It is that time of year again, when we celebrate the voyage of the Mayflower, which carried 132 passengers and crew over inclement seas for ten weeks, before landing just off the coast of present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts on November 21 (N.S.), 1620, founding the Plymouth Colony. After a very harsh winter and the ravagings of new diseases, only 53 persons of the original Mayflower passengers and crew survived.
In the following spring and summer, the pilgrims interacted with the neighboring Wampanoag tribe and the Sagamores, Massasoit, and Samoset. Critically for their survival, the pilgrims were taught how to cultivate maize through the rigorous instructions of Squanto. Having put their backs into it for a full growing season, the first Thanksgiving was celebrated between 90 Wampanoags and the 53 remaining pilgrims, with a meal that featured the first crop of corn produced at Plymouth.
But we have far more to be thankful for than corn, owing to the interaction of early settlers and native American Indians. The settlers and traders who came to live and work in present-day New England and New York were blessed to come in contact, at a very special time in history, with the Five Nations of the Iroquois.
While their European cousins were discovering the ancient ruins of Rome and Athens, and while newly invented printing presses were making available to a wide public the remaining writings of Pericles, Thucydides, Livy, and Cicero, which concerned ancient forms of democratic and representative governance that provided common laws and freedoms, traders like John Lawson were returning to Europe to tell of the Great Councils of Onondaga, where assemblies of the Five Nations would “debate issues very deliberately … with all the integrity imaginable, never looking toward their own interest before the public good.” The Council Lords, in council, expressed their steadfast belief that “God made them free … that no man has the natural right to rule another.” The “Constitution of the Five Nations of the Iroquois,” deemed “The Great Law,” was published, which had a simple central principle: the less government there is, the more freedom the individual has. Does this sound familiar?
From this interblending of ideas of what was new again in the Old World with what was old in the New World came the idea of the freedom and independence of the “natural man,” or the individual, who was born to be free and the sovereign over himself — at a time when, in old Europe, there was a belief in a divine right of kings to be sovereign over everything and everybody.
The two worlds notably met during a sensational visit of the “Four Kings of the Iroquois League” in 1710 to London. It was as popular an event as one might imagine if Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez were parading through Knightsbridge together today. One of the visitors, Canassatego, was greeted as a “king” by one of the ladies present, and he strenuously objected to the title, saying, “Madam, family creates no distinction but by its acts of wisdom and valor. … We make no distinction by birth — where mental and bodily qualities are found superior, that person gains authority over our hearts: the good [one] does his country is rewarded by glory and esteem; such are our manners and ideas.” When the lady objected, “Do you not want to be a king?,” the Sachem answered that he abhorred the office, as it was one that allowed an excessive “avarice, which is a detested vice” because the crown “engages in an eternal pillage” of its own subjects. And “such virtue in want … labors only for pampered idleness.” These words parallel those spoken by the greatest of the ancient Athenians, Aristides.
This conception of the natural man, and individual rights as opposed to the authority of pampered royalty, formed the foundations of revolutionary writers, such as Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, and Montesquieu and lit the fire of a revolutionary age.
During the time when our revolution was at its beginnings, there was a necessity to form a means of organizing thirteen former colonies into a defensive alliance capable of defeating the finest army on the planet at the time. Benjamin Franklin found it and based the nascent America’s “Articles of Confederation” on the ties that bound the Five Nations of the Iroquois League.
After the Revolution was won, during the Summer of 1787, Philadelphia was full of representatives of the Iroquois Nations, whose example did so much to found this nation’s freedoms.
So, when our Constitution was written, the concept of the 9th and 10th Amendments, which secured the rights of localities to govern themselves, owed as much to the precedent of the direct democracy of Athens as it did to the assemblies of the Seneca Nation. When a means of holding together the various states and how they and their people would be equally represented was considered, the examples of the Roman Senate and the Councils of Onondaga were both considered — and our system of a federal constitutional republic was born.
We owe a great deal of our conception of ourselves as a sovereign and free people to the Native Americans. This too should be celebrated with grateful thanks, and the contribution of the Iroquois should be taught as an inspiration in every classroom in America.
Richard C. Lyons, author of The DNA of Democracy: Volume I and Shadows of the Acropolis: Volume II is a third-generation printer, whose early career centered on religious and special education publishing. Lyons has since engaged in literary pursuits as a poet, essayist, screenwriter, and indie publisher.
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