The alliance, with its particular blending of material interests and cultural logics, always served political purposes. It excluded the British from the pays d'en haut; it protected Canada; ideally, it preserved peace among the villages and distributed goods to Onontio's children. At one end of the spectrum, the alliance served imperial politics; at the other end, village politics. But the converse was also true. The alliance was vulnerable to changes in imperial politics, and it was vulnerable to rivalries within the villages. In the 1740s and 1750s, the direct clash of empires, largely absent for a generation, exacerbated bitter political rivalries within villages. Rebellion racked the alliance, and the result was the rise of what the French called Indian republics.

For eighteenth-century French administrators, all the connotations of the word republic were pejorative. Republics destroyed hierarchy, order, and authority. The Indian republics shattered existing political arrangements, earning both British and French distrust. The republicans were a potentially volatile mix of the discontented from all over the pays d'en haut and the East. As Conrad Weiser noted of Logstown, one of the leading republican villages, the inhabitants were “very jealous at one another, they being of so many different nations. Each of them pretending to have as wise people as the rest.” They lived together as much from fear as from friendship.