After Christopher Columbus's first encounter with a continent that he initially mistook for India, North America became the permanent home of several markedly different cultural and ethnic groups. The "Age of Discovery" that Columbus initiated in 1492 was also an age of cultural interchange between the peoples of Europe and the Americas. Each learned from the other, borrowing artifacts -- and ideas. This traffic continues today. The result of such extensive communication across cultural lines has produced in contemporary North America a composite culture that is rich in diversity, and of a type unique in the world.

          The creation of this culture began with first contact -- possibly long before Columbus's landing. Fragments of pottery that resemble Japanese patterns have been found in present-day Equador, dated well before the birth of Christ. The Vikings left some tools behind in northeast North America. But while pottery, tools, and other things may be traced and dated, ideas are harder to follow through time. Thus, while the introduction of new flora, fauna, and tools has been given some study, the communication of ideas has been neglected.

          American Indians visited Europe before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Squanto, a Wampanoag, one of several Indians kidnapped from their native land (the immigrants called it New England), visited England during 1614 and returned home in time to meet the somewhat bewildered Pilgrims, who arrived during the fall of 1620, unprepared for winter on a continent that, to them, was as new as it was forbidding. It was Squanto who surprised the Pilgrims by greeting them in English and who helped the new immigrants survive that first winter, a season that produced the first Thanksgiving. At that first feast, Indians provided the Europeans with turkey, one of the best-remembered examples of cultural interchange in United States popular history. For his role in acculturating these English subjects to a new land, Squanto has been called a Pilgrim father.

          During the years following the landing of the Pilgrims, American Indians contributed many foods to the diet of a growing number of Euro-Americans. By the twentieth century, almost half the world's domesticated crops, including the staples -- corn and white potatoes -- were first cultivated by American Indians. Aside from turkey, corn, and white potatoes, Indians also contributed manoic, sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, peppers, pumpkins, tomatoes, pineapples, the avocado, cacao (chocolate), chicle (a constituent of chewing gum), several varieties of beans, and at least seventy other domesticated food plants. Almost all the cotton grown in the United States was derived from varieties originally cultivated by Indians. Rubber, too, was contributed by native Americans.

          Several American Indian medicines also came into use among Euro-Americans. These included quinine, laxatives, as well as several dozen other drugs and herbal medicines. Euro-Americans adapted to their own needs many Indian articles of clothing and other artifacts such as hammocks, kayaks, canoes, moccasins, smoking pipes, dog sleds, and parkas. With the plants and artifacts came the Indian words used to describe them, and other features of what, to the Europeans, was a new land. Half the states in the United States of America today bear names first spoken among Indians; the thousands of words that entered English and other European languages from American Indian sources are too numerous even to list in this brief survey.

          Assertions have also been made that Indian contributions helped shape Euro-American folksongs, locations for railroads and highways, ways of dying cloth, war tactics, and even bathing habits. The amount of communication from Indians to Euro-Americans was all the more surprising because Indians usually made no conscious effort to convert the colonists to their ways. While Euro-Americans often used trade and gift giving to introduce, and later sell, products of their cultures to Indians, Euro-American adoption of Indian artifacts, unlike some of those from Euro-Americans to Indians, was completely voluntary. In the words of Max Savelle, scholar of the revolutionary period, Indian artifacts "were to contribute their own ingredients to the amalgam that was to be America's civilization." This influence was woven into the lives of Europeans in America despite the fact that Indians lacked organized means of propagation, but simply because they were useful and necessary to life in the New World.

          Unlike the physical aspects of this amalgam, the intellectual contributions of American Indians to Euro-American culture have only lightly, and for the most part recently, been studied by a few historians, anthropologists, scholars of law, and others. Where physical artifacts may be traced more or less directly, the communication of ideas may, most often, only be inferred from those islands of knowledge remaining in written records. These written records are almost exclusively of Euro-American origin, and often leave blind spots that may be partly filled only by records based on Indian oral history.

          Paul Bohanan, writing in the introduction of Beyond the Frontier (1967), which he coedited with Fred Plog, stressed the need to "tear away the veils of ethnocentricism," which he asserted have often kept scholars from seeing that peoples whom they had relegated to the category of "primitive" possessed "institutions as complex and histories as full as our own." A. Irving Hallowell, to make a similar point, quoted Bernard de Voto:

Most American history has been written as if history were a function soley of white culture -- in spite of the fact that well into the nineteenth century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. Those of us who work in frontier history are repeatedly nonplussed to discover how little has been done for us in regard to the one force bearing on our field that was active everywhere. . . . American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all these affected white men and their societies.[1]

To De Voto's assertion, Hallowell added: "Since most history has been written by the conquerers, the influence of the primitive people upon American civilization has seldom been the subject of dispassionate consideration."

