Creating progressive moral mascots is bad history.
Every few years, someone tells us the United States is not really the child of the long tradition of republicanism, English common law, colonial self-government, the natural rights principles enshrined in our Declaration, and the debates involving the framing of a new government that transpired in Philadelphia after the war. No, we’re subtly led to assume that our political father is someone else entirely: this time, it’s the Haudenosaunee—the Iroquois Confederacy.
Ken Burns’s new PBS documentary on the American Revolution leans into that claim, suggesting in the first episode’s preamble that the very idea of our Union was inspired by the Iroquois. By subtly juxtaposing the Iroquois and the Founding Fathers, viewers are invited to believe that if they thought Franklin, Washington, and company fathered America, then they’ve been building the wrong monuments.
Burns tells a vivid story. But it’s also a deeply misleading one—and the very treaty on which his opening narrative depends says almost the opposite of what he needs it to say.
The scene in question is the 1744 Lancaster treaty council. Representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia met with Iroquois leaders to settle land disputes and keep them allied against the French. During the talks, an Iroquois speaker did just as Burns relates—namely, he advised the colonial governors to live at peace with one another and act together as the Iroquois nations did. But the colonial reply—effectively omitted by Burns—matters just as much.
The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania thanked the sachems for their counsel and then calmly explained that the colonies already were in “good agreement” under “the Great King beyond the water,” united in allegiance to George II and bound in mutual friendship. Translated into modern idiom, the answer is: We appreciate the advice, brothers, but we already do this. That is not the birth certificate of a new American idea. It is one people politely listening to another.
The same treaty minutes contain another exchange that exposes how strained this whole “Iroquois invented our Union” theory really is.
The colonial representatives proudly described a school for youth and invited Iroquois families to send children to be educated among the English. The response was gracious but firm. The sachems said, in essence, that they loved their children too much to send them so far away, that their people were not inclined to this kind of schooling, and that their customs differed greatly; they asked to be excused.
Now imagine a commentator pointing to that refusal and announcing, “Here! This is the true origin of the Western idea that parents—not the state—are the primary educators of their children. Our ‘parental rights’ tradition actually comes from the Iroquois!” You would rightly roll your eyes. To hang the entire Christian and legal tradition of the family on one polite “no, thank you” at a treaty council would be ridiculous. Yet that is exactly the kind of leap Burns asks us to make about the origin of the American Union.
There is also the not insignificant matter of context. The Iroquois arrived at Lancaster to secure recognition for territory they had recently conquered from rival tribes—lands that English settlers also claimed. Their counsels of unity seem to have been part of hard-nosed diplomacy aimed at solidifying those gains by alleging disunity among the colonies so that they could make a meaningful claim to lands where all three colonies’ settlers were mixed together. It looks less like a civics seminar for future founders and more like a clever ploy to foreclose any colonial claims on newly (and brutally) conquered Iroquois lands. The colonists, for their part, already lived within a functioning constitutional order: the British Empire, with its charters, assemblies, and inherited liberties.
When Franklin later proposed the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, he did cite the Iroquois Union. But until Burns’s documentary came along, Franklin’s citation had always been considered a rhetorical trope. Using a virtue of barbarians (or, in this case, the “savage”), Franklin shamed a civilized people by asking them how much better they should be than their barbarian counterparts:
It would be a very strange thing, if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner, as that it has subsisted ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
Franklin’s admiration of the Iroquois was not flattering. The idea that Franklin—with his detailed historical knowledge of political unions stretching from the United Colonies of New England all the way back to the Delian League of ancient Greece—took his bearing for Union from a single Iroquois ambassador’s words (or the Iroquois confederacy) is neither historically justifiable nor a reasonable speculation from his brief rhetorical mention of the Iroquois’s “scheme for such a union.”
Why, then, does this implicit origin story have so much appeal that it can open a major national documentary?
Part of the answer is our discomfort with our actual political parents. Many in our culture are uneasy giving too much credit to a tradition they have spent decades teaching students to despise: Greek democracy, ancient Roman republicanism, Christian teaching, canon and common law, British constitutionalism, natural law and natural rights philosophy, and those annoying writers of The Federalist who insisted on things like Providence, human nature, and the separation of powers. If you’ve formed two generations to treat the Founders as little more than selfish slaveholders, it becomes awkward to admit that these same men also achieved something genuinely noble in framing a durable, liberty-protecting union. So the temptation arises to doubt the Founding’s paternity.
The thinking goes that if our institutions can be misrepresented as coming from anyone other than those powdered, problematic gentlemen, then we can keep every institution we like while distancing ourselves from the heritage that actually shaped them.
But that sleight of hand does no honor to the native nations and historic tribes. In fact, it flattens the Haudenosaunee into a kind of moral mascot whose every utterance must have sired a modern, progressive ideal.
The real Iroquois Confederacy was a formidable power with its own covenant chains, rituals, and political genius—and with its own wars, alliances, and territorial ambitions. To pretend by means of suggestive arrangement of details that the 18th-century diplomacy of a brutal Iroquois confederacy that famously tortured and slaughtered Christian Hurons by the village was actually the secret founding grandfather of the U.S. Constitution is to refuse to take the Iroquois seriously on their own terms. Burns reduces them to being mere figurines in a faddish, cold war game against those who would seek, let’s say for instance, to cut PBS funding.
We do not respect our fellow Americans, those descended from the American Indians, or those descended from the English, European, and African settlers, colonists, immigrants, freedmen, and slaves with whom they traded, intermarried, and warred manfully for centuries, by turning any of them into plastic saints who conveniently endorse today’s fashionable narratives. We respect them by acknowledging their full, complicated humanity, and by telling the truth about what they actually did and did not give us.
So watch Ken Burns’s The American Revolution if you like. Learn from its strengths; argue with its interpretations. But then go to the sources. Read the Lancaster minutes. Read Franklin’s Albany Plan. Read the Constitution and The Federalist. Go read Cicero’s On Duties as the Founders did. Let the actual voices of our political past—not a disrespectful 21st-century ventriloquism—tell you who fathered and founded our Union. Only then can we foster proper gratitude to all who really did, respect for all those who did not, and the duty to uphold the dignity and rights of every American in accord with what was so marvelously founded for all.
