In 1776, the only known North American government established by the authority of the governed was found among Native Peoples, the most prominent and enduring being the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. As Cadwallader Colden, who became lieutenant governor of the New York colony in 1761, stated in characterizing the Iroquois system as the “original form of all government”:

Each nation is an absolute Republick by itself, govern’d in all Publick affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems of Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gained by and consists wholly in the opinions of the rest of the Nation in their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force Upon any of their People. Honour and Esteem are their principal Rewards, as Shame and being Despised are their Punishments.

For more than a century, some scholars have posited that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other American founders observed and “absorbed American Indian political and social ideas” and, in combination with the principles of the European Enlightenment, formed “a rationale for revolution in a new land.” Franklin, who cultivated his diplomatic skills negotiating with the Iroquois in the 1750s, saw in their confederation “a federal republic governed by local and national councils, which selected its leaders by clan-based consensus.” For Franklin and Jefferson, “the Indians had what the colonists wanted: societies free of oppression and class stratification[,]” and these observations “fired the imaginations of the revolution’s architects.”

An opposing school of thought has insisted that there is “virtually no support for the contention” that the Iroquois provided a model for the Declaration of Independence and the democratic republic that the 13 colonies adopted in the United States Constitution. For this group of scholars, the absence of any discussion of Iroquois’ political ideas “in their own language” precludes any conclusive determination of “what influence might they have had on colonial Americans[.]” In the existing record, these scholars find “little support for” the “myth . . . that the founders borrowed from the Iroquois ideas respecting the proper form of government.”

Resolving this decades-long debate is best left for another forum. Instead, this article provides some context from which students of history may begin to draw their own inferences. 

Franklin’s Involvement

In April 1754, Pennsylvania’s governor appointed Benjamin Franklin “to serve as a commissioner to a meeting scheduled for June, in Albany, New York, where delegates from the colonies were to negotiate a treaty during a congress with the Iroquois. “Franklin, well known among the Indians and a fervent advocate of Colonial union, was probably the most influential individual at the congress.” Having arrived in Philadelphia from Boston at the age of 17 as a poor runaway seeking work as a printer’s apprentice, Franklin “not only found work, but set up his own press, and prospered” by building “a thriving printing business that published one of the largest newspapers in the colonies, the Pennsylvania Gazette, as well as Poor Richard’s Almanack, which appeared annually.” In addition to his printing business, which also issued Pennsylvania’s official currency and documents, Franklin set up a post office, fire department, hospital and library, organized public sanitation, and became involved in real estate. 

In 1736, Franklin had begun printing accounts of the treaty negotiations between the Indians and the colonists, and over the next more than two decades he printed at least thirteen accounts and, after becoming Pennsylvania’s Indian commissioner, began to develop his renowned diplomatic skills. Among the treaty accounts Franklin printed was the official transcript of a 1744 meeting in Lancaster between the Iroquois sachems and commissioners from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, the apparent purposes of which were to address Iroquois complaints about Englishmen settling without permission on Indian land and to secure an Iroquois alliance against the French. As recorded in the account that Franklin published, on the last day of the more than two weeks of negotiations, Canassatego, speaker of the Grand Council of the Onondaga, told the assembly:

Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, do not fall out with one another.

From then on, “Franklin’s writings indicate that as he became more deeply involved with the Iroquois and other Indian peoples, he picked up ideas from them concerning not only federalism, but concepts of natural rights, the nature of society and man’s place in it, the role of property in society,” and other ideas that influenced his view about the proper form of government for the American colonies. On May 9, 1754, nearly ten years after he published the treaty account containing Canassatego’s remarks, Franklin, perhaps inspired by the unity among the Iroquois that the colonies then lacked, printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette the now-famous “JOIN, or DIE.” woodcut, shown below.

In June 1754, two months after publishing the woodcut, Franklin traveled to Albany for a congress between the colonists and the Iroquois, the purposes of which were to solidify a military alliance with the Iroquois against the French and to “ratify a plan of union for the colonies.” One of the Iroquois delegates echoed Canassatego in emphasizing to the colonists the strength the Iroquois derived from their confederation. After two weeks of deliberations, the colonial delegates to the Albany Congress “voted without dissent in support of Colonial union” aimed at securing the colonies’ security and defense. As principally memorialized by Franklin, what became known as the Albany Plan of Union “was a skillful diplomatic melding of concepts that took into consideration the Crown’s demands for control, the colonists desires for autonomy in a loose union, and the Iroquois’ stated advocacy of a Colonial union similar to theirs in structure and function.” While “[t]he Albany Plan of Union gained Franklin general recognition in the colonies as an advocate of Colonial union” and “earned [him] a position among the originators of the federalist system of government that came to characterize the United States political system[,]” unfortunately the Plan “died in the Colonial legislatures” and “was also rejected by the Crown.”

Twenty Years Pass . . . 

