The exposure to New World peoples sparked in 1492 by the voyages of Columbus profoundly changed Europe. As reflected in the fabulous world building of the 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels, European imaginations were just as amazed by New World peoples as they were its exotic plants and animals. What is largely underappreciated is how European exposure to the novel concepts of governance helped spark the Enlightenment and give birth to modern democracy.

European contact with the Native Americans increased as the late Renaissance was unfolding. Figures like John Locke, David Hume, and Jean-Jaques Rousseau painted Native Americans in a new, more positive light. In particular, central to Rousseau’s philosophy was the contrast in the extreme poverty that could be found in urban Europe of his time with the ‘noble savage’ he envisioned of ancient Europe and in what he saw as more egalitarian societies like the newly contacted Nambicuara people of the Amazon river basin. 

Benjamin Franklin and the Iroquois

A generation later, America’s Founding Fathers had much closer contact with the systems of government existing already in North America. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin was among a delegation from the British Empire’s Province of Pennsylvania that signed a treaty with the Iroquois League of Nations, according to Bruce E. Johansen’s 1990 article in Ethnohistory, “Native American Societies and the Evolution of Democracy in America, 1600 – 1800”.

Franklin first became acquainted with the operation of Indian political organization in his capacity as official printer for the colony of Pennsylvania. His job included publication of the records and speeches of the various Indian assemblies and treaty negotiations, but following his instinctive curiosity, he broadened this into a study of Indian culture and institutions. 

The Iroquois were a five tribe confederacy in which political decisions were made by a form of consensus building at communal assemblies and included broad voting and participatory rights for women. After the delegation’s meeting, Franklin saw Native Americans in an increasingly positive light and worried that they were threatened by mass European immigration and imports of rum according to Walter Isaacson’s “Benjamin Franklin” biography.

During the Seven Years War (known as the French and Indian War in the U.S.), the Iroquois were significant British allies. They controlled over 75% of the land of the modern day State of New York where the North American theater of the Seven Years Wars was largely fought. At the start of conflict, representatives of British-controlled American colonies met to discuss planning with Franklin present representing Pennsylvania. In his 1754 Albany Plan of Union, as it came to be known, he proposed directly imitating the Iroquois League of Nations and uniting the colonies into one political body under the British Crown. As he rather bluntly put it:

“It would be a very strange thing, if six nations of ignorant savages could be capable of forming a scheme for such a union … and yet that a like union should be impractical among for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary.” (From a 1751 Benjamin Franklin Letter to James Parker)

Though the Albany Plan was not used, it is largely seen as a precursor to the post-Revolution Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. It is also interesting to note that Franklin’s use of the word “savages” here to refer to the Iroquois was also used in the Declaration of Independence. 

Thomas Paine too

Thomas Paine was Franklin’s friend and ideological twin. His widely-read pamphlet Common Sense, which helped spark and popularize the revolution, was directly influenced by the Iroquois. According to Daniel N. Paul in “We Were Not the Savages: First Nations History, Collision Between European and Native American Civilizations”:

After arriving in America he developed a sharp interest in the Indians, who seemed to be living in the natural state so alien to the urban and supposedly civilized life he encountered around himself. When the American Revolution started, Paine served as secretary to the commissioners sent to negotiate with the Iroquois at the town of Easton near Philadelphia on the Delaware River in January 1777. Through this and subsequent encounters with the Indians, Paine sought to learn their language, and throughout the remainder of his political and writing career he used the Indians as models of how society might be organized. 

America’s Thanksgiving

Despite all this, the Iroquois were largely allied with the British during the revolution due to a longstanding military alliance dating back to before the Seven Years War. Paine had left America to continue his support for representative democracy in Europe. Franklin and Paine represented the old generation of America’s Founders. The younger generation like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison took over and the Iroquois were out of luck. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed in 1768 with the Iroquois ceding almost their entire historical homeland to the United States. Most Iroquois migrated west or north into British-controlled Canada.