Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. 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.”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. Pamphleteers often decried the Crown’s diplomacy with Native nations, as well as its inability to control them. Across the colonies, and particularly beyond the Appalachians, Native independence was seen as a threat to colonists, who had begun to envision their own claims to the same lands as necessary to their independence and sovereignty.The colonists sought not just territory, but unchallenged dominion. To achieve this, they needed to erase the legitimacy of Native governance and justify violent dispossession. It was precisely because Native societies mirrored some of the colonists’ own ideals (autonomy, law, liberty) that they had to be cast as savages. By 1776, American colonists had positioned Native peoples—and their resistance to conquest—as the antithesis of their own vision of an enlightened society: merciless, uncivilized, and geared toward “undistinguished destruction.” The founding documents of the United States may have been modeled on Enlightenment philosophy, but they were informed by the conflict among settlers, Native nations, and the Crown.Understanding this history is not a matter of diminishing the Revolution’s accomplishments, but of recognizing the contested ground from which they arose—and the Native lives, lands, and liberties they attempted to foreclose.The origins of the American Revolution stretch back further than the fabled year of 1776, and the poetics of the Declaration. The year 1763 stands out because of the momentous Treaty of Paris, which transferred most of New France to the English, more than doubling the Crown’s claims to North America. Now a person could travel from the Florida Panhandle to Hudson’s Bay and remain within the purported realm of King George III. The Crown (and its colonists) claimed all lands east of the Mississippi River, despite knowing that Native peoples governed much of this territory. The treaty would eventually inform the territorial boundaries of the United States, but Native dominion remained even as land transferred between European countries—a geopolitical reality absent from most current textbooks.In the summer of 1763, the Great Lakes region exploded when Indigenous villagers under the Odawa leader Obwandiyag (also known as Pontiac) destroyed a series of English forts. Pontiac, born around 1720, had experienced the withdrawal of French trade and authority and now rallied other Native villagers to fill the power vacuum. This Native resistance compelled British officials to the bargaining table—trade would eventually resume—and the Crown fatefully altered its own laws to accommodate Native resistance. In October, a royal proclamation prohibited colonial settlements past the Appalachians.Natives “with whom We are connected, and who live under Our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed,” King George declared.Early in the Revolutionary era, then, recognition of Native sovereignty both shaped the laws of the Crown and limited the prospects of its colonial subjects—kindling their eventual rebellion. Rather than accept new English prohibitions, and the Crown’s growing diplomacy with Pontiac, colonists formed new resentments, from which sprung new ideas, politics, and militancy.This map, issued by British General Thomas Gage in 1766, declared lands west of the Appalachians “reserved for the Indians.” (Library of Congress)Around that same time, an anonymous author published “Some Hints to People in Power, on the Present Melancholy Situation of Our Colonies in North America,” which was addressed to the King’s secretaries of state and concerned the “destructive Tumult” that was “raging on our Frontiers.” The author advised making Natives “dependent upon us” in order to thwart their supremacy over colonial farmers, whose commitment to a sedentary pastoral life rendered them slow and prone to attack. For as long “as the Bark of the Trees furnishes them with Shelter, and their endless Forests and numerous Rivers with Food, they know they cannot be seriously distressed,” the author concluded, arguing that Native peoples’ relationship with nature gave them advantages over a “civilized and settled Race of Men.” The pamphlet exposed a paradox in colonial reasoning: While colonists viewed Indigenous peoples as “savage” and inferior, they simultaneously recognized—and some even envied—their different forms of government and social organization.Across the Pennsylvania colony, men formed militia units. The frontiersman James Smith and his “Black Boys” militia donned Native dress, darkened their faces for concealment, and attacked supply trains from the Crown destined for Pontiac’s forces. In December, another militia unit known as the “Paxton Boys” massacred a Conestoga community in Lancaster County for allegedly ferrying information and supplies to Pontiac’s warriors. Benjamin Franklin, then a member of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, published a pamphlet condemning the attack as lawless and immoral. In his description of the event, “White People” were the “Barbarians” guilty of “Wickedness,” while Natives had historically demonstrated “Kindness and Hospitality.” The Paxton Boys, Franklin said, had brutalized the innocent Conestoga out of pure racism.“The only Crime of these poor Wretches seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin,” he wrote.Prior to the Seven Years’ War—which began in the mid-1750s and involved conflict among France, Great Britain, and Native tribes—the term white people had rarely been used. It had appeared a little more than once a year in colonial newspapers. During the war, however, there was a more than tenfold increase in newspapers’ use of the term. In 1757, George Washington, then an officer for Britain, wrote to a fellow colonel about a Cherokee conspiracy to attack “Traders and white people.” In Natives, white colonists found yet another group to define themselves against.When James Smith defended his militia’s violence, he framed British treaties with Native nations as alliances with “the enemies of Mankind.” In doing so, he revealed the new ethos of the era. In print, spoken verse, and everyday parlance, white people became synonymous with mankind, a