The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution

Abstract

T THE standard works on the United States Constitution and the Articles of Confederation do not credit the American Indians with having contributed to their origins. Indians are absent, as intellectual influences, from such sources as Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Samuel H. Beer's To Make a Nation, and Jack N. Rakove's The Beginnings of National Politics, to cite a few distinguished and representative examples.1 Instead, these works describe the political ideas of eighteenth-century British-American leaders and thinkers as creative adaptations of the intellectual heritage to American conditions. The intellectual roots of the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation lay, the mainstream authors assert, in Europe: in Great Britain above all, in Continental Europe to a considerable extent, and in ancient Rome and Greece to a much lesser extent. In contradiction to the mainstream is a revisionist school that gives much of the credit to the American Indians. The revisionists believe that the Indians, the forgotten Founders as Bruce E. Johansen terms them, significantly influenced the joining together of the thirteen colonies in I776, the writing of the Articles of Confederation, and the construction of a federal system of government in I787-I788.2 Although the Iroquois thesis lacks the persuasive power of the mainstream European thesis, it has been widely propagated and, for that reason alone, deserves serious, critical examination. Lewis Henry Morgan, who made the first comprehensive study of politics and society, may also have been the first proponent of the influence thesis. In i88i he wrote, It is worthy of remembrance