Topic: The League of Iroquois Constitution and Government

Bruce E. Johansen

1775 at Albany. Taken by themselves, these shreds of evidence may seem to support Tooker's assertion that "virtually no support" exists for the contention that knowledge of the Iroquois League helped shape United States institutions during the revolutionary period (Tooker I988: 305). In a cursory review of the historical evidence, Tooker isolates a few examples and removes them from context in an attempt to prove her point.

Having reviewed the only evidence she contends exists, Tooker then asks: "How much did the founding fathers actually know about Iroquois political ideas and the Iroquois form of government? Were they actually influenced by Iroquois ideas respecting proper forms of governance or merely their image of what these ideas were?" Neither Grinde nor I assert that any of the founders sought to replicate the Iroquois League in the colonies. In fact, Thomas Paine said that while he admired the Indian model, it could hardly be replicated wholly among peoples carrying Euro- pean cultural baggage. "To understand what the state of society ought to be," wrote Paine (1945, I: 6Io), "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 species of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets of Europe." Despite the appeal of a society without poverty, Paine (ibid.) wrote that it would be impossible "to go from the civilized to the natural state."

This is not to say, however, that native models of governance had no impact or that influential architects of our founding ideology paid no attention to them. A detailed study of history reveals the opposite. The Lancaster Treaty Council that Franklin published, for example, was only one of several that came off his press between 1736 and 1762. Franklin himself began his distinguished diplomatic career by representing Penn- sylvania among the Iroquois and allied native nations. During this time, Franklin was in frequent contact with Conrad Weiser, a fluent speaker of Mohawk who often attended the Iroquois Grand Council at Onondaga, and with Sir William Johnson, who also was fluent in Mohawk. In Octo- ber I753, a few months before the Albany Congress, Franklin attended an Iroquois condolence ceremony (Van Doren and Boyd 1938: 128-31).

Tooker (1988: 31I) asserts that the treaty councils were "of a diplo- matic character, hardly concerned with philosophical questions regarding the proper nature of political relationships between men." That Franklin conducted diplomacy with the Iroquois and their allies is undeniable, of course, but it is equally true that the treaty councils provided a vital chan- nel of communication between political opinion leaders of both cultures, and that Franklin, and others, drew philosophical sustenance from them.

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Commentary on the Iroquois and the Constitution

It was in this context that Franklin observed the assertions of Canassatego (cited ibid.: 309-Io) and made his own observation to James Parker in 1751 (ibid.: 308). The evidence Tooker cites, placed in proper historical context, refutes her own argument.

Likewise, plans for the Albany Congress of I754 grew out of Frank- lin's diplomatic affairs with the Iroquois and other native nations. This conference had two purposes: first, to do business with the Indians, and second, to create a plan for colonial union. It was definitely the kind of forum for an exchange of ideas on governance that Tooker denies took place. Toward the second end, the Mohawk sachem Tiyanoga (whom the British called Old Hendrick) described the Iroquois system to the colonial delegates (O'Callaghan 1851-53, z: 316). Franklin was commissioned to draw up the final draft of the Albany Plan on 9 July 1754, two weeks to the day after his Pennsylvania Gazette published the Join or Die car- toon, one of the first graphic illustrations in an American newspaper to advocate federal union.

In drawing up his final draft, Franklin was meeting several diplomatic demands: the Crown's for control, the colonies' desires for autonomy in a loose confederation, and the Iroquois' stated advocacy for a colonial union similar (but not identical) to their own in form and function. For the Crown, the plan provided administration by a president general, to be appointed by England. The individual colonies were to be allowed to retain their own constitutions, except as the plan circumscribed them. The retention of internal sovereignty within the individual colonies closely resembled the Iroquoian system and had no precedent in England. The colonies' mutual suspicion and their fear that the larger would dominate the smaller made it expedient for Franklin to adopt another Iroquoian device: any colony could veto the action of the rest of the body. Frank- lin chose the name "Grand Council" for the plan's deliberative body, the same name generally applied to the Iroquoian central council. The num- ber of delegates, forty-eight, was close to the Iroquoian council's fifty (ibid., 6: 889), and each colony had a different number of delegates, just as each Iroquoian nation sent a different number of sachems to Onon- daga. The Albany Plan was based in rough proportion on population as defined by tax revenues, however, while the Iroquoian system was based on tradition.

