Crispus Attucks' mother was a Natick Indian. "Attucks" in that language means deer; she was of the deer clan. His father was a "mulatto," so whether or not he was African is not known."

For a hundred years after our Revolution, Americans credited Native Americans as a source of their democratic institutions. Revolutionary-era cartoonists used images of Indians to represent the colonies against Britain. Virginia's patriot rifle companies wore Indian clothes and moccasins as they fought the redcoats. When colonists took action to oppose unjust authority, as in the Boston Tea Party or the anti-rent protests against Dutch plantations in the Hudson River valley during the 1840's, they chose to dress as Indians, not to blame Indians for the demonstrations but to appropriate a symbol identified with liberty.

They dressed in Indian clothes for a couple reasons. At the Boston Tea Party (I teach this one in my programs at schools) everyone was accustomed to seeing Indians around town, so seeing a gathering group—they kind of "picked each other up along the way" and headed to the shore—as Indians was no big deal.

Had they seen Sam Adams and his crew (pretty much all members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery), it would've caused a stir. He was a rabble rouser; where he went, so went trouble. He would've drawn attention—"Hey, there they go, wonder what they are up to now?"

Also, a couple of that group had mixed-blood wives in the family.

The present King of Great Britain...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.

"There was no room for Indians in Jefferson's empire of liberty," writes Jones. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson himself spoke frankly of what we would today call genocide. "We must leave it to yourself to decide [whether] the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal," Jefferson once wrote to Clark's older brother, the storied Indian fighter George Rogers Clark. "The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

Thomas Jefferson was one of the United States' biggest promoters of the Doctrine of Discovery, Miller said. "He was a devious and conniving character. He was the originator of the Indian Removal Act. We blame Andrew Jackson." But it was Jefferson who deemed Indians "the wild beasts of the forests" and proclaimed that "we will drive them to the Rocky Mountains."

The colonials were actually upset with Great Britain for precisely the opposite reason: the British had been "inciting" peace. The Proclamation of 1763 had achieved peace with Native Americans by forbidding colonists from settling west of the Appalachian continental divide. This enraged many colonials.

Virginia's 17th century policy toward its native people set a tone for the nation's treatment of Indians, said Edward D. Ragan, a historian and expert on Native American culture at Syracuse University.

Eradication and land grabs were embraced by Virginians George Washington and Thomas Jefferson when they were president, policies that had their origins in Virginia early in the 17th century.

The Indians called Washington "Conotacarious"—devourer of villages. He ordered the destruction of Indian villages in New York state during the Revolutionary War and warned other tribes he would do the same thing to them if they fought the Americans, Ragan said.

Jefferson sought to peacefully eradicate Indian culture, he said.

"When Thomas Jefferson comes along his policy tends to be to educate children in Christian ways, to reconstruct Indians socially by emphasizing agriculture as a way of confining men to a plot of land instead of hunting and roaming," Ragan said.

When governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson stated: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us." When he became President he had a standing army to wage his campaign of extermination and during his administration many of the nations were eliminated on the Atlantic side of the Eastern Mountains. His administration then waged war against the people indigenous to the "near West" beyond the Appalachians. Then he "bought" the West from France (whose claim to the land was based on the theology of the Christians Crusades (non Christians have no rights a Christian is bound to recognize.)

In early 1779, Washington ordered an assault into the heart of Iroquois country to avenge the massacres of soldiers and settlers in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley and New York's Cherry Valley a year earlier. Washington's plan called for Sullivan and Clinton to lead expeditions targeting the Finger Lakes villages of the Iroquois -- specifically the Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga tribes -- who had sided with the British.

The future president of the fledgling United States recommended the Iroquois villages "not be merely overrun, but destroyed."

By the time the three-month campaign ended in the fall of 1779, the more than 4,000 Continental troops in the expedition destroyed dozens of Iroquois towns and villages and more than 150,000 bushels of corn. Thousands of Iroquois sought safety at the British fort at Niagara, where many died during the harsh winter that followed.

After the Americans invaded Iroquois towns in the Susquehanna Valley in 1778, George Washington, determined to exterminate the Indian threat once and for all, ordered a massive sweep of Iroquois country, specifying that it should "not merely be overrun, but destroyed." Following orders by Washington to "lay waste all the settlements," Gen. John Sullivan's men ravaged 40 villages, burned 500 houses, and destroyed 100,000 bushels of corn. Some units stopped to plunder graves for burial goods; others skinned the bodies of dead Iroquois to make leggings.

Like Christopher Columbus, George Washington changed his attitude toward Indians. Washington held positive views of Native Americans early in his life, but after unleashing the Ohio War in 1790 he would come to denounce the Ohio Indians as "having nothing human except the shape."

Our history is full of wars with Native American nations. But not our history books. "For almost two hundred years," notes David Horowitz, "almost continuous warfare raged on the American continent, its conflict more threatening than any the nation was to face again." Indian warfare absorbed 80 percent of the entire federal budget during George Washington's administration and dogged his successors for a century as a major issue and expense.

[W]hen Chief White Eyes of the Lenne Lenape on the Tuscarawas River took the floor on April 23, 1778, he got everyone's undivided attention. For nearly a week, rumors had circulated that his presence would somehow alter the mood of the convention. When Chief White Eyes began to speak, the room went silent. He stood straight and tall, and his voice rang out with authority. His dark, piercing eyes looked squarely into each face, as if daring any man to question his right to be there. Drawing a deep breath, he began:

When the Delawares asked where their state boundaries would be exactly, they were told that a necessary signature had inadvertently been omitted from the statehood document. They were told that no law existed that would allow the signature to be added retroactively. In truth, they had decimated their tribe and spent their resources on behalf of America—and so they were no longer needed. With no excuses or apologies, they were turned away.

The Iroquois Indians:  I look into this little canard and I discover that the only evidence for this [that Iroquois Indians shaped the Constitution] is a letter from Benjamin Franklin. It turns out that there was something called the "Iroquois League." There were about ten tribes. These Indian tribes were having fratricidal conflict and eventually someone said, "Let's form a league. Let's meet two or three times a year. Let's sort out our differences." It wasn't a success; the Iroquois League fell apart in a few years. Anyway, Benjamin Franklin, very dejected by the argumentative nature of the Philadelphia convention and frustrated by the inability of the people to come together in a union, writes an open letter. He says, look, basically, if a bunch of barbaric Indians can get together and have a league to sort out their differences, why can't we civilized white guys get together and pull together a constitution? This, I kid you not, is the sole basis for arguing that the Iroquois League is the hidden fount of wisdom behind the U.S. Constitution.

Hiawatha and Deganwidah founded the League of the Iroquois sometime between A.D. 1000 and 1450 under a constitution they called the Kaianerekowa or Great Law of Peace.

[In Agrarian Justice, Thomas Paine] returned once again to the Iroquois, among whom he had learned democracy, when he wrote, "The fact is, that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, or had been born among the Indians of North-America at the present day."

After this taste of Indian diplomacy, Franklin became a lifelong champion of the Indian political structure and advocated its use by the Americans....Speaking to the Albany Congress in 1754, Franklin called on the delegates of the various English colonies to unite and emulate the Iroquois League, a call that was not heeded until the Constitution was written three decades later.

Another student of the Iroquois political organization was Charles Thomson, the perpetual secretary of the Continental Congress. He spent so much energy studying the Indians and their way of life that the Delaware Nation adopted him as a full member. Following Thomas Jefferson's request, Thomson wrote at length on Indian social and political institutions for inclusion in an appendix to Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia.

As with most academic questions, one side of the debate is not likely to sway the other, but there is growing acceptance of the belief that the Iroquois Confederacy and its Great Law played a major role in the birth of American democracy.

"I would say so," said Prof. Bruce E. Johansen of the University of Nebraska-Omaha, who has authored books on the influence theory since he first became aware of it in the 1970s.

Johansen told United Press International he based his conclusion on some 1,300 references to the subject he has collected from newspapers, magazines, books and educational outlines over the past 30 years.

"Based on that I think it's become more acceptable day by day, person by person and inch by inch," Johansen said. "All the reactions are interesting" and some have been outright "nasty."

"Ever since the '70s when I started, it's a lot more acceptable now than earlier. It's been an interesting debate," Johansen said.
.
.
.
Commentator George Will called the influence theory "fiction," conservative politician Patrick Buchanan labeled it "idiocy," and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh called Johansen's intellectual life's work "worse than historical revisionism. It's more than the distortion of facts. It's the elimination of facts."

Historian, conservative author and rejected U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork, in his book, "Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," labeled the concept "nonsensical." Bork complained that New York State has made it official educational doctrine that the U.S. Constitution was heavily influenced by the political arrangements of the Iroquois Confederacy.

"The official promulgation of this idea was not due to any research that disclosed its truth," Bork wrote. "Nor has any other state adopted this nonsensical idea. New York adopted it because the Iroquois mounted an intensive lobbying campaign directed at the State Department of Education."

Bork called it "a detrimental forcing of a false notion by one culture on another."

In his introduction to "Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom," Johansen said Bork's absolute denial "is but one of many examples of the subject's ability to rub raw nerves ... "

"The notion that American Indian political systems have contributed to our present-day notions of these (democratic) concepts has caused intense controversy," Johansen wrote. He said many in the academic world had staked everything on a belief that the Iroquois had nothing to do with the evolution of democracy in America.

Scholars who back the influence theory base their conclusions on the published and unpublished papers of Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, other historical documents, Iroquois oral histories and the Great Law. These researchers say that presents a plausible argument that the Iroquois influenced the ideological birth of the United States.

The Congress still was not satisfied. On June 13, 1782, it presented the collected work and recommendations of the three committees to Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress. Thomson was not an artist, but he was a practical man with the ability to get things done. He selected the best features of all the previous designs, assigning prominence to the eagle. Feeling that the new nation's symbol should be strictly American, however, Thomson replaced Barton's crested Imperial eagle with the native American bald eagle, wings extending downward as though in flight. He placed in the left talon a bundle of arrows and in the right, the olive branch. Providence.