1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Because the abduction, injury, or death of a family member had to be revenged, every violent incident led to a spiral of brutal, tit-for-tat skirmishes. From this brutal environment a heroic figure emerged: Deganawidah, the Peacemaker.

Deganawidah had a message of peace. He couldn’t easily promulgate it, though, because he had a tragic flaw: a severe speech impediment, perhaps a stutter.

In the ensuing conflict Tododaho killed Ayenwatha’s three daughters, nearly derailing the quest for peace. Other versions have the girls killed in a raid by another group. Whatever the circumstances, Ayenwatha vowed that no parent would ever experience such a loss again and rededicated himself to spreading Deganawidah’s ideas.

Over the years Deganawidah and Ayenwatha persuaded the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk to form an alliance instead of constantly fighting. Tododaho and Onondaga continued to refuse. In a parley, Deganawidah took a single arrow and invited Tododaho to break it, which he did easily. Then he bundled together five arrows and asked Tododaho to break the lot. He couldn’t. In the same way, Deganawidah prophesied, the Five Nations, each weak on its own, would fall into darkness unless they all banded together.

Soon after Deganawidah’s warning, a solar eclipse occurred. The shaken Tododaho agreed to add the Onondaga to the nascent alliance. But he drove a hard bargain, demanding that the main Onondaga village, now buried under the present-day city of Syracuse, New York, become the headquarters for the confederacy. Despite all the convulsions of history, the Onondaga have kept the council fire burn...

Although the council negotiated peace treaties, it could not declare war—that was left to the initiative of the leaders of each of Haudenosaunee’s constituent nations. According to the Great Law, when the council of sachems was deciding upon “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” its members had to “submit the matter to the decision of their people” in a kind of referendum.

In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal expression of a region-wide tradition. The sachems of Indian groups on the eastern seaboard were absolute monarchs in theory. In practice, wrote colonial leader Roger Williams, “they will not conclude of ought … unto which the people are averse.” The league was predicated, in short, on the consent of the governed, without which the entire enterprise would collapse.

the Five Nations were largely governed internally by the female clan heads, and the Great Law explicitly ordered council members to heed “the warnings of your women relatives.” Failure to do so would lead to their removal.

the sexes were assigned to two separate social domains, neither subordinate to the other. No woman could be a war chief; no man could lead a clan.

the two researchers estimated that the alliance was probably founded in the middle of the twelfth century. To check this estimate, Mann and Fields turned to astronomical tables. Before 1600, the last total solar eclipse observable in upstate New York occurred on August 31, 1142. If Mann and Fields are correct, this was the date on which Tododaho accepted the alliance.

The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth.

the Haudenosaunee exemplified the formidable tradition of limited government and personal autonomy shared by many cultures north of the Río Grande.

these were the free people encountered by France and Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution.

With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixed intervals), and its denial of suffrage to women, slaves, and the unpropertied, the Constitution as originally enacted was sharply different from the Great Law. In addition, the Constitution’s emphasis on protecting private property runs contrary to Haudenosaunee traditions of communal ownership.

who knew intact native cultures for some three centuries? In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society.

Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life. As a diplomat, he negotiated with the confederacy of Five Nations in 1744; in those days, knowledge of Indian ways was an essential part of the statesman’s toolkit. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, viewed then as critical state documents.

“Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.”

Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper.

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one of the seven chose the Indians.

Scholars have long acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and military tactics—the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the rebellious colonists bedeviled British soldiers. (“In this country,” Gen. John Forbes argued in 1758, “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians.”)

indigenous societies cooperated fully with the slave-trading system, sending war captives to colonists for sale overseas. In the Northeast, by contrast, the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee either killed or, more common, adopted captives; involuntary servitude, though it occurred, was strikingly rarer.

So did the Boston colonists who held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as “Mohawks.”

So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished—Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto—people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors.