Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace

<p>Did the Iroquois Shape the Constitution? The Great Law of Peace</p><p><br></p><p>In 1744 an Onondaga speaker told three English colonies to unite as his forefathers had. Franklin printed the speech. When the colonists designed a union, they did not copy it.</p><p><br></p><p>This is Episode 16 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, and it opens Week 16 of the series. It corresponds to Article 16, published October 5 on consequentialactions.com. The full article is free, with every source in its endnotes.</p><p><br></p><p>The Six Nations (the Haudenosaunee, whom the French and English called the Iroquois) held a union of self-governing nations together for centuries without a king. Their Grand Council had fifty seats fixed by its founding law. Clan mothers chose and could remove the men who held them, and nothing was decided until all three benches agreed. The colonists lived beside that union for generations, heard its speakers urge them to imitate it, and bought those speeches in small books printed in Benjamin Franklin&#39;s shop.</p><p><br></p><p>The episode asks one question: to what extent did the Confederacy influence the founders? It follows the record from Canassatego at Lancaster in 1744, through Franklin&#39;s 1751 letter and Hendrick&#39;s rebuke at Albany in 1754, to the scholarly dispute between Grinde and Johansen and Elisabeth Tooker, and the 1988 concurrent resolution in which Congress wrote its own answer into a preamble. The verdict: the contact is documented and the example is documented. The blueprint is not. In the same letter in which Franklin praised the Six Nations, he proposed a union with a Crown-appointed governor, a common treasury, and a tax on liquor.</p><p><br></p><p>Then the cost. By 1777 the Confederacy could no longer hold a common neutrality, and in a single season in 1779 an American campaign under John Sullivan destroyed more than forty of its towns. Eleven years later, three Seneca leaders told Washington the name their people had for him. An honest reckoning follows, then two objections from the skeptics, including one the episode concedes: the verdict rests on an archive made by one side.</p><p><br></p><p>Did it leave people more free, or more governed?</p><p><br></p><p>⏱️ CHAPTERS</p><p>0:00 Lancaster, 1744: Pen and Ink Work</p><p>2:02 Introduction</p><p>3:07 The Question of Influence</p><p>4:53 The Longhouse</p><p>5:54 The Peacemaker and the Condolence</p><p>8:05 Fifty Seats, Fixed by Law</p><p>8:41 Clan Mothers and