, 77.
Represents Pennsylvania at Royal Court, 78, 82, 107f.
Characterized (1763), 77-78.
On Lancaster massacre, 79-80.
Organizes militia against Paxton Men, 81.
Loses seat in Pennsylvania assembly, 82.
Departs for England (1764), 82.
Called "philosopher as savage," 83, 109.
Admires simplicity of Indian life, 83, 85.
Indians and happiness, 83, 102.
Indians and "happy mediocrity," 83.
Indians and natural rights, 83.
Indians and social role of property, 84, 104-105, 116.
Indians and public opinion, 84, 87, 102, 112.
Lack of ethnocentricism in writings, 84.
And cultural relativism, 84-85.
And Enlightenment thought, 84.
Cites Canassatego on English education, 86.
Decorum at Indian councils, 87.
Indians' recall of oral history, 87.
Compares Indian councils to House of Commons, 87.
On Indian hospitality, 88.
Use of Indian metaphors, 88.
Use of Indians to lampoon religious pomposity, 89-90.
As Deist, 89 91.
On religion as cover for exploitabon 90.
Possibie author of hoax (1768) 91.
Indians as "original men,' 92 94.
Collects Indian grammars, 94.
Opposes degeneracy theories, 94-95.
Pragmatism regarding Indians, 95.
Defends Americans in Europe, 96.
House in Philadelphia 99.
Declines to write Deciaration of Independence, 99.
Edits Jefferson: Declaration of Independence, 99.
Death (1791), 100.
As ambassador to France, 100-101.
Indians as metaphor for liberty, 83-84, 102.
On compensation for government service, 105.
Opposes property qualifications: voting, 105.
On Indians' property rights, 105-106.
Western land speculation of, 106-107f.
On British claim to America, 106.
Correspondence with Jefferson: aristocracy, 109-110.
On American distinctiveness 111.
On corruption and power, 111-112.
On public opinion and liberty, 112.
Studies Romans, Celts, 115.
Natural rights as European heritage, 115.
Invites Tom Paine to America, 116.
Organizes revolutionary efforts, 117.
Use of European theories by, 120.
Reputation in Europe, 121.
Iroquois as stateless society, 112-123.
As witness to history, 124.
FRANKLIN, William
Participant in treaty councils, 47.
Correspondence with Benjamin Franklin: Indian affairs,
82.
As envoy to Indians, 106-107f.
Western land interests, 106-107f.
GAGE, General
Troops requested, 79.
GERMANY
Source of immigration, 35.
Anglo-Saxon migration to England, 100.
GILLESPIE, James E.
On Locke, Hobbes, 121.
GOODMAN, Dr. Jeffry, 124.
GORDON, Pennsylvania Governor
Seeks alliance with Iroquois, 48.
GREAT BEAR (Iroquois clan), 28.
GREAT LAW OF PEACE (Kaianerakowa)
Political ideas in, xiv.
Separation of civil, military power, 10-11.
Religious toleration under, 12, 29.
Checks and balances, 11, 24.
Role of women, 15, 29.
Benjamin Franklin's use as political model, 16.
Mentioned, 18, 21.
Beginning date, conjecture, 21-22.
Provisions of, 23-29, 40.
Translation into English, 23.
Great Tree of Peace: metaphor for union, 23.
Adoption laws, 24, 40.
Rules for debate: Grand Council, 24.
Decisionmaking structure, 25.
Amendments, 25.
Qualifications of statesmen, 26.
Deportment of statesmen, 26.
Impeachment, 27.
Penalties for murder, 26.
Public opinion and, 27.
Election of pine-tree chiefs, 27-28.
War chiefs: election and duties, 28.
Clans cross political boundaries, 28.
Popular redress, 29.
National self-determination, 29.
Sanctity of homes, 29.
Recorded on wampum belts, 29-30.
Lack of racial prejudice in, 51.
Compared to United Nations' declaration of rights, 123-124.
GREECE
Democratic traditions, 117.
GRIFFIS, William E.
Cited, 10.
GRINDE, Donald
Cited, xiii, 19, 20.
HALE, Horatio
Cited, 18-19.
HALLOWELL, A. Irving
Cited, 6, 15.
