The State of Nature in the American Revolution: Confirming Locke, Denying Hobbes

In his Second Treatise, John Locke identifies five ways in which the state of nature arises in human history.  First, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived without formal institutions of government, they were living in a state of nature, in which all human beings are equally free; and during Locke's lifetime, he saw that the foraging bands of native Americans were still living in such a state of nature (ST, 49, 101-111).  

Second, people living under a government can choose to leave that country, and thus revert to a state of nature, and then they can emigrate either to another society with a ruling government or to a vacant part of the world where they can set up a new government (ST, 113-18, 121).  

Third, whenever people living under a government find themselves under the immediate attack of aggressive individuals, and there is no way to call in the protection of government, then the people under this threat have the natural right to momentarily enter the state of nature, so that they can reclaim "the executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who violate that law of nature, which includes the natural right of killing in self-defense (ST, 19).  

Fourth, whenever a government is dissolved, the people revert back to the state of nature, and they have the right to establish a new government by consent; this includes the dissolution of government by popular rebellion against a government that has become despotic (ST, 211-43).

Fifth, all the rulers of independent governments around the world are in a state of nature in their international relations because there is no world government over them (ST, 14).

In all five of these ways, we can see Locke's state of nature in the American Revolution.  Much of the evidence for this is conveniently collected in a book by Mark Somos--American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775 (Oxford University Press, 2019).

1.  THE ORIGINAL STATE OF NATURE

First of all, many American colonial thinkers explicitly recognized that many of the Native American Indians were living in a state of nature as described by Locke.  As early as 1725, John Bulkley, a prominent clergyman and surgeon in colonial Connecticut, quoted from Locke's account of the state of nature in the Second Treatise and argued that the "Aborigines of this Country" were living in this state of nature.  Bulkley also followed Locke's lead in applying Jose de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1604) to the Native Americans.  (Bulkley's writing can be found in Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, eds. Jack P. Greene and Craig B. Yirush [Liberty Fund, 2018], I: 595-627.)

In 1768, the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent a letter to their colonial agent in London, which argued that the colonists had a natural right to property, so that the British Crown could not take their property without their consent.  James Otis and Samuel Adams were probably the primary authors of this letter.  In one passage, they wrote:

"Property is admitted to have an existence, even in the savage state of nature.  The bow, the arrow, and the tomahawk; the hunting and the fishing ground, are species of property, as important to an American savage, as pearls, rubies, and diamonds ae to the Mogul, . . . . And if property is necessary for the support of savage life, it is by no means less so in civil society" (quoted in Somos, 68, n. 29).

Particularly interesting here is the recognition that the American Indians had a natural claim to property in their hunting and fishing grounds.  Bulkley had argued that the Indians did not own the land on which they hunted and fished, because they had not invested their labor in the land by cultivating it for agriculture; and consequently, the colonists in Connecticut could claim the land that they had appropriated for farming.

Remarkably, the freedom that the American Indians enjoyed in their state of nature was so attractive that many of the English and French settlers chose to become Indians--"White Indians" they were called.  Hector de Crevecoeur observed that "thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"  Some of the Europeans who became Indians said that they did this because they had "the most perfect freedom."  In his study of the White Indians, historian James Axtell suggested that "it may well be that the adults who chose to become Indians did so for some of the reasons that many of their countrymen turned to revolution" (The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America [Oxford University Press, 1985], 302-303, 327, 377).

In applying the Lockean understanding of the state of nature to the American Indians, the American colonists saw that in that state of nature all men were equally free and independent, in that no man could rule any other man without that man's consent.  They saw that this natural equality of liberty did indeed apply to all men, including slaves, and to all women as well as men.  This radical conception of human equality of rights was clearly affirmed, for example, by James Otis in his 1761 speech in Paxton's Case and in 1764 in his Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved.

2.  EMIGRATING TO THE STATE OF NATURE

Some of the colonists argued that it was this equal freedom in the state of nature that had drawn so many of the original European settlers to leave Great Britain and go to America, where they could revert to the state of nature.  This would illustrate what Locke identified as the second way in which people could enter a state of nature by leaving their native country to find freedom somewhere else.  For example, in 1765, Dennys Deberdt, who had just been appointed the colonial agent for Massachusetts in London, wrote a public letter that claimed that all the colonies, except Georgia and Nova Scotia, were settled by Englishmen fleeing oppression and seeking "civil and religious liberties," and that when they moved to America, "they were then in a state of nature, under no civil government, but what they form'd themselves."  Their colonial charters should therefore be understood as "compacts" with Britain to which they had freely consented.

3.  SELF-DEFENSE IN THE STATE OF NATURE

The revolutionary colonists also contended that once Great Britain violated those original compacts with the colonies and launched an attack on the rights of the colonists--their natural rights and their rights as Englishmen--the colonists could rightly invoke their natural right of self-defense in the state of nature, which was Locke's third way in which people could return to a state of nature.  The American colonists, however, expanded the individual right of self-defense to a collective right of the American people to defend their community against attack.

One of the clearest statements of this idea came some years after the Revolution in James Wilson's Lectures on Law (1790-1791):

"The defence of one's self, justly called the primary law of nature, is not, nor can it be abrogated by any regulation of municipal law.  This principle of defence is not confined merely to the person; it extends to the liberty and the property of a man; it is not confined merely to his own person; it extends to the persons of all those, to whom he bears a peculiar relation--of his wife, of his parent, of his child, of his master, or his servant: nay, it extends to the person of everyone, who is in danger; perhaps, to the liberty of everyone, whose liberty is unjustly and forcibly attacked.  It becomes humanity as well as justice" (Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey [Harvard University Press, 1967], 2: 609).

Thus, the people acting as a community could exercise their natural right of self-defense in defending their liberty from unjust attack.

