The True Spirit of American Freedom...

I'm so glad that the Original People are finally getting some long overdue cred for their contributions to the founding of the American Nation. When I think about the blood, sweat, tears, flesh and bones of the First Nations and the African-American Slaves that were sacrificed for "the good of the country", it serves to demonstrate what an incredible ass Paul Harvey really is...

--ryan




The Founding Sachems

By CHARLES C. MANN



Amherst, Mass.


SEEKING to understand this nation's democratic spirit,
Alexis de Tocqueville journeyed to the famous centers
of American liberty (Boston, Philadelphia,
Washington), stoically enduring their "infernal"
accommodations, food and roads and chatting up almost
everyone he saw.


He even marched in a Fourth of July parade in Albany
just ahead of a big float that featured a flag-waving
Goddess of Liberty, a bust of Benjamin Franklin, and a
printing press that spewed out copies of the
Declaration of Independence for the cheering crowd.
But for all his wit and intellect, Tocqueville never
realized that he came closest to his goal just three
days after the parade, when he stopped at the "rather
unhealthy but thickly peopled" area around Syracuse.


Tocqueville's fascination with the democratic spirit
was prescient. Expressed politically in Americans'
insistence on limited government and culturally in
their long-standing disdain for elites, that spirit
has become one of this country's great gifts to the
world.


When rich London and Paris stockbrokers proudly retain
their working-class accents, when audiences show up at
La Scala in track suits and sneakers, when South
Africans and Thais complain that the police don't read
suspects their rights the way they do on "Starsky &
Hutch," when anti-government protesters in Beirut sing
"We Shall Overcome" in Lebanese accents - all these
raspberries in the face of social and legal authority
have a distinctly American tone. Or, perhaps, a
distinctly Native American tone, for among its
wellsprings is American Indian culture, especially
that of the Iroquois.


The Iroquois confederation, known to its members as
the Haudenosaunee, was probably the greatest
indigenous polity north of the Rio Grande in the two
centuries before Columbus and definitely the greatest
in the two centuries after. A political and military
alliance formed by the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga,
Oneida, Mohawk and, after about 1720, the Tuscarora,
it dominated, at its height, an area from Kentucky to
Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain. Its capital was
Onondaga, a bustling small city of several thousand
souls a few miles south of where Tocqueville stopped
in modern Syracuse.


The Iroquois confederation was governed by a
constitution, the Great Law of Peace, which
established the league's Great Council: 50 male
royaneh (religious-political leaders), each
representing one of the female-led clans of the
alliance's nations. What was striking to the
contemporary eye was that the 117 codicils of the
Great Law were concerned as much with constraining the
Great Council as with granting it authority. "Their
whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of
power in the hands of any single individual,"
explained Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering
ethnographer of the Iroquois.


The council's jurisdiction was limited to relations
among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs
were the province of the individual nations. Even in
the council's narrow domain, the Great Law insisted
that every time the royaneh confronted "an especially
important matter or a great emergency," they had to
"submit the matter to the decision of their people" in
a kind of referendum open to both men and women.


In creating such checks on authority, the league was
just the most formal _expression of a regionwide
tradition. Although the Indian sachems on the Eastern
Seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory, wrote the
colonial leader Roger Williams, in practice they did
not make any decisions "unto which the people are
averse." These smaller groups did not have formal,
Iroquois-style constitutions, but their governments,
too, were predicated on the consent of the governed.
Compared to the despotisms that were the norm in
Europe and Asia, the societies encountered by British
colonists were a libertarian dream.


To some extent, this freedom reflected North American
Indians' relatively recent adoption of agriculture.
Early farming villages worldwide have always had less
authoritarian governments than their successors. But
the Indians of the Northeast made what the historian
José António Brandão calls "autonomous responsibility"
a social ideal - the Iroquois especially, but many
others, too. Each Indian, the Jesuit missionary
Joseph-François Lafitau observed, viewing "others as
masters of their own actions and themselves, lets them
conduct themselves as they wish and judges only
himself."


So vivid were these examples of democratic
self-government that 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. 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.


For two centuries after Plymouth Rock, the border
between natives and newcomers was porous, almost
nonexistent. In a way difficult to imagine now,
Europeans and Indians mingled, the historian Gary Nash
has written, as "trading partners, military allies,
and marital consorts."


