Revolutionary Negotiations

Though many stories credit the success of the American Revolution to the rebelliousness of the Sons of Liberty, the leadership of George Washington, or the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson, in Revolutionary Negotiations, history author Leonard Sadosky reminds us that when the Continental Congress declared that the United States “are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” it was placing itself in a complex arena of international diplomacy and trade. It had to catch up, and it had to do so quickly. At the same time that the Declaration was drafted, two other documents were ordered as well: the Articles of the Confederation, giving a framework to how this new nation would operate, and the Plan of Treaties, a foreign policy document that served to replace the British ministry system that had previously been in place, giving the United States the ability to negotiate for itself.

Congress understood that to secure independence and global trade, it needed acknowledgment and allyship not only from powerful European nations, such as France, but also from the nations that existed within its own borders — the Native Americans. As Sadosky outlines, even before the Declaration was signed, negotiating with the Native nations of the East Coast, specifically the powerful Haudenosaunee Confederacy, was a top priority.

Excerpt

Just as relations with the European powers could propel or sink the American Revolutionary project, relations with the several American Indian nations would also prove a crucial determinant in the outcome of the Thirteen Colonies’ resistance to the plans of George III and the North ministry. From the first month the Second Continental Congress convened, it sought to appropriate a key pillar of sovereign power that had fallen within the purview of the British imperial state—the power and authority to negotiate and treat with North America’s Indian nations.

Congress created a committee to study the question of how to approach Indian relations on 16 June, and the body was soon known as the Committee on Indian Affairs. Worried that the Ministry ‘will spare no pains to excite the several Nations of Indians to take up arms against these colonies,’ the Committee on Indian Affairs recommended on 12 July that ‘Commissioners be appointed . . . to superintend Indian affairs’ and that three Indian departments—northern, middle, and southern—be created in order to subdivide the responsibilities of the several commissioners. The following day the Committee for Indian Affairs presented language to be used in a speech to be given to the Six Nations, language that Schuyler would use, with some modifications, a month and a half later in the conference at Albany.

What was most radical, however, was the relationship the Articles of Confederation articulated between the United States and its American Indian neighbors. Where the colonial

provinces and the Indian nations had been congruent polities under the aegis of the British Empire, and Congress had seemed initially to have sought to perpetuate the existing imperial system when it created Indian departments and commissioners in June 1775, a close reading of the manner in which the Articles were revised in 1776 and 1777 reveals the drastic transformation the American Revolution would bring to the negotiations between settler and indigenous polities in North America. The Philadelphian system would not include the American Indian nations. It is inconceivable that American Indians disappeared from the minds of the delegates to the Continental Congress as they drafted the three key state papers of the summer of 1776…The early months of 1776 had seen increased efforts on the part of British agents to get at least some of the Iroquois communities to abandon neutrality, and discussions at the Iroquois Grand Council at Onondaga in late March 1776 were contentious. When the invitation to a conference at Albany and a follow-up visit to the American capital arrived in Iroquoia, representatives of only four of the Six Nations opted to participate. By this time, the congressional military leadership—most notably George Washington—doubted that Iroquois neutrality would continue much longer and sought to recruit as many of the Six Nations to the American side as possible.