Without Doors: Native Nations and the Convention

Fordham Law Review Volume 89 Issue 5 Article 3 2021 Without Doors: Native Nations and the Convention Mary Sarah Bilder Founders Professor of Law, Boston College Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mary Sarah Bilder, Without Doors: Native Nations and the Convention, 89 Fordham L. Rev. 1707 (2021). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol89/iss5/3 This Symposium is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Law Review by an authorized editor of FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact . WITHOUT DOORS: NATIVE NATIONS AND THE CONVENTION Mary Sarah Bilder* Wednesday last arrived in this city, from the Cherokee nation, Mr. Alexander Droomgoole, with Sconetoyah, a War Captain, and son to one of the principal Chiefs of that nation. They will leave this place in a few days, for New-York, to represent to Congress some grievances, and to demand an observance of the Treaty of Hopewell, on the Keowee, which they say has been violated and infringed by the lawless and unruly whites on the frontiers. We are informed that a Choctaw King, and a Chickasaw Chief, are also on their way to the New-York, to have a Talk with Congress, and to brighten the chain of friendship. —Pennsylvania Mercury, June 15, 17871 INTRODUCTION The Constitution’s apparent textual near silence with respect to Native Nations is misleading. As this Article reveals, four representatives of Native Nations visited Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Their visit ensured that the Constitution secured the general government’s treaty authority with Native Nations and decisively barred state claims of authority. But, the visits also threatened to disrupt Congress’s passage of the Northwest Ordinance and the vision of nationally sanctioned white settlement. In the process of successfully preventing the representatives from reaching Congress, Secretary at War Henry Knox developed the central tenets of what would * Founders Professor of Law, Boston College Law School. This Article was prepared for the Symposium entitled The Federalist Constitution, hosted by the Fordham Law Review on October 2, 2020, at Fordham University School of Law. I am particularly grateful to Colin G. Calloway, whom I met at Mount Vernon when I was curious about 1787 visits to Philadelphia. Colin wrote, “A delegation of Choctaws led by a chief called Taboca visits Philadelphia and NY in the summer of 1787. There may be more.” Email from Colin G. Calloway, Professor of Hist. & Native Am. Stud., Dartmouth Coll., to author (Sept. 16, 2016) (on file with the Fordham Law Review). My thanks to Gregory Ablavsky, Colin G. Calloway, David Nichols, Greg O’Brien, Charles Weeks, and the Symposium participants, and in particular, to Avi Soifer for his careful reading and suggestions and to Vanessa Bernard and Timothy Conklin for reading an early draft. For assistance with materials, I thank the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Oklahoma Historical Society, Archivo General de Indias, the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, and Laurel Davis, Deena Frazier, Helen Lacouture, and Caitlin Ross. 1. Philadelphia, June 15., PA. MERCURY & UNIVERSAL ADVERTISER, June 15, 1787. 1707 1708 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW [Vol. 89 become the George Washington administration’s early Indian policy: an acceptance of Native Nation sovereignty, disapproval of unauthorized white encroachment, and an attempt to discourage Native Nations from sending additional representatives. In addition to emphasizing the strong national federal government role and Native Nation sovereignty, this history provides evidence that the Framers’ generation without doors—outside the Convention—critically affected the creation of the Constitution as an instrument and a system of government. Figure 1: Back of the State House2 I. A CONSTITUTION OF TREATIES On June 18, 1787, four deputies of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations were in Philadelphia. At the time, their presence was widely reported. They met George Washington and other Philadelphia Convention members, as well as congressional delegates and the secretary at war, Henry Knox. Although their visits have received some discussion by historians, accounts of the Convention entirely overlook their presence.3 2. William Russell Birch, Back of the State House, Philadelphia (illustration) (1800). 3. See, e.g., COLIN G. CALLOWAY, THE INDIAN WORLD OF GEORGE WASHINGTON 306–07 (2018); STANLEY W. HOIG, THE CHEROKEES AND THEIR CHIEFS: IN THE WAKE OF EMPIRE 70– 71 (1998); GREG O’BRIEN, CHOCTAWS IN A REVOLUTIONARY AGE, 1750–1830 (2005); U.S. NAT’L PARK SERV., SIGNERS OF THE CONSTITUTION 53 (Robert G. Ferris ed., 1976) (including an illustration of a newspaper article); Greg O’Brien, The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries on the Post-revolutionary Southern Frontier, 67 J.S. HIST. 39, 67 (2001); Daniel Flaherty, “People to Our Selves”: Chickasaw Diplomacy and Political 2021] NATIVE NATIONS AND THE CONVENTION 1709 The erasure of these deputies has resulted in what is taken to be the relative silence of the Convention on the constitutional relationship with Native Nations. The basic components of the Constitution’s drafting history have been well documented.4 Historian Francis Paul Prucha, for example, wrote that “very little attention was paid to the issue in the Constitutional Convention, and there was no extensive statement about Indians in the Constitution itself.”5 As legal scholar Gregory Ablavsky recently wrote, “[h]istories of the Constitution, even very recent ones, assume this absence reflects Indians’ irrelevance, and so almost entirely omit Natives.”6 The major treatise about Native Nations covers the Convention in one paragraph.7 The absence of Indigenous people from the Convention’s history means that even scholarship emphasizing the broader contextual history of Native Nations is nevertheless relegated to a focus on white political figures.8 This Article shifts traditional analysis. First, I believe that in the summer of 1787, the “Constitution” remained a concept referring to a system of government. The instrument drafted that summer reconfigured the constitution but the instrument was not yet the Constitution itself. The Constitution as an instrument should therefore be interpreted within the larger concept of the Constitution as a system of government. Second, with respect to this Constitution as a system of government, the drafters were hardly the only relevant actors. A larger framing generation drafted the Constitution as a system of government.9 To refer to this context, the delegates used the phrase “without doors”10 and I employ that phrase here. Development in the Nineteenth Century 75–87 (2012) (Ph.D. (...truncated)