Posted on 07/13/2007 9:11:02 AM PDT by kawaii
7-11-05
Did the Founding Fathers Really Get Many of Their Ideas of Liberty from the Iroquois?
By Jack Rakove
Mr. Rakove is Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of Political Science, at Stanford University.
Editor's Note: On Monday July 4th the New York Times published an op ed by journalist James Mann that made broad claims about the influence of the Iroquois on American constitutional history. Specifically, he argued that the Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by Indian ideas of liberty and that our very form of government was shaped in decisive ways by Indian influences at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. True? Others have advanced this argument in the past and even convinced NY State a few years ago to adopt this view in teaching assignments. We asked Stanford historian Jack Rakove to assess the legitimacy of Mann's argument.
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So vivid were these examples of democratic self-government [from colonial Indian history] that some historians and activists have argued that the [Indians'] Great Law of Peace directly inspired the American Constitution. Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus and its denial of suffrage to women, the Constitution as originally enacted was not at all like the Great Law. But in a larger sense the claim is correct. The framers of the Constitution, like most colonists in what would become the United States, were pervaded by Indian images of liberty. -- James Mann, in the NYT (7-4-05)
The English colonists did not need the Indians to tell them about federalism or self-government. The New England Confederation was organized as early as 1643. The claim of influence is based on a very strange idea of causality: Franklin at the Albany Conference in 1754 learned about federalism and self-government from the Iroquois and then 33 years later at Philadelphia passed on these ideas to his fellow delegates at the Convention. Never mind that Franklin was very elderly and scarcely spoke at the Convention. For discussion of the issue see articles by Elisabeth Tooker in Ethnohistory vols 35 (1988) and 37 (1990).--Gordon Wood
When I studied for my oral exams back in 1970-1971, I did not read a single work relating in any sustained way to the history of Native Americans. There were not that many then worth reading, and even in my special field of early American history, where the hottest and most innovative historical writing was taking place, the subject commanded little apparent interest.
That has all changed since, of course. One cannot imagine preparing the early American field without reading the works of James Merrell, Dan Richter, Richard White, and others. Equally noteworthy is the way in which the very conceptualization of the field, the perspective from which it is viewed and reconstructed, has changed.
It therefore seems appropriate that the New York Times has just marked the 229th anniversary of American independence by allowing Charles Mann, author of the soon-to-be-published Before 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus to preview his book on its op-ed page. (By the way, am I wrong to think that the NYT has been doing more of this recently? Call your publicist!) Mann is a journalist, so we can expect the work to be something of a synthesis that won't tell historians much that they do not already know. But what disappointed me about this piece is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in "the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture."
What's wrong with the Iroquois influence hypothesis? There are two principal and, I think, fatal objections to the idea that anything in the Constitution can be explained with reference to the precedents of the Haudenosaunee confederation.
The first is a simple evidentiary matter. The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois. It is of course possible that the framers and ratifiers went out of their way to suppress the evidence, out of embarrassment that they were so intellectually dependent on the indigenous sources of their political ideas. But these kinds of arguments from silence or conspiratorial suppression are difficult for historians to credit.
But, it is objected, there were no real European antecedents and sources for the institutions that Americans created, or for the democratic mores by which they came to live. Again, this is a claim that cannot escape serious scrutiny. All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like. Even on the egalitarian side of the political ledger, 17th-century English society did give rise, after all, to the radical sentiments and practices we associate particularly with the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Levellers and the Putney debates, and the abolition of the House of Lords and the monatchy. And on this side of the water, New England colonists managed to set up town meetings before they had made much progress creating vocabularies of Indian words. The same can of course be said for the famous meeting of the Virginia assembly in 1619.
None of this is to deny that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements in the shaping of colonial society and culture. Whether those contacts left a significant political legacy, however, is a very different question.
Response by Charles C. Mann 7-21-05
Prof Rakove says that what "disappointed" him about my article "is that it recapitulates the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution." Had he actually read the piece, he would not have been so disappointed. My article specifically criticized that argument as follows:
"...some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the American Constitution. Taken literally, this assertion seems implausible. With its grant of authority to the federal government to supersede state law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus and its denial of suffrage to women, the Constitution as originally enacted was not at all like the Great Law." **Not at all like** -- I don't know how to be clearer than that.
Instead of the straw man that Prof Rakove does battle with, I proposed a cultural argument -- that the well-known democratic spirit had much to do with colonial contact with the Indians of the eastern seaboard, including and especially the Iroquois. In other words, I was saying (as Prof. Rakove puts it in his piece) "that prolonged contact between the aboriginal and colonizing populations were important elements [sic] in the shaping of colonial society and culture." Why he seems to think I was saying something else is mystifying to me.
As a side note, the Iroquis fought with the Brits as did the rest of the Five Nations--except for one: The Oneidas. They were on the patriot side throughout the RevWar.
So, if you ever want to support Indian enterprise, you can feel especially good about supporting the Oneidas (they are mainly in NY State and Wisconsin, today).
Hey how awya..Hey how awya...
Americans have been brain washed with the word democracy.. like it is a "HOLY" word.. Most republican politicians call America a democracy.. including George Bush..
Democracy is Tribal Law.. or Mob Rule.. ALWAYS in every instance at any time in any measure of it.. A very primitive government like the governments in Canada and Europe.. MOB RULE.. Thats why democracy could work in Iraq, but a republic is NEEDED..
Thats what went WRONG with the republican party... they became DEMOCRATS.. democrats have NEVER been republicans..
