The individualism of the backwoodsmen, however, was tempered by a sound common-sense, and capacity for combination.  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 the chief function of government was to provide for the griping military needs of the community, and the one pressing duty of its chief was to lead his followers with valor and wisdom in the struggle with the stranger. [Footnote:  My friend, Professor Alexander Johnson, of Princeton, is inclined to regard these frontier county organizations as reproductions of a very primitive type of government indeed, deeming