The Declaration of Independence’s ‘Problematic’ 27th Grievance
Among the many “injuries and usurpations” King George III committed against the colonists as described in the Declaration of Independence, one line in particular continues to raise eyebrows today for its racial insensitivity.
In the final complaint in a list of 27 grievances over British tyranny, Thomas Jefferson included the following charge against the king: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The three words “merciless Indian Savages” have not aged well, to say the least, and in modern times are commonly cited as proof of the Founding Fathers’ inherent racism and possibly their genocidal intent.
An article by Adrian Jawort in Indian Country Today, for instance, notes the hypocrisy of declaring that “all men are created equal,” and then, in the following breath, dismissing its original inhabitants as merciless savages. Marveling that not just Jefferson but a committee of five people — including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams — had assisted in drafting the document and that it had been ratified by the Continental Congress numerous times before being signed by 56 delegates who all apparently agreed with this language, Jawort points out that “this was a carefully mulled over phrase in that Natives would forever be considered ‘savages’ in regards to their future relations with the U.S.”[1]
Writing at the Journal of the American Revolution, James M. Deitch argues that the main purpose of the 27th grievance was one of propaganda to rally the colonists to the cause of independence. “[I]n the 27th grievance,” Deitch writes, “Thomas Jefferson carefully constructed a foundation of fear, based on … folklore and myth concerning the native inhabitants of the land they coveted.” Understanding that “emotion, not reason, determined action,” Jefferson and other founders “needed to focus on crowd psychology and stoke it into a mob rule.” Therefore, they “appealed to the base fear that lingered and would have been present even if American colonists were satisfied with the government under which they lived.”
The three words have even attracted some international attention, with U.S. adversaries citing them to deflect criticism of their human rights records. In 2022, the Chinese government joined in the denunciation of the founders’ racism, pointing out that the Declaration of Independence’s language set the groundwork for a genocide that would eventually nearly wipe out America’s native inhabitants.
“On July 4, 1776, the United States of America was founded with the Declaration of Independence, which … slandered Native Americans as ‘the merciless Indian Savages,’” the Chinese foreign ministry stated in a communique. Based on this openly stated belief “in white superiority and supremacy,” the U.S. government then “set out to annihilate the Indians and attempted to eradicate the race.” According to China, U.S. leaders “coveted the vast Indian lands and launched thousands of attacks on Indian tribes, slaughtering Indian chiefs, soldiers and even civilians, and taking Indian lands for themselves.”[2]
Few people today would dispute that these words were ill-chosen, but are these criticisms of the founders’ motives actually fair? What would those who lived through the era have thought about Jefferson’s choice of words? While clearly insensitive to modern sensibilities, a closer look reveals that the words “merciless Indian savages” were not employed lightly, nor were they chosen from a place of ignorance. While the Declaration of Independence was certainly motivated to rally the people to the revolutionary cause and may have employed propagandistic methods to do so, the language employed about Native Americans was less based on “folklore and myth,” as Deitch argues, than it was by the lived historical experience of the colonists.
Indeed, the fact that they are seen as “problematic” today probably says more about modern-day biases than it does about the founders’ supposedly genocidal views.
‘Not Destitute of Merit’
In fairness to the founders, the issue was not as cut and dry as the Chinese government or historical revisionists might imply.
First of all, it should be appreciated that the founders’ general views of Native Americans were not necessarily bigoted or prejudiced, with a certain amount of respect shown towards their Indian counterparts, and efforts were made to establish a peaceful and mutually beneficial co-existence. The relationship between whites and Indians was not a simple one, of course, and was just as often a marriage of convenience — or even one of mutual admiration — as it was a rivalry.
It should be appreciated that Jefferson, despite disparaging them in the Declaration of Independence, was quite familiar with some tribes and would at times have some positive words to say about them — conceding, for example, that the Indian “in body and mind [is] equal to the white man.”[3]
Jefferson even appeared at times to be somewhat enamored by Indian culture, observing in Notes on the State of Virginia that the designs that they carved on their pipes were “not destitute of design and merit.” Jefferson further observes that Indians will “astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory,” which “prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated.”[4]
In a letter to John Adams in 1812, Jefferson explains that his intimate knowledge of certain Indian tribes arises from the fact that in the “early part of my life, I was very familiar, and acquired impressions of attachment & commiseration for them which have never been obliterated,” pointing out that “before the revolution they were in the habit of coming often, & in great numbers to the seat of our government, where I was very much with them.”[5]
Jefferson even recommends several writers who had studied Native American traditions, pointing out that the fullest accounts “of their customs & characters are given us by most of the early travelers among them,” in particular Joseph-François Lafitau, who published Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times in 1724.[6]
Jefferson knew, however, that attempts at white-Indian co-existence were often fraught and undermined by mutual suspicion and animosity.
