Background
Across what is now the United States and over hundreds of years, tribal governments encompassed a wide array of forms, from relatively simple to complex, and from nearly autocratic to very democratic. In addition, Indigenous Americans and tribal governments significantly shaped the history of the English colonies and the early American states and the United States. Indian affairs were some of the most critical “foreign affairs” that the states and the U.S. government faced in the early national period and were cited as a primary reason for developing the U.S. Constitution with its strong federal government.
Prominent founders such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Wilson, and John Adams were acquainted with Indigenous peoples, tribal governments, and Indigenous theories of governance. Many had worked in diplomatic settings with Native nations as treaty negotiators and commissioners in the decades before the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, which helped shape their political thinking. Tribal cultures and governments had positive and negative influences on the Constitution, as the founders were influenced both by Native ideas regarding governance and by the perceived threats posed to the new nation by the existence of Indian nations.
Positive Indian Influences on the Founders and the Constitution
Throughout his career, Benjamin Franklin had extensive contacts with the tribal nations while negotiating treaties, conducting diplomatic meetings, and printing Indian treaties for the Colony of Pennsylvania. In 1744, Franklin represented Pennsylvania at a significant diplomatic meeting with representatives of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, where Franklin and other colonial representatives were advised by the Iroquois leader Canasatego that the English colonies should form a union like the Iroquois Confederacy. Demonstrating how one arrow was easily broken but a bundle of arrows was unbreakable, Canasatego told them, “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 powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power.”
This advice did not go unheeded. Pennsylvania Governor George Thomas thanked Canasatego for this advice, Franklin printed Canasatego’s speech in 1744, and Cadwallader Colden, a well-known early American historian, reprinted it in his 1747 book on the Iroquois. In addition, Franklin wrote a widely distributed 1751 letter in which he noted, “It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a . . . Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”
Historians note that Franklin applied Canasatego’s advice in 1754 when he began promoting his Albany Plan, which was one of the first proposals to advocate a union of the thirteen colonies and is cited as a forerunner of the U.S. Constitution. According to Franklin biographer Carl Van Doren, Franklin “admired the Iroquois confederation, and plainly had it in mind in his earliest discussion of the need of union among the colonies.” Historian Julian Boyd states that Franklin “found his materials” for the Albany Plan “in the great confederacy of the Iroquois.”
Through Franklin’s 1751 letter, Canasatego’s advice became fairly well known in the pre-Revolution period. Thirty-one years later, on August 25, 1775, commissioners of Indian affairs for the Continental Congress quoted Canasatego’s 1744 speech back to Iroquois leaders at a meeting in Albany, saying their forefathers thought his “advice was good” and his words had “sunk deep into their hearts” and they had tied twelve arrows together into a “strong confederacy.” Five of the six commissioners who spoke these words were founders who helped draft and ratify the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787.
Thomas Jefferson was also well acquainted with tribal governments and Indigenous political theories, having a longtime interest in Native cultures. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson wrote that Indian legal systems were preferable to “too much law, as among civilized Europeans.” In 1787, Jefferson wrote to John Rutledge, a member of the Constitutional Convention, regarding the virtues of American Indian governments, saying, “The only condition on earth to be compared with ours is that of the Indians, where they still have less law than we.” In 1812, he wrote to John Adams that France was a “den of robbers” and England was a den of “pirates,” and said he would rather the United States be “ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighboring savages are.”
The more democratic Indian nations may have been better models for the founders than were European governments. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a member of the Continental Congress’s Committee on Indian Affairs, an Indian commissioner, and treaty negotiator for Pennsylvania, said at the Constitutional Convention that “the British Government cannot be our model.” Charles Pinckney, a South Carolina Constitutional Convention delegate, said in 1788 that the delegates were skeptical of European governments since “from the European world no precedents are to be drawn for people who think they are capable of governing themselves.”
