From the earliest settlement of the country by the whites, down to 1817, the Colonies, and afterwards the thirteen States, met the emergencies of Indian contact as they arose. The parties to negotiation were often ill-defined, and the forms of procedure much as happened. Not only did each Colony, prior to 1774, conduct its own Indian relations, generally with little or no reference to the engagements or the interests of its white neighbors; but isolated settlements and even enterprising individuals made their own peace with the savages, or received the soil by deed from its native proprietors. Nor on the part of the Indians was there much more regard for strict legitimacy. Local chieftains were not infrequently ready to convey away lands that did not belong to them; and when a Colony grown powerful wished a pretext for usurpation, almost any Indian would do to make a treaty with or get a title from. It is scarcely necessary to say of negotiations thus conducted, that they embraced no general scheme of Indian relations; that they aimed invariably at the accomplishment of immediate and more or less local objects, and often attained these at the cost of much embarrassment in the future, and even at the expense of neighboring settlements and colonies. Throughout the history of Colonial transactions, we find few traces of any thing like impatience of the claims of the Indians to equality in negotiation and in intercourse. Neither the power nor the character of the aborigines was then despised as now. Strong in his native illusions, his warlike prestige unbroken, the Indian still retained all that natural dignity of bearing which has been found so impressive even in his decline. The early literature of the country testifies to the disposition of the people to hold the more romantic view of the Indian character, even where the animosities of race were deadliest; nor does it seem that the general sentiment of the Colonies regarded the necessity of treating on equal terms with the great confederacies of that day as in any degree more derogatory than the civilized powers of Europe in the same period esteemed the necessity of maintaining diplomatic relations with the great Cossack power of the North. Indeed, the treaty with the Delawares in 1778 actually contemplated the formation of a league of friendly tribes under the hegemony of the Delawares, to constitute the fourteenth State of the confederation then in arms against Great Britain, with a proportional representation in Congress. And this was proposed, not by men accustomed to see negroes voting at the polls, and even sitting in the Senate of the United States, but by our conservative and somewhat aristocratic ancestors.