As we celebrate this Thanksgiving holiday, I want to look back over four centuries to remind us of the lasting importance of The Mayflower Compact. The Compact was a legal agreement signed in 1620 by 41 of the 50 male passengers on the Mayflower. Historian Pat Bauer explains, “The document [was] signed on the English ship Mayflower on November 21, 1620, prior to its landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was the first framework of government written and enacted in the territory that is now the United States of America.”[1] Pilgrim leaders believed the document was necessary because they were about to disembark onto unknown and ungoverned territory. Bauer explains:

“Rough seas and storms prevented the Mayflower from reaching its intended destination in the area of the Hudson River, and the ship was steered instead toward Cape Cod. Because of the change of course, the passengers were no longer within the jurisdiction of the charter granted to them in England by the Virginia Company. Within this legally uncertain situation, friction arose between the English Separatists (the Pilgrims) and the rest of the travelers, with some of the latter threatening to leave the group and settle on their own. To quell the conflict and preserve unity, Pilgrim leaders (among them William Bradford and William Brewster) drafted the Mayflower Compact before going ashore.”

The Mayflower Compact reminds us that dignified individuals with honest disagreements can sit down together to peacefully resolve their differences. The disagreements that arose on the Mayflower could be cited as America’s first culture clash. Journalist Jeff Jacoby explains, “[Landing on Cape Cod] was a setback, but not enough to weaken the resolve of the ship’s Protestant Separatists, who had come to America to create a community true to their religious beliefs and would stick together no matter what. A majority of the Mayflower’s passengers, however, were non-Separatist ‘Strangers,’ some of whom now insisted they were no longer bound by the original plan. William Bradford, who would become the foremost Pilgrim leader, wrote that several Strangers began to make ‘discontented and mutinous speeches,’ announcing that when the ship anchored they would go their own way. The Virginia patent was now void, they said, and ‘none had power to command them.’”[2]

Nathan Dorn, a Rare Books Curator at the Library of Congress, observes, “People have often seen [the Mayflower Compact] as a kind of herald of self-government in the 13 original colonies and later of constitutional democracy in the United States of America. While it is an important document for this country’s cultural heritage, its immediate purpose on the day it was signed was more narrowly focused.”[3] In other words, to get along, passengers on the Mayflower focused on mutual concerns and cooperative solutions rather than ideologies or religious tenets. Those “narrowly focused” concerns established that the signers would:

● Be loyal to the King of England
● Be Christians who served God
● Create fair and just laws
● Work together for the good of the colony

The original Mayflower Compact is lost, but there are three early copies with slightly different wording. The first version was printed in 1622, the second in 1646, and the third in 1669. Basically, the document stated:

“Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November [New Style, November 21], in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.”

Dorn observes, “The compact served the immediate political purpose of uniting the signatories in recognition of the legal and civil authority of the government that the colonists would choose. … While the Compact does not propose a frame of government, its language speaks about uniting the people into a ‘civil body politic,’ which is a 17th-century expression that refers to a group of citizens acting together as a self-governing body. In its day, the phrase included a variety of types of organization, among them medieval boroughs, certain municipalities, and corporations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit.”

On the 400th anniversary of the signing of The Mayflower Compact, the Editorial Board at The Boston Globe wrote, “This founding document of what would become the great experiment of American democracy deserves to draw a crowd’s attention, even if at a safe distance. In these fraught times, when divisions run deep and civility seems like a lost concept, there is much we can still learn from the disparate group of would-be settlers who landed here 400 years ago and saw in their need to survive the need to coexist — and to coexist under a government of laws. Even though in the same document they swore allegiance to their king, everything about their act was revolutionary.”[4]

The legacy of the Mayflower Compact should not be overstated; however, it is an important example of how the past can teach us lessons hundreds of years later. It demonstrated the importance of establishing a social contract for citizens to live by. It demonstrated the importance of rule of law for maintaining peace and harmony among disparate factions. As History.com notes, “Knowing life without laws could prove catastrophic, colonist leaders created the Mayflower Compact to ensure a functioning social structure would prevail.”[5] Today, life without laws would prove equally catastrophic and civil individuals need to do everything in their power to preserve and protect a system of government that has kept American democracy alive for centuries. Our freedom and our democracy are just two of the many blessings we should be thankful for today. Although the Mayflower compact was drawn up by people of the Christian faith, people of all religious persuasions have benefited from the revolutionary spark of governance established by those early immigrants. Happy Thanksgiving.

Footnotes
[1] Pat Bauer, “Mayflower Compact,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13 September 2024.
[2] Jeff Jacoby, “How the Mayflower compact sowed the seeds of American democracy,’ The Boston Globe, 22 November 2017.
[3] Nathan Dorn, “The 400th Anniversary of the Mayflower Compact,” Library of Congress Blog, 25 November 2020.
[4] Editorial Board, “An imperfect founding document still holds lessons for a divided nation,” The Boston Globe, 26 November 2020.
[5] Editors, “Mayflower Compact,” History.com, 29 October 2009.