The most famous text of the Revolution culminates not with an idealistic wish but with a derogatory indictment, legal as well as moral. The drafters drew upon nascent doctrines of international law and made England’s incitement of “Savages” the ultimate unjust act against a “Free and Independent” people. In this so-called Age of Reason, Native Americans were charged with having none at all. They were not only lawless but also irrational, incapable of self-governance, and lacking moral capacity.
This one-dimensional vision of Native Americans was new. Having lived alongside Native communities for generations—during war, peace, and constant trade—the colonists had ample evidence that they were capable of self-government. Native people maintained distinct customs, laws, and forms of sovereignty, many of them in defiance of both British and colonial authorities. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the nations of the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Confederacy centralized political, military, and diplomatic practices. Throughout the 1740s and ’50s, Benjamin Franklin commented on the durable forms of union exercised by the Iroquois, whose confederacy, as he wrote, “has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble.”
In fact, Native self-governance was so evident and persistent that it became a source of colonial frustration. Pamphleteers often decried the Crown’s diplomacy with Native nations, as well as its inability to control them. Across the colonies, and particularly beyond the Appalachians, Native independence was seen as a threat to colonists, who had begun to envision their own claims to the same lands as necessary to their independence and sovereignty.
The colonists sought not just territory, but unchallenged dominion. To achieve this, they needed to erase the legitimacy of Native governance and justify violent dispossession. It was precisely because Native societies mirrored some of the colonists’ own ideals (autonomy, law, liberty) that they had to be cast as savages. By 1776, American colonists had positioned Native peoples—and their resistance to conquest—as the antithesis of their own vision of an enlightened society: merciless, uncivilized, and geared toward “undistinguished destruction.” The founding documents of the United States may have been modeled on Enlightenment philosophy, but they were informed by the conflict among settlers, Native nations, and the Crown.
Understanding this history is not a matter of diminishing the Revolution’s accomplishments, but of recognizing the contested ground from which they arose—and the Native lives, lands, and liberties they attempted to foreclose.