War & Peace Quote by Hiawatha

There is a deliberate calm in Hiawatha's phrasing, and that calm is the point. "All the other chiefs and tribes" is less a census than a pressure tactic: unanimity is invoked to make dissent feel like isolation. The sentence performs coalition-building in real time, turning peace from a private virtue into a public standard. You can hear the diplomatic move: if everyone has accepted the Great Law of Peace, the remaining holdouts are not merely unconvinced; they are out of step with the future.

The "Great Law of Peace" functions as more than an agreement. It is branding, moral architecture, and constitutional claim. By naming the law as "great", the line elevates it above ordinary treaties that can be revised when power shifts. Hiawatha is not selling a truce; he is legitimizing a framework meant to outlast individual leaders and grudges. The second sentence tightens the pitch: "They now live in peace with one another" offers a present-tense proof of concept. Peace is framed as lived experience, not aspirational rhetoric.

Context matters here: the formation of a confederacy among previously warring nations demanded a language that could bridge sovereignty without erasing it. The subtext is that peace is achievable without submission, and that unity can be engineered through shared law rather than a single dominating chief. In two spare lines, Hiawatha turns diplomacy into inevitability: join, and you join a working order; refuse, and you choose instability.