The revolutionary colonists also protested against King George III's attempts to disarm the colonists as a violation of their natural rights and their rights as Englishmen.  That individuals have a natural right to momentarily enter a state of nature in defending themselves against attacks has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as a natural right that is also a constitutional right.  This was most clearly stated in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), which ruled that cities and states that ban handguns have violated the natural right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, a natural right protected in the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

In the McDonald decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent in which he argued that recognizing the right of individuals to carry handguns for self-defense is contrary to the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.  In support of this argument, he quoted from section 128 of Locke's Second Treatise, which speaks of the powers individuals have in the state of nature that they must give up when they enter civil society.  In the state of nature, a man has the power "to do whatsoever he thinks fit for the preservation of himself and others within the permission of the Law of Nature."  But when he joins a particular political society, he "gives up" this power that he had in the state of nature.  But here Stevens ignores what Locke says in explaining that a man "gives up" natural rights only "the better to preserve" them in a civil society, and that a man in civil society may kill a thief or anyone who acts as an aggressor threatening his life, in circumstances where there is no way to call in officers of the government for protection (ST, 18-19, 131).

4.  IN THE STATE OF NATURE AFTER THE DISSOLUTION OF GOVERNMENT

In 1774, the American colonists were divided by a debate between Patriots and Loyalists over the state of nature.  The Patriots believed that since the British imperial government over the colonies had been dissolved, the Americans had been thrown back into a state of nature, in which the American people had the natural authority to establish a new government to secure their natural rights.  The Loyalists believed that Parliament still had governmental authority over the colonies, and therefore the Americans were not in a state of nature, although there was a need to settle the American disputes with Parliament in a way that would preserve American liberty while maintaining Parliamentary rule over the colonies.

On September 5, 1774, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia for the first time.  On the next day, they began their debates; and Patrick Henry of Virginia was the first to speak.  Here is what John Adams wrote in his Diary for that speech:

Mr. Henry. Government is dissolved. Fleets and Armies and the present State of Things shew that Government is dissolved. -- Where are your Land Marks? your Boundaries of Colonies.

We are in a State of Nature, Sir. I did propose that a Scale should be laid down. That Part of N. America which was once Mass. Bay, and that Part which was once Virginia, ought to be considered as having a Weight. Will not People complain, 10,000 People Virginians have not outweighed 1,000 others.

I will submit however. I am determined to submit if I am overruled.

A worthy Gentleman Ego near me, seemed to admit the Necessity of obtaining a more Adequate Representation.

I hope future Ages will quote our Proceedings with Applause. It is one of the great Duties of the democratical Part of the Constitution to keep itself pure. It is known in my Province, that some other Colonies are not so numerous or rich as they are. I am for giving all the Satisfaction in my Power.

The Distinctions between Virginians, Pensylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders, are no more.

I am not a Virginian, but an American.

Patriots like John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Roger Sherman agreed with Henry in arguing that they were in a state of nature, and that they would need to establish a new government.

On September 8, Joseph Galloway spoke for the Loyalists in denying that the colonists were in a state of nature.  Here is what Adams wrote in his Diary:

Mr. Galloway. I never could find the Rights of Americans, in the Distinctions between Taxation and Legislation, nor in the Distinction between Laws for Revenue and for the Regulation of Trade. I have looked for our Rights in the Laws of Nature -- but could not find them in a State of Nature, but always in a State of political Society.

I have looked for them in the Constitution of the English Government, and there found them. We may draw them from this Soursce securely.

Galloway went on later to propose a Plan of Union, which would create a Colonial Parliament that would act together with the British Parliament in legislating for the colonies.  The Congress voted to reject this plan, and the plan was even stricken from the records of the Congress's proceedings.

Loyalists like Galloway had to contend either that the state of nature never existed, or that while it could exist, it was a dangerous condition of violent disorder, and therefore should be avoided at all costs.  In taking the second position, they assumed a Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a "war of all against all."

Patriots like Henry had to contend that the state of nature was a reality of human history, and that it could be a state of social order in which people act as a community capable of establishing a new government.  Thus, the Patriots assumed a Lockean view of the state of nature as a social state of peace, even if it could become a state of war in the absence of government.

The Patriots thought that the experience of Massachusetts in 1774 confirmed their view of the state of nature.  As a result of Parliament's passage of the Coercive Acts in the spring, the government of Massachusetts under its colonial charter was dissolved, and Massachusetts was reduced to a state of nature; but the people of Massachusetts organized themselves through hundreds of local meetings and committees of correspondence to create extralegal governing bodies that could send delegates to the Continental Congress, which could then become a provisional government for a union of the colonies.

We can see here that the fundamental debate in the American Revolution and American Founding was over the state of nature.

This debate continued in some form throughout the Founding period.  For example, when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed the ratification of its Constitution as a substitute for the Articles of Confederation, some of the opponents of ratification argued that the Constitutional Convention did not have the legal authority to frame and propose this Constitution.  They made two arguments.  First, in February of 1787, the Congress of the United States under the Articles of Confederation had recommended a Convention that would propose alterations in the Articles.  But then the Convention in Philadelphia proposed a Constitution that consisted not of alterations in the Articles but a total substitution for the Articles, which went beyond the authorization of the Congress.  Secondly, while under the Articles of Confederation (Article XIII), any "alteration" of the Articles would have to be ratified by the legislatures of all thirteen of the states, the Constitutional Convention proposed that the new Constitution should be submitted to a convention of delegates "chosen in each State by the People thereof," and that the Constitution would come into effect as soon as the conventions of nine states had ratified it.  Far from being a mere alteration or revision of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of 1787 looked like a revolutionary overthrow of the Articles, with an appeal to the authority of the People in a state of nature to establish a new government to better secure their natural rights.

In The Federalist, James Madison responded to this objection by in effect admitting that the Constitution Convention was proposing a Second American Revolution based on the principles that justified the First American Revolution.  He did this in two ways.  First, he invoked the revolutionary language of the Declaration of Independence.  He claimed to speak for those at the Convention:

"They must have reflected, that in all great changes of established governments, forms ought to give way to substance; that a rigid adherence in such cases to the former, would render nominal and nugatory, the transcendent and precious right of the people to 'abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness;' since it is impossible for the people spontaneously and universally, to move in concert towards their object; and it is therefore essential, that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorised propositions, made by some patriotic and respectable number of citizens" (no. 40).

In doing this, the Framers of the Constitution were "recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed" (no. 43).

