Treatises on Baptist polity

I ran across this publication and thought it might be of interest: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life, edited by Mark Dever Copyright ©2001 Center for Church Reform.

http://9marks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Polity.pdf

There are three introductory essays by Dever, Greg Wills and Al Mohler (you can see that it has a bias toward Particular or Reformed Baptists by that lineup, but instructive all the same). The essays are followed by reprints of treatises primarily related to the American churches. The exception is that of Benjamin Keach (1697), but it is important in the American context because of Keach's influence on the colonial churches, partly because his son founded so many churches of the original Philadelphia Association.

They range from the appendix to the Philadelphia Confession (which is hardly ever published with the confession's articles, even though it was published with the full authority of the association) through the Charleston Association manual to William Reynolds (1874). I haven't read through them all, but it is safe to say that questions of leadership and membership were central to the early churches.