It would be another 20 years “before the colonists—inflamed into union by the Stamp Act and other measures the British pressed upon the colonies to help pay the Crown’s war debts—would take Franklin’s and Canassatego’s advice, later epitomized in Franklin’s phrase: ‘We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’” In August 1775, just a few months after the spring skirmishes at Lexington and Concord that signaled the onset of the Revolutionary War, commissioners from the now-united 13 colonies met with Iroquois chiefs at Philadelphia seeking their alliance—or, at least, neutrality—this time against the British. After initial friendship rituals, the colonial commissioners recounted to their Iroquois guests Canassatego’s advice at the Albany Congress that the colonies form a united confederacy like the Iroquois:

These were the words of Canassatego. Brothers, Our forefathers rejoiced to hear Canassatego speak these words. They sunk deep into our hearts. The advice was good. It was kind. They said to one another: “The Six Nations are a wise people, Let us hearken to them, and take their counsel, and teach our children to follow it.” Our old men have done so. They have frequently taken a single arrow and said, Children, see how easily it is broken. Then they have taken and tied twelve arrows together with a strong string or cord, and our strongest men could not break them. See said they, this is what the Six Nations mean. Divided, a single man may destroy you; united, you are a match for the whole world. We thank the great God that we are all united; that we have a strong confederacy, composed of twelve provinces . . . These provinces have lighted a great council fire at Philadelphia and sent sixty-five counsellors to speak an act in the name of the whole, and to consult for the common good of the people. . . .

As debates over government and independence continued, “Iroquois leaders were invited to Philadelphia to observe debates over the Declaration of Independence[,]” and in May 1775 in fact they lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania Statehouse, now Independence Hall. Exemplifying the mutual respect between the Iroquois and the revolutionaries, “on June 11, 1776, the Iroquois delegation gave John Hancock an Iroquois name, ‘Karanduawn,’ meaning ‘Great Tree.’” Charles Thomson, who was adopted into the Delaware nation as a young man, meticulously recorded this naming ceremony in the records of the Continental Congress, for which he served as secretary. One scholar has observed that, “[w]ith the Iroquois chiefs inside the halls of Congress on the eve of the Declaration of Independence, the impact of Iroquois ideas on its makers was unmistakable.” Indeed, “[i]mmediately after the meeting with the Iroquois, the Congress proceeded to appoint a committee”—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston—“to draft a Declaration of Independence” and a second committee “‘to prepare and digest a form of a confederation . . . between these colonies.’” 

Jefferson Steps In 

Jefferson seemed to pick up Franklin’s “intellectual thread,” as evidenced by his writings “show[ing] that he shared Franklin’s respect for Indian thought.” For both Franklin and Jefferson, the Native American may have “served as a metaphor for liberty.” As one scholar observed, both Franklin and Jefferson “represented the Enlightenment frame of mind of which the American Indians seemed a practical example.” Less than a few weeks after Hancock’s naming ceremony, in the Declaration of Independence Jefferson would demand for the colonists rights derived from the “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God[,]” a concept embraced by the Enlightenment and made manifest among the Native Americans. 

Great Respect

The scholarly debate over whether and to what extent the drafters of the Declaration of Independence drew inspiration and influence from the Iroquois confederacy will undoubtedly continue. Without minimizing the volumes of evidence demonstrating the Enlightenment influences on the founders, this abbreviated review of the historical record would appear to provide at least a “little support” for the novel notion that at least two of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, Franklin and Jefferson, were more than familiar with and, at a minimum, greatly respected, the Iroquois form of governance.

* * *

Editor’s note: The author, Magistrate Judge Sarah L. Cave, is a member of the Board of Editors of the Federal Bar Council Quarterly.

1.  Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica; Wikipedia, “John Jay”; Historical Society of the New York Courts; Supreme Court Historical Society; National Museum of American Diplomacy; John Jay Homestead; Online Library of Liberty; American Battlefield Trust; Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center; Founders Online, National Archives; Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “John Jay and the Federalist Papers,” 8 Pace L. Rev. 237 (1988).

2. The original Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Senecas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, the Mohawks, and the Cayugas, became Six Nations when the Tuscaroras moved north from the Carolinas in 1714. Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders, at 21 (Gambit, Inc. 1982). 

3.  Forgotten Founders, at 38. Colden was the son of a Scottish minister who arrived in America around 1710 at age 22, rose through the ranks of New York’s colonial government, and simultaneously became so close to the Iroquois that he was adopted by the Mohawk. Id. at 36.

4. Forgotten Founders, at 8. 

5. Bruce E. Johansen, Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom, 9 (Clear Light Publishers 1998).

6.  Forgotten Founders, at xvi.

7.Elizabeth Tooker, “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League,” 35 Ethnohistory 4, at 305 (Duke Univ. Press, Autumn 1988) (hereinafter Tooker). See Donald A. Grinde, Jr. & Bruce E. Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, at xviii n.4 (American Indian Studies Center 1991).

8.  Tooker, at 311.

9. Tooker, at 311, 321.

10.  Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, at 66 (W.W. Norton & Co. 2018).

11.  Forgotten Founders, at 69.

12. Forgotten Founders, at 56-57. 

13. Forgotten Founders, at 57.

14.  Forgotten Founders, at 54.

15.  Forgotten Founders, at 58.

 16. Forgotten Founders, at 58, 61-62.

17.  Forgotten Founders, at 54.

18. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-story-behind-the-join-or-die-snake-cartoon (last visited Apr. 5, 2026). See These Truths, at 65. 

19.  Forgotten Founders, at 69.

20. Forgotten Founders, at 70.

21. Forgotten Founders, at 71.

22. Forgotten Founders, at 73-74.

23.  Forgotten Founders, at 75.

 24. Forgotten Founders, at 76.

25. Debating Democracy, at 9.

26. Debating Democracy, at 9; Exemplar of Liberty, at 145.

27.  Exemplar of Liberty, at 145, 159.

28.  Exemplar of Liberty, at 145.

29. Exemplar of Liberty, at 146-48.