Second, Madison says that the Framers of the Constitution must have understood that what they were doing in 1787 was similar to what was done by the American Revolutionaries in 1774 to 1776:

"They must have recollected that it was by this irregular and assumed privilege of proposing to the people plans for their safety and happiness, that the States were first united against the danger with which they were threatened by their antient government; that Committees and Congresses, were formed for concentrating their efforts, and defending their rights; and that Conventions were elected in the several States, for establishing the constitutions under which they are now governed; nor could it have been forgotten that no little ill-timed scruples, no zeal for adhering to ordinary forms, were any where seen, except in those who wished to indulge under these masks, their secret enmity to the substance contended for" (no 40).

Notice that without using the term state of nature, Madison implicitly affirms that the Framers of the Constitution had entered a state of nature in which the People had the natural right to dissolve the Articles of Confederation and establish a new national government through the Constitution that would better secure their rights.

And if we see the Constitution as the Second American Revolution, should we also see the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments (13-15) as the Third American Revolution.  Because didn't America need that Third Revolution to fulfill the original promise of the First Revolution to secure equality of rights for all men and women, which required the Civil War as an "appeal to Heaven" and new amendments overturning the constitutional protections for slavery and establishing the "equal protection of the laws"?

5.  INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS A STATE OF NATURE

The Declaration of Independence concludes with the Continental Congress declaring "that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."

Just as in the state of nature, all individuals are free and independent, and so any social order is based on the mutual consent of those individuals, likewise in the international state of nature, all states are free and independent, and so any international order is based on the mutual consent of states.  So here we see how for Locke, and other theorists of the state of nature, international relations are a fifth way in which human beings can be in a state of nature.

In their thinking through this idea, the American Revolutionaries were much influenced by their reading of Emer de Vattel's The Law of Nations, or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758).  Vattel's fundamental principle was that the law of nations was the law of nature of individuals in the state of nature applied to states.

Much of the modern theorizing about international relations and international law has turned on this idea of international politics as a state of nature.

CONCLUSION

In the American Revolution, we can see the five ways in which the Lockean state of nature appears--in the original human condition of hunter-gatherers, in human emigration from an established government, in individual and collective self-defense against attacks, as a consequence of the dissolution of government, and in international relations.

We can also see here that the American Revolution was a historical experiment that confirmed Locke's account of the state of nature as superior to Hobbes's.  For Hobbes, the state of nature must always be a state of war; and therefore it must be avoided at all costs.  For Hobbes, any government is better than none, because peace is always better than war.  

But for Locke, the dissolution of government does not necessarily lead to the dissolution of society and the state of war.  Although there is always the risk that it will collapse into a state of war, a state of nature can be a state of peaceful cooperation as people organize themselves into a social order without any formal government.  And therefore, even though the state of nature is risky, there are circumstances in which it can become a sanctuary from a condition that is even worse--the loss of liberty under the rule of an oppressive government.  For Locke, people consent to government with the trust that it will secure their natural rights.  When a government has violated that trust, the government can be dissolved, and the people can regroup as a society in the state of nature and establish a new government.  The American people did that in the American Revolution.

 

The Lockean Liberal Evolution of Symbolic Niche Construction in the Declaration of Independence: A Declaration of "Free and Independent States"

The Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics rests on the idea that human beings mentally create social institutions through collective recognition of those institutions as symbolic realities, which Locke identified as the language of "mixed modes."  While other animals can mentally create cultural traditions, only human beings have the evolved cognitive capacity to create collective symbolic traditions, because human beings are unique in having 16 billion neurons in their cerebral cortex, which probably gives them the capacity for collective symbolism.

The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality in our minds as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.

If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).

The Declaration of Independence is what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  So, for example, a twenty-dollar bill has monetary value as long as we recognize that a twenty-dollar bill (X) counts as currency (Y) in the monetary system of the United States (C).  Similarly, the American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans against the British was in the Saratoga Campaign, June through October 1777.  For the first time in history, an entire British army surrendered in the field.  When French King Louis XVI learned of this, he began negotiations with Benjamin Franklin to form a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won the Saratoga Campaign, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

There are many good objections to my Lockean and Darwinian reading of the Declaration of Independence.  And over the years, I have responded to most of them.  

But I haven't yet answered in full an objection suggested by David Armitage in his important book--The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.  2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  As its subtitle indicates, Armitage's book is a global history of the Declaration from 1776 to the end of the twentieth century, concentrating mostly on its implications for international law, particularly as expressed in the many "Declarations of Independence" from Vermont in 1777 to Eritrea in 1993.  The American Declaration of Independence was the first of over one hundred such declarations over the past 250 years.

Armitage claims that the primary purpose of the Declaration of Independence is prominently stated in the opening and closing sentences of the Declaration.  It begins with one long sentence:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

It concludes:

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."

This shows, Armitage observes, that this was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states.

At the end of the Declaration, the Continental Congress claimed to act "in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies" to declare that the colonies are "Free and Independent States."  But the Congress had no legal authority under British law to do this.  Their authority came from the Laws of Nature and Nature's God, as stated in the second paragraph, that entitled them to secure the "unalienable Rights" of men by exercising the "Right of the People" to "alter or abolish" a government that fails to secure their natural rights and "to institute new Government . . . as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

As I have argued, not only the second paragraph but the whole of the Declaration of Independence echoes the language and principles of Locke's Second Treatise of Government.  This is certainly true for the Declaration's claims about "free and independent states."  In the state of nature, men are "by Nature, all free, equal, and independent," and no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his consent (ST, 95).  But while once people have formed political societies by consent, they have left the state of nature, the governments they have formed are in themselves in a state of nature:  "all Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments all through the World, are in a State of Nature" (ST, 14).  These governments can enter into international agreements by mutual consent, but as long as they are politically independent of one another, they are in an international state of nature, and each government is naturally equal and independent.

This Lockean understanding of the law of nature in the international state of nature was elaborated in Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations in 1758:

"Nations being composed of men naturally free and independent, and who, before the establishment of civil societies, lived together in the state of nature,--nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature."

"It is a settled point with writers on the natural law, that al men inherit from nature a perfect liberty and independence, of which they cannot be deprived without their own consent.  In a state, the individual citizens do not enjoy them fully and absolutely, because they have made a partial surrender of them to the sovereign.  But the body of the nation, the state, remains absolutely free and independent with respect to all other men, all other nations, as long as it has not voluntarily submitted to them" (Vattel 2008: 68).

