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frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to
time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. 9
    Wholly independent of the Jamestown colony, the Pilgrims established their settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on democratic and egalitarian principles and the rule of law. Their framework set a precedent for future frontier agreements and was a radical departure from the European model, as no institutions but God and king preceded their compact.
    The Plymouth Pilgrims had much in common with the settlers in Virginia, but they departed from the Jamestown model in a crucial respect: their efforts would be dedicated to glorifying God. To the Plymouth settlers, the colony would represent an uncorrupted ideal, serving as an example to the decadent, fallen, and unreformed. Their compact and ensuing laws were modeled not on the principles of English liberties, but on the covenant between God and the Israelites.
    The radical principles of governance based on consent and equality boded well for the colony. But as in Jamestown, the Pilgrims learned the hard way that without the proper incentives for work even a project comprised of godly men was doomed. Amidst poor harvests and spreading unrest, William Bradford scrapped the communal living and work rules, which had been imposed by the Virginia Company in London, and granted private freehold title to land directly to family units. The colonists’ natural industriousness and ingenuity quickly re-emerged.
    The leader of the follow-on Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, also saw his project as a fundamentally redemptive one, an opportunity to start the world anew in the unspoiled wilderness. Plymouth Plantation, like Jamestown, enjoyed de facto self-government through distance and circumstance, 10 but the colony’s founders managed to get a charter approved in 1629 that required no oversight meetings in London, giving the Massachusetts Bay Colony great legal flexibility. The self-governing principle, along republican and religious lines, clearly imbued the Bay Colony, which Winthrop, drawing from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount,
proclaimed to be “as a City upon a Hill,” adding “The eyes of all people are upon us.” In Winthrop’s terms, America was an exemplar burdened with history’s judgment. The American Creed was coming into focus as a principled exception to European models of governance.
    Despite their democratic procedures, neither Plymouth Plantation nor the Bay Colony in Boston were bastions of liberty. Pilgrim leaders governed Plymouth like a theocratic dictatorship, and the Bay Colony banished Quakers and other religious dissenters.
    One dissenter expelled from the Bay Colony was the Baptist Roger Williams, who later established a separate colony in Rhode Island that affirmed the radical precept of religious liberty. Along the Williams model, more colonies based on religious tolerance emerged in British North America, such as Lord Baltimore’s Catholic haven in Maryland (founded in 1634) and William Penn’s Quaker-led colony in Pennsylvania (founded in 1682). All the while, the frontier beckoned liberty-seeking pioneers, offering a new social contract along less rigid lines of religious or political control. The space of the New World, as much as political and religious doctrine, made America home to liberty.
    Notably, these experiments in self-government preceded the high-minded theories of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes. Locke, whose ideas would ring through the Declaration of Independence, was himself strongly influenced by the American colonial experience in crafting his ideas on the social contract and natural liberty. 11 Remarkably, America helped to spread ideas of liberty far before its independence.

UNITY UNDER GOD
    Though the various American colonies had similar governing principles