HAMILTON, James
Appoints Benjamin Franklin to Carlisle Treaty Commission
(1753), 66.
HAMILTON, Milton W.
On Hendrick's eloquence, 49.
HAWK (Iroquois clan), 28.
HANSON, Hans, Beaver trader And Canassatego, 90.
HENDRICK (Tiyanoga)
Mentioned, 78.
At Albany congress, 18.
Participant at treaty councils, 48.
Personal sketch, 49.
Principal chief of Mohawks, 49.
Eloquence, 49.
Friendship with William Johnson, 49-50, 51.
Special invitation to Albany congress, 69.
Advice on Colonial union, 70.
Recalls Canassatego, 70.
Recalled by Benjamin Franklin, 71.
HENRY, Thomas R.
Cited, 15.
HEWITT, J. N. B.
Cited, 10, 15, 18.
HIAWATHA
Founder of Iroquois Confederacy, 22.
HOBBES, Thomas
Familiarity with Indian societies, 120.
Indian influence, Leviathan, 121.
HOUSE OF COMMONS (British)
Report on Americans' battle tactics, 117.
HOWARD, Helen A.
Cited, 18.
HUTCHINSON, Thomas
Aids Benjamin Franklin; Albany Plan of Union, 70.
INDEPENDENCE HALL, 99.
IROQUOIS, IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY (See also: Five Nations Six
Nations)
Political system, brief description, xiv.
Alliance with English, xv.
Government compared to that of United States, 8-20.
Democratic political structure, 18-19.
Engels on, 19.
Beginnings, 21-22.
As balance of power, 31.
Alliance sought by British, French, 30-35, 42, 45, 46-47,
52, 53, 58-59.
Colden describes, 36.
Compared to Romans, 36, 37, 39, 60.
Compared to Greeks, 41, 60.
Compared to Celts and Druids, 37
As original form of government, 37.
Public opinion in, 38.
Voluntary poverty of chiefs, 39.
Personal liberty, 40.
Role of women, 41.
Oratory, 41, 47-48.
Derivation of "Iroquois," French word, 41.
Military power, 42 45.
Strategic geographical position, 34, 42, 45, 59.
Hold trade route, 43.
Influence with other Indian nations, 45.
William Johnson among, 50-51.
And Lancaster treaty council (1744), 52-62.
Conrad Weiser and, 51.
Cement alliance with English (1744), 58.
Delegation arrives at Lancaster (1744), 59.
Maryland land claims refuted, 60-61.
Assert independence from King, 62.
Federal character of government, 64.
French attack allies of, 66.
Issues at Albany congress (1754), 68.
And London Board of Trade, 68.
Arrival at Albany congress, 69.
Described, at Albany congress, 69-70.
Iroquois example and Albany plan, 72.
Urge regulation: Indian trade, 73.
Problems with squatters, 73.
At Philadelphia conference (1775), 75.
Advice recalled: Colonial union, 75-76.
Influence in Ohio Valley, 45, 66, 78.
As counterpoint in Europe, 91.
Tom Paine and, 116.
Territory divided by Treaty of Paris (1783), 118.
And "burned-over district," 121.
JACOBS, William
Cited: Indian giffs and British mercantilism, 47.
JEFFERSON Thomas
Mentioned xii, xiv, 84, 120.
Use of Indiians as political model, xvi, 8, 19-20.
Indians and natural rights, 17, 84, 102.
As Deist, 89.
Collects Indian grammars, 94.
Opposes degeneracy theories, 95-96.
America as new nation, 96.
Indians and "happiness," 98, 102.
Declaration of Independence edited by Benjamin Franklin,
100.
Agrees to write declaration, 100.
Reputation at Continental Congress, 100.
Rues editing by committee, 100.
Admiration for Benjamin Franklin, 101.
Ambassador to France after Benjamin Franklin, 100-101.
Ideas: Declaration of Independence, 102.
Indian ideas and declaration, 101.
Indians and public opinion, 84, 102-103, 112-113.
Indians as metaphor for liberty, 102-111, 114.
Contrast: Indian egalitarianism and European class
societies, 103, 108-109, 110, 123.