Armitage recognizes Vattel's book as "the standard text on the subject in Europe and the Americas for more than half a century," and thus the best guide to the American understanding of how people can claim the rights and powers of "free and independent states" as rooted in the law of nature.  But he does not recognize how this contradicts his argument that the appeal to the law of nature in the Declaration's second paragraph is unnecessary for the primary purpose of the Declaration in declaring independence for the United States in the international system of states.

Armitage also argues that the many declarations of independence after 1776 show the unimportance of the second paragraph of the Declaration in the global history of the document:  "The earliest imitations of the Declaration in Europe and beyond set the pattern for most later documents by taking the Declaration's opening and closing sentences as their template while overlooking the self-evident truths of the second paragraph" (113).  Surveying the more than one hundred such documents, he says that "relatively few . . . contained a declaration of individual rights that paralleled the second paragraph of the American Declaration" (104).

But Armitage's reader should notice that of the ten declarations that he reproduces in his book, seven contain passages that echo the language of the second paragraph (187, 199, 205, 211-12, 217-18, 227-29, 231, 239-40).  For example, the Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (January 4, 1790) opens by saying; "Since it has pleased Divine Providence to restore our natural rights of liberty and independence  by severing the bonds that once fastened us to a Prince and House whose domination was ever harmful to the interests of Flanders, we feel obliged to recount for present and future generations the events which inspired and accomplished this happy Revolution" (187).  The Declaration of Independence by the People of Texas (March 2, 1836) appeals to "the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable right of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right toward themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their welfare and happiness" (212).

Even those declarations that do not explicitly speak of the "natural rights of liberty and independence" do implicitly assume the natural right to government by consent of the governed and the right to overthrow governments that do not secure the natural rights of the people.  After all, any group of people who declare their independence from an established government and their right to establish a new government are engaged in an extralegal act that can only be justified by an implicit appeal to a natural right beyond positive law.

REFERENCES

Armitage, David. 2007. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shain, Barry Alan, ed.  2014.  The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Vattel, Emer de.  2008.  The Law of Nations.  Eds. Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Weddle, Kevin J.  2021.  The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

The North American Indian Declaration of Independence: A Darwinian Lockean Liberal Perspective

FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES

The Declaration of Independence seems to be hypocritical in its handling of the American Indians.  While it appeals to the "self-evident" principles of government by the consent of the governed to justify the right of the American colonies to become "Free and Independent States," it refuses to consider the possibility that the American Indians have the same right to be free and independent from European or American imperial rule.  

In the Declaration, one of the grievances against the King is that he "has excited 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."  

The Declaration is silent about the claim of the American Indians that their warfare on the British colonists was in defense of their self-governing sovereignty over their ancestral territory that was being invaded by colonial settlers who were stealing land that belonged to the Indians.

In 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War (a theater of the Seven Years War) with a victory for the British over the French.  American Indians had fought on both sides of the conflict.  In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the King divided the lands in North America taken from the French.  This created an "Indian Reserve" west of the Appalachian Mountains, prohibiting the British colonists from settling there.  But many colonial settlers and land speculators refused to accept this, which was one of the grievances against the King that led to the American Revolution.

                   Map of North America Established by the Treaty of Paris and the Proclamation of 1763

In 1783, another Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution with a victory for the Americans.  Although American Indians had fought on both sides of the Revolution, they were not represented in the diplomatic negotiations over the Treaty, and they were shocked when they learned that the Treaty carved up the North American continent with no territory for the Indian Nations.  What had been set aside in 1763 as Indian Territory west of the Appalachians was given to the new American Empire.

But while the United States claimed all of the Trans-Appalachian West east of the Mississippi, most of that territory was actually controlled by Native American Nations.  Moreover, almost all of the continent west of the Mississippi was controlled by Indians.  In 1783, North America was still, as Pekka Hamalainen has argued, predominantly an "indigenous continent," just as it had been for thousands of years.

                            Map of North America Established by the Treaty of Paris of 1783

In 1783, Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), a Mohawk chief, became the founding leader of the Northwestern Indian Confederacy (1783-1795), which brought together Indian nations in the central Mississippi Valley and the Ohio Country to stop the United States from stealing Native land.  The member nations--Shawnees, Illinis, Miamis, Lenapes (Delaware), Potawatomis, Wyandots (Huron), Odawas, Ojibwes (Chippewa), Piankashaws, and Wabash--agreed that no nation could sell its land without the consent of the others.  They called themselves the "United Indian Nations."  This was the largest pan-Indian resistance movement in the history of North America.

They fought the U.S. in the Northwest Indian War (1785-1795)--the first of the American Indian Wars fought with the U.S. Army.  They won some remarkable victories--most notably in 1791, they drove U.S. soldiers under the command of General Arthur St. Clair, the federal governor of the Northwest Territory, into a retreat and killed over 97% of the soldiers, making it one of the worst defeats of the U.S. Army.  But in 1794, the Indians were badly defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.  And in 1795, they were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville that ended the war and also ended the Indian Confederacy.

In 1794, Brant met with Henry Knox, the U.S. Secretary of War.  Speaking for the American Indians, Brant told him: "We are of the same opinion with the people of the United States; you consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.  This country was given to us by the Great Spirit" (Ablasky 2019: 591).

Here Brant was echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence: "That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."  And he was claiming that the Native Indian Nations had the same right to be recognized "as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations."

Actually, Brant was invoking an international legal principle of equal Native nationhood that had been accepted as federal policy in the presidential administration of George Washington.  Secretary of War Henry Knox had told Washington shortly after his inauguration: "Independent nations and tribes of Indians ought to be considered as foreign nations."  Washington's Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson advised him "that the Indians had the full, undivided and independent sovereignty as long as they chose to keep it and that this might be forever" ("Notes on Cabinet Opinions," February 26, 1793).  

The phrase "Free and Independent States" was a reference to the law of nations, particularly as stated in Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations (1758).  Vattel repeatedly identified sovereign nations as "free and independent" (68, 71, 74, 77, 84-85, 214, 265).  This must be so because "nations being composed of men naturally free and independent, and who, before the establishment of civil societies, lived together in the state of nature,--nations or sovereign states are to be considered as so many free persons living together in the state of nature."

As I have argued previously, this follows John Locke's account of how people naturally free and independent in the state of nature can establish civil societies that become sovereign nations that are free and independent in the international arena, which is itself a state of nature because there is no world government over all nations.

