History of the United States Author:Samuel Eliot Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of the Pilgrims of Plymouth is this, that they relied upon themselves, that they adopted their own institutions and developed their own resources, of course in a... more » feeble, but not the less in a manly manner. Before they landed, they " covenant and combine themselves together into a civil body politic, to enact such just and equal laws as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony." The state thus founded was continued in entire independence of external authority, except in so far as its territory was held by grants from the Council for New England. Political The political forms of Plymouth were singu- forms. ial.]y gjmp|e. Every settler admitted to the privileges of the colony, and not an apprentice or a servant, was a freeman, a member of the body by which all affairs were administered or directed. An assembly of a representative character was not held for nearly twenty years, (1639.) Out of the freemen a smaller body was taken to exercise the every-day functions of government. It was composed merely of the governor and his assistants, or council, of which he was simply the presiding officer with a double vote. The first governor was John Carver; the second was William Bradford, who retained the post, with a few interruptions, for thirty-six years. It marks the simplicity, not to say the distastefulness, of these offices, that there should have been a law subjecting a man not having served the preceding year, and yet refusing to be governor, to a fine of twenty pounds, equivalent to a much larger amount in our day. A military body was headed by Miles Stan- dish, the hero of the settlement. But the spirit beneath these forms is of more Spirit. importance than the forms themselves. The earnest faith of the Pilgrims was at once the source from whic...« less