Prefers "happiness" to "property," 103-104.
On aristocracy, 103-104, 108. To Benjamin Franklin on,
110. Loathes monarchy, 111, 117.
On European class society, 103, 104.
On property, 104, 108, 116.
"Indian society may be best . . . ," 108.
Calls self "savage from . . . America," 109.
Critique: French bill of rights, 110.
Advocates progressive taxation, 110.
On corruption and power, 111-112.
Public opinion and liberty, 112-114.
Indian societies: popular consent, 114-115.
On right of revolution, 113-114.
On impeachment, 114.
Studies Romans, Celts, 115.
On natural rights as European heritage, 115.
Use of European theories, 119.
JENNINGS, Francis
Cited, 19.
JEWS
Relation to Indians conjectured, 94.
JOHNSON, Sir William
Mentioned, 10.
Adopted by Iroquois, 24.
Participant in treaty councils, 47.
Friendship with Hendrick, 49-50, 51.
Personal sketch, 50.
As spokesman for Iroquois, 51.
Dresses as Iroquois, 50, 51.
Sexual exploits, 51.
And Cadwallader Colden, 51.
And William Penn, 79.
And Benjamin Franklin: Indian affairs, 82.
Land interests: Ohio Valley, 106-107f.
KAMES, Lord
Correspondence with Benjamin Franklin, 81-82.
KENNEDY, Archibald
Work read by Benjamin Franklin, 64, 66.
Urges regulation of traders, 64, 73.
Urges alliance with Iroquois, 65.
Urges Colonial unity, 64, 67.
Friendship cultivated by Benjamin Franklin, 65.
Work cited by Benjamin Franklin, 69.
KERCHEVAL, Samuel
Letter from Jefferson, 109.
KOCH, Adrienne
Cited, 121.
KRAMER, Frank
Cited, 121.
KRAUS Michael
Cited 120.
LAFITAU, Joseph Francois
Iroquois compared to Romans, 39.
LANCASTER, Penn., LANCASTER TREATY COUNCILS
As frequent council site, 53.
Treaty council at (1744), 57-62, 65.
Colonists recall 1744 council (1775), 75-76.
"Paxton Men" attack Indians at, 79.
"Paxton Men" assemble at, 81.
LANCASTER MASSACRE
Described, deplored by Benjamin Franklin, 79-80.
de LANCY, James, New York governor
Invites Hendrick to Albany congress, 69.
Meets with Hendrick, et. al., 69-70.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 10.
LE BOEUF
French fort at, 66.
LEXINGTON, Mass.
Battle of (1775), 75, 99.
LLOYD, Herbert M.
Cited, 9-10.
LOCKE, John
Mentioned, xiv, 14, 120.
On property, 120.
Familiarity with Indian societies, 120.
LOGAN
Son of Shickallemy, 49.
Speech recorded by Jefferson, 49.
LONDON
Mentioned, 47.
Declaration of Independence arrives at, 98.
LONDON BOARD OF TRADE
And Albany congress, 68.
MAGNA CHARTA, 11.
MARSHE, Witham
Describes Canassatego, 48.
MARTYR, Peter, 17.
MARYLAND
Delegation at Lancaster treaty (1744), 46, 58, 59.
Disputes Iroquois land claim, 60.
MARX, Karl
Investigates Iroquois sociopolitical structure 19.
Mentioned 121.
On Indian societies, 121-123.
Study of anthropology, 122.
Admires Iroquoian democracy, egalitarianism, 122.
Death of, 122.
MATHUR, Mary E.
Cited, 18.
McGUFFY'S READER
Logan's speech in, 49.
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
Iroquois influence in, 45.
MOHAWKS
Mentioned, 21, 30.
Internal decisionmaking 23.
Role in Grand Council, 23.
Relations with William Johnson, 50, 51.
Adoption of Conrad Weiser, 58.
Keepers of "Eastern Door," 69.
Proximity to Albany, 69.
Disguise, Boston Tea Party, 75.
MONTESQUIEU, 14.
MORE, Thomas
Author of Utopia, 14.
On property, 120.
Indian influence: Utopia, 121.
MORGAN, Lewis Henry
League of the Iroquois, 8, 9.