John Adams analyzed various tribal government structures in his 1787 three-volume treatise on constitutions, where he appears to use Native governments as examples of the separation of powers. He thought it would be worthwhile “[t]o collect together the legislation of the Indians” because while the “sovereignty is in the nation . . . the three powers are strong in every tribe.” He said that “an accurate investigation of the form of government of the ancient Germans and modern Indians” would be worthy because “in both, the existence of the three divisions of power is marked with a precision that excludes all controversy.” Adams also noted that in Native governments the “democratical branch, especially, is so determined, that the real sovereignty resided in the body of the people and was exercised in the assembly of king, nobles, and commons together.” He pointed to the Mohawk Nation in particular as having “complete individual independence,” and noted that their tribal leaders deliberated national affairs in councils and left major decisions to “a national assembly.”
Most of the founders also would have been familiar with tribal governance as an example of federalism, where a federal government handles national affairs, but semi-autonomous towns and bands handle local issues. The Iroquois Confederacy, the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Creek, among others, operated under federalist principles, with national governing councils devoted to national and foreign affairs and tribal towns deciding local issues. The Iroquois Confederacy, for example, had a federalist system with a central government under a constitution known as the Great Binding Law of the Five Nations that was written on sacred wampum belts. Many of these federalist governments also had checks and balances on civil and military affairs to avoid the concentration of power in individual hands and protected a wide range of individual freedoms and democratic rights that the U.S. Constitution came to include, such as freedom of religion, citizens’ initiatives, veto and recall provisions, and women’s suffrage. Women played important roles in the Iroquois Confederacy and many other tribal governments and were heavily involved in political and economic decision-making, an Indigenous practice not adopted by the United States in the Constitution ratified in 1788.
Indian affairs were also important to the decision to create a new federal government to replace the Articles of Confederation. A stronger central government was needed to exercise exclusive authority over Indian affairs because of confusion over states’ roles created by the Articles of Confederation. James Madison, the framer of the Constitution, noted that the confederation government’s inability to control trade with Indians was a key deficiency of the Articles of Confederation and urged adoption of the Indian Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Negative American Indian Influences on the Founders and the Constitution
Following the Revolutionary War, the new United States was weak and could not afford to fight Native nations that were within the borders of the thirteen states and in nearby territories. The danger posed by Native nations, and the inability of the country to address it under the Articles of Confederation, created pressure to create a stronger federal government that could formulate and enforce Indian policy and raise the funds to maintain a standing army and forts on the western frontier.
Alexander Hamilton wrote that one of the “important objects” of a strong federal government was to raise an army to protect the “western frontier against the savages.” Even some Anti-Federalists, who feared a standing army because of the danger of misuse, agreed that an army, frontier garrisons, and the taxes required to maintain them were needed to protect the country from Native violence. As historian John C. Miller points out, between 1790 and 1796, nearly five-sixths of the United States’s operating budget went to fighting Indians.
Legacy
The U.S. Constitution as enacted contains several references to Indian nations and peoples. Tribes are specifically included in the Interstate Commerce Clause, which states that the U.S. Congress has the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” This section of the Commerce Clause giving the federal government authority over Native tribes is commonly referred to as the Indian Commerce Clause. Tribal governments are also included by implication in the Treaty Clause, which gives the president the power to negotiate treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, because of the hundreds of treaties the American colonies, states, and the federal government entered into with Indian nations from 1609 onward. Native individuals are expressly mentioned in Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution as “Indians not taxed,” meaning those who were unassimilated at the time did not count as citizens of the United States.
According to historians Donald A. Grinde Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen, “the character of American democracy evolved importantly (although, of course, not solely) from the examples provided by the American Indian confederacies that bordered the British colonies.” In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution acknowledging the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy to the development of the U.S. Constitution. Some historians, however, dispute this influence. Elizabeth Tooker, an anthropologist and historian of the Iroquois Confederacy, disputes evidence of American Indian influence on the U.S. Constitution, concluding that it is uncertain how much the colonists knew about the Iroquois system of governance because little was written about it and noting the numerous ways the Constitution differs from the Iroquois system. Similarly, Philip A. Levy asserted that evidence for Native influence on the Constitution lacked historical credibility. Historian Colin Calloway calls the evidence for such an influence circumstantial and asserts that “most scholars see all this as a stretch,” while also noting that the founders “certainly took Indian nations into account as they built their own constitution.” Evidence suggests, however, that Native nations influenced the American government in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future.