          Felix Cohen, author of the Handbook of Indian Law, the basic reference book of his field, also advised a similar course of study and a similar break with prevailing ethnocentricism. Writing in the American Scholar (1952), Cohen said:

When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white man's conquest of America. What the Roman historians did not see was that captive Greece would take captive conquering Rome and that Greek science, Greek philosophy and a Greek book, known as Septaugint, translated into the Latin tongue, would guide the civilized world and bring the tramp of pilgrim feet to Rome a thousand years after the last Roman regiment was destroyed.

American historians, wrote Cohen, had too often paid attention to military victories and changing land boundaries, while failing to "see that in agriculture, in government, in sport, in education and in our views of nature and our fellow men, it is the first Americans who have taken captive their battlefield conquerers." American historians "have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," Cohen asserted. In his view, "The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man."

          Cohen's broad indictment does not include all scholars, nor all historians. The question of American Indian influence on the intellectual traditions of Euro-American culture has been raised, especially during the last thirty years. These questions, however, have not yet been examined in the depth that the complexity of Indian contributions warrant.

          To raise such questions is not to ignore, nor to negate, the profound influence of Europe on American intellectual development. It is, rather, to add a few new brush strokes to an as yet unfinished portrait. It is to explore the intellectual trade between cultures that has made America unique, built from contributions not only by Europeans and American Indians, but also by almost every other major cultural and ethnic group that has taken up residence in the Americas.

          What follows is only a first step, tracing the way in which Benjamin Franklin and some of his contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, absorbed American Indian political and social ideas, and how some of these ideas were combined with the cultural heritage they had brought from Europe into a rationale for revolution in a new land. There is a case to be made in that American Indian thought helped make that possible.[2]

          Comparison of the Iroquois' system of government with that of the new United States' began with Lewis Henry Morgan, known as the "father of American anthropology," who produced in 1851 the first systematic study of an American Indian social organization in his League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Following more than a decade of close association with the Iroquois, especially Ely Parker (the Seneca who helped arrange Morgan's adoption by the Iroquois), Morgan observed:

Among the Indian nations whose ancient seats were within the limits of our republic, the Iroquois have long continued to occupy the most conspicuous position. They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organization and acquired a higher degree of influence than any race of Indian lineage, except those of Mexico and Peru.

          "The People of the Longhouse commended to our forefathers a union of colonies similar to their own as early as 1755," Morgan wrote. "They [the Iroquois] saw in the common interests and common speech of the colonies the elements for a confederation." Morgan believed that the Iroquois Confederacy contained "the germ of modern parliament, congress, and legislature."

          Morgan's major works have been widely reprinted in the United States and in several other countries during the century and a half since he first sat around the Iroquois Confederacy's council fire with his newly acquired brothers. In some of these editions, the idea of Iroquois influence on the formation of the United States' political and social system have been raised anew. Herbert M. Lloyd, in an introduction to the 1902 Dodd, Mead and Company edition of League of the Iroquois, wrote:

Among all the North American peoples, there is none more worthy of study, by reason of their intellectual ability, the character of their institutions and the part they have played in history, than the Iroquois of the League. And, as it happens, this is the people which has longest been known to ourselves, which has been most closely observed by our writers and statesmen, and whose influence has been most strongly felt in our political constitution and in our history as colonies and nation.

Lloyd continued: "In their ancient League the Iroquois presented to us a type of Federal Republic under whose roof and around whose council fire all people might dwell in peace and freedom. 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."

          In an early history of the relations between Sir William Johnson and the Iroquois, William E. Griffis in 1891 advised further study of Iroquoian influence on the formation of the United States, especially Benjamin Franklin's role in this interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century Arthur C. Parker, son of the Ely Parker who had been close to Morgan, wrote in a preface to his version of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

Here, then, we find the right of popular nomination, the right of recall and of woman suffrage flourishing in the old America of the Red Man and centuries before it became the clamor of the new America of the white invader. Who now shall call the Indians and Iroquois savages?

          A similar point of view was taken in 1918 by J. N. B. Hewitt, who not only suggested that the Iroquois influenced the formation of the United States, but that the Iroquois league also served as something of a prototype for the League of Nations.

          The Iroquois' Great Law of Peace, wrote Hewitt, "made a significant departure from the past in separating the conduct of military and civilian affairs." The confederacy, he continued, also recognized no state religion: "All forms of it [religion] were tolerated and practiced." The Iroquois polity separated the duties of civil chiefs and prophets, or other religious leaders. Hewitt also noted the elevated position of women in the Iroquois system of government.

          In 1930, Arthur Pound's Johnson of the Mohawks again introduced the possibility of intellectual communication: "With the possible exception of the also unwritten British Constitution deriving from the Magna Charta, the Iroquois Constitution is the longest-going international constitution in the world." Pound remarked at the "political sagacity" of the Iroquois, as well as the checks and balances built into the Iroquois league, which was structured in such a way that no action could be taken without the approval of all five represented Indian nations. It was Pound's belief that "in this constitution of the Five Nations are found practically all of the safeguards which have been raised in historic parliaments to protect home affairs from centralized authority."

          Carl Van Doren's biography of Benjamin Franklin, published in 1938, noted Franklin's admiration of the political system of the league, and suggested that his plans for a Colonial union, expressed first during the 1750s, owed some debt to the Iroquois. Franklin, Van Doren wrote, found no European model that was suitable for the needs of the colonies that he hoped to unite.

          In 1940 Clark Wissler asserted that "students of politics and government have found much to admire in the league [of the Iroquois]. There is some historical evidence that knowledge of the league influenced the colonists in their first attempts to form a confederacy and later to write a constitution."[3] Five years later, Frank G. Speck, finding the Iroquois "a decidedly democratic people,"[4] quoted Wissler to support his contention that the Iroquois played a role in the founding of the United States. Wissler mentioned advice, given by the Iroquois chief Canassatego at the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) treaty of 1744, to the effect that the colonists could benefit by forming a union along Iroquoian lines.

          By 1946, the nations of the world had established a second international organization and, as in 1918, attention was turned to the Iroquois in this regard. Paul A. W. Wallace, who devoted his scholarship to a study of the Iroquois, used quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the Preamble to the Constitution of the United Nations to open and close his book, the White Roots of Peace:

I am Deganwidah, and with the Five Nations confederate lords I plant the tree of the Great Peace. . . . Roots have spread out from the Tree . . . and the name of these Roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace . . . they may trace the Roots to their source . . . and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree. . . .

We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . . and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights . . . and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for law can be maintained . . . do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

While Wallace's White Roots of Peace was principally an account of the traditional story of the creation of the Iroquois league, he also mentioned Franklin's attention to Iroquois political institutions and the possible role that this attention played in the founding of the United States.

          By 1952, suggestions of Iroquoian contributions to the evolution of the United States' political structure, as well as that of international bodies, had been "in the air" of Euro-American scholarship for more than a century. During that year, Felix Cohen began to develop the idea in the American Scholar. Cohen wrote that in their rush to "Americanize" the Indian, Euro-Americans had forgotten, or chosen to ignore, that they had themselves been influenced by Indian thought and action. To Cohen, American disrespect for established authority had Indian roots, as did the American penchant for sharing with those in need. In the Indian character resided a fierce individuality that rejected subjugation, together with a communalism that put the welfare of the whole family, tribe, or nation above that of individuals.

          "It is out of a rich Indian democratic tradition that the distinctive political ideals of American life emerged," Cohen wrote. "Universal suffrage for women as well as for men, the pattern of states within a state we call federalism, the habit of treating chiefs as servants of the people instead of as their masters . . ." Cohen ascribed at least in part to the "Indian" in our political tradition. To this, Cohen added: "The insistence that the community must respect the diversity of men and the diversity of their dreams -- all these things were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed." To support his assertion, Cohen offered an excerpt from a popular account of America that was circulated in England around 1776: "The darling passion of the American is liberty and that in its fullest extent; nor is it the original natives only to whom this passion is confined; our colonists sent thither seem to have imbibed the same principles."[5]

          "Politically, there was nothing in the Empires and kingdoms of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to parallel the democratic constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, with its provisions for initiative, referendum and recall, and its suffrage for women as well as for men," Cohen continued. The influence of such ideas spread to Europe, where they played a part in Thomas More's Utopia. Cohen further asserted that "to John Locke, the champion of tolerance and the right of revolution, the state of nature and of natural equality to which men might appeal in rebellion against tyranny was set not in the remote dawn of history, but beyond the Atlantic sunset." Cohen also found the influence of Indian thought in Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, "and their various contemporaries." Anticipating the arguments of Charles Sanford nine years later, Cohen implied that many of the doctrines that played so crucial a role in the American Revolution were fashioned by European savants from observation of the New World and its inhabitants. These observations, packaged into theories, were exported, like the finished products made from raw materials that also traveled the Atlantic Ocean, back to America. The communication among American Indian cultures, Europe, and Euro-America thus seemed to involve a sort of intellectual mercantilism. The product of this intellectual traffic, the theories that played a role in rationalizing rebellion against England, may have been fabricated in Europe, but the raw materials from which they were made were, to Cohen, substantially of indigenous American origin.

          Cohen, continuing his synthesis of a hundred years of suggestions that Indian ideas helped shape America's and Europe's intellectual traditions, asserted that "the greatest teachers of American democracy have gone to school with the Indian." He mentioned Canassatego's advice to the colonists at the 1744 Lancaster treaty, and asserted that Benjamin Franklin had integrated this advice into his ideas favoring Colonial union seven years later. Cohen also asserted that Thomas Jefferson freely acknowledged his debt to the conceptions of liberty held by American Indians, and favorably compared the liberty he saw in Indian politics with the oppression of Europe in his time.

          Following publication of Cohen's article, suggestions that American Indian, and especially Iroquoian, thought had played some role in the genesis of a distinctly American conception of society and government became more numerous. In 1953, Ruth Underhill (Red Man's Continent) wrote that Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington all were familiar with the Iroquois polity, which, she said, "was the most integrated and orderly north of Mexico. Some have even thought that it gave suggestions to the American Constitution." Underhill also devoted some attention to the equality of women, and the political powers reserved for them, in the Iroquois structure. Like Wallace before her, Underhill also asserted similarity between the Iroquoian system and the modern United Nations. Both, she wrote, "dealt only with international concerns of peace and war."

          In 1955, Thomas R. Henry, in an account of the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, picked up Hewitt's suggestion of intercultural communication. Hewitt, wrote Henry, had used Canassatego's 1744 speech and a remembrance of it in a 1775 treaty council to support his assertion that the Six Nations had played a role in the formation of the United States. "J. N. B. Hewitt was firmly convinced that the League of the Iroquois was the intellectual progenitor of the United States." While acknowledging Hewitt's argument, Henry wrote that more research in the area needed to be done.

          A. Irving Hallowell in 1957 mentioned the subject of intellectual origins of the American republic in connection with the Iroquois, but did not delve into it. "It has been said that information about the organization and operation of the League of the Iroquois which Franklin picked up at various Indian councils suggested to him the pattern for a United States of America." He also advised more study of these suggestions.

          In 1960, author Edmund Wilson, having traveled to Iroquois country to research his book, Apologies to the Iroquois, heard an oral-history account from Standing Arrow, a Seneca, of the reliance that Franklin had placed on the Great Law of Peace. He did not pursue the subject in the book.

          In 1961, Charles Sanford's Quest for Paradise again raised the possibility of intellectual mercantilism. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, originator of the "Frontier Hypothesis" who found democracy inexplicably emerging from among the trees, Sanford stressed the effect of the New World's geography over its inhabitants, but he still found a few Indians in the forest that he characterized as a new Eden:

The archetypical Adam, living in a state of nature was thus endowed by his creators, which included Thomas Jefferson, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The revolutionary doctrines which grew out of discoveries of the New World were first developed by European savants only to be borrowed by the American colonists and turned against Europe.

          In 1965, William Brandon wrote that more attention should be paid to "the effect of the Indian world on the changing American soul, most easily seen in the influence of the American Indian on European notions of liberty." Brandon asserted that the first British inter-Colonial union of any kind, the New England Confederation of 1643, came about "not only as a result of the Pequot War but possibly in some imitation of the many Indian confederacies . . . in aboriginal North America." The first formal inter-Colonial conference outside of New England, which took place in Albany in 1684, "was held at the urging of the Iroquois and to meet with Iroquois spokesmen," Brandon wrote.[6] He also described accounts by Peter Martyr, the first historian of the New World, which enthusiastically told of the Indians' liberty, the absence of crime and jails, and the greed that accompanied a societal emphasis on private property. Martyr and other Europeans of his time wondered whether, in Brandon's words, the Indians lived "in that golden world of which the ancients had spoken so much." Out of such imagery came the myth of the Noble Savage, another product of the intellectual mercantilism that seemed to accompany its economic counterpart across the Atlantic Ocean. Out of such imagery, too, came the assumption that Indians, at least those Indians still uncorrupted by European influences, lived in the original state of all societies and that, by observing them, the new arrivals from Europe could peer through a living window on their own pasts. To many who had recently escaped poverty, or fled tyranny in Europe, this was a vision of the past that must have carried no small amount of appeal.

          During 1967, C. Elmore Reaman's work on the Iroquois' role in the conflict between the British and French during the mid-eighteenth century again raised the possibility of Iroquoian influence on the founding of the United States: "Any race of people who provided the prototype for the Constitution of the United States, and whose confederacy has many of the aspects of the present-day United Nations, should be given their rightful recognition." Reaman supported his assertion by quoting from a speech given by Richard Pilant on Iroquoian studies at McMaster University April 6, 1960: "Unlike the Mayas and Incas to the south, the Longhouse People developed a democratic system of government which can be maintained [to be] a prototype for the United States and the United Nations. Socially, the Six Nations met the sociologist's test of higher cultures by having given a preferred status to women." Reaman added that the Iroquois league, in his estimation, "was a model social order in many ways superior to the white man's culture of the day. . . . Its democratic form of government more nearly approached perfection than any that has been tried to date. It is claimed by many that the framers of the United States of America copied from these Iroquois practices in founding the government of the United States." This material was based on Hewitt's work.

          Throughout the next few years, a thread of interest in the Iroquois' communication of political ideas to the new United States continued to run through literature in this area of history. In 68, Allan W. Eckert wrote:

The whites who were versed in politics at this time [c. 1750] had every reason to marvel at this form of Indian government. Knowledge of the league's success, it is believed, strongly influenced the colonies in their own initial efforts to form a union and later to write a Constitution.

          In 1971, Helen A. Howard borrowed part of Wallace's White Roots of Peace, including the paired quotations from the Great Law of Peace and the United Nations' Constitution, to raise the question of Iroquoian intellectual influence. During the same year, Mary E. Mathur's Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin asserted that the plan of union that Franklin proposed at the Albany congress (1754) more closely resembled the Iroquoian model than the British. Mathur placed major emphasis on an appearance by Hendrick, an Iroquois statesman, at the congress. She also asserted, but did not document, reports that Felix Cohen had read accounts written by British spies shortly before the Revolutionary War that blamed the Iroquois and other Indians' notions of liberty for the colonists' resistance to British rule.

          A European, Elemire Zolla, in 1973 recounted Horatio Hale's belief, published in The Iroquois Book of Rites, that democracy sprang mainly from Indian origins. Zolla also recounted Edmund Wilson's encounter with Standing Arrow and the Senecas. In 1975, J. E. Chamberlin's The Harrowing of Eden noted that "it is generally held that the model of the great Iroquois [Six Nations] Confederacy was a significant influence on both the Albany plan and the later Articles of Confederation." In a footnote to that reference, Chamberlin wrote that the Iroquois had also exerted influence on Karl Marx and Frederich Engels through Lewis H. Morgan. Engels, having read Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Light of the Researchers of Lewis Henry Morgan (1884), which contained an intricate account of the Iroquoian polity that most directly examined the league's ability to maintain social cohesion without an elaborate state apparatus. The Iroquois, wrote Engels, provided a rare example of a living society that "knows no state."[7]

          Francis Jennings's finely detailed work, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1975), closed a discussion that noted Euro-Americans' perceptions of Indians' liberty with a sweeping statement: "What white society owes to Indian society, as much as to any other source, is the mere fact of its existence."

          Donald A. Grinde in 1979 collected much of what had been written about the subject of Iroquoian intellectual interaction with English-speaking Euro-Americans. While his The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation was mostly a military and diplomatic account of the Iroquois' role during the time period around the American Revolution, it also contained most of the published evidence in secondary sources on this topic. Grinde reserved special attention for the interaction of Franklin and Jefferson with the Iroquois, and urged more study of the matter: "More needs to be done. Especially if America continues to view itself as a distinct entity set apart from many of the values of Western Civilization." Grinde also stated that such study could help dissolve negative stereotypes that many Euro-Americans harbor about American Indians' heritage.

          The negation of stereotypes is important to this investigation because to study the intellectual contributions of American Indians to European and American thought, one must to some degree abolish the polarity of the "civilized" and the "savage" that much of our history (not to mention popular entertainment) has drilled into us. We must approach the subject ready to be surprised, as our ancestors were surprised when they were new to America. We must be ready to acknowledge that American Indian societies were as thoughtfully constructed and historically significant to our present as the Romans, the Greeks, and other Old World peoples.

          What follows is only a beginning. The Iroquois were not the only American Indians to develop notions of federalism, political liberty, and democracy long before they heard of the Greeks or the Magna Charta. Benjamin Franklin was not the only Euro-American to combine his own heritage with what he found in his new homeland. And the infant United States was not the only nation whose course has been profoundly influenced by the ideas of the Indians, the forgotten cofounders of our heritage.