New Technologies
Despite being widely castigated today as genocidal colonizers, English settlers who attempted to build a life in the New World were more than willing to develop good relations with their indigenous neighbors, often, of course, out of necessity.
Indians, for their part, while suspicious of those seen as encroaching on their hunting grounds and fertile land, generally saw the value of trade, which enabled some Native American tribes to enjoy a new degree of economic prosperity. Even the most distrustful of the Indian tribes could see the benefits of trading with whites,[7] and novel technologies and conveniences such as firearms and European clothing led to new lifestyles being adopted in indigenous communities that were considerably more comfortable than those they had previously been accustomed to. The whites, for their part, desired to obtain essentials offered by the natives, especially food, furs, and medicines.
Although considered by white settlers necessary and prudent, establishing trading relationships with Indians could be dangerous business. While both sides may have seen some benefit in trade, these were two radically different cultures, and while whites sometimes established alliances with Native Americans, just as often they would be victims of their raids. Indians, who held the warrior ethos in high esteem and greatly valued virtues such as courage in battle and manliness displayed by stoic endurance under horrific torture, were known to be brutal in their methods of warfare and cruel captors to anyone unfortunate enough to be taken captive. They quickly earned a reputation for indiscriminate violence against people of all ages and sexes.
Practices of torture were common among the Indians, a history of brutality that originates long before Europeans arrived on the continent.[8] Constantly at war with each other, Indians routinely abducted their enemies and put them to death through slow acts of torment that could take several days.
Burning the captives was common, and women and children sometimes participated in the torture, especially the wives and mothers of those who had been killed in battle. Sometimes, the captive was placed in the center of a circle of dancers and compelled to sing and dance, and often made to run a gauntlet of two lines of warriors armed with clubs, tomahawks, and other weapons.[9]
Settlers and Missionaries
Whites’ first-hand experiences with both cruelties and kindnesses date all the way back to the first English settlement in the Americas, when the newly established Jamestown colony was promptly met with hostility and violence.
On May 26, 1607, just a month after Jamestown settlers had arrived in Virginia, they were attacked by 200 Powhatan Indians, who continued to launch sporadic raids on the colony in subsequent years.[10] The Powhatans, however, also coveted the new technologies brought by the English and frequently provided the settlers with desperately needed food, at times offering a lifeline for the struggling colony.
On March 2, 1622, a group of Powhatans came to the Virginia colony “with deer, turkeys, fish, fruits, and other provisions to sell us,” English explorer John Smith wrote in his History of Virginia.[11] The Indians were unarmed, signaling their friendly intent, but this was a ruse. As soon as they entered the settlement, they grabbed any tools or weapons available and killed all the settlers they could — men, women, and children.
“In this attack 347 of the English of both sexes and all ages were killed,” explained Captain Anthony Chester, who was in Virginia at the time of the attack. “Simply killing our people did not satisfy their inhuman nature, they dragged the dead bodies all over the country, tearing them limb from limb, and carrying the pieces in triumph around.”[12]
Early missionaries, too, would feel the wrath of inimical Indians. In 1636, a French Jesuit priest named Isaac Jogues traveled to the New World to bring Christianity to the indigenous peoples, committing himself to the “conversion and welfare of the natives.” It wouldn’t quite work out that way, however, mainly because the missionaries brought not only the Bible but also diseases such as smallpox.[13]
Unequipped with natural immunity for these diseases, tribes such as the Huron, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca were hit hard with sickness and crop failures, and came to believe the missionaries, known as “Black Coats” because of their robes, were using magic to kill them. The suspicions were exacerbated by rumors spread by Dutch and English settlers that the French Black Coats were planning to kidnap women and children and sell the men into slavery. The Mohawks decided to eliminate the threat, and went into Huron territory to take the Christians captive.
