Albany Congress Exposes Franklin to Haudenosaunee Democratic Model

The Albany Congress marks a pivotal moment when Benjamin Franklin and colonial delegates directly engaged with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy leaders, including Mohawk leader Hendrick, to discuss an English-Haudenosaunee alliance against the French and a plan of union for the colonies. By special invitation, Hendrick explained the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s democratic model—a functioning federal system featuring representative government, checks on executive power, impeachment provisions, and a balance between individual nation sovereignty and confederated governance. This exposure to Indigenous democratic structures, which had been operating successfully for centuries (dating to between 1000-1450 CE), directly influenced Franklin’s subsequent Albany Plan of Union, which proposed federating the British American colonies under a single legislature with a president-general—a structure remarkably similar to the Haudenosaunee model.

Franklin’s extensive engagement with Haudenosaunee governance began earlier through his successful printing business, where from 1736 to 1762 he published treaty council proceedings brought to him by Conrad Weiser, a Pennsylvania diplomat adopted into the Mohawk nation. These publications—the first distinctive forms of Indigenous American literature—sold widely and familiarized colonial leaders with Indigenous political philosophy. The Albany Congress crystallized this influence, with Franklin drawing directly on Haudenosaunee principles of federalism and representative democracy in his plan. The Haudenosaunee system featured assumptions foreign to European monarchies: leaders were servants of the people rather than lords, with provisions for impeachment if they failed to serve well. Individual nations (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca, later joined by Tuscarora) handled their own internal affairs while coming together to address common concerns—a federal structure that would later be echoed in the relationship between American states and the federal government.

The U.S. Senate formally recognized this influence in a September 16, 1987 resolution noting that “the original framers of the Constitution, including most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and governmental practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.” While scholars debate the precise extent of Haudenosaunee influence on the Constitution (European political thought also played significant roles), historians increasingly acknowledge that the Founders developed democratic principles barely practiced in contemporary Europe—and that exposure to functioning Indigenous democracy provided a critical counter-model to monarchy. Notably, the Haudenosaunee Great Law granted equal power to women and men, a level of equality the United States would not achieve for centuries. The Great Law’s symbol of five arrows bound together representing unity and strength of the five nations later appeared adapted in the U.S. seal’s eagle clutching 13 arrows representing the original colonies. This moment at Albany Congress illustrates both Indigenous contributions to American democracy and the tragic irony that the nation built partially on Indigenous democratic principles would subsequently engage in systematic genocide and dispossession of the very peoples whose governance models it had borrowed from.