They were not "covenanters" in the Congregational sense of having brought an established church with them to the Fair Play territory. But the Fair Play settlers understood and subscribed to the principle of popular control, which was fundamental to such solemnly made and properly ratified agreements. Separated from the authority of the crown, detached from the authority of the hierarchy of the church by the Protestant Reformation, possessing no American tradition of extensive political experience, these settlers could only depend upon themselves as proper authorities for their own political system.
Furthermore, the great majority of the settlers who came to the Fair Play territory came from families who had left their homes in the old country to escape political, economic, and social restrictions, only to be made unwelcome in their new homes in the settled areas of Pennsylvania. Displaced persons in a new country, they were forced by lives of conflict to seek better opportunity by moving to undeveloped lands. As a result, they settled along the West Branch of the Susquehanna, beyond the authority of the crown and outside the pressures of the Provincial legislature.
If man is a predatory beast in his natural state, a belief some expressed in the eighteenth century, then it follows naturally that every society must have some agency of authority and control. The universally standardized solution to the problem of social control is government. The Fair Play system was the answer on this Susquehanna frontier to the need for some legitimate agency of force.[4] This system vested authority in the people through annual elections of a tribunal of three of their number. The members of the tribunal were given quasi-executive, legislative, and judicial powers over all the settlers in the West Branch Valley "beyond the purchase line."[5]
Although no record of any of these elections has been preserved, the composition of the Fair Play tribunal in 1776 has been established and verified by subsequent reviews of land claims in the county courts.[6] Also, two of the members of the tribunal of 1775 are identified in a pre-emption claim made before the Lycoming County Court in 1797.[7] It is interesting to note that among these five men are represented the three most prominent national stock groups in the area, with the Scotch-Irish, as our earlier sample demonstrated, in the majority.