The captives were tortured, with Father Jogues experiencing some of the worst abuse. The Mohawks ripped out his fingernails, gnawed his fingers until the bones were visible, and a woman cut off his thumb. He and his fellow Christians were placed on a platform where Indians pelted them with objects, including hot coals thrown by children.
Over several days, they were marched from village to village, where they were flogged and beaten by sticks and rods. Jogues was hung from a wooden plank and left to die but an observer took pity on him and cut him down. He was then banished, spending the next few years wandering alone in the woods, starving and cold, until finally managing to escape back to France in autumn of 1643.[14]
Wars of Aggression, or Resistance?
A few decades later, in 1675, King Philip’s War would break out, leading to unprecedented violence in the colonies and souring white-Indian relations for generations.
What initiated the conflict was a Christian Indian named John Sassamon warning the Plymouth Colony that Wampanoag enemies led by Chief Metacom — also known as King Philip — were planning to attack English settlements, an act of betrayal that led to the murder of Sassamon. After his body was found in an icy pond, a jury composed of both white colonists and Indians found three Wampanoag men guilty for the murder and hanged them on June 8, 1675.
This incensed King Philip and ignited tensions between the Wampanoag and the colonists, sparking the First Indian War, a conflict in which English colonists suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of their indigenous neighbors. The way that the Indians retaliated against the executions of the three Wampanoags, with vicious raids on homesteads and villages throughout New England, helped cement their reputation as “merciless savages,” as Jefferson would write a century later.
As described by Thomas Church in 1829, “The war of 1675, was the most important Indian war that New England ever saw. Philip or Metacom … had wrought up the Indians of all the tribes through New England, into a dangerous combination on to extirpate the English.”[15] Church’s account of the opening attack starts with the slaughter of cattle and burning of homes, but the Indians, he writes, “thirsted for English blood” and “did not long content themselves with that game.”
They proceeded to kill ten colonists at Matapoiset, “[u]pon whose bodies they exercised more than brutish barbarities; beheading, dismembering and mangling them, and exposing them in the most inhuman manner, which gashed and ghostly objects struck a damp on all beholders.” Church recalled that “[o]ne town after another felt the fury of the savage foe,” and noted that “[a]ccounts of the slaughter of helpless women and children, and the torch which turned happy homes to ashes, follow one another in dreary similarity.”[16]
King Philip’s warriors systematically assaulted English colonies throughout New England, attacking Plymouth Plantation and decimating Providence, Rhode Island. In early 1676, while pursuing Narragansetts who had burned down several Rhode Island settlements, Captain Michael Pierce’s force of about 60 Plymouth Colony militia and 20 Wampanoag warriors were ambushed in what is now Central Falls, Rhode Island. Pierce’s forces were overcome by their attackers, who killed nearly all of the colonial militia. Ten of the colonists were taken prisoner, with nine being gruesomely tortured to death at a site in modern-day Cumberland, Rhode Island, which has come to be known as “Nine Men’s Misery.”[17]
The war continued along these lines for years in New England. As colonist Nathaniel Salstonstall described the aftermath of a spate of Indian raids in 1676 across several towns, not only were all the buildings and animals wantonly destroyed, but the natives raped, tortured, killed and mutilated hundreds of innocent people. More than 800 men, women and children were reportedly slaughtered in the raids, with many having been killed with “exquisite Torments,” according to Salstonstall.
The Indians, he wrote, “rarely [gave] Quarter to those that they [took], but if they [were] women, they first forced them to satisfie their filthy Lusts.” After raping the women, the Indians would kill them by “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head or Hair.” The Indians also allegedly used body parts as trophies, “wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dress[ed] for Belts.”