This chain of events helped Julian Boyd (198I: 239), editor of Frank- lin's treaties and Jefferson's papers, to conclude a half century ago that Franklin "got his ideas from the Iroquois" for the Albany Plan, a fact that Tooker omits from her analysis. Ignoring Boyd, as well as statements by Richard K. Matthews and Arrell M. Gibson (cited below), Tooker (I988:

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Bruce E. Johansen

306) asserts that "the idea . . . figures not at all in the standard histories of the Constitution nor in the documents on which they rest" (italics mine).

In her extensive recapitulation of Lewis Henry Morgan's writings on the Iroquois Confederacy, Tooker also does not cite passages in Morgan's work that refute her own argument. For example: "The nations [of the Iroquois League] sustained nearly the same relation to the league that the American states bear to the Union. In the former, several oligarchies were contained within one; in the same manner as the latter, several republics

are embraced in one republic" (Morgan 1922 [I85I]: 3). Morgan (1847: I8o-8I) repeated this assertion under the pen name Skenandoah in the American Review. Morgan also noted that "the People of the Longhouse commended to our forefathers a union of the colonies similar to their own

as early as 1755. . . . They saw [in] the common interests and common speech of the colonists the elements for a confederation." On another occasion, Morgan (1965 [i88i]: 32) wrote that the Iroquois Confeder- acy contained "the germ of modern parliament, congress and legislature." How do these passages square with Tooker's (I988: 323) stated belief that "there is no evidence that Morgan believed that white Americans had obtained their political ideals from the Iroquois"? Later in her article, Tooker quotes part of the above statements from Morgan as they appear in work by Herbert M. Lloyd but does not explain the contradiction with her earlier assumption.

Thus, while the founders of the United States certainly did not copy the Iroquois' matrilineal, clan-based system of governance any more than they copied the unwritten constitution of the British, or any other Euro- pean precedent, it is possible to argue that the concept of our system of federalism, of states within a state, owes a substantial debt to that of the Haudenosaunee. As they did with other precedents, the founders took what they wanted of their image of the Iroquoian system (and those of other native confederacies) and disregarded what they could not use.

If a case can be made that Iroquois thought helped shape the Albany Plan, Tooker attempts to cut such an analysis off at its root by asserting that the Albany Plan and the Articles of Confederation had very little in common. I am indebted to Grinde (pers. com., I989a) for the observa- tion that her assumption "is not only factually unsubstantiated but also contrary to accepted scholarship and evidence on the matter." Paul Smith (1976: 99, z8i), editor of the Letters of the Delegates to Congress, ob- served that on ii June 1776 plans for a confederation based on Franklin's 1754 plan of union were formulated in a committee of Congress and that the "4th, 7th, 8th and Izth of Franklin's Thirteen Articles were con-

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Commentary on the Iroquois and the Constitution

spicuously incorporated into the committee's work" (Grinde, pers. com., I989a).

On the same day, sachems of the Iroquois made one of many in- vited visits to Independence Hall and appeared before Congress as inde- pendence was being debated, according to Grinde's (I989b: I5) account. President John Hancock spoke to the assembled Iroquois, calling them "brothers" and declaring that the Americans and the Iroquois were "as one people, and have but one heart." After that speech, an Onondaga chief gave Hancock the Indian name Karanduawn, "the Great Tree" (Worthing- ton C. Ford, cited ibid.: I5-I6).

Carrying the analysis into the Constitutional period, Grinde has found references to American Indian polities in John Adams's Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787). This three-volume work, used on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, is generally regarded as the most influential treatise on political theory published in America during the late eighteenth century. Tooker's analysis displays no knowledge of it.