notion not universal—as the Declaration would have one believe—but exclusionary.This racial logic was embedded in the founding documents of the United States. In 1776, Smith represented interior interests at Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention in Philadelphia, helping draft the state’s first constitution. The document, in its opening paragraph, scolded the King for employing “savages and slaves” in a “cruel and unjust war” against the commonwealth—an echo of the final grievance of the Declaration of Independence, adopted mere steps away, 12 weeks earlier.The founding documents thus served a dual purpose: to oppose both tyranny and “savagery.” Colonists saw themselves besieged by an oppressive monarch abroad and by violent “savages” on their frontiers, with no guarantee that they would share in “the blessings of peace” or the profits of “victory and conquest,” as it was phrased in the July 1775 Olive Branch Petition signed by Thomas Jefferson and other delegates to the Second Continental Congress.In essence, their Revolution was not only for liberty but also for the ability to expand and to govern the lands and resources of Native nations—lands that they felt they and the Crown had “won” on the battlefield, and that they would soon win again by rejecting the Crown and declaring sovereignty.The Revolution was not, however, a contest between the order of the state (reason) and the perceived disorder of nature (savagery). It was a contest between competing visions of governance and law, and between colonial sovereignty and the sovereign traditions of Native nations.The Declaration of Independence opened the world to democratic possibility, sparking a wave of revolutions, yet it also marked the narrowing of political possibilities within the nascent United States. The very document that proclaimed a new kind of liberty also stifled other forms of governance, particularly those practiced by Native nations, which became outsiders to the new American body politic. Across eastern North America, European forms of authority and landownership were now imposed on Native communities, displacing matriarchal clan systems that had long governed village politics and intertribal diplomacy.In the story of America, Native peoples are reduced to a perpetual “thorn in the side” of the state, in the words of the political scientist James C. Scott, who argued that modern states were built to manage nonmigratory, easily categorized populations that could be taxed, conscripted, and surveilled. Much of American history has involved efforts to impose constrained visions of liberty—rooted in individualism, private property, and patriarchal norms—on Native peoples. Settler societies, like the colonies in 1776, are legible to a state. In contrast, Indigenous communities exist outside that frame, with fluid, seasonal, and relational systems of economics and politics that remain hard to regulate and control. Native nations have long fought to secure fishing and hunting rights through treaties, and therefore preserve migratory economies and animal resources.Studying the contradictions of the Revolution disrupts the myth of a singular founding moment and reveals a contested process. Thousands of Native people fought and an untold number died during the Revolutionary War, not all in opposition to the colonists; Daniel Nimham, a Wappinger Indian who was made a captain in the Continental Army, perished with colonial troops while leading the Stockbridge Indian Company at the Battle of Kingsbridge (in what is now the Bronx) in August 1778. And if Native peoples formed the “climax of the Declaration,” as the historian Robert Parkinson put it, then their history is central to the country’s. Native nations retain sovereignty despite colonization, and acknowledging this makes them parallel rather than peripheral to the American story—which, in turn, gives the Revolution fuller dimension and meaning.The United States continued to grow after its founding by displacing and subordinating generations of Native nations. A century after the Declaration, federal assimilation programs removed Native children from their families, placed them in institutions, and subjected them to abuse and indoctrination. The goal was clear: to break familial and cultural ties and instill new values. Depriving nations of their children is how peoples are destroyed, which is why the United Nations lists this tactic among its definitions for genocide.Textbooks have inched toward acknowledging these histories, yet they still fall short of explaining how “liberty and freedom” for some was often used to justify the conquest and dispossession of others. Indeed, the lofty ideals at the core of our founding documents risk becoming hollow if they are stripped of their historical failures and limitations. Rather than smoothing over the Declaration’s paradoxes—which Native peoples have long sought to expose—Americans should confront them directly. As the Lakota author Luther Standing Bear reflected in 1933, recalling his time at the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “I can well remember when Indians in those days were stoned upon the streets as were the dogs that roamed them. We were ‘savages,’ and all who had not come under the influence of the missionary were ‘heathen.’ ”Standing Bear’s words, written a full century and a half after the Declaration’s signing, remind us that the phrase merciless Indian Savages was never just rhetorical; it was strategic in its vilification. The U.S. Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment both explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed,” as did civil-rights laws of the Reconstruction era. Not until 1924 were Native peoples granted U.S. citizenship through congressional legislation, in part to advance Indian assimilation and alienate more reservation lands.Reckoning with this complex legacy requires a reframing of American independence, nationhood, and the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Perhaps, upon its 250th anniversary, the United States can envision the Declaration as one of interdependence—expansive enough to confront its own contradictions and inclusive enough to honor the sovereignties it sought to erase.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “The 27th Grievance.”