In 1744, leaders of the Iroquois Confederacy met with representatives of several British colonies to negotiate a treaty. One of the Native Americans, an Onondaga diplomat named Canassatego, pointed out that the colonies could learn from their alliance, which dated back hundreds of years.
“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,” he said. “We are a powerful confederacy, and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power.”
The speech was included in a collection printed by Benjamin Franklin, who later mused in a 1751 letter to a friend that it would be “a very strange Thing” if the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee, were able to form a union and not “ten or a Dozen English Colonies.”
These are some of the facts cited by supporters of the Iroquois influence theory, which holds that the Native American alliance was an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution. Its adherents further point to similarities in everything from federalism and the impeachment process to the use of the bald eagle and a bundle of arrows as symbols.
Within the field of history, this theory is a subject of some dispute. Historians have picked apart various pieces of evidence and claims about the specific influences that the Iroquois may have had on the delegates to the constitutional convention. And to be fair, some of the scholarship put forward for the Iroquois influence over the years has been overstated or thinly sourced, though no one would argue that the framers were not aware of the Iroquois example.
The Europeans who came to North America were from countries that had largely run into an authoritarian dead end.
As Kirke Kickingbird, co-author of “Indians and the United States Constitution,” once said, imagining that the framers weren’t influenced by Native Americans would be like saying the Germans and the French didn’t know each other. That influence is worth contemplating on Thanksgiving, a day that acknowledges the debt that all Americans owe to the people who were here first.
The Europeans who came to North America were from countries that had largely run into an authoritarian dead end, overseen by rulers with absolute powers to dictate how their subjects lived and died. Here, the European settlers discovered a vast array of alternatives, including hereditary rulers, ones chosen only after careful debate, leaders who governed by consensus as well as those whose powers were limited to the hunting season or by a tribal council.
Even those Europeans who wanted to defend their system had to grapple with the existence of these alternatives in America in philosophical treatises that in turn influenced American democracy.
Many responded by inaccurately casting Native Americans as living in a sort of anarchy, a “state of nature” that, they implied or outright declared, European society had outgrown. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose “Leviathan” defends the absolute powers of a king, described the lives of such unfortunates as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as they lacked the supposed comforts of an all-powerful ruler.
But reformers, too, were preoccupied with America. As he outlined his objections to the divine right of kings in his “Two Treatises of Government,” the English philosopher John Locke described life before the invention of private property by comparing it to the New World. “In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.” Other Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu also wrote about the state of nature in ways that made it clear they were thinking about America, too.
There are plenty of differences, of course, between the Iroquois Confederacy and the U.S. Constitution. The framers of Constitution were also influenced by European sources as varied as ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the Hanseatic League and Swiss cantons. And the Enlightenment was driven by the spread of coffeehouses and libraries and the rise of a middle-class merchant class, among other things. But to acknowledge all these influences does not mean rejecting the notion that Native Americans were also in the mix.
The encounter between Europeans and Native Americans that began in the 15th century changed both forever profoundly, in ways both good and bad. The introduction of the horse allowed the Plains Indians to flourish, while diseases like smallpox wiped out entire tribes. Europeans picked up new staple crops like potatoes and tomatoes as well as an addiction to tobacco. Sequoyah was inspired to create the Cherokee written language, while European military strategists were influenced by Native American battlefield tactics.
It’s clear that this also included an exchange of ideas on how people should be governed and the proper limits of power that we are still grappling with today. So as we give thanks for the turkey and the corn this Thanksgiving, let us also take a moment to appreciate the gift of these ideas as well.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW.