Original Democracy: The Six Iroquois Nations That Inspired the Birth of the United States

Days before July 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin invited twenty-one chiefs of the Iroquois nations to Philadelphia. These leaders represented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a league of six Indigenous nations whose territories spanned part of what is now New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Indigenous delegates were lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House—now known as Independence Hall—directly above the room where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was about to be signed.

John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, welcomed them on behalf of the thirteen colonies, addressing them as "brothers" and wishing for a friendship that would last "as long as the sun shines and the waters run". In turn, an Iroquois chief took the floor and bestowed upon Hancock the name Karanduawn, a title drawn from the Haudenosaunee's Great Law of Peace, which translates to "The Big Tree".

For Hancock and the assembled delegates, the immediate goal was strategic: to prevent the Iroquois from allying with the British. The presence of the Haudenosaunee signaled a willingness—at least initially—to maintain neutrality in the Revolutionary War, which had erupted a year prior and would rage for seven more. But Benjamin Franklin's invitation extended far beyond wartime tactics; he saw in the Iroquois a profound political model.

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Franklin had been familiar with the Haudenosaunee system of government for over two decades. He had first encountered them in 1744 during negotiations for the Treaty of Lancaster, where the six nations and three North American colonies gathered to settle territorial disputes. Years later, in 1751, Franklin wrote a letter to his printer, James Parker, noting with biting irony that if six Indigenous nations—whom many colonists viewed with disdain—could forge an indissoluble political union, he saw no reason why the thirteen colonies could not do the same.

The U.S. founding father crossed paths with them again at the Albany Congress of 1754. There, he once more heard the parable the Iroquois chiefs used to explain the centuries-old origin of their league. "You can easily break a single arrow over your knee, but if you bind five arrows together and try to do the same, you will fail; together, they will never break," Mohawk chief Hendrick Theyanoguin told Franklin. This account was shared via phone from New York by Emerson Shenandoah, an Onondaga nation member and director of the Center for the Great Law of Peace, an institution dedicated to preserving Haudenosaunee history.

The oldest democracy, born in 1142

Those five arrows represented the original nations of the confederacy: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. By Franklin's time, however, they were already six, following the integration of the Tuscarora in the early eighteenth century. Historians estimate that this alliance dates back to 1142, marking the birth of both the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and its democratic system of governance—a model that endures today, even as some clans within the six nations have adopted other practices. It is a system that challenges the United States' own claim to the title of the world's oldest continuous democracy.

"Some nations, like the Onondaga and certain Seneca clans, still govern themselves by this nearly millennium-old system. They are the oldest democracy that I know of", explains Scott Manning Stevens, a member of the Mohawk nation and director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University.

The impact of the Haudenosaunee governance model on Franklin's political philosophy is well-documented, Stevens notes, appearing across several of his writings. This influence is so profound that in 1988, a year after the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, the United States Congress passed a resolution formally acknowledging that "the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one Republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself." The resolution also admitted that "the original framers of the Constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations," explicitly recognizing a historical debt to them.

For the first time, it was officially acknowledged that the U.S. Constitution was not shaped solely by European Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke—whose weight remains undeniable—but also by Native American principles. This was a thesis pioneered in the early 1980s by historian Bruce E. Johansen in his book Forgotten Founders. Johansen argued that "the Iroquois indeed played a key role in the ideological birth of the United States, especially through Franklin's advocacy for federal union."

"Benjamin Franklin realized this was a viable model for the thirteen colonies, allowing them to maintain their individual identity and autonomy while forming a unified body", Stevens explains. "At the same time, he recognized that ours is a deeply democratic culture. We are not ruled by kings or supreme chiefs, everything we do is through councils and through voting and democracy; and both men and women have a vote, which is unlike the European traditions".

"Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington compared the Haudenosaunee to the Greeks and Romans in terms of civic values", Shenandoah adds: "Everyone claims democracy comes from the Greeks, but they completely forget the Native American contribution".

The Original Legend

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is governed by the Gayanesshagowa, or Great Law of Peace, which some scholars consider the oldest known democratic and federal constitution in the world. Rather than being written on paper, this constitution was woven into a wampum belt and transmitted orally. "It takes days to fully recite the Great Law of Peace", Stevens explains.

"The Great Law of Peace dates back to our founding in the twelfth century", he adds. "At that time, our nations were trapped in a cycle of constant warfare. Then, a political and spiritual leader known as the Peacemaker emerged. He brought a vision of peace—a concept we call Skano, or the Great Peace—which established our core principles of organization".

According to tradition, the Peacemaker and his disciple, the warrior Hiawatha, successfully united the chiefs of the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca nations into a peaceful alliance. However, the Onondaga remained under the rule of a tyrannical sorcerer who had killed Hiawatha’s daughters and sought to perpetuate the war. It was a woman named Jigonsaseh who finally convinced the Onondaga to join the league. The Peacemaker had struck a pact with her: if she could help bring an end to the bloodshed, she would gain the authority to choose the nations' leaders. Jigonsaseh succeeded, becoming the first Clan Mother—the women responsible for selecting the leaders of the clans that comprise each nation.

To seal the alliance, the Peacemaker gathered the chiefs of the five nations during a total solar eclipse and proclaimed the Great Law of Peace for the first time. He recorded it on a belt made of shell beads contributed by each nation. Known as the Hiawatha Belt, it became the symbol and flag of the Confederacy. The leaders then uprooted a white pine, buried their weapons of war in the cavity, and replanted the tree on top. This "Tree of Peace" remains the central element of their flag and belt.

"Our word for peace, Skano, means more than just the absence of war", Stevens explains. "It means being in harmony with your family, your community, your nation, other nations, nature, and yourself".

How Does Iroquois Democracy Work?

The Great Law of Peace established a decision-making system that has governed the Confederacy ever since, a democratic model in which women hold pivotal power. Gathered in clan councils, the Clan Mothers select the leaders of each clan through a process that demands absolute consensus.

"Our clans are matrilineal", Stevens explains. "You cannot marry within your own clan; you must marry into another, and when a man marries, he joins his wife’s clan. Each clan elects a council of Clan Mothers, chosen by the people. Their job is to mediate disputes, but they also choose the chiefs. They usually chose male chiefs because they dealt more with external affairs, like other nations and warfare, and it was decided men were better skilled as warriors, while anything domestic was ruled by women".

These mothers are uniquely positioned to choose leaders "because they have seen the children grow, knowing them from a very young age, and they know their character", says the Mohawk professor. "If the United States used a Clan Mother system, Donald Trump would never have been chosen as leader", he addes. Furthermore, the system includes its own checks and balances: if a chief misbehaves or fails to listen to his people, the Clan Mothers possess the authority to depose him.

Each nation has up to nine clans: the Turtle, Beaver, Eel, Wolf, Bear, Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk. Each clan has several mothers and a leader chosen by them, although some of these positions sit vacant today in certain nations. They do not have a president; instead, a supreme chief of the six nations, known as the Tadodaho, serves as a spiritual and political figurehead. "But he holds no executive power," Shenandoah remarks. "He only conveys what has been decided by the collective. He cannot issue executive orders or make unilateral decisions".

Another defining feature of Haudenosaunee democracy, one that sharply differentiates it from the American system, is consensus. "The law of the majority, the 51 percent, or the 'winner-takes-all' dynamic does not apply here," Stevens adds. "We do not like that. Within the Confederacy, everything must be achieved by consensus. As my grandfather used to say, that means everyone will be a little unhappy, because no one gets everything they want".

It is clear that the Founding Fathers of the United States overlooked many Iroquois precepts when —eleven years after declaring independence— they drafted the Constitution, beginning with the political power of women. "Women have always held rights in our nations; from the very beginning, they enjoyed equal rights and full autonomy", Shenandoah explains. "They have always been able to divorce their husbands, something women in some nations still can't do in this modern day".

Yet, there is little doubt that the conversations shared with Iroquois leaders in Philadelphia left a lasting mark on Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington as they forged the Declaration of Independence. However, the goodwill expressed in the summer of 1776 would soon violently evaporate.

Division, War, and Reservations

Some nations within the Confederacy deeply mistrusted the thirteen colonies, predicting—correctly—that American independence would inevitably lead to the usurpation of their lands. Consequently, the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga allied with the British, while the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the American revolutionaries. "The Confederacy was divided for the first time in six hundred years", Stevens says.

Once part of the Confederacy allied with the Crown, "Washington became our chief enemy", the Mohawk professor explains. In written instructions delivered to General John Sullivan on May 31, 1779, Washington declared that "the immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners as possible, of every age and sex". He ordered that Haudenosaunee territories "be not merely overrun, but destroyed" through a scorched-earth campaign that Stevens characterizes as "what we would define today as ethnic cleansing".

It was during this campaign that the Haudenosaunee branded George Washington with the name Hanadagáyas —"Town Destroyer"—a title that has been inherited by every single United States president since.

The Haudenosaunee lands that Washington ordered razed quickly became the currency used to pay the Continental soldiers. Lacking actual funds, the New York State government "rewarded" its veterans by distributing nearly 800,000 hectares confiscated from the ancestral territories of the Onondaga and Cayuga nations —parceling out roughly 240 hectares per soldier— through treaties signed under extreme duress.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the peoples of the Confederacy were cornered into progressively shrinking reservations. "The Onondaga were promised a reservation of twenty miles by twenty miles [about 103,000 hectares]; today, we hold just five miles by five miles [roughly 6,500 hectares]," Shenandoah explains.

Today, the six Haudenosaunee nations reside across eight reservations in New York State and another eight in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Approximately 120,000 registered members live on these reservations—40,000 in Canada and 80,000 in the U.S.—supplemented by an estimated 30,000 unregistered descendants living among the general population.

"We remain an independent and sovereign nation," asserts the director of the Center for the Great Law of Peace. "We Onondaga continue to make our decisions through our traditional system of government; we do not vote in U.S. elections, nor do we accept federal funding. We are independent and sovereign, just as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a whole still maintains its Grand Council". Remarkably, the Haudenosaunee are one of the few Indigenous nations worldwide to issue their own internationally recognized passports.

Even now, the Haudenosaunee continue to claim their ancestral lands, at the very least demanding the enforcement of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which George Washington signed and the U.S. systematically breached. Today, the Council of Chiefs still gathers periodically to deliberate on sovereignty, land rights, and modern existential threats: "Issues like climate change," Stevens notes, "and, more recently, the encroachment of massive AI data centers that drain our water supplies".

Now, as the United States marks its 250th anniversary and its own democratic institutions appear increasingly strained under the weight of an imperial presidency, the Haudenosaunee's wampum belt resists the erosion of time. The Great Law of Peace and the democratic system they forged nearly a millennium ago did more than just inspire the Founding Fathers; they are well on their way to outliving the very republic they helped inspire.