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1 min read History

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy Showed the Colonies How to Build a Union. Benjamin Franklin Took Notes.

A working indigenous confederacy showed the colonies exactly what to do. Similar guiding principles made it into the U.S. Constitution.
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In 1744, 43 years before the Constitutional Convention, Onondaga leader Canassatego told colonial representatives at the Treaty of Lancaster what their problem was. The colonies quarreled and stayed weak. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy had grown stronger by acting together. Benjamin Franklin printed the proceedings, including Canassatego's speech.

The Confederacy united the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, later joined by the Tuscarora, under the Great Law of Peace. Some estimates place its founding in the 1500s; research linking Haudenosaunee oral tradition to a solar eclipse dates it to 1142. Either way, by 1744 this was no political experiment. It had endured for generations.

Each nation kept its own leadership while common matters went to a Grand Council governed by consensus. Ten years after printing Canassatego's speech, Franklin proposed his Albany Plan of Union. Congress formally acknowledged Haudenosaunee influence in 1988, though scholars debate how direct it was.

Other ideas did not make the transition. Clan Mothers, who selected and could remove male leaders, had no equivalent in the new government. Consensus decision-making also did not survive. Neither did the Seven Generations principle.

When leaders sat in council for the welfare of the people, they made decisions on behalf of the next seven generations. The present generation was not the endpoint of government. It inherited from those before it, held that inheritance temporarily, and carried a responsibility to pass it forward to the seven generations still to come.

The Founders encountered a centuries-old confederacy that preserved separate nations while acting collectively, gave women political authority and asked leaders to govern for generations they would never meet. Federalism was not the only idea on offer.

Read the full story at PBS, December 13, 2018

Hot Take: This selective borrowing, if true, is the policy-making equivalent of stripping a house of its hardwood floors and keeping the paneling.

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