The Declaration of Independence is venerated for its poetic language and universalist prologue, with the soaring, “self-evident” truth that all men have the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But, less famously, the Declaration is also a set of specific grievances. There are 27 in total, building to a defining final charge against the Crown: The King of England has attempted to afflict frontiersmen with “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

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The most famous text of the Revolution culminates not with an idealistic wish but with a derogatory indictment, legal as well as moral. The drafters drew upon nascent doctrines of international law and made England’s incitement of “Savages” the ultimate unjust act against a “Free and Independent” people. In this so-called Age of Reason, Native Americans were charged with having none at all. They were not only lawless but also irrational, incapable of self-governance, and lacking moral capacity.

Jeffrey Ostler: The shameful final grievance of the Declaration of Independence

This one-dimensional vision of Native Americans was new. Having lived alongside Native communities for generations—during war, peace, and constant trade—the colonists had ample evidence that they were capable of self-government. Native people maintained distinct customs, laws, and forms of sovereignty, many of them in defiance of both British and colonial authorities. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the nations of the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Confederacy centralized political, military, and diplomatic practices. Throughout the 1740s and ’50s, Benjamin Franklin commented on the durable forms of union exercised by the Iroquois, whose confederacy, as he wrote, “has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble.”

In fact, Native self-governance was so evident and persistent that it became a source of colonial frustration.