The Founders didn’t model us on the Six Nations, and George Washington didn’t tomahawk a Frenchman.
The Founders didn’t model us on the Six Nations, and George Washington didn’t tomahawk a Frenchman.
I had intended to watch the new Ken Burns miniseries on the American Revolution and report on its overall portrayal of the founding of our nation. But I didn’t need to get very far in to encounter a big whopper. The problems with the first episode start early. Burns kicks off by misleading his audience about the origins of American political ideas, and adds to that a deceptive history of a key battle.
Here is the opening narration, which is preceded only by two quotations — one from Thomas Paine about the momentous nature of the struggle and one from Canasatego, spokesman for the Iroquois Six Nations, about white people wanting Native American land. Then, as Native American songs continue to play, we are told:
Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy — Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk — had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee — a democracy that had flourished for centuries.
“We heartily recommend union. We are a powerful confederacy. And by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power. Therefore, whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.” — Canasatego
In the spring of 1754, the celebrated scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin proposed that the British colonies form a similar union. He printed a cartoon of a snake cut into pieces above the dire warning “Join, or Die.”
A few weeks later at Albany, New York, Franklin and other delegates from seven colonies agreed to his Plan of Union — and then went home to try and sell it. . . . But when the plan was presented at the colonial capitals, each of the individual legislatures rejected it because they did not want to give up their autonomy. The plan died, but the idea would survive.
Twenty years later, “Join or Die would be a rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history.
Burns has been making high-profile narrative documentaries for more than three decades. He doesn’t pick his introductions without intending them to carry a message about the story he aims to tell. The message that this scene-setting is plainly designed to send is that the founding of the United States was in some sense derivative of Iroquois ideas, prompted by Iroquois recommendations, and/or modeled on Iroquois institutions. None of this is true.
One Nation, Not Six
Burns leapfrogs from Canasatego recommending a colonial union in a 1744 speech to Benjamin Franklin proposing one a decade later in 1754, and then concludes that “the idea would survive” to resurface “20 years later” in the Revolution. In doing this, he implies a genealogy of ideas. But he falls down right off the bat. As the constitutional scholar Robert Natelson explained in 2022, summarizing the work of historians who have reviewed this thesis going back to the 1990s, the evidence of Franklin having gotten his ideas about unity from Canasatego is itself flimsy:
Franklin’s print shop reproduced the 1744 “unity speech” only because it was printing a volume collecting 13 negotiations leading to Indian treaties, and the speech happened to be in the records for one of the 13. The speech occupied only 10 lines in the 450-page volume.
Franklin’s 1751 letter mentioned unity, but contained no discussion of the institutions of the Iroquois or whether the colonies might copy them.
The 1754 [Plan of Union] document apparently was not even written by Franklin, but by Thomas Hutchinson. Hutchinson played no role in the crafting of the American Constitution; he was a Tory who fled to England during the Revolution. Moreover, the document touched mostly on colonial-Indian relations, not on the Iroquois form of government.
In fact, the details of the Iroquois system were not even studied and explained in writing by English speakers until the 1840s. Franklin and other early Americans knew well that the Six Nations had a political union, but they seem to have known only vague outlines of how their tribal government worked.
A political union or alliance among smaller states was the furthest thing from a novel idea in the world of 1754. Ancient Greek city-states had formed leagues for defense, and the Holy Roman Empire had a famously convoluted structure of member states. Switzerland and the Netherlands at the time of the Founding had something resembling federalist structures.
To describe the Six Nations as “a democracy,” as Burns does, is also wrong on two counts — the “a” and the “democracy.” In many ways, the Six Nations functioned more like the European Union, NATO, or the United Nations than like the United States, especially the U.S. after 1787. It was a confederacy of five previously warring nations (later expanded to include the Tuscarora around 1720) who had reached an agreement aimed at keeping the peace among them and conducting some degree of common foreign policy, rather than a comprehensive system of internal government. The cohesion of that union was insufficient to prevent the Oneida and Tuscarora from supporting the Americans in the Revolution, while the other four backed England. But even when it functioned more smoothly, the member nations still saw themselves as separate nations with their own governments.