Works read by Marx and Engels, 19, 122.
Friend of Ely Parker, 122.
Adopted by Iroquois, 122.
Cited by Engels, 122.
MONROE, James
Letter from Jefferson, 1ll.
MORMONISM
Possible Indian influence, 121.
NEWBOLD, Robert
Cited, 44.
NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION
(1643), 16
NEW FRANCE
Ideas: France, 121.
NEWHOUSE, Seth
Transcribes Great Law of Peace into English, 23.
NEW YORK
Mentioned, 44, 45.
Official contacts with Shickallemy, 48.
NORRIS, Isaac
Carlisle treaty commissioner, 67.
Urges regulation of Indian trade, 68.
OHIO, OHIO COUNTRY, OHIO VALLEY
Iroquois influence in, 45, 67.
Scotch-Irish immigration into, 78.
Pontiac's rebellion, 78.
Benjamin Franklin's visit (1776), 79-80.
Benjamin Franklin's land interests in, 106-107f.
OLD TESTAMENT, 40.
ONEIDAS
Mentioned, 21.
Role in Grand Council, 23.
ONONDAGAS, ONONDAGA New York
Mentioned, 21.
Site of Grand Council fire, 23, 24.
Role in Grand Counicl, 23.
Canassatego as council speaker, 58.
Lancaster Massacre and, 79.
OSWEGO, New York
Trading house at, 44.
PACIFIC OCEAN, 33
PAINE, Tom
Arrives in America, 116.
Attends treaty council (Easton 1777), 116.
Learns Iroquois language 116.
Seeks Iroquois alliance, 116.
Fascinated by Iroquois, 116.
On Indians and property, 116.
Civilization: cause of poverty, 116.
Jefferson in (1785), 109.
Peace treaty (1783), 118.
PARKER, Arthur C.
On Iroquois society, 10.
On Iroquois Confederacy beginnings, 21.
Great Law of Peace, 28.
PARKER, Ely
Mentioned, 8.
And L. H. Morgan, 122.
PARKER, James
Correspondence with Franklin, 56, 65, 71.
de PAUW
Expounds degeneracy theories, 95.
PAXTON, Penn., "PAXTON MEN"
Vigilantes attack Indians (1763), 79.
Vigilantes invade Lancaster, 79.
Criticized by Benjamin Franklin, 79-80.
PEARCE, Roy Harvey
Credited by Charles Sanford, 120.
PENN, William, Governor, Pennsylvania
And "Paxton Men" (1763), 79.
And Benjamin Franklin, versus "Paxton Men," 81.
Family founds Pennsylvania, 98.
PENNSYLVANIA
Commissioners at Lancaster treaty council, 46, 58.
Official contacts with Shickallemy, 48.
Benjamin Franklin as offficial printer, 56-57.
Benjamin Franklin represents in England, 57.
Cements alliance with Iroquois (1744), 58, 63.
Expenses, Indian affairs, 66.
Aids Indians attacked by French, 66.
Benjamin Franklin represents at Albany congress, 69.
Frontier settlement of, 79.
PETERS, Richard
Carlisle treaty commissioner, 67.
Urges regulation of Indian traders, 68.
PHILADELPHIA
Mentioned, 70.
Benjamin Franklin's arrival in (1723), 56.
Description (1744), 56.
Benjamin Franklin's civic activities in, 57.
Benjamin Franklin establishes printing business in, 57.
Treaty council at (1742), 59.
Booksellers, 57.
Meeting with Iroquois at (1775), 75.
Continental Congress at, 76, 116.
Described (1763), 77-78.
Rumors of attack by"Paxton Men," 79, 80.
Described, mid 1770s, 98.
As "Grand Council fire" of Confederacy, 98.
PILGRIMS
Met by Squanto (1620), 4.
PILANT, Richard, 17.
PITTSBURGH, 34.
PLOG, Fred
Cited, 6.
PONTIAC
Opposes squatters, 78.
de la POTERIE, Monsieur
On Iroquois, 39.
POUND, Arthur
Cited, 11.
POWNALL, Thomas
Opposes confiscation of Indian land, 106.
