One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  In Weiser’s estimation, he survived only by sheer luck, but the fallen man did not see it that way. “We saw that if the Indian had slipped four or five paces further, he would have fallen over a rock one hundred feet perpendicular upon craggy pieces of rocks below. The Indian was astonished, and turned quite pale; then, with outstretched arms and great earnestness, he spoke these words: ‘I thank the great Lord and Governor of this world, in that he has had mercy upon me, and has been willing that I should live longer.’ ”

  Two hundred miles along on this same journey, Weiser found himself “extremely weak.… with the cold and hunger.” Facing freshly fallen snow twenty inches deep and several days yet of a “frightful wilderness” to cross, he lost all hope. “My spirit failed, my body trembled and shook. I thought I should fall down and die,” he wrote. “I stepped aside and sat down under a tree, expecting there to die.”

  His companions marched on without him, but then, “The Indians came back and found me sitting there. They remained awhile silent. At last the old Indian said: ‘My dear companion, thou hast hitherto encouraged us; wilt thou now quite give up? Remember that evil days are better than good days. For when we suffer much we do not sin. Sin will be driven out of us by suffering, and God cannot extend his mercy to them; but contrary wise, when it goeth evil with us, God hath compassion on us.’ These words made me ashamed. I arose up and traveled as well as I could.”

  On another journey he came upon a man who seemed something close to an Indian version of the famous mendicant saint, Francis of Assisi: “An Indian came to us in the evening, who had neither shoes, stockings, shirt, gun, knife nor hatchet. In a word, he had nothing but an old torn blanket and some rags. Upon enquiring whither he was going, he answered to Onondago. I knew him, and asked him how he could undertake a journey of three hundred miles so naked and impoverished, having no provisions, nor arms to kill animals for his sustenance? He told me very cheerfully that God formed everything which had life, even the rattlesnake itself, though it was a bad creature; and that God would also provide, in such a manner, that he should go thither; that it was visible, God was with the Indians in the wilderness, because they always cast their care upon Him; but that, contrary to this, the Europeans always carried their bread with them.”

  Perhaps most relevant to his work as an interpreter of Indian words and wishes during diplomatic negotiations, Weiser had been witness to meetings they held amongst themselves. “I have had occasion to be in council with them upon treaties for land and to adjust the terms of trade,” he wrote. Whenever anyone addressed a gathering, no matter the topic they raised, “not a man of them was observed to whisper or smile—the old, grave; the young, reverent in their deportment. They spoke little, but fervently, and with elegance. I have never seen more natural sagacity.”

  At such times, even following heated discussions, Weiser had seen a particular ancient sachem fall peacefully back into a kind of reverie, framing with sacred ceremony even issues as mundane as property disputes. “He began to sing with an awful solemnity, but without expressing any words. The others accompanied him with their voices. After they had done, the same Indian with great earnestness of fervor spoke these words: ‘Thanks, thanks be to Thee, Thou great Lord of the world, in that Thou hast again caused the sun to shine, and has dispersed the dark cloud. The Indians are Thine.’ ”

  While the tone of Weiser’s recollections perhaps suggests that these Iroquois were addressing a Christian God or otherwise imitating European styles of devotion, this was not usually the case. He likewise heard sachems speak to gatherings of Iroquois and “charge and command them to love the Christians, and particularly live in peace with me and the people under my Government.… At every sentence of which they shouted and said Amen in their way.”

  At the start of the Lancaster meeting, it was his openness to cultural difference—as well as a well-honed diplomatic sense—that led Weiser to rebuke the colonial cohort as they stood milling around the Indian encampment. He warned them not to laugh at the often strange dress of their guests, nor even to speak of it, lest they give offense. Unlike the colonists, many of the Iroquois had no difficulty understanding the language of those on the other side of the negotiating fire.

  Yet his urging largely fell on deaf ears. The assembled representatives of the colonies were far from home and could not help their gawking. Nor was their curiosity limited to the Indians. The following day, according to Witham Marshe, the Maryland contingent traveled out to a place they called the “Dunkers nunnery”—“Dunkers” being the pejorative term for those who practiced adult baptism, and “nunnery,” of course, a term that smacked of the latent popery assumed of anyone diverging from Protestant norms—which happened to be the very Ephrata community of which Conrad Weiser had once been a member. With his own countrymen scornful of his prior religious commitments, and having only positive things to say about the devotions of the Iroquois, the colonial interpreter had sympathies for the nations they would face across the treaty fire that were slightly warmer than impartial.

  After a weekend of conviviality—both the colonists and the Iroquois enjoyed lubricating diplomacy with wine and punch—the real work began. For most of a month, they met in marathon sessions not only to determine the fate of isolated tracts of disputed land but to consider the future of two peoples with competing claims on the resources of the continent.

  The negotiations were mostly congenial—even, at times, mutually enjoyable. At certain moments, however, the radically different interpretations of history that separated the English and the Iroquois became apparent. Rarely were such differences spoken of during the meeting sessions, but when they were, the machinery of negotiation seemed to grind to a halt. One day, one of Witham Marshe’s fellow representatives of the governor of Maryland laid claim to land which “Our Great King of England, and His subjects, have always possessed… free and undisturbed from any claim of the Six Nations for above one hundred years past.” The following day, Canassatego rose to speak. He chose his words carefully and then listened as they were translated by his friend Conrad Weiser.

  “What is one hundred years in comparison to the length of time since our claim began? Since we came out of this ground?” he asked. “For we must tell you that long before one hundred years, our Ancestors came out of this very ground, and their children have remained here ever since.”

  In his seventh decade, Canassatego was still regarded as a force to be reckoned with. Though he was said to possess “a good-natured smile,” he did not readily offer it now. He had no desire to put the English at ease.

  Again speaking through Weiser, he continued: “You came out of the ground in a country that lies beyond the Seas. There you may have a just Claim, but here you must allow us to be your elder Brethren.” With a skilled debater’s panache, he then casually erased the Marylander’s appeal to history and offered one of his own. “The lands belonged to us before you knew anything of them,” he said.

  As a political body, the Six Nations had existed by this time for more than three hundred years, making it not only older than any colonial government but older than many of the kingdoms of Europe—older, in other words, than the United States of America will be in 2076. Historians have estimated that it could date from the fourteenth century. Before the English, the French, or the Dutch had come to the northern parts of the Americas, before Columbus had stumbled into a place that was not India and yet called its inhabitants Indians, the Iroquois had united diverse, often warring peoples under a common cause and a single code of law. In the not too distant past, Canassatego reminded the colonial representatives, the entirety of the land in question had been theirs.

  “Above One Hundred Years ago” he said, when the first Europeans had come to Iroquois lands, they had brought with them goods including awls, knives, hatchets, and guns. “When they had taught us how to use their Things, and we saw what sort of People they were, we were so well pleased with them, that we tied their ship to the bushes on the shore; and af
terwards, liking them still better the longer they staid with us, and thinking the bushes too slender, we removed the Rope, and tied it to the trees; and as the trees were liable to be blown down by the high winds, or to decay themselves, we, from the affection we bore them, again removed the rope, and tied it to a strong big rock, and not content with this for its further security, we removed the rope to the big Mountain, and there we tied it very fast, and rowll’d Wampum around about it, and to make it still more secure we stood upon the Wampum, and sat down upon it, to defend it, and to prevent any Hurt coming to it, and did our best Endeavors that it might remain uninjured forever.”

  Such a cozy relationship between the natives of this continent and those who hoped to remake it in their own image surely never existed in quite the way Canassatego described. Yet his parable—and it was indeed a parable, stocked with symbols drawn from his religious understanding of the land—served as a reminder to the colonists that there were two competing interpretations of history at play here. With a few choice words, he called into question the entire English experiment in the Americas, and then went on to inform them that they had not improved this land, as they supposed, but had caused it to suffer.

  “By way of Reproach,” he said, the English would often tell the Iroquois “that we should have perished if they had not come into the Country and furnished us with Strowds and Hatchets and Guns… but we always gave them to understand that they were mistaken, that we lived before they came amongst us, and as well, or better, if we may believe what our Forefathers have told us.”

  Even after he had spoken his mind, Canassatego was not quite done offering uncomfortable truths. Before the negotiations had ended, this highest-ranking member of the Iroquois Confederacy chastised the colonists for their scattershot diplomatic efforts. The fact that they—the Iroquois—had to make separate agreements with each of the colonies was a clear indication that there was too much discord among the English in America for them to ever achieve their goals.

  “We heartily recommend Union and a Good Agreement between you our Brethren,” he said. “Never disagree, but preserve a strict Friendship for one another, and thereby you as well as we will become the Stronger. 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. We are a Powerfull confederacy, and by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power; therefore, whatever befalls you, never fall out with one another.”

  The turnabout here would have been jarring to any of the colonial negotiators, amounting to a cognitive dissonance long before the phrase had been coined. The colonists had arrived at the negotiations full of the usual dismissive attitudes toward their native interlocutors. Witham Marshe, for one, could not help but dwell on their weakness for alcohol, their ragged appearance, their backward ways. And yet here they were presuming to tell the king’s subjects how to live and organize themselves.

  No matter the immediate outcome of the negotiations, or the ultimate victory the colonists and their descendants would eventually have over native ways of life, in that moment, forced to compare their own political disorder to the accord among the Iroquois, the colonists who had earlier jeered at the Indians could only have been humbled. Conrad Weiser, meanwhile, who had actually given voice to Canassatego’s rebuke, was inspired.