Another colonist wrote that “our miserable inhabitants lye naked, wallowing in their blood, and crying, and whilst the Barbarous enraged Natives, from one party of the Country, to another are on Fire, flaming forth their fury, Spoiling Cattle and Corn and Burning Houses, and torturing Men, Women, and Children; and burning them alive.”[18]
By the end of this brutal conflict, as Richard Markham explains in A Narrative History of King Philip’s War and the Indian Troubles in New England, “the Indians were held as so many devils inspired by Satan, as so many wild and cruel beasts that should be shot down without mercy.” He added that “[t]his was no honest, manly foe who met them face to face, but a cowardly craven who fired upon them from ambushes, and who treated women and children with as much barbarity as they did the men.”[19]
Although devastating to the white settlers, the war also decimated several Indian nations, which lost between 60 and 80 percent of their population, with many more physically displaced or sold into slavery.[20] Fragments of defeated tribes joined Indian nations allied with the French to resist the continuing expansion of the English, but the Indians’ culture and way of life was further eroded as more whites settled the area.[21]
Some tribes continued to resist, leading to King William’s War in the 1690s and one of the most notorious incidents in colonial New England history, in which a group attacked the town of Haverhill on March 15, 1697, and captured 40-year-old Hannah Duston, her newborn baby and some of their neighbors.
According to the account Duston later gave to Cotton Mather, the Indians took the women captive and killed the baby. “They dash’d out the brains of the infant against a tree,” Mather wrote, “and several of the other captives, as they began to tire in the sad journey, were soon sent unto their long home.”[22]
The women were told that they would be stripped and forced to run the gauntlet, but Duston managed to arouse the other captives in the middle of the night and slayed their captors, tomahawking and scalping them while they slept. Only one squaw and one boy escaped, with Duston and the other escaped captives making their way down the Merrimac River to an outlying settlement, where they were welcomed as heroes.[23]
As Hannah Duston’s story recalls, white-Indian relations were often characterized by bloodshed, but at times, they were based on cooperation and mutual interests. The allegiances of the Indians were constantly shifting and were often motivated as much by intra-Indian conflicts as they were by resistance to white encroachment on their lands, and sometimes Indians found the whites useful in advancing their own interests against rival tribes.
In the Yamasee War of 1715–1717, for instance, which was launched by the Yamasee along with the Creek, Muscogee, Catawba, and Apalachee, the whites were allied with the Cherokee, who were motived by their traditional hatred of the Creek. The conflict ended in a colonial victory, with the power of the Yamasee broken and colonists establishing uncontested control of the Carolina coast, but also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of colonists, many of whom were killed through ritualistic torture.[24]
Cultural Differences
While graphic descriptions of Indian “savagery” over the years provide some context to the seemingly racist choice of words in the Declaration of Independence’s 27th grievance, in their harsh assessments of Native Americans’ “savage” customs, what the whites may not have understood was that the Indians’ techniques reflected spiritual and symbolic belief systems.
Targeting children and women, or ripping fetuses from their wombs, for instance, was considered justified because it symbolized the destruction of a people that posed a threat to their way of life. The practice of scalping, moreover, held an important cultural significance to Indian warriors, who considered collecting as many enemy scalps as possible a status symbol and proof of their bravery.
Besides being a demonstration of a warrior’s prowess in battle, scalping was also an important tribal bonding custom, used to comfort those who were mourning the loss of a loved one. In a narrative published by an Irish immigrant named Mary Jemison, who was abducted and sold to the Seneca tribe after her family was murdered in a Shawnee raid in 1755, the function of scalping in easing the pain of the bereaved is described in detail:
It is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy. On the return of the Indians from conquest, which is always announced by peculiar shouting, demonstrations of joy, and the exhibition of some trophy of victory, the mourners come forward and make their claims.[25]
Torture, likewise, was considered an important component of tribal life. Jemison explains that in her time living with the Seneca, she witnessed many cruel acts performed on captives, often justified as a method to comfort the bereaved:
All the prisoners that are taken in battle and carried to the encampment or town by the Indians, are given to the bereaved families, till their number is made good. And unless the mourners have but just received the news of their bereavement, and are under the operation of a paroxysm of grief, anger and revenge; or, unless the prisoner is very old, sickly, or homely, they generally save him, and treat him kindly. But if their mental wound is fresh, their loss so great that they deem it irreparable, or if their prisoner or prisoners do not meet their approbation, no torture, let it be ever so cruel, seems sufficient to make them satisfaction.[26]
Besides its function as a tool in the mourning process, torture also appears to have a religious component. Torture’s conventions were well understood by Indians, who viewed it as central to their spiritual identity and in defining masculinity, with the victim of the torment expected to demonstrate fortitude and bravery while he suffered.