In the Defence, Adams (ibid., I: xv-xvi) states that in forming con- stitutions it would be productive to have "a more accurate investigation of the form of governments of the . . . Indians" for reference. Adams also writes that American Indian confederacies had the best example of the separation of powers, "marked with a precision that excludes all con- troversy," and that in American Indian governments, "real sovereignty resided in the body of the people." Adams (cited in Grinde I989b: 31) states that Franklin, the French philosophes, and other "great philoso- phers and politicians of the age" were attempting to "set up governments . . . of modern Indians." In a specific reference to the Iroquois, Adams (1787, I: 315) writes that the Mohawk had "complete individual inde- pendence." Adams (ibid.: 225) also discusses the election of sachems and how Indian councils-very likely the Grand Council of the Iroquois- operated.

Knowledge of American Indian polities followed Franklin to France, where he represented the United States beginning in 1776; Franklin "loved to cite and to practice faithfully the proverb of his friends, the American Indians, 'keep the chain of friendship bright and shining' when discussing the concept of liberty among distinguished French philosophers like Tur- got, Helvetius, La Rochefoucault and Condorcet. French observers in the salons stated that Franklin would discuss the politics of the Indians with great exactness and interest. Furthermore, Franklin thought the ways of American Indians were more conducive to the good life than the ways of 'Civilized Nations'" (Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, cited in Grinde

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Bruce E. Johansen

1988: 30). Franklin's interest in American Indian polities, particularly the Iroquois, was not restricted to a couple of chance paragraphs as Tooker would have us believe. It was a lifelong avocation, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tooker acknowledges the existence of the Sons of Saint Tammany, a secret society which grew out of the Sons of Liberty and included Frank- lin and other influential founders. This society espoused a belief that the United States was a synthesis of European and Native American values. She dismisses it in one paragraph, in which she mistakenly refers to St. Tammany Day as May i (Tooker 1988: 32z). Grinde has researched the Tammany Society much more extensively and has been able to tie its actions into the pervasive presence of Iroquois and other Native American leaders among the colonials. To cite one example from Grinde's work: On z August 1790, the Sons of Saint Tammany acknowledged the United States' debt to the Iroquois for providing notions of unity and federal- ism. The banquet was attended by, among others, Thomas Jefferson (then secretary of state), John Jay (chief justice of the Supreme Court), Henry Knox (secretary of war), and a delegation of Creek Indians in New York City. At this banquet, the Constitution was toasted with Iroquois imagery as "our tree of peace . . . [that shelters] us with its branches of union" (New York Journal, io August 1790, cited in Grinde i989b: 39-40).

Perhaps a third of Tooker's article recapitulates statements of vari- ous historians and anthropologists supporting, with varying precision, the contention that the Iroquois and other American Indian polities helped shape the United States' early institutions as the colonists' image of these societies provided a model for liberty to the revolutionary generation. In a remarkable note, Tooker (I988: 33on.z) acknowledges having borrowed a substantial part of her material from Forgotten Founders, then writes, "I attempt here no consideration of all the questionable interpretations of the data such authors as Johansen and Grinde make, or of the larger issues such handling of the material pose respecting the doing of histori- cal studies." Why does she not do so? Can she take her analysis past the casting of generalized dispersion and personal speculation? If our analysis is the "myth" Tooker asserts it is, how can she account for the abundance

of references to American Indian polities that salt the historical record, century after century? For example, Horatio Seymour, former governor of New York state and Democratic nominee for president of the United States in i868, noted that "government of the whole, by the whole, and for the benefit of the whole are native here, and are no more to be traced back to the Old World than are the granite rocks on which we stand" (Akwesasne Notes 1970). Governor Seymour was a frequent visitor to

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Commentary on the Iroquois and the Constitution

Onondaga and witnessed a white dog sacrifice there (Harper's Weekly 1872).

Likewise, Tooker seems to credit the premise of some of my later work, then seems to pretend it doesn't exist. She acknowledges that the new nation needed to forge an identity of its own vis-a-vis Britain "and so not unexpectedly ... turned to the Indian for symbols" (Tooker 1988: 3zz). And, she acknowledges, "as every schoolchild 'knows' (or at least once knew), it was Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawk Indians who threw the tea into the harbor at the Boston Tea Party" (ibid.).