The Iroquois system, while sophisticated and forward-thinking for its day, was also nothing that would be recognizable to Westerners as a democracy, let alone some sort of precursor to our constitutional system. Chiefs had hereditary titles tied to their family lineage, although the individual holder was selected by a consensus of elites — not by any sort of popular vote. This was a hereditary oligarchy, not relying on any species of majoritarian or representative system of government (even by 18th-century standards). Its consensus-based decision-making methods were nothing like how Americans have ever operated, although it more nearly resembles some oligarchic European republics. The outsize role of women in the Iroquois system of longhouses and matrilineal cultures also rather obviously did not influence Americans or others in the West during the Founding era.
None of this has stopped there from being a movement among activists and a few fringe scholars to try to confect a theory that the Iroquois system had a major influence on the development of the American system of government and the ultimate structure of the U.S. Constitution. But this is agitprop masquerading as scholarship, in the same way that the 1619 Project relied upon cherry-picking scraps of the historical record and hoping nobody noticed the rest of the facts.
Where We Came From
Overemphasizing the Iroquois influence on American political thought might be forgivable if Burns were offering his audience a menu of those influences for context and just got excessively enthusiastic in boosting one of them. But he does nothing of the sort. Instead, his presentation strips the revolutionary generation of nearly all of their other influences, aiming instead to shear them from their cultural and intellectual heritage. He brings out a historian to argue specifically that the universalist language of the revolution about the rights of man severed its connection to their English roots — roots that Burns seems very eager to downplay. That gives the audience no context in which to evaluate his ode to the Iroquois example.
While there is time to discuss the Haudenosaunee, there’s no mention of Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution. No time is given to Locke or Montesquieu, or to the ancient Greek democracies or the Roman Republic, the birth and death of which fixated the Founders (hence, the popularity of Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato). There’s nothing on the Mayflower Compact or the 1619 founding of the Virginia House of Burgesses, both made by men who had doubtless not yet heard much if anything about Native Americans in upstate New York. The Founding Fathers are extracted entirely from the context of the English political culture, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the classics.
You can’t make this mistake by accident. Few people in history have left behind a richer record of what they were thinking than the American Founders. They debated, in closed sessions and open newspapers and pamphlets, the drafting and ratification of 13 new state constitutions (14, counting Vermont’s 1777 constitution as an independent republic), the Articles of Confederation, and the ultimate federal Constitution. James Madison took copious notes at Philadelphia in 1787, which were published after the death of everyone involved.
In all of this vast corpus, there were only the most glancing of references to the governing systems of Native Americans. The Federalist Papers were directed to the people of New York, the home base of the Six Nations. Madison and Hamilton considered many examples not only of democracies and republics but of confederations throughout history drawn from unions of many different kinds of governments. In Federalist No. 9, Hamilton discussed the ancient “Lycian confederacy, which consisted of twenty-three cities or republics,” and Montesquieu’s assessment of it. In Federalist No. 18, 19, and 20, Madison reviewed at great length the history of confederacies, covering ancient Greece, Germany from before Charlemagne to the Peace of Westphalia, Poland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Native American confederacies even within New York’s own borders were unmentioned.
John Adams, the primary drafter of the 1780 Massachusetts constitution (which was influential at Philadelphia even in his personal absence), wrote and published in 1787-88 A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a multi-part treatise of extreme verbosity offering a theoretical and practical defense of the country’s state constitutions. The whole multi-volume set mentions Native Americans six times. On and on Adams marches, through “Democratical Republics,” notably in Switzerland and the Netherlands, “Aristocratical Republics,” most of them small Swiss and Italian city-states, “Monarchical Republics” such as Poland, “Ancient Republics,” and the works of philosophers from Franklin to Montesquieu to Polybius.
Adams probably devoted the most attention of any contemporary American theorist of government to Native American governing structures — and it wasn’t much. As a compulsive completist, Adams noted that, “to collect together the legislation of the Indians, would take up much room, but would be well worth the pains” — but he did not actually attempt the task. His description, while supporting his general thesis of the natural division of society into the one, the few, and the many, does not sound like a model for his vision of a republic of laws, not of men:
BEFORE we proceed to the Greeks, we may even mention the savages. Every nation in North America has a king, a senate, and a people. The royal office is elective, but it is for life; his sachems are his ordinary council, where all the national affairs are deliberated and resolved in the first instance: but in the greatest of all, which is declaring war, the king and sachems call a national assembly round a great council fire, communicate to the people their resolution, and sacrifice an animal. Those of the people who approve the war, partake of the sacrifice; throw the hatchet into a tree, after the example of the king; and join in the subsequent war songs and dances. Those who disapprove, take no part of the sacrifice, but retire.
