Planning to make the first formal attempt to take action similar to Canassatego’s suggestion that the colonies unite, Franklin developed on his way to Albany “a plan for the union of all the colonies under one government,” as he put it in his autobiography. Such a union, he believed, “might be necessary for defense, and other important general purposes.”
Perhaps uncertain about the implications of proposing such a rash change in colonial governance in the open air of a gathering of colonists and Indian chiefs, Franklin first shared it with “two gentlemen of great knowledge in public affairs,” James Alexander and Archibald Kennedy. The former was a lawyer and amateur astronomer with whom Franklin had founded the American Philosophical Society; the latter, a New York colonial official who had recently caused a stir as the author of a pamphlet entitled “The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest Considered,” which began by paraphrasing the parable Canassatego had offered at Lancaster:
When the first ship arrived here from Europe, the Indians, it is said, were so pleased that they had her tied to a tree in order to better secure her; but as cables were subject to rot, they would have it an iron chain, and this to be continued into the Indian countries that they might be better able to keep their part of it clear from rust, as we were to keep our part. If the Indians were in distress or want, the call was, as it is at this day, to make clean, or renew the covenant chain; the Christians on their part were to do the like.
As Kennedy’s pamphlet makes clear, Franklin had turned to associates who took for granted the necessity of cooperation between the Iroquois and the colonies. Receiving support from these two associates (on philosophical grounds from Alexander and political grounds from Kennedy) was apparently the affirmation Franklin needed. “Being fortified by their approbation,” he later remembered, “I ventur’d to lay it before the Congress.”
As it happened, others arrived with similar thoughts, and a number of proposals for union were offered in Albany. When the question was asked of the assembled representatives if a union should be established, it passed unanimously. Of the proposed plans, Franklin’s was chosen as the most preferable. It would have established a system by which the general government of all the colonies would be administered by a president-general, who would be “appointed and supported by the crown.” There would also be, however, “a grand council… chosen by the representatives of the people of the several colonies.”
Despite the popularity of this scheme, the Albany Plan did not survive. “In England it was judged to have too much of the democratic,” Franklin wrote. Years later, even after Independence, he would continue to wonder what might have been. “I am still of opinion it would have been happy for both sides the water if it had been adopted. The colonies, so united, would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would then have been no need of troops from England; of course, the subsequent pretence for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided. But such mistakes are not new; history is full of the errors of states and princes.… The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forc’d by the occasion.”
The “previous wisdom” cited here refers, at least in part, to Iroquois wisdom. The People of the Longhouse had accomplished a union of their various nations without bloodshed. Had the colonists followed their lead, Franklin imagined, the “bloody contest” by which they eventually won their freedom might have been avoided, replaced perhaps with a more gradual parting of the ways.
Though Franklin’s Iroquois-indebted Albany Plan did not win immediate approval, some maintain that it remained a part of the Revolutionary generation’s democratic DNA. As outlined most extensively by the historians Bruce E. Johansen and Donald Grinde beginning in the late 1970s, the controversial “Iroquois influence theory” posits that the Longhouse People’s divinely given Great Law of Peace so inspired Franklin and others among the founding fathers that it served as the model for the Articles of Confederation, the governing document of the United States for the first decade of its existence, and the precursor of the Constitution ratified in 1787.
There is, this theory posits, a spiritual genealogy often overlooked in the establishment of a republic where there had been the colonies of a monarchy. Though most hagiography of the founders, and even the architecture of the nation’s capital, usually looks to classical cultures for precedent for what the Revolutionary generation accomplished, there may have been another ancient culture much closer to home that provided inspiration as well.
Detractors of “Iroquois influence” dismiss it as wishful thinking or “shoddy-yet-trendy multiculturalism” run amok, and trace an alternate genealogy—one of inserting “fanciful” ideas into the historical record—going back through much of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, the foundational work in the ethnology of native North America, Lewis Henry Morgan’s League of the Ho-de-no-sau-see, was enlisted in the cause of validating a notion that most historians find suspect at best. In a preface to his reprinted edition of Morgan’s 1851 opus, Herbert M. Lloyd made a grand claim that was somewhat beyond the original work’s intentions: “Franklin’s plan of union, which was the beginning of our own federal republic, was directly inspired by the wisdom, durability, and inherent strength which he had observed in the Iroquois constitution.… Our nation gathers its people from many peoples of the Old World, its language and its free institutions it inherits from England, its civilization and art from Greece and Rome, its religion from Judea—and even these red men of the forest have wrought some of the chief stones in our national temple.”
