a council with the Iroquois Indians had been held. Here were raised the German regiments, including the Body Guard of General Washington, and here also the people first saluted the leader of the Continental armies, by the title so familiar to them, "Father of his Country." In this region, such leaders as Generals Hand and Muhlenburg, Colonels Hartley and Hubley, and Major Burckhardt arose to lead freedom's hosts. For a time it was the national capital, for the Continental Congress met here while the British possessed Philadelphia. Here, or near by, the Hessian mercenaries employed by the German king of Great Britain, George III. captured by Washington at Trenton, coming among people and clergymen of their own tongue and stock, were shown and convinced of the badness of the cause into which they had been impressed and the meanness of the work in which they had been ignorantly engaged. Thousands left the service they learned to hate, including Fritz, Washington's coachman, and Custer, the grandfather of our brilliant cavalry leader—"the boy general with the golden locks." Of thirty thousand Hessians who came to America, only seventeen thousand returned to Germany. Here lived and were buried not only James Buchanan, last president of the slave-holding American republic, but also Thaddeus Stephens. The unquailing enemy of human servitude and champion of the rights of man, lived, laboured, and died in Lancaster, his sepulchre being still within the city's limits. Conestoga river, near by, gave its name to a tribe of Indians, deadly enemies of
