The Neighbors Check In
This Week in 1776, #23
“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from the American Revolution, mostly political and military in nature. I drew on these very loosely for my Engines of Liberty series of YA novels.
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Nothing substantive has changed for New York, and Washington returned from Philly after meeting with Congress. Benedict Arnold’s situation is getting worse, and he’s going to get his butt kicked next week at Quebec. Congress does a lot of talking and continues to encourage the colonies toward individual declarations of independence.
And then the Iroquois get involved.
Indian Diplomacy
A delegation from the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) visited Congress this week in Philadelphia. In fact they got there last week and managed to see George Washington as he was heading back to New York. The exchange was diplomatic and ceremonial, though within this range of dates nothing too significant happened. I’ll have more on that next week.
Why did the Iroquois drop by? Well, they represented the largest coalition of Indian tribes in the area, and as such they had their own formal relationship with various colonial bodies, and they understood that the British Colonies were on the cusp of a mighty shift, so it would do well to keep that relationship amicable. They were mostly there to reaffirm their neutrality and their desire to trade with their neighbors.
Congress was just as eager to clarify this relationship. The French and Indian War had only happened 20 years prior and thus was still fresh in living memory—many officers including Washington had cut their teeth in that war. America wasn’t interested in fighting their Indian neighbors alongside their British enemies, so the diplomacy mattered. Furthermore they put on a demonstration of military might with parades and drills from a few thousand troops, to impress the Iroquois and let them know they were a worthwhile ally to have.
The Six Nations included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. I mention this because not all of them will maintain their neutrality as the war carries on.
A Model of Confederation
Sometimes you’ll hear historians claim that the Founding Fathers got their ideas for our republican form of government from the Iroquois, but this is much more an editorialized view of history than a factual one. The pedigree of thought that resulted in the Articles of Confederation—and later, the Constitution—is well documented in the abundant writings of the Founders. While Benjamin Franklin did praise the Iroquois model as early as 1751, there is insufficient evidence to make any substantive claim that the Constitution was then modeled upon it.
This has not stopped activist historians and their politician allies from trying to wring a narrative from the raw material of history. Some even went so far as to pass Concurrent Resolution 331 in the Senate in 1988, which “formally acknowledges” that the Iroquois Confederacy was a template for our government in some way. (The law once said that black people weren’t fully people, so you can’t use that as the last word.)
Jeff Fynn-Paul had a section on this in his 2023 book NOT STOLEN. With wisdom and brevity he took apart the argument and laid out its pieces as the ejecta of the modern myth-making movement to exaggerate minority history and downplay American and European intellect. While there were results in the Iroquois model that Benjamin Franklin admired, the model itself wasn’t to his liking, and ultimately wasn’t a template for our legal founding.
Especially when you consider the fact that this confederacy fractured during our Revolution, and never fully recovered, least of all by 1787 when the Constitution was drafted.
But I’m moving beyond the scope of this almanac now. I’ll have more to say on it next week when John Hancock, president of Congress, meets with the delegates.
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