  What accounted for such confidence on the part of the Iroquois? Though they were an ancient nation by this time, and though they occupied a strategically significant location between English and French strongholds in North America, they had nowhere near the population or the resources to truly compete with the colonists. Yet like the pilgrims who had envisioned a city upon a hill, and who drew strength from this vision despite innumerable challenges, the Iroquois sought to create a society based on religious ideas as filtered through a single enduring metaphor.

  The term “Iroquois” itself seems to be a French transformation either of words neighboring tribes once used to describe them or of words they often used themselves. In the former interpretation, they were labeled with the epithet Irinakhoiw, “rattlesnakes,” by their ancient enemy the Huron. In the latter, the name derives from a feature of their language, the tendency to end all declarations with the words hiro koue, which both claimed ownership of the statement and, like a prehistoric emoticon, emphasized the kind of feeling it was meant to convey.

  They eventually would adopt the name applied to them by Europeans, but at the time of the Lancaster meeting they still preferred to call themselves the Haudenosaunee, which literally means “People of the Longhouse.” At one time as closely associated with them as the adobe pueblos of the southwest were with the Zuni tribe encountered by Mustafa Zemmouri, the longhouse was a multiroom structure shared by as many fifty people. William Nelson Fenton describes their layout: “Typically it had from three to five fires, each of which might be shared by two nuclear families of five to six persons. Houses were on average twenty-five feet wide; the length depended on the number of families to be sheltered. Each fire added a two apartment module of about twenty-five feet to the length of the longhouse.” Built this way, longhouses of two hundred feet were common, and archaeological evidence suggests they could be twice that size, creating footprints of 10,000 square feet. A large settlement within the Iroquois Confederacy might include more than one hundred of these multifamily dwellings.

  For the Iroquois, to be the People of the Longhouse was not merely to describe the structure in which they lived. It was instead to affirm an image of themselves as united beyond the expected bounds of kinship. The longhouse was a physical representation of the accord that existed between the Six Nations, which was known as the Gayanashagowa, or the Great Law of Peace. No mere mortal agreement, this was regarded as a divine reality.

  Whereas the English had as their American foundation myth the story of the city upon a hill, the Iroquois had the perhaps humbler image of the longhouse. The city upon the hill shines as a singular, set-apart exemplar; the longhouse, meanwhile, seeks to gather in rather than set apart; it is a founding myth of radical inclusion. Each is an extension of the respective creation stories at the root of two mythological systems: Humanity cast out of the communion with nature, on one hand; humanity rescued through communion with nature, on the other.

  When the Iroquois spoke of their union and its strength, these were the stories that undergirded it. In short, they believed that their confederacy was God-given, and it was this belief that gave a small collection of tribes the confidence to tell the colonists, and through them the king of England, that peace would exist on their terms.

  The Treaty of Lancaster hashed out in 1744 might have been like most other agreements between the colonists and the natives—honored in name for a time but then repealed, replaced, or simply forgotten. In this case, however, it remained relevant long after the last session had closed, not only because of what was said but because of who recorded it.

  When the meeting adjourned, Conrad Weiser knew something interesting had happened, something worth publishing and sharing with his countrymen. He rode from Lancaster to Philadelphia, where he visited a printer who had in the past edited and published accounts of other treaty negotiations. As it happened, this printer was the older brother of the printer in Boston who had caused such a stir with his publications against inoculation. The older brother was forward-thinking in his openness to the possibility of change, though he too had an eye for stories that would capture the public’s imagination.

  According to some scholars, as he printed the Lancaster Treaty, the Philadelphia printer’s thoughts ran from the Six Nations to his own thirteen colonies. Not fully free of the prejudices of the time, he nonetheless knew a good idea when he heard one. As he would later write, “It would be a very strange thing if Six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a Union and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsiste
d Ages, and appears indissoluble, and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.”

  The printer’s name, of course, was Benjamin Franklin, earliest architect of the union between the states. When he published the account of the Lancaster Treaty in 1744, the question he later posed would be put before the American reading public for the first time. If the nations of Indians could unite, why not the colonies? What was it that allowed the Iroquois to come together as they had?

  Franklin carried these questions with him as he evolved from a printer to a writer and statesman of considerable skill and reputation. He gained much of his experience as a diplomat, which would later serve his rising nation so well when he was dispatched to win the support of France, through his role as negotiator among the various tribes of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Over time, he developed a practical understanding of how two communities whose fates were entwined for so long might influence each other. Christianizing efforts meant to replace native myths and rituals with beliefs from the Bible were not for Franklin. Instead of missionaries, for example, Franklin once proposed sending a blacksmith into every Indian village. “A smith is more likely to influence them than a Jesuit,” he said.

  Ten years after he printed Canassatego’s words of rebuke and advice to the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Franklin was enlisted as part of a meeting of representatives from the thirteen colonies to discuss how they might better defend themselves, as a unified body, from increasing international pressures. With war again expected against France, the colonists met with chiefs of the Six Nations in Albany in hopes that peace for the Americans would also mean peace for the People of the Longhouse.