Subordinate to the Congress of Sachems were the noted chiefs, such as Red Jacket, Big Kettle, Corn Planter and others who influenced the councils with their oratory.
Women were recognized by them as having rights in the government of the nation, being represented in council by chiefs, known as their champions. Thus they became factors in war or peace, and were granted special rights in the concurrence or interference in the sale of lands, claiming that the land belonged equally to the tillers of the soil, and its defenders. The equality of rights granted women was one of the principal factors of strength in their confederacy, or union.
Their orators studied euphony in the arrangement of their words. Their graceful attitudes and gestures made their discourse deeply impressive. A straight, commanding figure, with blanket thrown over the shoulder, the naked arm raised in gesture, would, to use the words of an early historian, "give no faint picture of Rome in her early days."
A difference existed between the Iroquois and other tribes with respect to oratory. No others have left records of models of eloquence except in single instances on rare occasions.
Red Jacket, Logan and Corn Planter were orators, who have by their eloquence perpetuated their names on the pages of history.
In the happy constitution of the ruling body and the effective security of the people from misgovernment, the confederacy stands unrivaled. The prevailing spirit was freedom.
They were secured all the liberty necessary for the united state and fully appreciated its value.
The red man was always free from political bondage. He was convinced that man was born free; that no person had any right to deprive him of that liberty. Undoubtedly the reason for this was the absence from the Indian mind of a desire for gain—that great passion of the white man—"His blessing and his curse in its use and abuse."
The hunter wants of the Indian, absence of property in a comparative sense, and the infrequency of crime, dispensed with a vast amount of legislation and machinery incident to the protection of civilized society.
The system upon which the League was founded, as before stated, was a singularly well chosen one, and is highly illustrative of the intellectual character of this people. "It was wisely conceived by the untaught statesman of the forest, who had no precedents to consult, no written lore of ages to refer to, no failures or triumphs of systems of human governments to use as models or comparisons, nothing to prompt them but necessity and emergency."