When a New York Times review quoted this and similar passages from the book, the “Iroquois influence theory” had its mass audience debut. Most historians remained skeptical of a direct link between the Iroquois way and the federal system through most of the twentieth century, and still are today. Yet despite scholarly reticence, the theory eventually became so thoroughly accepted in some quarters that it has even received the affirmation of the United States Congress. In 1988, the Senate passed a Resolution “To acknowledge the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution,” which included affirmations that “the original framers of the Constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy” and “the confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.”
While the extent of the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy and its beliefs on the English colonists and the nation they would form remains open to debate, the consequences in the opposite direction, of the colonists’ beliefs on the Iroquois, are fairly self-evident: Christianity gained ground over native beliefs just as the Iroquois political alliance began to unravel.
Despite the great show of native traditions at the start of events like the Lancaster Treaty, this was a clearly evident trajectory even then. Seeing this, Conrad Weiser—the man whose role as a translator made possible many of the notions of Iroquois influence debated centuries later—could at times barely contain his dismay over what the exposure to his people meant for the Six Nations. “The worst is that they are the worse for the Christians,” Weiser wrote, “who have propagated their vices, and yielded them tradition for ill, and not for good things.”
Yet the understanding that all good things came from the Iroquois and all bad came from the colonists does not do justice to the complexity of the relationships between these two communities throughout the eighteenth century. For generations, they variously were neighbors, allies, and adversaries. Beliefs passed back and forth between them as surely as goods or information. The ultimate significance of Native American influence is not limited to the similarities between the Iroqu
ois system of governance and the Articles of Confederation.
Weiser himself is a good example of the way the complexity of the interactions between colonial and Native America has been written out of history by stalwarts on both sides of the “influence” debate. During his life, there was no one among the colonists who better understood the religious underpinning of Iroquois society—the beliefs that had allowed the Iroquois to forge a bond between nations that endured longer, ultimately, than would the British occupation of the continent. Weiser had stood inside the massive longhouses of Pennsylvania and New York and heard the stories of what it meant to the families who dwelt within to be part of a people joined by divinely inspired law.
Having died in 1760, Conrad Weiser did not live long enough to record an accounting of the debt the United States owed to the people among whom he had spent so much time. Had he lived longer, he likely would have been surprised by the way most significant elements of native culture began to fade from the new nation’s collective memory, and he might have been most surprised by the role his own image would play in this great forgetting. In the following century, Conrad Weiser’s name and likeness began to be used by a cigar manufacturer. He was chosen no doubt because tobacco then represented something of a domesticated native experience, affording users the opportunity to imagine themselves communing with Indians, as the long-ago colonial representatives had done in Lancaster. On the boxes in which Conrad Weiser cigars were sold, just to the right of the promise of “Highest Quality and Best Workmanship,” a small illustration shows the adventurous translator making one of his visits to a native village. The Indians in the image do not stand in front of the longhouse that defined them; there is no hint of the centuries-old government the longhouse stood for; no suggestion of the great civilization once sustained by it; instead, they stand in front of a roughly sketched teepee, an entire culture diminished to a tiny square on a cigar box.
The image of the Iroquois as a people with distinct traditions that inevitably influenced those who came in contact with them has likewise been diminished to the point of fading away. With the forgotten longhouse, we have lost a powerful metaphor for what it means to be one country of many peoples, built not only upon thirteen colonies but upon Six Nations and the beliefs that held them together.
The Character of an Atheist. From the New York Weekly Journal, February 27, 1749.
CHAPTER 8
Awakenings
1737–1753
The Mohawk Valley, cut like a scar across the midsection of upstate New York, was named by Dutch traders for its original residents, members of the Iroquois Confederacy that joined the native nations of the region more than three hundred years before the first Europeans arrived. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Mohawk people had already endured two centuries of Christianizing efforts by the Dutch, the French, and the English, but still some missionaries thought there was work to be done. Upstate New York would later gain a reputation as a hotbed of religious revival; it was an unlikely place for the education of one of the earliest men in America who took the once-damning accusation of being an atheist in stride.
When a boy of thirteen named William Livingston found himself in the Mohawk Valley in 1737, he was in the company of a missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Conrad Weiser was not yet so well known that he would have a cigar named after him, and young Will would have had no idea he was following in some illustrious footsteps. In any case, his short time among the Indians would ultimately have very different implications, both for himself and the nation he would help to found.
Up until then, his life had been one of privilege and relative comfort. His family, Scottish gentry going back generations, dominated political life near Albany from Livingston Manor, the 200-square-mile tract of land granted to Will’s grandfather by royal charter. A portrait of the boy painted around this time suggests that his family indulged in the stubborn pretensions of a far-flung aristocracy. Sporting a cocked hat with a feather, a ruffled shirt, and close-fitting knee breeches, he does not seem to be someone who would choose a hardscrabble existence in the company of the natives, but a year spent among them was to prove transformative. Though his intention was to bring the Mohawks closer to the English way of life, instead he made a study of Iroquois language and beliefs. Among the things he would have learned among them was that, though his missionary endeavor sought to provide order to native society, the Mohawk were not without existing religious interpretations of the country they inhabited—and how best to organize a civilization within it. They, too, had stories about how the world came into being, and these stories conditioned the way they lived.
