Reply #12: the Iroquois

[Viva_La_Revolution]

and other Indian nations.

In a round-a-bout kind of way. :)

While the seventeenth century saw academic interest in the native democracies of North America through thinkers such as John Locke, the eighteenth century was a time when direct experience with American Indian leaders and their political systems became common on both sides of the Atlantic. The eighteenth century was a period of struggle between the empires of France and England, and the Iroquois and other native nations played a crucial role in this struggle. During King George's war, the colonists needed Iroquois support against the French. Ironically, many of the United States' founders got their initial exposure to Iroquois and other native leaders and the political systems within which they operated from diplomacy and other activities at the behest of Britain, beginning two generations before the Revolutionary War.

Beginning nearly two generations before the Revolutionary War, the circumstances of diplomacy arrayed themselves so that opinion leaders of the English colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy were able to meet together to discuss the politics of alliance -- and confederation. Beginning in the early 1740s, Iroquois leaders strongly urged the colonists to form a federation similar to their own. The Iroquois' immediate practical objective was unified management of the Indian trade and prevention of fraud. The Iroquois also stressed that the colonies should have to unify as a condition of alliance in the continuing "cold war" with France.

This set of circumstances brought Benjamin Franklin into the diplomatic equation. He first read the Iroquois' urgings to unite as a printer of Indian treaties. By the early 1750s, Franklin was more directly involved in diplomacy itself, at the same time that he became an early, forceful advocate of colonial union. All of these circumstantial strings were tied together in the summer of 1754, when colonial representatives, Franklin among them, met with Iroquois sachems at Albany to address issues of mutual concern, and to develop the Albany Plan of Union, a design that echoes both English and Iroquois precedents which would become a rough draft for the Articles of Confederation a generation later.

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/EoL/chp6.html