nation. The first hunters might come
alone or in couples, but the actual colonization was done not by
individuals, but by groups of individuals. The settlers brought their
families and belongings either on pack-horses along the forest trails,
or in scows down the streams; they settled in palisaded villages, and
immediately took steps to provide both a civil and military
organization. They were men of facts, not theories; and they showed
their usual hard common-sense in making a government. They did not try
to invent a new system; they simply took that under which they had grown
up, and applied it to their altered conditions. They were most familiar
with the government of the county; and therefore they adopted this for
the framework of their little independent, self-governing commonwealths
of Watauga, Cumberland, and Transylvania. [Footnote: The last of these
was the most pretentious and short-lived and least characteristic of the
three, as Henderson made an abortive effort to graft on it the utterly
foreign idea of a proprietary colony.]

They were also familiar with the representative system; and accordingly
they introduced it into the new communities, the little forted villages
serving as natural units of representation. They were already thoroughly
democratic, in instinct and principle, and as a matter of course they
made the offices elective, and gave full play to the majority. In
organizing the militia they kept the old system of county lieutenants,
making them elective, not appointive; and they organized the men on the
basis of a regiment, the companies representing territorial divisions,
each commanded by its own officers, who were thus chosen by the fighting
men of the fort or forts in their respective districts. Thus each of the
backwoods commonwealths, during its short-lived term of absolute
freedom, reproduced as its governmental system that of the old colonial
county, increasing the powers of the court, and changing the justices
into the elective representatives of an absolute democracy. The civil
head, the chairman of the court or committee, was also usually the
military head, the colonel-commandant. In fact the military side of the
organization rapidly became the most conspicuous, and, at least in
certain crises, the most important. There were always some years of
desperate warfare during which the entire strength of the little
commonwealth was drawn on to resist outside aggression, and during these
years