To what degree did the "Iroquois Confederacy" have an influence on the US founding fathers?

by cassisback

These series of videos called Extra History imply in the series on the formation of the confederacy that the ideals behind it influenced some of the founding fathers.

Some preliminary googling seems to indicate that congress at one point thought this as well. At least they did in 1988: https://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/hconres331.pdf

But Im not so sure. Ideas often arise independent of each other, and from what ive read the founding fathers drew most of their inspiration from the enlightenment writers. Is there any writings to indicate some of the founding fathers drew inspiration from the Iroquois confederacy?

Georgy_K_Zhukov

Always more than can be said on a topic, but be sure to check out this old answer from /u/Reedstilt on this topic.

Gorrest-Fump

The notion that the US Constitution was based on the Iroquois Confederacy has been most forcefully advanced by scholars Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen - see, in particular, their book Exemplar of Liberty for details of their argument.

That being said, most other scholars strongly disagree. I listed some of their objections in this post a couple of months ago.

Another article critical of the Grinde-Johansen thesis which I didn't cite in my previous post was Elisabeth Tooker's "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League", Ethnohistory 35 (1988): 305-336. Tooker, one of the leading scholars of Iroquois culture, traces this notion back to the 1890s, but more specifically to the influence of Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt, who traced a line of influence on the Constitution originating with the speech of Onondaga sachem Canasatego at the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster conference, in which he suggested that the Confederacy was a model of union to be adopted by the colonists.

This point of view gained currency among white Americans, Tooker points out, because they had long treated Native Americans as a symbol of "natural liberty" - as exemplified by the costumes of protesting colonists at the Boston Tea Party, the creation of "Tamanny Societies", and John Locke's invocation of Native Americans as people "in a state of nature". This theme was invoked in the 1890s by some writers who tied the US Constitution to the Iroquois League. (This culture of appropriating Native American symbols as a means of creating a distinctive Anglo-American political identity has been explored at length by Philip Deloria in his book Playing Indian.)

But the evidence behind this point of view is rather thin, to put it charitably. As Tooker notes:

Research over the past several decades has revealed that the sources of thought embodied in the Constitution are more varied and its history more complex than had previously been suspected, and there has been something of a revolution in this regard. But of all the influences that have been uncovered and assessed in recent years, none points to an Indian one.