PRESQUE ISLE
French fort at, 67.
PROVINCE ISLAND, Philadelphia
Indian settlement at, 79.
Rumors of attack: "Paxton Men," 79.
PURITANS, PURITANISM
Benjamin Franklin's distaste for orthodoxy of, 56.
QUAKERS
Tension with Frontier settlers, 79.
Form militia versus "Paxton Men, 81.
In Philadelphia, 98.
REAMAN, Elmore
Cited, 17.
REYNOLDS, Wynn R.
Examines Iroquois oratory, 41.
ROMAN REPUBLIC
Liberties in, 117.
ROMANS
Studies by Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, et. al., 115.
ROSSITER, Clinton
On Benjamin Franklin and federalism, 73.
ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques
Mentioned, xiv, 14, 120.
Ignites French imagination, 121.
SANFORD, Charles
Cited, 14, 16, 120.
American imagined as Garden of Eden, 115.
SAVELLE, Max
Cited, 5.
SAXONS, 106
SCARROOYADY
At Carlisle treaty council (1753), 68.
Urges regulation of Indian trade, 68.
Traders use of liquor: Eaud, 68.
SCOTCH-IRISH
Immigration to Pennsylvania, 78.
SENECAS
Role in Grand Council, 24.
SHICKALLEMY (Swatane)
Participant in treaty councils, 48.
Iroquois envoy to border tribes, 48.
Personal sketch, 48.
Death of (1749), 49.
Friendship with Conrad Weiser, 53.
SHORT, William
Letter from Jefferson, 108.
SIX NATIONS (See also: Five Nations, Iroquois)
Strategic position vis-à-vis English French, 42.
Cadwallader Colden among, 44.
At Lancaster treaty council (1744), 58, 59.
At Carlisle treaty council (1753), 66.
Meeting with united colonists (1775), 74.
Thanked for advice: Colonial union, 76.
Benjamin Franklin and, 83.
SMITH, W. S.
Letter from Jefferson, 113-114.
Source of immigration to New World, 35.
SPECK, Frank G.
Cited, 11-12.
SQUANTO
Visits Europe, 4.
Greets Pilgrims in New World, 4, 34.
STAMP ACT
Colonists rally against, 75.
Benjamin Franklin's writings after, 96.
STANDING ARROW (Seneca)
And Edmund Wilson, 16, 19.
STANDING BEAR (Lakota)
Quoted, xi.
SUSQUEHANAH INDIANS
And Swedish missionary, 89-90.
SYRACUSE, New York
At site of Iroquoian Grand Council fire, 23.
THANKSGIVING
First feast, 4.
THOMAS, Gov. George, Esq.
Greets Iroquois at Lancaster treaty council (1744), 59.
Role at treaty council, 59.
Urges alliance with Iroquois, 59-60.
Response to Canassatego, 62.
TREATY COUNCILS (See also: individual councils)
Diplomatic sign)ficance, 47.
Proceedings widely read, 47.
Protocol at councils, 53-54.
As forums for Ideas, 53.
Accounts published by Benjamin Franklin, 54.
TURNER, Frederick Jackson
"Frontier Hypothesis," 16.
TURTLE (Iroquois clan), 28.
TURTLE ISLAND
Iroquois name for North America, 30.
TUSCARORAS
Join Iroquois Confederacy, 21.
Lack voting rights in Grand Council
TWIGHTWEES (Indians)
Alliance with British and Iroquois, 67.
Attacked by French (1752), 67.
UNDERHILL, Ruth
Cited, 15.
UNITED NATIONS
Declaration of rights compared to Iroquois' Great Law of
Peace, 17-18, 29, 123-124.
Indian nations petition, 123.
UNITED STATES
Mentioned, xii, 118.
Governmental structure compared to Iroquois', 9-10, 15,
17-18, 20.
Revolutionary ideology of founders, 54.
Federal governmental structure, 73-74.
Born during Enlightenment, 125.
VAN DOREN, Carl
Cited, 11.
Indian treaties printed by Benjamin Franklin, 62f.
VENANGO
French fort at, 67.
VIKINGS
Travel to America, 3-4.
VIRGINIA
Commissioners at Lancaster treaty council, 46, 58, 59, 85.