According to Vattel, a nation is "free and independent" as long as it is self-governing:

"Every nation that governs itself, under what form soever, without dependence on any foreign power, is a sovereign state.  Its rights are naturally the same as those of any other state.  Such are the moral persons who live together in a natural society, subject to the law of nations.  To give a nation a right to make an immediate figure in this grand society, it is sufficient that it be really sovereign and independent, that is, that it govern itself by its own authority and laws" (83).

By this standard, as Brant and other Indian leaders indicated, the self-governing Native American polities of North America could claim the rights of sovereign statehood equal to the United States.  Locke also saw this because he recognized that the Indians in America were divided into self-governing "nations" or "peoples"--"little Independent Societies" (FT, 144, 153, ST, 41, 102, 105, 107-108).  Consequently, the European imperial powers had no authority over the Indians: "Those who have the Supream Power of making Laws in England, France or Holland, are to an Indian, but like the rest of the World, Men without Authority" (ST, 9).

THE AGRICULTURALIST ARGUMENT

And yet, both Vattel and Locke sometimes seemed to suggest that being a self-governing nation is not enough to make that nation a "free and independent state."  Those people in America who "live only by hunting, fishing, and wild fruits," Vattel observed, cannot rightly object when nations that live by cultivating the land appropriate some of the land of the Indians that they have left uncultivated, because the agricultural development of the land supports a much larger human population than would be possible if the hunter-gatherer Indians were allowed to claim all the land for themselves (128-131, 213-217).

Similarly, in his chapter on "Property" in the Second Treatise, Locke recognized that the hunter-gatherer Indians could claim property in the deer that they had hunted and killed or the acorns and apples that they had gathered, because they had mixed their labor with those natural resources and thus appropriated them to themselves (ST, 26-31).  But he also saw that once human beings engaged in agriculture, then they needed to claim property not just in the wild plants they had gathered or the wild animals they had hunted, but in the land that could be rendered productive through agriculture.  "As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property" (ST, 32).  

In appropriating such land for farming, they were obeying the command of God in Genesis 1:28 after He had created human beings in His image: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it."  The English colonists in America used this as Biblical sanction for their taking land from the Indians (Seed 1995: 16-40).  Since the Indians lived by hunting and gathering and were not engaged in agriculture, they had no right to exclude the colonists from appropriating land for farming and thus rendering productive what the Indians had left as the "uncultivated wast of America" (ST, 37).

It has been common for "post-colonial" theorists to cite this as evidence that Locke justified colonial settlers in their oppression of indigenous people and that this shows inherent contradiction in early liberalism--claiming to defend liberty against tyranny but denying the liberty of indigenous people facing colonialist oppression (Tully 1993).

But there are at least four lines of Lockean argument that support American Indian claims for national freedom and independence (Goldie 2015).  The first argument is that many of the American Indians engaged in agriculture: they grew corn, beans, and squash (Hamalainen 2022: 12-13).  And Locke knew this because in his writing about the American colonies, he recognized the importance of "Indian corn" for the colonial settlers (Kammen 1966: 154).  So, if ownership of land depends on cultivation, these agrarian Indians had good claims on their land.

On the other hand, if the Lockean claim on land ownership depends on laboring upon the land, then one can make a good argument that Indian hunting, gathering, and grazing over a certain territory is a rightful claim of territory: occupying the land is a form of labor.  In 1725, John Bulkley insisted that by Locke's standard, the Indians had no claim on their lands because they had not engaged in agricultural cultivation (Bulkley 1725).  But in 1781, Samuel Wharton offered a different interpretation of Locke: "the very act of occupancy alone, being a degree of bodily labour, is from a principle of natural justice, without any consent or compact, sufficient of itself to gain a title."  He also appealed to the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence as justifying the equal rights of the Indian Nations (Wharton 1781: 15-16, 24-25).

A third Lockean argument for the claims of the American Indians is that Locke saw that most of the Indians were no longer in a state of nature, governed by natural property rights, but rather, as indicated above, they were living as Indian Nations with established governments, and "in Governments the Laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions" (ST, 50).  The Europeans recognized the nationhood of the Indians by dealing with them through treaties, which are international agreements between sovereign nations.  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized American Indian nationhood and its territorial claims: "It is just and reasonable . . . that the several nations or tribes of Indians . . . should not be molested or disturbed in the possession of such parts of our dominions and territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to them."

The fourth Lockean argument for the independence of the American Indian nations is the most fundamental:  the same Lockean reasoning for the American colonists revolting against British imperial rule--the reasoning in the Declaration of Independence--can be used by the American Indians to revolt against American imperial rule.

AMERICAN WARS OF INDEPENDENCE

The Declaration of Independence is what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  So, for example, a twenty-dollar bill has monetary value as long as we recognize that a twenty-dollar bill (X) counts as currency (Y) in the monetary system of the United States (C).  Similarly, the American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Address).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.  When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

Similarly, just as the American patriots had formed a confederacy of the "United States" to fight a war of independence from the British Empire, the American Indians formed the Northwest Confederacy of the "United Indian Nations" to fight a war of independence from the newly emerging American Empire in 1783.  That phase of the war came to an end with their defeat in the battle at Fallen Timbers in 1794, which forced them to sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which opened two-thirds of the Ohio Country to American settlement.

Although Brant had insisted that American Indian Independence was granted to them by the Great Spirit, it seemed that the God of Armies had not favored the Northwest Indian Confederacy.

THE GREAT SPIRIT'S CHOSEN PEOPLES FIGHT HOLY WARS OF INDEPENDENCE

Brant's appeal to the Great Spirit as supporting American Indian resistance to European and American colonialism expressed a religious cosmology of Indian resistance that had arisen in the 18th century among some Indian prophetic mystics.  This continued in the 19th century as new Indian prophets had supernatural visions of the Creator or the Great Spirit promising His providential care for the American Indians in their holy war for independence from the white colonial imperialists.  This series of Indian prophets included Neolin (the Delaware Prophet), Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet), and Kenekuk (the Kickapoo Prophet) (Cave 1999; Mohammedi 2002).