In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams
recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a
multiracial society. "Aaron Pomham, the priest, and
Moses Pomham, the King of the Punkapaug and Neponsit
Tribes, were frequent visitors at my father's house,"
he wrote nostalgically. Growing up in Quincy, Mass.,
the young Adams frequently visited a neighboring
Indian family, "where I never failed to be treated
with whortleberries, blackberries, strawberries or
apples, plums, peaches, etc." Benjamin Franklin was
equally familiar with Indian company; representing the
Pennsylvania colony, he negotiated with the Iroquois
in 1754. A close friend was Conrad Weiser, an adopted
Mohawk who at the talks was the Indians' unofficial
host.


As many colonists observed, the limited Indian
governments reflected levels of personal autonomy
unheard of in Europe. "Every man is free," a
frontiersman, Robert Rogers, told a disbelieving
British audience, referring to Indian villages. In
these places, he said, no person, white or Indian,
sachem or slave, has any right to deprive anyone else
of his freedom. The Iroquois, Cadwallader Colden
declared in 1749, held "such absolute notions of
liberty that they allow of no kind of superiority of
one over another, and banish all servitude from their
territories." (Colden, surveyor general of New York,
was another Mohawk adoptee.)


Not every European admired this democratic spirit.
Indians "think every one ought to be left to his own
opinion, without being thwarted," the Flemish
missionary monk Louis Hennepin wrote in 1683. "There
is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of
America," a fellow missionary unhappily observed. "All
these barbarians have the law of wild asses - they are
born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint;
they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit."


Indians, for their part, were horrified to encounter
European social classes, with those on the lower rungs
of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the
upper. When the 17th-century French adventurer
Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan, tried
to convince the Huron, the Iroquois's northern
neighbors, of Europe's natural superiority, the
Indians scoffed.


Because Europeans had to kowtow to their social
betters, Lahontan later reported, "they brand us for
slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not
worth having." Individual Indians, he wrote "value
themselves above anything that you can imagine, and
this is the reason they always give for it, that one's
as much master as another, and since men are all made
of the same clay there should be no distinction or
superiority among them."


INFLUENCED by their proximity to Indians - by being
around living, breathing role models of human liberty
- European colonists adopted their insubordinate
attitudes. Lahontan was an example, despite his noble
title; his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an
incitement toward rebellion. Both the clergy and Louis
XIV, the king whom Lahontan was goading, tried to
suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French
officials to force a French education upon the
Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their
social betters. The attempts, the historian Cornelius
J. Jaenen reported, were "everywhere unsuccessful."


In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous
villages into competitors for colonists' allegiance.
Colonial societies could not become too oppressive,
because their members - surrounded by examples of free
life - always had the option of voting with their
feet.


It is likely that the first British villages in North
America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords,
would have lost some of the brutally graded social
hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is
also clear that they were infused by the democratic,
informal brashness of American Indian culture. That
spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans,
aristocrat and peasant alike. Others found it a deeply
attractive vision of human possibility.


Historians have been reluctant to acknowledge this
contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide. Yet a
plain reading of Locke, Hume, Rousseau and Thomas
Paine shows that they took many of their illustrations
of liberty from native examples. So did the colonists
who held their Boston Tea Party dressed as "Mohawks."
When others took up European intellectuals' books and
histories, images of Indian freedom had an impact far
removed in time and space from the 16th-century
Northeast.


The pioneering suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Matilda Joslyn Gage, both Finger Lakes residents, were
inspired by the Great Law's extension of legal
protections to women. "This gentile constitution is
wonderful!" Friedrich Engels exclaimed (though he
apparently didn't notice its emphasis on limited state
power).


Just like their long-ago confreres in Boston,
protesters in South Korea, China and Ukraine wore
"Native American" makeup and clothing in,
respectively, the 1980's, 1990's, and the first years
of this century. Indeed, it is only a little
exaggeration to claim that everywhere liberty is
cherished - from Sweden to Soweto, from the streets of
Manila to the docks of Manhattan - people are
descendants of the Iroquois League and its neighbors.


Charles C. Mann is the author of the forthcoming
"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus."