Did the Iroquois Really Influence the Birth of the USA? (Part Two)

Maybe don't blame Benjamin Franklin's kooky, unworkable plan of union on Native America.

(This is the second part of a three-part series. Read Part One.)

In 1753, the British Board of Trade called a convention, which met in 1754 in Albany, New York. Delegates representing seven of Britain’s Atlantic colonies and the Haudensaunee Confederation of the Six Nations of the Iroquois were to settle disputes with regard to trade and white encroachment; a larger British aim, as discussed in Part One, was to persuade the strategically and diplomatically all-important Six Nations not to ally with the French in the quickly developing Seven Years War.

Few people discussing that convention today mention its agenda—regarding land, some deals were made; regarding alliances, the result was inconclusive—or its British-ministry auspices. When looking back through later events considered more important, what most people want to talk about regarding the Albany Convention is something that the colonial delegations explored during meetings among themselves that preceded the main event.

All of the colonies, the delegations decided in those preliminary sessions, should form some sort of formal union. The purpose would be to coordinate diplomatic relations with the various Native nations and manage a concerted defense against those nations and their European allies. Though it failed, this plan is routinely described as 1) presaging the union formed 22 years later by the thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain; and 2) drawing influence from the governance structure of the Haudenasunee Confederation that was to participate in the main part of the convention.

A historical line is thereby often drawn to connect Native forms of government to U.S. forms of government. The line starts at the 1754 Albany Plan of Union and thence, since Albany is seen as a precursor, runs through the 1776 union of states; extends to the 1781 Articles of Confederation, ratified as a consequence of independence; and proceeds all the way to the Constitution of the United States, because when ratified in 1788, the Constitution replaced the Articles. Thanks to that line, Haudenosaunee influence on U.S. government is taken as given in a number of standard texts. The idea incited argument when recently invoked, more suggestively than argumentatively, in the opening of Ken Burns’s “American Revolution” series.

The historical line, as run, rests largely on two facts about Benjamin Franklin:

1. He was only person who played an important role at the Albany Convention, the Second Continental Congress, the drafting of the Articles, and the debates at the Constitutional Convention.

2. He made a much-quoted remark about the Six Nations confederation, in the context of promoting what became the Albany Plan of Union:

It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.

Taken together, Franklin’s career and Franklin’s quote run the line. While a few other facts and ideas are also sometimes raised in support of the Haudenosaunee-influence claim—the Burns series quotes the Onandaga diplomat Canasatego, for example, at the Treaty of Lancaster negotiations in 1744, advising colonials to form a union like that of the Six Nations—the Franklin quote is the one thing that's invariably brought up in this context.

There’s no denying the importance of Franklin’s role in the pre-meeting discussions at the Albany Convention. He’d been interested in colonial unification even before the convention was called, and just prior to traveling to Albany to represent Pennsylvania, he wrote and distributed some notes, which he titled “Short Hints,” outlining the benefits of such a system and describing how he thought it should work. While we have little detail on the convention’s process of adopting the Plan of Union, and while others also submitted ideas, a comparison of Franklin’s pre-conference notes and the conference committees’ notes shows pretty clearly that his ideas dominated the outcome. Because it’s often said that the union proposed at Albany, while unsuccessful, represented the earliest attempt to create a union of Britain’s Atlantic colonies, and therefore served as the forerunner of such intercolonial protests against British policy as the Stamp Act Congress and the Continental Congresses, Franklin, as the plan’s main author, gets credited with a certain prescience regarding the American future.

But Albany wasn’t the earliest attempt at union.

In 1643, four Puritan colonies of New England succeeded in forming a confederation for purposes similar to that of the failed 1754 Albany effort: mutual defense (or aggression) against Native nations, the French, and the Dutch. That union lasted, if loosely and spasmodically, for forty years and ended only in 1684, when Charles II, a closet Catholic, revoked some of the New England charters. In 1686, his brother, James II, openly Catholic, established the Dominion of New England. That dominion ended, in turn, when James was deposed in favor of the Protestants William and Mary, in 1689. Their accession settled long-standing conflicts over the nature of royal rule

1690 saw another American effort, this one in New York, to organize an intercolonial military force, in this case to wage war on New France. Its leader, Jacob Leisler, had rebelled against James II and taken control of New York. Now he pretended to have a commission from William and Mary, but he was in fact operating independently and was soon convicted of treason and executed.

I don’t think it’s worthwhile trying to tie the protests of the 1760’s and ‘70’s, and the break with Britain in 1776, to any of the pre-1763 efforts at colonial union. But if you must try, I think either of those two would make a slightly less bad candidate for a precursor than the Albany Plan of 1754—and not just because they actually went into effect and the Albany Plan didn’t. The New England confederation, while it wasn’t in opposition to the Crown, as the post-1763 intercolonial groups were, had a sui generis Puritan-American self-reliance that worried and annoyed Charles and was a cause of his revoking the charters. Leisler’s military leadership against New France, in conjunction with Connecticut, went all the way and outright defied the home government. The Albany Convention, by dramatic contrast, was a compliant colonial creature of the home government, and the Albany Plan of Union, far from seeking to establish a system that would operate separately from Crown authority, would have actively increased Crown authority in the Atlantic colonies. When you stop looking unrealistically backward through the imperial crisis for supposed precursors—if you take an interest in the imperial and colonial politics of the day, when nobody could look forward and see the future—it’s hard to make Albany a forerunner of anything. The politics of the day were peculiar to the conditions of the day.

Also to the peculiarities of the politicians. Franklin’s ceaseless lobbying for Pennsylvania to become a royal colony—his eagerness, right up until his humiliation in London in 1775, to perpetuate the imperial system in America—clarifies his purpose in the Plan of Union. Closely followed his suggestions, the Albany Convention resolved to ask Parliament, for the purpose of handling all policy and execution of policy regarding Indian affairs and military defense, to pass an act that would unify the British colonies under a Crown-appointed executive, who was to wield an absolute veto power; and a council elected by the colonial assemblies. Had the plan taken effect, the impact on Pennsylvania, where Franklin was early into his career in the assembly, would have been to water down the proprietor’s executive power, especially the proprietary governors’ absolute veto power over the assembly. In matters of defense—and many other matters would naturally have gotten involved—the governor’s veto would have been subject to an override by the even more powerful veto of the proposed union’s Crown appointee. That’s what Franklin was up to.

Once you see everything he did in politics before 1775 as dedicated, one way or another, and by any means necessary, to taking down the Pennsylvania proprietor and advancing the power of the Pennsylvania assembly—the body over which he at times aspired to hold and for a period succeeded in holding nearly dictatorial power—his wildly veering, situationist politics start to make an oddball kind of sense. It’s not that Franklin had no political principles. It’s that before 1775, he had only one political principle, which is nearly opaque to us, because it has nothing to do with what occurred during the imperial crisis of the 1760’s and ‘70’s. Franklin himself didn’t properly track that crisis until it was almost too late.

This reading of Franklin’s politics also helps clarify why the Albany Plan of Union didn’t make any sense, at all, just as a plan, which is why both the British government and the colonial assemblies rejected it pretty much on its face. To the ministry, the proposal smacked of weird logistical complications and murky colonial ambitions. To the colonial legislatures, inviting the Crown to bring more home-government power to the Atlantic colonies seemed likely to undermine the home government’s long-prevailing policy of benign neglect of the colonies, a policy that was already, even before the outbreak of the Seven Years War, under some degree of threat. While I doubt anyone was reading the thing with the analytic capabilities enabled by a long look backward, l do suspect that some of Franklin's rather kooky underlying ideas about the proper way to govern the colonies, though not explicitly expressed in the Albany plan, leached into readers’ consciousnesses without being fully understood or even necessarily noticed. He was in the process of developing a theory whereby, because they were representative, each of the provincial legislatures was properly a kind of House of Commons unto itself, with the British monarch serving as the executive for each province. The real Parliament, according to that model, had no legitimate role at all in legislating for the colonies. The model also had no place, critically to Franklin, for the proprietor of Pennsylvania.

No rational person in British government could have taken that idea seriously. The key effect of William and Mary’s settlement of British government had been to foster a “King-in-Parliament” structure, whereby the monarch acknowledges parliamentary restraints on royal power: That’s how George II and III were operating. Now, for the purpose of ruling the colonies, Franklin—along with some other Americans—would have liked to extract the King from Parliament, and thus from parliamentary restraint, and make him something like a “King-in-Assembly,” with each colonial assembly (but really a union of the assemblies) displacing Commons, and with no equivalent of Lords at all. Even if the idea had made any constitutional or logistical sense—and amazingly, Franklin spent ten years trying to push it on the privy council—the prospect of taking power away from the ministry and the Boards of Trade would have been pragmatically unacceptable. When John Dickinson put forth the theory that legislative sovereignty was divided for the purposes of certain kinds of taxation, he had a real basis in old British legal ideas—Parliament could tax to balance trade; taxation for revenue required consent, given via representation—and got some support in Britain. But Franklin refused to make any such distinction. He wasn't just against the taxes. His idea, which Jefferson and others also came to hold, pushed things to a point where Parliament had no right to legislate for the colonies at all.

Had that idea been put into effect (impossible, but just as a thought experiment)—had the Crown, that is, been enabled to nullify the parliamentary laws governing the colonies—royal power would have been enhanced, Parliament’s power weakened, the settlement unsettled. At the same time, the Crown, in governing its Atlantic possessions, would have been subjected to representational restraint not by Parliament, per the settlement, but by bodies formed in each of those possessions, or by a body to which they sent delegates. That prospect was totally absurd, as many Brits, as well as many Americans, could plainly see—effectively a harebrained kind of loyalist scheme, despite the fact that, if implemented (which was impossible), it would have undermined the fundamentals of British government that were established in 1689.

Some Americans were already seeing the existing royal element in their governments as royal trouble enough and didn’t want to see more of the King. In 1775, when Franklin came home and joined the push for independence in the Continental Congress, the independence crowd mistrusted him at first, suspecting he was a Crown asset. They were projecting a degree of intellectual consistency on him that he never had any use for.

It should be pretty obvious by now that Franklin’s ideas about intercolonial union were very far from those behind the Haudenasaunee Great Law of Peace, which had “subsisted for Ages, and appear[ed] indissoluble” because, unlike his ideas, which were never put into practice even for a moment, it made logistical sense, had a rational purpose, and employed procedures and mechanisms founded in long experience. The sheer uselessness of the Albany Plan of Union makes any claim that the Six Nations influenced it look fantastically unfair to the Six Nations.

And since the Albany Plan had an intent pretty much the opposite of the intent of the union of American states that formed in 1776, and was in no realistic sense a forerunner of that union, what are we to do with the widespread insistence on a line, supposedly beginning in Albany, and traceable from there through all of the U.S. founding documents, supposedly showing significant Native influence on the U.S. form of government? I don’t know, but in the third (and final!) part of this series, I’ll reflect on Franklin’s and other U.S. founding thinkers’ knowledge of and ignorance of Native practices (Franklin did have some knowledge); and on how and why the line continues to be drawn, regardless of any relationship to reality.

For example: Is it possible that we discuss the Albany Convention today only because of those pre-meetings—with the Six Nations delegates not even in the room—and those meetings’ supposed inspiration by the Great Law of Peace? And what about that guy Canasatego? And where does John Adams fit into all this?

We shall see . . .