The Fair Play System
The settlers elected three commissioners each March who were responsible that everyone was dealt with fairly (hence the name "fair play"). Most of their rulings seem to have dealt with property issues, but they dealt with any legal or criminal cases in the Fair Play area. They granted permission for new settlers to enter the area, could take away a settler's land claim if they were absent more than six weeks (except for military service), and could expel a person (by setting them adrift in a canoe on the river). The commissioners' decisions were final and supposedly were never challenged. In 1776 the three commissioners of the Fair Play Men were Bratton Caldwell, John Walker, and James Brandon. They are the only commissioners whose names are now known and it is conjectured that they were the only three for the duration of the Fair Play system.
Read more about this topic: Fair Play Men
Famous quotes containing the words fair, play and/or system:
“Playing games with agreed upon rules helps children learn to live by rules, establish the delicate balance between competition and cooperation, between fair play and justice and exploitation and abuse of these for personal gain. It helps them learn to manage the warmth of winning and the hurt of losing; it helps them to believe that there will be another chance to win the next time.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning....They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)