Did democracy exist on this Pennsylvania frontier? Was the Fair Play system marked by real representation and popular control? These questions must be answered before any judgment can be made concerning political democracy in the West Branch Valley.
Was there equality of economic opportunity on this farmers' frontier? Was land available to all who sought it, and on equal terms? These problems need to be considered before we can attach the label "democratic" on the economic life of the Fair Play settlers.
If democracy prizes diversity, as some claim, were the diverse elements of Fair Play society equally recognized?[3] Was the class structure open or closed, mobile or fixed? Did the mixed national stocks enjoy religious freedom? One needs to inquire into each of these areas prior to a final evaluation of Fair Play society.
A useful tool for evaluating political democracy can be found in Ranney and Kendall's _Democracy and the American Party System_.[4] It suggests the use of popular sovereignty, political equality, popular consultation, and majority rule as criteria for democracy. Accepting these criteria as basic principles of democracy, we can begin to analyze the democratic character of the Fair Play system.
A political system based upon popular sovereignty is one in which the final authority to rule is vested in the people. The question of who the people are is still before us today. In the fullest sense, popular sovereignty means rule by all the people, but in colonial America the "people" was a much more qualified term. It generally signified white, Protestant, adult males who were property owners. In the Fair Play territory, the ruling "people" were "the whole body" of adult male settlers who annually elected their governing tribunal and participated in the decisions of its "court."[5] Lacking an established church, or any church for that matter, and possessing property lying beyond legal limits of settlement, the Fair Play settlers could not have enforced religious or property qualifications for voting, even if they had so desired, and there is no evidence to indicate that they did. Furthermore, the frequency of elections, which were held annually, and the principle of rotating the offices among the settlers tended to emphasize the sovereignty of the people in this part of the West Branch Valley. The right of suffrage, it is true, had not been extended to women, but this was the rule throughout colonial America. Popular sovereignty, in its qualified eighteenth-century sense, was a basic characteristic of the political democracy which existed on this frontier.