Democrats are FOR a Democracy...
Republicans are FOR a Republic..
Its that simple.. many republicans are democrats..
You can take the democrat out of the party buts hard to remove the democrat from the MOB.. Its very tribal..
This is complete nonsense...the founding father drew their idea from the great philosopers and from Britains form of government. The Indians were seen as savages during this time. I hate revisionist history.
Right. How thoughtless of me to forget the small pox infested blankets we gave to such a highly advanced native population (and shiny colored beads, and a bottle of whiskey which they still love so much) in a conspiracy to bring these mighty highly advanced native nations down.
What troubles me however, is why did they need blankets? Didn't they have advanced, all natural powered looms to make their own? Why were they running around half naked and freezing at night covered in animal flesh?
Of course we know from real history that disease and death plagued these tiny native tribes long before we ever arrived, and is why their numbers were so low, with small tribes virtually dying off after a harsh winter. If the truth be known, European immigration to the America's, with medicines and knowledge of disease, and disease prevention probably saved them from a natural extinction. Their numbers began to grow because of the tools and knowledge we gave them.
Are you at all aware of what the English did to the Acadians?
How could I not be? I see it on Canadian TV broadcasts all the time(a benefit(?) of living along the Canadian border) when they show those Canadian heritage commercials. White man lied to them apparently. Seriously, yes I'm aware, but also aware of what the Iroquois did to the British who were captured by the French later and were then set free on the promise they not rejoin the British lines. They were to march to the port, board their ships and leave, which they were doing when they were ambushed and slaughtered by the Iroquois, even the Arcadian who were escorting them
bflr
not the first time i guess...
“Montcalm attempted to negotiate an honourable surrender for the British troops. From a Native American perspective, the only way to surrender honorably was, when in captivity, to die quietly without a fight.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_William_Henry
In fact, one of the artists never finished painting some of the murals because he went down on the Titanic.
There is one mural depicting Dutch settlers trading beads and copper spitoons with the Indians. I look at it every time I am there and say to myself - "yep - theretheyare - the Dutch screwing the Indians out of Manhattan." I am waitying for that day when somebody is deeply offended by this work and the Freeholders seriously consider changing it.
When that failed, they went independent. That said, if you read the Federalist Papers, you’ll see that the cohesive ideology of the Founding Fathers was about as Western and Classical as you can get. They tried to take all the best concepts from European jurisprudence and Roman and Greek constitutional theory and apply them to an existing but newly re-emerging country that already had some problematic issues (slavery, inequality of suffrage, etc.) that could have stopped the founding of the new country in its tracks. Fortunately for us, though, the “politicians” of that day were pulling for America, not America’s defeat, and were willing to forego their own personal interests and to acknowledge that the new system of self-rule would be far better than anything the history of government had seen, even if it wouldn’t be perfect.
The thesis you present sounds like multi-Cult, revisionist pablum.
Laughable.
By reading the "Federalist Papers," their correspondence, and their debates. In the eighteenth century there were far fewer opportunities for verbal interaction than there are today with modern communication by telephone, for example. Travel for face to face meetings was even more difficult. Thus, to explain and persuade, they were forced to rely primarily on written communication, from which historians can pretty well determine what they were thinking about and why they did what they did.
really tired of this PC claptrap. The idea of Englishmen getting their ideas from illiterate savages is ridiculous.
alwyas sounded french to me...
Because if you were, you wouldn't be surprised that some people were not lining up to call themselves "Canadians," even though some of those very people you disparaged were proud to call themselves Canadians, and even fought in the Canadian armed forces.
The British forced the Acadians to swear an oath of allegiance to the crown even though that oath meant they could be conscripted to fight in England's foreign wars, and that they could not own property legally or take part in civic life. Their religion was barely tolerated. Swearing to that oath would have made them second-class citizens in the land they founded---in the communities they developed.
So when they wouldn't swear that oath, the British rounded up all the Acadian men they could, stripped them of their arms, imprisoned them, kept them from seeing their wives and their children, and later, put them on ships---in the same manner that slaves were put on slave ships---and sent to every corner of British North America. Then they did the very same thing to the men, women, and children still left behind in Acadia, and they did this with no regard to families at all, so that families were split apart---brothers, sisters, wives, husbands---it didn't matter. One could be shipped to Massachusetts, the other to Rhode Island, and another still to South Carolina.
Those Acadians who were still left behind were systematically hunted down and killed, as was their livestock. Their crops and their homes and their villages were razed.
And then, the British "repopulated" the Acadian settlements with "good protestants" from England, Scotland, Ireland, and New England. But those new settlers weren't as successful at husbandry as the Acadians were, so what did the British do? They allowed some Acadians to return as indentured servants to work their own land.
And then, many years later, the British---now the "Canadians"---"allowed" the Acadians to return. But not to their original settlements, of course---to the worst land in the area, the southwest portions of Nova Scotia.
And your "shocked" that some of the descendants of these people aren't clamoring to call themselves Canadians?
It has to do with people finding what they take to be similarities and interpreting that as influence or causation. This idea wasn’t around a quarter century ago. From what I can find out the idea is that Franklin and John Rutledge attended the pre-war Stamp Act Congress in Albany and learned of the Iroquois convention there. But what real and hard evidence is there? By contrast, you can find references to Greece, Rome, Holland, Switzerland, Poland, and the Holy Roman Empire in the founders’ papers.
The Ohio was the route for the fur trade. First one to the Ohio wins was the name of the game. The politics sure was interesting. Same story...different day!
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