Manly ideals were represented by the ability to stoically endure physical pain, which they believed also brought them closer to supernatural entities like Maushop — a giant who, it was believed, created the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard from sand emptied out of his moccasins.[27] For Indian men, maintaining these spiritual associations was essential to success in life, particularly in masculine endeavors like hunting, warfare, governance, and marriage.[28]
While this may have made sense to the Indians, to the white Christian settlers, naturally, the torture and wanton violence that they used routinely against men, women and children appeared to be nothing more than heinous brutality, adding to the Indians’ reputation as a depraved and cowardly enemy that employed shocking means to terrorize innocent civilians. This reputation would plague the indigenous tribes for the rest of early American history, with raids against settlements and stories of atrocities coloring whites’ views of Indians, who for their part also experienced cruelty at the hands of enraged whites. Often, this cruelty was retribution for an earlier incident, leading to a never-ending tit-for-tat escalation of violence.
This culture of violence and retribution would become further exacerbated by the specific political context of the revolutionary era, offering further insight into the thinking that led to Thomas Jefferson’s seemingly insensitive choice of words in the Declaration’s 27th grievance.
Royal Proclamation
In North Carolina, the Cherokees, who had allied with the colonists against the French, would soon find themselves in a different position a few years later as their one-time allies continued to demand more land. Following the French and Indian War, white settlers began to arrive in Watauga, Nolichucky and Horse Creek in the late 1760s and early 1770s.
Although these settlements were illegal according to the 1763 British Royal Proclamation, in 1772 colonists made agreements with the Cherokee to lease properties, which avoided the more legally problematic option of purchasing lands. Royal authorities, however, soon found out about settlements beyond the Proclamation Line, and white settlers were told to return to North Carolina and Virginia, which some did. By this point, however, the colonies were in a state of rebellion against the Crown and the British were unable to control their people through the law. Many colonists simply ignored the British demands,[29] and royal agents responded by telling the Cherokees that they were within their rights to drive the illegal settlers off the land and to seize their livestock as penalty for breaking British law.[30]
Emboldened by British agents who had assured the Cherokees that they were within their rights to enforce the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and to drive off the squatters (as well as take their horses and cattle as a penalty for breaking English law),[31] the Cherokee forged an alliance with Mohawk, Delaware and Shawnee Indians, and resolved to go to battle against the whites. War was declared on the Watauga and Nolichucky settlements, and rather than pack up and retreat, settlers decided to defend their claims, leading to skirmishes in which numerous atrocities were committed.[32]
Similar difficulties played out in autumn 1773, when a hunter named Daniel Boone led a group of about 50 settlers to establish a colony in Kentucky County, Virginia. The whites believed that their expedition was sanctioned by the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the British had acquired the land south of the Ohio River from the Iroquois, but was rejected by other Indian tribes who hunted in these lands.
The Shawnee, in particular, felt the treaty was illegitimate and organized an alliance known as the Shawnee-Ohio Confederated Indians to defend what they saw as their hunting rights. Soon after the arrival of the whites, a group of men and boys including Boone’s 16-year-old son James and Captain William Russell’s son Henry, were attacked and tortured to death by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees.[33] The viciousness of the killings shocked even the hardened frontier settlers, and Boone’s party abandoned their settlement.
The whites struck back, however, by wiping out of the entire family of the prominent John Logan, chief of the Mingos, a multi-tribal confederation allied with the Six Nations. Chief Logan was the son of a French father (who was adopted into the Oneida tribe as a child) and a Cayuga mother, and had maintained friendly relations with the whites, pointedly staying neutral during the French and Indian War. Despite these years of friendly interactions, on April 30, 1774, his brother and sister would be killed in the Yellow Creek Massacre — led by a notorious Indian hunter named Daniel Greathouse. The massacre is described in A Man of Distinction Among Them by Larry L. Nelson:
The attack was swift and brutal. John Sappington, one of the Virginians, shot and killed Logan’s brother and then scalped him. … Logan’s sister was panic stricken; she ran across the courtyard in front of the trading post and stopped six feet in front of one of Greathouse’s men. In the split second that their eyes met, he put a bullet into her forehead. Grabbing the infant from her cradleboard, he took hold of its ankles and was about to dash its brains out when one of his companions intervened to save the child’s life.
The remaining Indians also were shot or tomahawked. Within seconds, all the Mingos were dead. The savagery of the attack was astounding, and even James Chambers, a neighbor of Baker’s who was not present, declared that the murderers “appeared to have lost, in a great degree, all sentiments of humanity as well as the effects of civilization.”[34]
Chief Logan felt betrayed and was infuriated by the loss of his family members, writing in a letter that “white People killed my kin at Coneestoga a great while ago, & I though[t nothing of that.] But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek, and took m[y cousin prisoner] then I thought I must kill too; and I have been three time[s to war since but] the Indians is not Angry only myself.”[35]
He then led a campaign of reprisal against the white settlers, leading to what became known as Lord Dunmore’s War, named after the royal governor of Virginia who was seen as provoking the conflict. For the next several years, Indian nations opposed to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix attacked settlers, ritually mutilated and tortured to death the surviving men, and took the women and children into slavery.[36] The Ohio River became a bloody border, with raids and counterraids conducted with painful regularity and hardening the distinctions between the whites who wanted to settle the area and the Indians who wanted to keep them out.[37]
In March 1775, just weeks before the Shot Heard Round the World would be fired at Lexington, North Carolina land speculators were hammering out a sweetheart deal for valuable Cherokee hunting grounds — trading blankets, knives and gunpowder for 27,000 square miles of Cherokee land. Settlers were hoping to have their illegal land grab legitimized, but a resistance movement began to rally behind a Cherokee leader named Dragging Canoe, who warned of the folly of making such land deals with the colonists, astutely observing that the whites were attempting to have their illegal appropriations sanctioned by treaty.
“We never thought the white man would come across the mountains, but he has, and has settled on Cherokee land,” Dragging Canoe warned. “He will not leave us but a small spot to stand on.”[38] If warriors did not drive off the settlers, Dragging Canoe argued, the Cherokee people would be destroyed. Force, as Dragging Canoe saw it, was the only means for the Cherokee to retain their sovereignty.[39]
Lands and Liberties
Even as war brewed with the Cherokee in the southern colonies, up north, Samuel Adams was reaching out directly to the Mohawk Indians, appealing to religious sensibilities in seeking an alliance with the tribe.
“They have made a law to establish the religion of the Pope in Canada,” Adams warned in 1775. “We much fear some of your children may be induced, instead of worshipping the only true God, to pay his dues to images made with their own hands.”
He urged the Indians “to whet your hatchet and be prepared with us to defend our liberties and lives.” Although the Mohawks didn’t come through, Adams’s appeal may have won over two heads of the St. John’s tribe, who said they were joining the Penobscot Indians “to stand together, and oppose the People of Old-England, that are endeavoring to take your, and our Lands and Liberties from us.”[40]
Later that year, the Second Continental Congress established Indian commissioners that would answer directly to the Congress rather than each individual colony. Three departments of Indian affairs were established based on the geographical regions of the colonies, with Congress assuming centralized control.
Benjamin Franklin was placed in charge of diplomacy with the northern tribes, Patrick Henry with the mid-Atlantic tribes, and James Wilson with the southern tribes. Franklin was particularly concerned with neutralizing the threat of the Six Nations of the Iroquois and began negotiations in 1775, offering trade goods and blacksmith services in exchange for their support or at least neutrality.[41]
The sachems of the Six Nations met in German Flats, New York, to negotiate a treaty in case of war. An adopted Delaware named Charles Thompson took notes on the meeting, which revealed an intimate understanding of the ways of the Iroquois League.
Using metaphors and terms that would be relatable to the Indians, the commissioners responded to skepticism the Indians expressed about the lack of unity among the colonies. “[We] have lighted a great Council Fire in Philadelphia and have sent Sixty-five Counsellors to speak and act in the name of the whole,” the commissioners explained. Emphasizing the righteousness of the American cause, they told the Indians that “[w]e do not take up the hatchet … for Honor and Conquest, but to maintain our Civil constitution and religious privileges.” As a sign of his admiration, Franklin proposed the Pine Tree Flag as the first flag of the United States, a nod to the symbol of the Iroquois confederacy.[42]
The following year, when the Congress was considering the Articles of Confederation to govern the newly declared United States of America, some of the founders looked to the Indian confederations to learn how they had achieved unity. Franklin’s intimate knowledge of the Iroquois confederacy proved useful in building the foundations of government.