One of the persistent themes in this prophetic teaching was that while God had created all human beings, He had created them to live in separate groups in different parts of the world.  Roger Williams heard this from the Narragansett Indians early in the 17th century: "although they do not deny that Englishman's God made English men and the Heavens and Earth where the English come from.  Yet, they also believe their Gods made them and the Heaven and the Earth where they live" (Williams 2019: 108).  Later prophets reported mystical visions of the Great Spirit who taught them that He had created Indians, Negroes, and whites separately, and favored the Indians and the Negroes.

Sometime around 1762, Neolin had a vision of ascending into Heaven and seeing the Master of Light, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.  (This resembles the mystical vision of Saint Paul who ascended into Heaven.)  The Master of Light condemned the Indians for being corrupted by the vices of the white people.  He declared that to regain His favor, the Indians would have to expel the Europeans from the Indian lands.  He told Neolin: "As to those who come to trouble your lands, --drive them out, make war upon them.  I do not love them at all; they know me not, and are my enemies. Send them back to the lands which I have created and let them stay there."  Later, Neolin reported this vision to his people and promised them that "the Great Spirit will give success to our arms.  He will give us strength to conquer our enemies" (Cave 1999: 273).

In 1763, the Odawa (Ottawa) war leader Pontiac brought together many of the Indian tribes in the lower Great Lakes region to form a confederacy to fight against the British and to expel them from their lands.  Pontiac was a shrewd military leader.  As many as eight small British forts were captured, and three major forts--Fort Pitt, Fort Detroit, and Fort Niagara--were put to siege but not captured.

Although the Indians did not defeat the British, they did fight to a military stalemate that was ended by a treaty in 1766.  Pontiac's War was the first pan-tribal confederacy of Indians fighting the first of a series of wars of independence.  The Northwest Indian War was the second of those wars.

The third of those Indian wars of independence was also sparked by an Indian prophet.  Beginning in 1805, the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa fell into an ecstatic trance in which he saw the Master of Life in Heaven.  He began preaching sermons about a new religion that combined elements of Christianity with the traditional Shawnee religion.  He taught his people that they needed to return to traditional Shawnee ways, to reject the corrupt practices of the white people, and to fight against the American settlers who were stealing their land.  He attracted a large group of followers who gathered in western Ohio near Greenville.  He was criticized by some Indian leaders who thought it was foolish to challenge the white settlers with violent resistance, and that it was more prudent to compromise with them and seek some peaceful accommodation with them.  Tenskwatawa charged these rivals to his leadership with being witches who should be punished (Mohammedi 2002).

                                                   George Catlin's Portrait of Tenskwatawa

In 1806, General William Henry Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory, and he was disturbed by the reports of Tenskwatawa's accusing some Indians in Indiana of practicing witchcraft and ordering that they be tortured and executed.  Harrison denounced this as barbarous.  He also told the Indians that they should test the power of this "notorious imposter."  On April 18, he wrote a letter to them that was published in newspapers advising them: "If he is really a prophet, ask him to cause the sun to stand still--the moon to alter its course--the rivers to cease to flow--or the dead to rise from their graves.  If he does these things, you may then believe that he has been sent from God."  

This was a big mistake because he had forgotten that astronomers had predicted a total eclipse of the sun that would pass over the lower Great Lakes area on June 16, 1806.  Tenskwatawa had heard about this from the scientists who were setting up observation stations across Indiana and Illinois.  So, after Harrison's letter had been published, Tenskwatawa said that the Great Spirit was angry at Harrison; and that as a sign of His anger, on June 16, He would hide the Sun at noon in His hand, and the day would turn dark.  This miracle confirmed that he was a true prophet.

In 1809, Harrison began to push the Indians into signing a treaty for selling some of their lands that could be opened to white settlers.  Some Indian leaders signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne that ceded some extensive lands north of Vincennes along the Wabash River.  

Tecumseh, a Shawnee political leader and brother of Tenskwatawa, denounced the treaty.  Like Brant, 25 years earlier, Tecumseh argued that the Indians should form an intertribal confederacy that would refuse to sell any lands unless all the tribes agreed and that would go to war to defend their lands.  He also invoked his brother's religious visions in claiming that the Great Spirit would give His divine sanction to their war.  Tecumseh traveled widely as he spoke to different tribes trying to persuade them to join the confederacy.  Many Indians moved to Prophetstown, north of what is now Lafayette, Indiana, where Tenskwatawa has established a city for his followers.

On November 7, 1811, Harrison led an army to Prophetstown that fought Tenskwatawa's warriors, defeated them, and burned the city.  This became known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, named after the Tippecanoe River.

Tecumseh continued to build his confederacy with the support of British allies.  In the War of 1812, he led his Indians in fighting in Canada on the side of the British.  Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of Thames in Canada in 1813.

All of these wars of Indian independence, as led by people like Pontiac, Brant, and Tecumseh, were inspired by the religious belief that the Great Spirit would give the Indians victory in war, and thus they were what Locke had called an Appeal to Heaven.  But the failure of the Indians to win these wars suggested to some Indians that either the Great Spirit was not on their side, or that the Indian prophets in their mystical visions had misunderstood the true message of the Great Spirit.  The Kickapoo Prophet Kenekuk then had his own vision of the Great Spirit, who advised that the Indians should take a stance of peaceful coexistence with American culture and nonviolent resistance to American imperialism, which would allow them to preserve their tribal cultural traditions.  

The life of American Indian tribes today shows the success of this strategy for the cultural evolution of American Indian life through adaptation to American liberal pluralism so that the Indian tribes have survived and even thrived.

KENEKUK AND THE VERMILLION KICKAPOOS

                                                        George Catlin's Portrait of Kenekuk

The Kickapoos are an Algonquin-language indigenous tribe originating in the lower Great Lakes region, particularly along the southern Wabash River near what is today Terre Haute, Indiana.  The Vermillion Kickapoos are a distinct band of Kickapoos who by the early 19th century were living along the Vermillion River in eastern Illinois.

Kenekuk was a Vermillion Kickapoo who as a young man was a hard-drinking ne'er-do-well who was thrown out of his band after he killed his uncle in a drunken rage.  After a time of wandering among frontier settlements, begging for food and shelter, he was finally taken in by a charitable Catholic priest who instructed him in Christianity and the ways of the white people.  Kenekuk then decided that he must atone for his past sins, swear off drinking, and preach the word of God to the Kickapoos.  He was welcomed back into his Kickapoo band.  And by 1816, he had emerged as a leading chief (Herring 1985; 1988).

