Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Ep. 16
Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace
In 1744 an Onondaga speaker told three English colonies to unite as his forefathers had. Franklin printed the speech. When the colonists designed a union, they did not copy it.
This is Episode 16 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it opens Week 16 of the series. It corresponds to Article 16, published October 5 on consequentialactions.com. The full article is free, with every source in its endnotes.
The Six Nations (the Haudenosaunee, whom the French and English called the Iroquois) held a union of self-governing nations together for centuries without a king. Their Grand Council had fifty seats fixed by its founding law. Clan mothers chose and could remove the men who held them, and nothing was decided until all three benches agreed. The colonists lived beside that union for generations, heard its speakers urge them to imitate it, and bought those speeches in small books printed in Benjamin Franklin's shop.
The episode asks one question: to what extent did the Confederacy influence the founders? It follows the record from Canassatego at Lancaster in 1744, through Franklin's 1751 letter and Hendrick's rebuke at Albany in 1754, to the scholarly dispute between Grinde and Johansen and Elisabeth Tooker, and the 1988 concurrent resolution in which Congress wrote its own answer into a preamble. The verdict: the contact is documented and the example is documented. The blueprint is not. In the same letter in which Franklin praised the Six Nations, he proposed a union with a Crown-appointed governor, a common treasury, and a tax on liquor.
Then the cost. By 1777 the Confederacy could no longer hold a common neutrality, and in a single season in 1779 an American campaign under John Sullivan destroyed more than forty of its towns. Eleven years later, three Seneca leaders told Washington the name their people had for him. An honest reckoning follows, then two objections from the skeptics, including one the episode concedes: the verdict rests on an archive made by one side.
Did it leave people more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 Lancaster, 1744: Pen and Ink Work
2:02 Introduction
3:07 The Question of Influence
4:53 The Longhouse
5:54 The Peacemaker and the Condolence
8:05 Fifty Seats, Fixed by Law
8:41 Clan Mothers and the Three Benches
10:20 Wampum: A Law Never Written Down
11:26 Ely Parker and the 1916 Text
12:59 Conrad Weiser, the Man in the Middle
13:58 Two Versions of the Education Reply
15:24 The Union Speech, July 4, 1744
16:12 Franklin's Press and the 1751 Letter
17:48 Albany, 1754: Hendrick's Rebuke
19:06 Franklin's Own Plan of Union
20:37 Grinde, Johansen, and Tooker
21:25 What Congress Did in 1988
21:55 The Verdict: Example, Not Blueprint
22:37 1777: The Council Fire Put Out
23:28 The Sullivan Campaign, 1779
24:26 The Seneca Address of 1790
24:56 Grand River and the Written Law
25:29 The Honest Reckoning
26:58 Objection: Any Federation Resembles Any Other
27:55 Objection: An Uneven Standard of Proof
28:54 The Liberty Test: Unanimity
30:18 The Answer
31:23 Coming Up and Closing
📚 Read Article 16, "The Great Law of Peace," with full endnotes: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-great-law-of-peace-the-haudenosaunee-confederacy-and-the-question-of-influence
🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, Episode 16: The Great Law of Peace. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Question of Influence. Consequential Actions Podcast.
Next: Episode 16B, our contemporary application episode, on Tuesday, October 13, takes this week's questions into the present. Then Episode 17, "Self-Government Before Theory," on Saturday, October 17.
—
Consequential Actions is a libertarian, non-interventionist analysis of American constitutional and foreign policy. New episodes weekly.
Comments