To enforce these recommendations extra-legal committees, generally backed by public opinion and sometimes concretely supported by an organized "mob," would meet in towns and counties and would be often effectively centralized where the opponents of the British policy were in control.
In several of the colonies the want of orderly government became so serious that, in 1775, the Continental Congress advised them to form temporary governments until the trouble with Great Britain had been settled.

When independence was declared Congress recommended to all the States that they should adopt governments of their own.

In accordance with that recommendation, in the course of a very few years each State established an independent government and adopted a written constitution.

It was a time when men believed in the social contract or the "compact theory of the state," that states originated through agreement, as the case might be, between king and nobles, between king and people, or among the people themselves.

In support of this doctrine no less an authority than the Bible was often quoted, such a passage for example as II Samuel v, 3: "So all the elders of Israel came to the King to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David King over Israel." As a philosophical speculation to explain why people were governed or consented to be governed, this theory went back at least to the Greeks, and doubtless much earlier; and, though of some significance in medieval thought, it became of greater importance in British political philosophy, especially through the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.