Kenekuk became a charismatic preacher who claimed to have received from the Great Spirit a religion that combined elements of Catholic Christianity and traditional Kickapoo religious beliefs.  His followers believed in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.  They worshipped Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints.  But they also practiced traditional Indian singing and dancing in their ceremonies.

To maintain the stable order of the community, Kenekuk taught them that they must abstain from all alcohol because drunkards would be punished in Hell.  Their sobriety saved them from the ravages of alcoholism that had ruined so many Indian tribes.

He also taught them that they should be hard-working farmers.  Unlike other Indian tribes, the Kickapoo men gave up hunting, gathering, and the warrior's ethos, so that they could devote themselves to farming, along with the women.

Having seen that the violent anti-Americanism of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had been disastrous for the Indians, Kenekuk taught his followers to practice peaceful coexistence with the white frontier settlers.  They should love their neighbors as themselves and turn the other cheek in response to attacks.  But he also taught them to stand up for their rights to religious liberty, to their tribal lands held in common, and to the survival of their Kickapoo Indian culture.

Although Kenekuk's Kickapoos were resolute in defending their eastern Illinois homeland, in obedience to the Great Spirit's command that they should never sell tribal lands, in 1832 they were forced by pressure from President Jackson's Indian Removal Bill and the public reaction to the Black Hawk War of 1832 to sign the Treaty of Castor Hill that ceded all Indian claims to Illinois lands, which compelled them to move west of the Mississippi.

In 1833 they settled on the west bank of the Missouri River a few miles north of Fort Leavenworth.  They reestablished their customary way of life in the new land, with promises in the treaty that the federal government would provide money, food, and farming tools.  They soon became some of the most prosperous Indian farmers in America.

Many Protestant and Catholic missionaries came to their land in the attempt to convert them into orthodox Christians.  But their devotion to the Prophet and his distinctive syncretic religion could not be broken.

Kenekuk died in 1852 from smallpox.  But even after his death, the Kickapoo abstinence from drinking and other vices, their agricultural work ethic, and their religious unity created a social solidarity in preserving their tribal culture against white encroachments on their lands.

While most of the Indian tribes in Kansas were forced to move out to make way for white settlers, the small Kickapoo reservation remains today as one of only three Indian reservations in the state.

INDIGENOUS IMPERIALISM

So far, I have written about the American Indian fight for independence and resistance to conquest as if it were a binary struggle between Indians and settlers.  But that is not true.  Indigenous tribes fighting for their independence were fighting as much against other tribes as they were against colonial powers.  And tribes allied with other tribes to fight against yet other tribes.  Some tribes committed genocide against their neighboring tribes.  Tribes conquering other tribes often enslaved those they had subjugated.  Moreover, there is plenty of archaeological and ethnographic evidence that intertribal warfare, conquest, and enslavement pervaded the history of the North American Indians long before the arrival of Europeans (Chacon and Mendoza 2007).

And while we commonly think of the Indians as fighting against European or American imperialism, much of the Indian fight against imperialism was against the indigenous imperialism of other Indian tribes.  Consider, for example, the indigenous empires established by the Powhatans, the Iroquois, the Lakotas, and the Comanches.

In 1607, when the English colonists landed in Virginia and established Jamestown, they were surrounded by the Powhatan people, who were under the rule of the Powhatan Empire (Hamalainen 2022: 59-69).  The Powhatans were ruled by Wahunsenacawh, the paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy with the title of mamanatowick, which suggested manito--his "spiritual power."  He was quioccosuk, a "god on Earth," ruling by divine right over his empire.  He had subjugated several rival nations, who were forced to pay tribute to him--providing soldiers and over eighty percent of their possessions.  He ruled over more than thirty towns and twenty thousand people.  He had as many as a hundred wives.  His ten-year-old daughter was known to the English as Pocahontas.  Captain John Smith observed that "the form of their Commonwealth is a Monarchical government, one as Emperor rules over many Kings or Governors."  The will of the chief ruler "is a law and must be obeyed: not only as a King, but as half a God they esteem him.  His inferior Kings whom they call Werowances, are tied to rule by customs, and have power of life and death at their command."

At about this same time, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were beginning to expand by conquest in the eastern Great Lakes region to become the dominant imperial power in the Eastern Woodlands by the middle of the seventeenth century (Hamalainen 2022: 97-141).  Previously, I have written about how the Huron were devastated by Iroquois attacks, which forced the Hurons who survived to abandon their native territory, which was taken over by the Iroquois.  At least a dozen Indian nations were forced by Iroquois expansion to abandon their ancient homelands and retreat into the western Great Lakes region along the southern shore of Lake Superior and the western shore of Lake Michigan.  This was the first large-scale westward expansion of a conquering people in early American history.

                                                         Expansion of the Iroquois Empire

The largest westward expansion of Indians west of the Mississippi was by the Lakota people, who eventually transformed themselves into one of the most powerful empires in North American history (Hamalainen 2019; 2022: 400-408).  The Lakotas are one of three subcultures of the Sioux, along with the Eastern Dakota and Western Dakota.  They might have originated in the Great Lakes region.  They migrated west along the Missouri River Valley until the first Lakota explorers arrived in Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, in 1776.  They identified Paha Sapa as their spiritual birthplace.  It also provided the natural resources they needed, such as pastureland for their horses and bison herds for their hunting.  But several Indian nations believed that the Great Spirit had given the Black Hills to them.  And so the Lakotas had to form an alliance with the Cheyennes and Arapahos to push the Crows, Kiowas, and Shoshones out of the Black Hills.  Later, they expelled the Pawnees, Omahas, and Otoes from the river valleys of the central plains.  According to the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), the Platte River was the southern border of Lakota territory.

                                                         Lakota Sioux Treaty Lands

And yet the Lakotas claimed a two-hundred-mile southward extension of their territory to the Arkansas River by the right of conquest.  The Oglala leader Black Hawk explained: "These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows, but we whipped these nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians."  This proved that the Great Spirit was on the side of the Lakota Empire.

To the south of the Lakotas, there was another indigenous empire--the Comanches.

