The Town Hall political meetings of Sam Adam's time in Boston were liberal democracy at its most deliberate. Speeches were made, debated, interjections came from the crowd and bystanders, but in the end democratic consensus was formed. And that consensus was tight enough that the Town Hall system backed a revolution for American independence.

Charles Mann in the final chapter of the book 1491 argues that there was a cultural ethnogenesis between the North East Americans and the constitution and polity of the Native Indian Five Nations. Mann argues that this, along with the enlightenment, affected Massachusettean views of liberty and equality.

The Five Nations were a product of continuing warfare between the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. The story goes that Deganawidah invited the powerful leader Tododoha to break a single arrow. Which he did. Deganawidah then bunlded five arrows together and asked Tododoha to do the same. He could not. Soon after a solar eclipse occurred, effectively sealing the fate of the tribes as independent by fulfilling Deganawida's prophecy of the tribes going into darkness if they did not join and stop the violence.

I do not know much about this, but it appears that the Haudenosaunee established a constitutional government under the Great Law of Peace as the Five Nations in around 1150 AD. The constitution included a constitutionally limited representative parliament where representatives would meet as sachems and then forge out a suitable outcome through unanimous agreement. The sachems, who were male, were chosen by women, who were the heads of the clans. Rather than the liberal view of political equality, there was a political distribution of power along sexual lines.

The northern American colonists came into contact with the Five Nations often and were admirers of their individual liberty, democratic forms and their social equality. Mann argues that ethnogenisis occurred here in the North, though not in the South were the Native American Indians were more hierarchical and autocratic in structure.

Mann argues that there was a free market in liberty where colonists could vote with their feet:

In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists' allegiances. Colonial societes could not become too oppressive, because their members, surrounded by examples of free life - always had the option of voting with their feet.

If is likely that the first British villagers in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterised European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture.

Mann argues that when the Tea Party occurred and Bostonian dressed up as Mohawks tipped tea into the Harbour, the dressing up wasn't to deflect blame. It was a statement for the kind of liberty and social equality they saw in the culture of the Mohawks. They wanted it for America too.

Mann's chapter is contentious. But it is a fascinating challenge to how we view European colonisation of the new world.