The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth colony and an important record for the United States. Passengers aboard the Mayflower, known as the Pilgrims, sailed across the Atlantic in 1620 with a patent to establish a religious settlement in northern Virginia. When they found themselves along the Massachusetts coast, outside the jurisdiction of Virginia, and unable to go any farther, they realized that any settlement they built would be without any legal authority. Governor William Bradford wrote that there were soon “discontented and mutinous speeches” from some of the “Strangers” on board the ship, those passengers who were not members of the Separatist Church (the “Saints”). The “Strangers” (mostly members of the Church of England) threatened to “use their own liberty” and go their own way. Bradford realized cooperation was necessary for their common survival.
All the passengers then agreed to form a “civil body politic” that would bind the Separatists and the “Strangers” in a self-governing unit. It was signed by 41 passengers, all the free adult males, in the cabin of the Mayflower on November 11 (November 21, new style calendar), 1620, while the ship was anchored in Provincetown Harbor at the tip of Cape Cod. The covenant agreed to was specifically for their “better ordering and preservation.” They agreed to “enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws. . . as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony.” It was a covenant similar to ones used in the Protestant churches of the time providing for those who agreed to the covenant to be bound by “all due submission and obedience.” What the Mayflower Compact created was a secular covenant consented to by its signatories providing for a voluntary government, but one that would still be agreeable to the laws of England.
Many years later Americans believed that the Mayflower Compact was one of the progenitors of American democracy and a forerunner of the idea of self-government as expressed in the U. S. Constitution. However, the compact made on the ship Mayflower had only a short life. The Mayflower Compact was superseded by the Patent of 1621, which was sent to the Plymouth colony by John Pierce, one of the merchant adventurers in England who
This painting shows the Pilgrims signing the compact in one of the Mayflower's cabins. (Library of Congress)
Had helped finance the voyage. The original document of the Mayflower Compact has never been found.
Further reading: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Dover Publications, 2006); James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620-1691 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).
—Stephen C. O’Neill and Billy G. Smith
World History
