These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Most states arranged a government of three branches, with a governor as executive, a superior court as judicial, and a Senate and House of Representatives as legislative. But some states, attempting to correct for colonial arrangements, in which a royally appointed governor and his appointed council wielded the preponderance of power over a weak elected assembly, granted the greatest weight to lower houses of the legislature rather than to upper houses or to an executive. Pennsylvania’s constitution, like its Quakers, was the most radical, and, in the eyes of many observers, alarmingly democratic. It called for annual elections, no governor, and a unicameral legislature whose members served limited terms. Any proposed law had to be printed and distributed to the people, who would have a year to consider it before the legislature voted.