Her analysis ends in one sentence, as if the symbol the Sons of Liberty chose had been picked at random, as if it had no meaning in the larger frame of revolutionary history. Tooker's bibliography displays no aware- ness of the exploration into this subject that I undertook in History Today (Johansen I985). Once again, Tooker uses her own incomplete knowledge of the historical record as a defense, a risky tactic in any scholarly debate.

Indian societies also were used as examples of polities in which pub- lic opinion created a style of consensus that often made physical force unnecessary. Writing to Edward Carrington in 1787, Thomas Jefferson (1955: 49) said:

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 Indi- ans] . . . enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.

Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams saw in the native societies that sur- rounded the colonies what they believed to be a window on Europeans' premonarchial past. The tribal governments of the Celts often were com- pared to the Indians'. The Iroquois often were compared to the Romans under their republic, as well as to the Greeks. Indeed, a recent scholar of Jefferson, Richard K. Matthews (1984: izz), asserts that in Jefferson's mind "American Indians ... provided the empirical model for his political vision." Tooker ignores Matthews's perspective, as well.

Franklin, Jefferson, and others often used the Indian example as a counterpoint to what they regarded as a tyrannical and corrupt Europe. Franklin, in Europe, was called "philosopher as savage" (Gay 1970: 48); Jefferson called himself "a savage from the mountains of America" (Wash- ington 1854, I: 444). Both actively sought alternatives to the European status quo, in the history of their own peoples, and in the Indian soci-

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Bruce E. Johansen

eties of their new home. Both saw egalitarianism among the Indians as opposed to European society's principles of "hammer over anvil" and "wolves over sheep." Franklin (1973: 381) put it this way in 1770: "The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superflous 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."

If the idea that the Iroquois and other American Indian political sys- tems provided an inspiration to colonial Americans is a "myth," as Tooker contends, why did so many people utilize such images in so many different ways over such a large geographical area for nearly two centuries before, and as, the Constitution was written? If the Iroquois League was so much less democratic at that time than present-day Iroquois believe, why did so many colonials develop images of it, and other native confederacies, as exemplars of liberty? If Grinde and I have so overromanticized the his- torical record, why does it brim over with references that agree with our thesis? Tooker offers only a caricature of our argument, not an alternative explanation.

While the Iroquois and other Native American societies did not pro- vide the model for the Constitution by and of themselves, American Indian societies did provide our founders with examples of societies that were substantially freer than Europe's of that time. The use of the Indian image as a symbol of liberty is too widespread throughout the colonial period to be regarded merely as a myth invented by a few historians in later years. These perceptions are pervasive enough to be dealt with on their own terms, as motivating forces of ideology.

When Grinde and I engaged Tooker in an impromptu debate early in May I989 at Philadelphia's Atwater Kent Museum, she seemed gen- uinely surprised that so many Iroquois people had opposed the argument she had framed in Ethnohistory. Tooker seems to believe that by writing the article she was doing the Iroquois a favor. But it is no favor to write native people out of history when so much of the record indicates that they have played a vital part in helping to shape important ideas that still excite the human imagination around the world. Tooker also seems to have failed to comprehend how deeply she has offended many native people by refusing them a role in interpreting their own history, even when such accounts do not square fully with what she believes to be ac- cepted truth. Native Americans must be listened to, not treated solely as artifacts, if anthropology is to regain its credibility. Her facile treatment of the historical record does nothing to restore that credibility. What is

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Commentary on the Iroquois and the Constitution

Tooker to make of Arrell M. Gibson's (1960: 580) assertion, for example, that "colonists ... copied [Iroquois] democratic procedures and models"?

American Indian confederacies provided a historical example-not the only one, to be sure, but a very important one. These are profoundly important ideas which bear on how dearly we all hold our liberty and personal freedoms and on our respect for those of others. I am not about to suggest that we junk references to the Magna Carta, the Roman Re- public, the Greeks, or other European precedents in our remembrance of national history, but that we include an indigenous, American aspect. If history is to be an honest record of our past, we must complete the pic- ture. History is discovery, through the debate of many voices, not just one "expert" opinion. Out of this debate will grow a more complete, accurate, and honest record of the ideas that gave birth to the United States.

Note

The author wishes to thank Donald Grinde for his critique of this commentary and for sharing his research while it was being prepared.

References

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