How Benjamin Franklin tried—and failed—to form a union | Richard Kreitner | Big Think

How Benjamin Franklin tried—and failed—to form a union

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Most people know the basics of American history and may even be able to name all 13 colonies, but where exactly did the idea to form a union comes from?

Political writer and essayist Richard Kreitner explains how Benjamin Franklin learned the concept from the Iroquois Confederation. When he tried to introduce it to the colonists, however, they "thought it was essentially equivalent to tyranny."

The idea eventually caught on, but not without land disputes and issues of representation, which explains why the US House of Representatives has 435 voting seats while the Senate has just two seats per state, equal for all states regardless of population size—it was a compromise. Kreitner argues that this imbalance may one day rupture the US political system.

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RICHARD KREITNER:

Richard Kreitner was born in Queens, New York, grew up in Wayne, New Jersey, and graduated from McGill University in Montreal. A frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, he has also published articles and essays on history, politics, and culture for Slate, Salon, The Boston Globe, The Baffler, Raritan, and elsewhere. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler's Guide to Literary Locations Around the World (Black Dog & Leventhal) and of a forthcoming history of American disunion (Little, Brown and Company). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Find Richard Kreitner's latest book Break It UpSecession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union at

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TRANSCRIPT:

RICHARD KREITNER: One of the things I was interested in about the colonial era is, ""Where did the colonists get the idea of union from?"" It took them, I think we don't really realize this very often, it took them a century and a half to actually join together. And that was not because nobody really thought of it. That was because they didn't want to. They didn't want to form a union. But the first people who did have the idea of a union, was the Iroquois Confederation. Which was an upstate in New York founded, you know scholars disagree, but many think the middle of the fifteenth century. And the colonists were constantly coming into contact with the Iroquois, because they have this very sophisticated political organization and a really ambitious imperial project, on their own, where they took advantage of a vacuum that formed with the decline of many neighboring tribes. And they often played the English and the French off against one another. So the Iroquois have this league of the five nations, and eventually a sixth nation came up from North Carolina and joined. And that was essentially what we would call today a union or a confederacy, where each nation, the Cayuga, the Seneca, and Oneida, sent a certain number of delegates to a tribal council that met near present day Syracuse, where they adjudicated all their differences that they had with one another, and in that way they were able to prevent wars from breaking out with one another.

Benjamin Franklin learned about this, because one of his jobs as a printer was publishing the treaties from different Indian conferences, that the colonists and their officials had to coordinate disputes that they had between Indians and colonists. And one of those, in one of those treaties that Franklin printed, he saw a speech from Iroquois leader named Canasatego, who gave the speech in Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, saying that ""we the Iroquois figured out union, ""it's time for you the colonists to do so also."" Because he had noticed that different colonists from different colonies were constantly quarreling with one another, and fighting. This is what Franklin was inspired by, to draw up what he called, The Albany Plan of Union, which was presented in 1754. And was the first really full fledged plan to get the colonists to unite. You know, we barely remember these events. But if we remember anything at all, it's the cartoon that Franklin drew up and published in his Philadelphia newspaper to try to convince the colonists to join together, and said ""Join, or Die."" But they rejected his plan. They wanted no part of it. They thought it was essentially equivalent to tyranny. And they threw it out. And Franklin became, you know, very unpopular for a while, and that's when he moved to London. Now ultimately the colonists did take Canasatego's advice and formed a Union. But it was at the Iroquois' expense.

The major issues that were dividing the Americans right when...

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