A while ago I got into a discussion with a friend about the United States the roots of our governance and our Constitution. Without going into the details of the discussion, my friend was of the belief that the Constitution grew out of biblical principles. My friend was hard pressed for an answer to my query, as to why the lack of those principles being stated as such in the US Constitution. Not that I don't believe in God I do, and consider myself a Christian.
However I don't believe that the lack of references to God was an over site on the part of our forefathers, nor a lack of appreciation of faith, although many concepts of the Constitution are also biblical in nature. And yes, the Declaration of Independence mentions both "God" and "Creator." So with the lack of biblical reference what is it that influenced the founders of American's great Constitution? Well many historians either through ignorance or bias don't write much about some of the great, and important influences of the time that shaped the founders thinking.
Many of you will probably be surprised to know that a constitution of sorts called the "Great Law of Peace," essentially the Iroquois Constitution was already here. Here in America for hundreds and maybe thousands of years before Philadelphia, before the Mayflower, and before our great Constitution. It was the pact of the "Haudenosaunee" (People of the Longhouse) also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, or the League of Peace and Power, and made up of the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, and later the Tuscarora tribes. The Haudenosaunee's Great Law of Peace brought to a halt decades of warfare between the the tribes and probably created the world's first democratic government.
Under the Great Law of Peace the Iroquois enjoyed peace, freedom, woman's rights and suffrage under a representative government known as the Grand Council. Each tribe sends chiefs to act as representatives and make decisions for the whole nation. The number of chiefs to this day has never changed.
Lets take a look at
how the precepts of the Great Law of Peace became influential in shaping the thinking of many of our country's forefathers.
Beginning nearly two generations before the Revolutionary War, the circumstances of diplomacy arrayed themselves so that opinion leaders of the English colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy were able to meet together to discuss the politics of alliance — and confederation. Beginning in the early 1740s, Iroquois leaders strongly urged the colonists to form a federation similar to their own. The Iroquois' immediate practical objective was unified management of the Indian trade and prevention of fraud. The Iroquois also stressed that the colonies should have to unify as a condition of alliance in the continuing "cold war" with France.
This set of circumstances brought Benjamin Franklin into the diplomatic equation. He first read the Iroquois' urgings to unite as a printer of Indian treaties. By the early 1750s, Franklin was more directly involved in diplomacy itself, at the same time that he became an early, forceful advocate of colonial union. All of these circumstantial strings were tied together in the summer of 1754, when colonial representatives, Franklin among them, met with Iroquois sachems at Albany to address issues of mutual concern, and to develop the Albany Plan of Union, a design that echoes both English and Iroquois precedents which would become a rough draft for the Articles of Confederation [later replaced by the United States Constitution] a generation later.
An article in
Indian Country Today by Tom Wanamaker talks about Oren Lyons the Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee. Lyons spoke in the fall of 2005 at McNaughton Hall on the Syracuse University campus. His topic was how the founding fathers were influenced by the traditional Haudenosaunee methods of governing, and recommendations to frame a new form of government for the American colonies.
'The Six Nations were involved in all land-based meetings in the Northeast during colonial times,'' Lyons said. ''We set the protocol and showed the Europeans how to have a meeting - no interruptions, listen to each other, define the issues, one speaker at a time.''
During this era, Lyons observed, the term ''Americans'' actually meant ''Indians.'' Most European residents of the colonial governments considered themselves subjects of the British Crown.
Lyons cited a 1744 meeting in Lancaster, Penn. involving four colonial governors and the leaders of the six Haudenosaunee nations. At that gathering, according to Lyons, an Onondaga chief told the governors that their colonies ''would never amount to much'' if they did not unite as the Haudenosaunee had done. Historian Cadwallader Colden's notes of the meeting were later sent to Philadelphia, where a printer named Benjamin Franklin published them.
Ten years later, Franklin initiated the Albany Plan of Union, a proposal to create a royally appointed President-General and a 48-member Grand Council, elected by colonial legislators, to provide for unified colonial governance. Mohawk Chief Hendrick met with the colonists to advise them on Haudenosaunee ways. The plan never came to fruition, but contained many elements that would later reappear in the U.S. Constitution.
By the way, after the unfruitful "Albany Plan of Union" meeting in 1754, there was a meeting with the governor in front of the governor's residence. There was a handful of colonial delegates in just one row of benches, facing about 200 Indians in attendance that sat on ten rows of benches. A speech approved by the delegates paragraph by paragraph was read by the governor and translated to the Indians. Some of the Indians spoke, and ceremonial presentations of wampum belts to the Indians was made.
Among my favorite authors Kathleen O'Neal and W. Michael Gear, in the afterword of one of their books:
People today tend to speak in terms of dispossession and "Americanization" of the Indian, but the reverse is equally, if not more powerfully, true....
From the first moment that reports reached Europe describing the lifeways of the aboriginal peoples, Europeans were intoxicated.
In fact, it became a real problem for European governments. To battle this fascination with the "Nobel Savage," the European elite proposed the "theory of degeneration." According to which, the American climate debased all life on the continent, animals, plants, the aboriginal peoples, and, of course, any European who set foot there.
This only seemed to inflame the interests of the common people, and gifted writers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson made sure that interest did not wane. They genuinely believed that the Iroquoian form of government was superior to that of the monarchy, and encouraged all colonists to listen carefully to what the Iroquois had to say.
For further reading:
The Six Nations: Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth.
Oren Lyons - The Faithkeeper, an Interview with Bill Moyers Public Television.