He and other founders drew on the 1754 Albany Plan of Union for the colonies, which had been discussed with input from Iroquois representatives but ultimately rejected, as Franklin explained, because “it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic,”[43] for the 1777 Articles of Confederation.
The Iroquois had been providing advice about how to create a government across a great geographic expanse, such as the vast territory of the 13 colonies, and based on his understanding of the functioning of the Iroquois confederacy, Franklin included language in the Articles that borrowed both concepts and language from the Iroquois League. Article II, for instance, stated that the “Colonies Unite themselves so as to never be divided by any act whatsoever, and hereby severally enter into a firm League of friendship with each other.”[44]
Although the Iroquois League served in some ways as inspiration for the founding of the American republic, the confederacy was not a monolith, and just as the colonies in some ways were ripped apart by divided loyalties, so too were the Iroquois Six Nations. During the revolution, two of the nations — the Oneida and the Tuscarora — fought with the rebels, while the other four nations sided with the British. While the redcoats fought the patriots on the eastern seaboard, the Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and many of the Onondaga conducted nonstop raids on western settlements.
Meanwhile, Abenakis from Penobscot and St. Francis guided Benedict Arnold through the New England wilderness and some 40 St. Francis Abenakis joined the patriots in the Quebec campaign. Other Abenakis from St. Francis, however, fought alongside British regulars in defense of Quebec and helped defeat Arnold’s fleet at the Battle of Valcour Island in October 1776.[45] The shifting allegiances of the Abenakis were indicative not only of the challenges facing Native Americans but also the broader problems facing the patriot cause, in particular the challenge of finding reliable allies and fighters.
Ultimately, General George Washington came to believe that Indian allies were too fickle to be trusted.[46] Jefferson, too, had his doubts. While not entirely hostile to Native Americans, he was skeptical about the prospect of assimilating them in America’s democratic experiment.
Although he expressed admiration for some tribes such as the Creeks who were “far advanced in civilisation,” Jefferson also believed that other tribes were “backward” and “English seductions will have no effect” on them. These backward tribes, Jefferson said, “will relapse into barbarism & misery,” and therefore whites “shall be obliged to drive them” into the mountains and ultimately subjugate them.[47]
The conquest of Indian tribes, Jefferson explains, “secures our women & children for ever from the tomahawk & scalping knife.” In this respect, Jefferson based his assessment on first-hand knowledge as well as the long and well-documented history of white-Indian interactions, which provides no shortage of context for his “problematic” choice of words in the Declaration of Independence.
Nat Parry is the author of the just-published book Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era. He is the editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader.
***
[1] Jawort, Adrian. “The Declaration of Independence — Except for ‘Indian Savages’”. September 23, 2017. Indian Country Today. https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/the-declaration-of-independence-except-for-indian-savages
[2] “The American Genocide of the Indians — Historical Facts and Real Evidence”. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202203/t20220302_10647120.html
[3] Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Chastellux, June 7, 1785. https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/66
[4] Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14. 1784. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s28.html
[5] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100 Accessed October 22, 2022
[6] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100 Accessed October 22, 2022
[7] Hinderaker, Eric. “The Amerindian population in 1763”. A Companion to the American Revolution, edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole. Blackwell (2000), p. 95
[8] Abler, Thomas S. “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War”. Anthropologica Vol. 34, №1 (1992)
[9] Rath, Richard Cullen . How Early America Sounded. Cornell University Press (2005), p. 156
[10] “History of Jamestown”. https://historicjamestowne.org/history/history-of-jamestown/ Accessed October 25, 2022
[11] Four Hundred Years of Virginia, 1584–1984: An Anthology. University Press of America, 1985. p. 17
[12] Voyage of Anthony Chester to Virginia, made in the year 1620. “Two Tragical Events.” William and Mary Quarterly 9, no. 4 (April 1901): 204–214.
[13] Scott, Martin. Isaac Jogues: Missioner and Martyr. P.J. Kenedy & Sons (1927), p. 45.
