Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed. How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.