Iroquois intiuence on frontier of, 69.
VOLTAIRE, 14.
de VOTO, Bernard
Cited, 6.
WAITE, Robert
On Cadwallader Colden, 36
WALLACE, Paul A. W.
Iroquois Confederacy compared to United Nations, 12, 15,
18.
Beginnings of Iroquois Confederacy, 22.
Indian governments resemble Utopia, 120.
WAMPUM
Belts as written communication, 28, 29.
Political significance, 26.
Great Law of Peace recorded on, 29.
Used to record contracts, 29.
Used to assist memory, 29
Used as medium of exchange, 30.
Fabrication of, 30.
Diplomatic uses, 30.
WASHINGTON, George
Mentioned, 15.
Collects Indian grammars, 94.
Indian-warfare (guerilla) tactics, 117.
WRAXALL, Peter
Reproves William Johnson for sexual exploits, 51.
WEISER, Conrad
Mentioned, 78.
Adopted by Iroquois, 52, 58.
Participant in treaty councils, 47.
Personal sketch, 52.
And Lancaster treaty, 85.
Supplies Benjamin Franklin with treaty accounts, 52,
57-58.
Friendship with Canassatego, 52, 88, 90.
Hosts Iroquois at Lancaster treaty council (1744), 52, 58-59.
Friendship with Shickallemy, 53.
Friendship with Benjamin Franklin, 58.
Delivers Lancaster treaty council account to Benjamin
Franklin, 58.
Meets Canassatego at Lancaster (1744), 58.
Recalled by Benjamin Franklin, 88.
WHEELOCK, Matthew, 77, 100.
WILD POTATOES (Iroquois clan), 28.
WILLIAM AND MARY (College), 85.
WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia
Site of William and Mary College, 85.
Jefferson plans trip to (1776), 100.
WILSON, Edmund
Cited, 16, 19.
WISSLER, Clark
"Iroquois family," 45.
ZOLLA, Elemire
Cited, 18-19.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Forgotten Founders by Bruce E. Johansen
In FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS, Bruce Johansen has written an
exciting book, one that broadens the basis of American history,
enriches the national heritage, and deepens our understanding of
the freedom we all share.
Calling on Benjamin Franklin as his chief witness, Dr.
Johansen shows us how the primitive, but surprisingly democratic
and enlightened culture of the American Indian, clarified the
thinking of immigrant colonists and even of the world beyond our
shores -- a world tired of the elaborate hierarchies of kings and
nobles and the inherited miseries of their subjects. To the
European, America was another planet. Franklin saw in it the shadow
of an imperfect but practical Utopia.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Six
Nations of the Iroquois were our allies in England's war with
France. They may be seen as the friends and equals of our Colonial
statesmen. On both sides, there were those who spoke the other's
language fluently. White man and red man sat together around the
Indian Council fires and the record of what they said exists today.
Urged and assisted by Indian friends, as well as by the
speculations of historians, Bruce Johansen went back to those
records. When approached with the exchange of ideas as the key
rather than that of arrows and bullets, the documents are rich in
evidence. Dr. Johansen sees his study only as a beginning, but, in
this first exploratory expedition, what he has found is a new and
vital essence in the national character. The Sachem, as well as the
Sage, had much to do with the nature of our life, our liberty and
our pursuit of happiness.
[IMG: Bruce Elliott Johansen]
Bruce Elliott Johansen
Dr. Bruce E. Johansen has his own roots in Seattle, where he
worked documenting American Indian and Chicano history for a decade
and a half. During that time he also worked as a newspaper reporter,
a university professor and a community organizer, and earned a Ph.D.
in Communications History at the University of Washington. FORGOTTEN
FOUNDERS began as a doctoral dissertation in the communication of
ideas between cultures.
Born January 20, 1950, Johansen has lived in the Phillippines,
Puerto Rico and several locations within the United States. He first
worked as a reporter and a copyeditor with The Seattle Times
(1970-1976), but has since freelanced for The Washington Post's
Outlook section, Newsday, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and
several other newspapers and periodicals. He is currently Assistant
Professor of Communications at the University of Nebraska.
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