[14] Ward, Donna Patricia. “Mohawk Indians Kidnapped and Tortured a Jesuit Priest in New France for His Spread of Magic”. October 3, 2018. History Collection https://historycollection.com/mohawk-indians-kidnapped-and-tortured-a-jesuit-priest-in-new-france-for-his-spread-of-magic/
[15] Church, Thomas. The History of Philip’s War: Commonly Called the Great Indian War of 1675 and 1676. J. & B. Williams, Exeter (1829), pp. xxiii-xxiv
[16] Ibid., p. 32
[17] Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War. Viking Press (2006), p. 299
[18] Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Vintage (1999). pp. 71–72
[19] Markham, Richard. A Narrative History of King Philip’s War and the Indian Troubles in New England. Dodd, Mead and Company (1883), p. 146
[20] Cutter, Barbara. “The Gruesome Story of Hannah Duston, Whose Slaying of Indians Made Her an American Folk ‘Hero’”. April 9, 2018. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gruesome-story-hannah-duston-american-colonist-whose-slaying-indians-made-her-folk-hero-180968721/ Accessed January 9, 2023
[21] O’Brien, Andy; Chapman, Will. “Radical Mainers: A Brutal Race War Ends in Victory for the Abenaki”. February 11, 2020. Mainer News https://mainernews.com/radical-mainers-6/
[22] Mather, Cotton. “A notable exploit; Dux Fæmina Facti”, Magnalia Christi Americana: Or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from 1620–1698, vol. II, book four. (1702), pp. 550–552.
[23] B. L. Mirick. The History of Haverhill. Massachusetts (Haverhill: A. W. Thayer. 1832), pp. 86–95.
[24] Oatis, Steven J. A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War. University of Nebraska Press (2004), pp. 126–127
[25] A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison (1824), https://open.maricopa.edu/earlyamericanliteratureanthology/chapter/a-narrative-of-the-life-of-mrs-mary-jemison/
[26] Ibid.
[27] Caduto, Michael J. Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants through Native American Stories and Earth. Fulcrum Publishing (1997), p. 57
[28] Romero, R. Todd. “‘Ranging Foresters’ And ‘Women-Like Men’: Physical Accomplishment, Spiritual Power, and Indian Masculinity in Early-Seventeenth-Century New England. Ethnohistory (2006) 53 (2). pp. 281–329.
[29] “Early Tennessee Settlers of the Watauga Settlement of Washington County”. Piedmont Trails. February 14, 2020. https://piedmonttrails.com/2020/02/14/early-tennessee-settlers-of-the-watauga-settlement-of-washington-county/
[30] Marshall, Peter. “The West and the Amerindians, 1756–1776”. A Companion to the American Revolution. (eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole). Blackwell (2000), p. 163
[31] Dean, Nadia. “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776”. American Indian Magazine. Winter 2013 / Vol. 14 №4 https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/demand-blood-cherokee-war-1776 Accessed December 31, 2022
[32] Marshall, Peter. “The West and the Amerindians, 1756–1776”. A Companion to the American Revolution. (eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole). Blackwell (2000), p. 163
[33] Neal O. Hammon, ed., My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone (University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 39.
[34] Nelson, Larry Lee. A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Country Frontier, 1754–1799. Kent State University Press (1999), p. 79
[35] Maj. Arthur Campbell to Col. William Preston, October 12, 1774, in Thwaites and Kellogg, Documentary History, 246–247.
[36] Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. Holt Paperbacks (1993), pp. 89–96
[37] Salafia, Matthew. Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River. University of Pennsylvania Press (2013), p. 26
[38] Dean, Nadia. “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776”. American Indian Magazine. Winter 2013 / Vol. 14 №4 https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/demand-blood-cherokee-war-1776 Accessed December 31, 2022
[39] Baker, Jordan. “The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective”. Journal of the American Revolution. July 29, 2021. https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/07/the-cherokee-american-war-from-the-cherokee-perspective/
[40] Stoll, Ira. Samuel Adams: A Life. Free Press (2009), p. 153
[41] Nies, Judith. Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events. Ballantine Books (1996), p. 200
[42] Ibid., p. 201
[43] Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (eds. Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman). Yale University Press (1964), p. 210
[44] Nies, Judith. Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture’s Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events. Ballantine Books (1996), p. 203
[45] Calloway, Colin G. The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People. University of Oklahoma Press (1994), p. 208
[46] Calloway, Colin G. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. Oxford University Press (2018), p. 133
[47] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-05-02-0100