He did not endorse imitating Native American systems — quite the contrary:
If Cicero and Tacitus could revisit the earth, and learn that the English nation had reduced the great idea [of a republic, in which there is a governor, a senate, and a house of representatives] to practice . . . and that the Americans, after having enjoyed the benefits of such a constitution a century and a half, were advised by some of the greatest philosophers and politicians of the age to renounce it, and set up the governments of ancient Goths and modern Indians — what would they say? That the Americans would be more reprehensible than the Cappadocians, if they should listen to such advice. [Emphasis added]
Washington Shot First?
If misrepresenting ideas was not bad enough, Burns also gets a key event wrong in an important way, for reasons that seem relatedly ideological. Describing the initial encounter between the Virginia militia and a French expeditionary force in 1754 that escalated into the global Seven Years War, Burns tells us that George Washington was said by one Native American witness to be the first “to shoot into the enemy’s encampment. . . . If so, George Washington fired the very first shot of a global conflict.” From there, Burns proceeds directly to the war, known here as the French and Indian War.
This is profoundly dishonest. I’ve detailed at length how the war started at what became known as Jumonville Glen. This was not simply a French “encampment,” taken unawares; the two sides were rival expeditions facing one another to test competing territorial claims. The best historical research supports the view that the Virginian militia most likely fired the first volley, and on Washington’s orders. But that leaves out the most sensational part, which transformed a mere border skirmish into a war. After the initial volley, the French leader (Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville) tried to surrender, but while Washington was considering the ultimatum Jumonville had been tasked to deliver to him, Washington’s Native American ally Tanaghrisson rushed forward, split Jumonville’s head open with a hatchet, and washed his hands in Jumonville’s brains.
Tanaghrisson had been raised among the Seneca (one of the Iroquois Six Nations) after being abducted into them as a child. He held a tenuous political position within the broader Iroquois world, which for complicated reasons I won’t reiterate here gave him an independent motive to provoke a conflict between the British and the French. No serious historian thinks that he was acting at Washington’s bidding.
But to attribute the war to a Native American tomahawking a defenseless European officer during a parley would apparently disturb the story Burns wants to tell. So, that part had to go, leaving Washington holding the hatchet. So much for history.
A Long Penance
Why does Ken Burns wish his audience to believe untruths about the American Founding? To be fair, there is plenty to like in the first episode. It’s hard not to tell an inspiring story in covering this material. Burns is a skillful storyteller backed by a star-studded voiceover cast, including Paul Giamatti reprising the voice of John Adams. Onscreen, we hear from many distinguished historians. But he just can’t seem to resist the temptation to tell a story that is fashionable with the enemies of the American Founding rather than one that is true.
Burns, now 72, burst into American consciousness with his fantastic 1990 miniseries The Civil War. Like any Civil War history, it covered many topics that remain hotly contested and is subject to its share of criticisms. It would be made differently today. Still, while taking a (correctly) pro-Union point of view on the war, Burns sought to give a fair account of how the conflict looked from the perspectives of the soldiers, civilians, and political leaders of both contending sides. The dramatic presentation of representatives of each group in their own contemporary words was the most powerful element of the series. In so doing, he did not neglect the voices of slaves and free black Americans, including black soldiers.
Nonetheless, he committed two cardinal sins for which progressives have hounded Burns ever since: portraying the war as a tragedy rather than solely as a needed purging of slavery and giving significant screen time to southern historian Shelby Foote. Foote, who shot to media stardom for his role, was a master storyteller, and while he was not a whitewasher of the Confederate cause, he wrote and spoke with clear ancestral sympathy for the Southerners, especially the ordinary Confederate fighting man.
Combine how much the liberal Burns has evidently been pained by those criticisms with advancing age, the radicalization of the academy upon which he draws for scholarship, the fact that Burns has been making this series for the past decade (meaning that much of this was assembled at the height of Peak Woke) and the steady, mind-losing polarization that has afflicted our politics over those years (a dynamic apparent in Burns’s public commentary), and it’s clear that Burns can no longer be trusted with telling our history as it is without trying to placate the extreme left’s funhouse narratives. For such a gifted storyteller, that’s a shame.