                                                                  The Comanche Empire

The Comanches expanded their empire by attacking the Spanish, Mexican, and white settlers and also other Indian tribes such as the Lipan Apaches.  Eventually, what the Spanish called Comancheria encompassed forty thousand Comanches living on a quarter million miles of land, making it the largest indigenous territory in North America.  In 1846 and 1847, the Comanches even sent thousands of soldiers deep into Mexico--attacking the city of Queretaro, only 135 miles north of Mexico City (Hamalainen 2008; 2022: 409-29).

THE EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY OF POWER

As Pekka Hamalainen has observed, Darwinian science allows us to explain the evolutionary ecology of Lakota and Comanche power that came from harnessing the stored energy from the Sun in horses, bison, domesticated plants, and human slave labor (Hamalainen 2022: 12-15, 249-58, 421-23).  (I have pursued a similar line of thought in writing about the Big History of photosynthesis and the cosmic evolution of complexity as measured by energy rate density.)

The modern domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus) is a subspecies of the wild horse (Equus ferus).  The wild horse evolved over 45 million years ago.  Humans began domesticating horses around 4,000 BCE.  There were horses in North America until around 10,000 years ago, when they went extinct there.  They were reintroduced into North America by the European colonists.  When they arrived in the North American West early in the eighteenth century through a trade chain from Spanish New Mexico, the Native Americans in the west entered a new technological age.

Previously, the Indians had domesticated the dog.  But the domesticated horse was a bigger and stronger dog and a better energy converter.  Horses transformed the Sun's energy stored through photosynthesis in the biomass of the continental grasslands into immediately available muscle power, which the Indians could harness for hunting bison and waging war on their enemies.

The grasses on the North American Great Plains coevolved with large grazers like the bison.  And the bison were good at converting the energy stored in the grasses into an animal body that was a source of meat, bones, and hides for Indian hunters.  As they became more dependent on the bison meat as a source of protein, the hunters reduced their gathering of plants.  They developed trade relations with Indian farmers so that they could trade bison meat and hides for corn (maize), squash, and beans, which the farmers had genetically modified through domestication.

In this dependence on domesticated horses, the Lakota and Comanche empires belong to the deep history--over 2,000 years--of how warhorses became essential to the building and sustaining of great empires--from the Persian Empire of Cyrus to the Mongol Empires of Genghis Khan and Timur (Chaffetz 2024).

Many Indian tribes--including the Lakota and Comanche--also used Indian slaves as like domesticated animals, which was another way of harnessing the energy of the Sun stored in the muscle power of the slaves that could be put to useful work.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS IN A LOCKEAN LIBERAL SOCIETY

By the 1880s, the U.S. Army had defeated the American Indian warriors.  This was beneficial for the Indians insofar as it ended the intertribal warfare and indigenous imperial conquest that had run through thousands of years of Indian history in North America.  But this benefit brought with it the cost of surrendering the Indians to American imperial conquest, and this subjugation made them vulnerable to violence and oppression.  Over the past 50 years, some historians have even spoken of the Americans as committing "genocide" against the Indians, so that Native American life was essentially extinguished --perhaps finally, as Dee Brown argued (in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)--with the U.S. Cavalry's 1890 massacre of more than 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee.

But recently, some scholars of American Indian history--including American Indian scholars like David Treuer (in his Heartbeat of Wounded Knee)--have complained that this story of the "dead Indian" denies or demeans the vibrant life of American Indians in America today.  The story of American Indian genocide is refuted by the simple fact of the stunning demographic growth and diversity of American Indian lives today.  As many as 5 million Americans identify themselves as American Indians today, which probably exceeds the population of Indians in North America in 1800.  Over the past 50 years, the average income of American Indians has been rising, and the poverty rate has dropped.  Indian-owned businesses have been growing.  The number of college-educated Indians has increased.  The youthful reservation population has been growing.  But most Indians live in urban areas.  Many move back and forth between a reservation and the city.  Indians are actively engaged in preserving Indian cultural traditions, including American Indian religious practices and beliefs.  In the 135 years since Wounded Knee, the Indians have not only survived, but they have even lived flourishing lives

As Treuer indicates, there are two reasons for this.  The first is that while the Indians' violent resistance to conquest was defeated in battle by the U.S. Army, their nonviolent resistance to oppressive subjugation has succeeded in securing their rights as American citizens to life and liberty.  This illustrates what I have argued about the importance of Lockean nonviolent resistance to oppression, which explains what John Adams meant when he said that America's Revolution of Independence was achieved "in the minds of the people" in the resistance movement from 1660 to 1775, long before any blood was shed at Lexington.

The second reason why American Indians have been able to live good lives as Indians in America is that a Lockean pluralist society allows for a culturally diverse social order in which one can live as both an American and an Indian.

Treuer conveys both of these points in this passage:

While Wounded Knee was the last major armed conflict between Indian tribes and the U.S. government, there have been many battles since 1890: battles fought by Indian parents to keep their children, and by the children far away at boarding schools to remember and keep their families and, by extension, their tribes, close to their hearts; battles of Indian leaders to defeat allotment and other destructive legislation; battles of activists to make good on the promises their leaders couldn't or wouldn't honor; battles of millions of present-day Indians to be Indian and modern at the same time.  We are, in a sense, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those hundreds who survived Wounded Knee and who did what was necessary to survive, at first, and then--bit by bit--to thrive (453).

When he speaks of the battle of Indians "to be Indian and modern at the same time," what he calls "modern" is what I call--in my convoluted professorial language--Lockean liberal symbolic niche construction, which is based on Adam Smith's principle of "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice."  

In other words, American Indians have discovered that they can be citizens in America's bourgeois pluralist society while preserving their Indian tribal identity.  This shows the evolution of Indigenous peoples through cultural adaptation so that they can live and live well as American Indians.

In 1877, the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph surrendered to General Nelson Miles in northern Montana.  Two years later, Chief Joseph gave a speech in Washington, D.C., which was directed to the government and to the general American public.  Treuer quotes the entire speech, which includes this passage:

I know that my race must change.  We can not hold our own with the white men as we are.  We only ask an even chance to live as other men live.  We ask to be recognized as men.  We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men.  If the Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law.  If the white man breaks the law, punish him also.

Let me be a free man--free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself--and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

That's the American Indian's Declaration of Independence. 

 

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