A century before, a Dutch missionary to the Mohawk, Johannes Megapolensis, recorded one of the earliest versions of the Turtle Island legend still told in various forms today. “They have a droll theory of the Creation,” he wrote, “for they think that a pregnant woman fell down from heaven, and that a tortoise (tortoises are plenty and large here, in this country, two, three and four feet long, some with two heads, very mischievous and addicted to biting), took this pregnant woman on its back, because every place was covered with water, and that the woman sat upon the tortoise, groped with her hands in the water, and scraped together some of the earth, whence it finally happened that the earth was raised above the water.”
In contradistinction to the tale of biblical origins that would have been told by this Dutch missionary and the French and English who would follow, this was a story about collaboration rather than dominion. With the woman and the turtle working together to create the places upon which the future would depend, the story served as a model for the relationship between humanity and nature, and between one individual and another. It was a myth, of course, but one with real-world implications. Its effects could be seen in this same missionary’s understanding of the native approach to the structure and purpose of society: “The government among them consists of the oldest, the most intelligent, the most eloquent and most warlike men. These commonly resolve, and then the young and warlike men execute. But if the common people do not approve of the resolution, it is left entirely to the judgment of the mob. The chiefs are generally the poorest among them, for instead of their receiving from the common people as among Christians, they are obliged to give to the mob, especially when any one is killed in war, they give great presents to the next of kin of the deceased.”
A century later, the basic premise implied in this description prevailed in the Iroquois Confederacy. Though sent to help the cause of their conversion, William Livingston would later write that he had learned “the genius and the manners” of the Mohawk, the people who had established the first democracy in America. Abraham Lincoln’s famous “by the people, for the people” may only be a more graceful expression of Megapolensis’s “judgment of the mob” that ensured chiefs would be responsible to those in need. To a boy subject to a king an ocean away, the idea would have been outlandish. That he might learn it from supposed savages allegedly in need of English salvation would have seemed extraordinary.
Will Livingston’s lessons were not only about the natives, however. He also took note of the varying ways Englishmen and other newcomers to the continent dealt with the people who had lived along the same river in the shadow of the Catskill and the Adirondack mountain ranges for perhaps a thousand years. The Mohawks at the time were pawns in the chess game of North American dominance then being played by the English and the French, whose respective religious attachments were employed more to gain earthly advantage than for reasons of genuine spiritual concern. Will particularly noted the manner in which the French had tried to bring the Mohawks to the Christian faith. Even decades later he would complain of “missionaries who practise incredible arts to convert them.” So thorough was their use of misinformation and guile in bringing about religious adherence for political gains, young Will noticed, that the French “persuade these people that the Virgin Mary was born at Paris” and that Jesus Christ “was cruc
ified at London.”
As he saw it, no matter the obvious skill of the French in winning converts, this was a relationship built mostly on coercion. In order to clear the way for its Jesuits, France had destroyed entire native villages and burned food supplies. Only when the French had won did the killing stop and the conversions begin. Livingston marveled at the “Jesuitical craft” that followed such mayhem. He noted the canonization of “a squaw by the name of St. Catharine,” as the seventeenth-century Mohawk convert Katerina Tekakwitha was already known. (She would not be formally made a Roman Catholic saint until 2012.)
At thirteen, William Livingston felt outraged at the prospect of the French spreading their faith among the Mohawk. There was, to be sure, a good amount of anti-Catholic bias in his sentiment. But more than that, he seems to have experienced at that young age a general suspicion of the trappings of religion and its relationship to governance.
Before his time as an apprentice missionary, there was no indication that he would show interest in either government or religion. In fact, he wanted nothing so much as to be a painter. He had asked his parents to send him to Italy to study art, but they had other plans for him. As the second oldest in the third generation of New York Livingstons, he did not stand to inherit Livingston Manor, and so he would have to learn to make his way in the world.
Leaving the Mohawk Valley for New Haven at the age of fourteen, and then focusing his studies on the law, he might have practiced profitably and forgotten his youthful ardor for the problematic place of religion in politics.
Yet young William Livingston suffered from the curse of being born into interesting times. He would later command rebel troops, pen scathing jeremiads as a Revolutionary propagandist, serve as the first governor of one of thirteen states newly independent and united, and sign the U.S. Constitution. If his critics are to be believed, he was also the first vocal atheist to raise a ruckus in the public square. True or not, fifteen years after he learned his lessons among the Mohawk, he fought one of the first battles against religious establishment in America.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 19