Mayflower Compact

Mayflower Compact in U.S. colonial history, an agreement providing for the temporary government of Plymouth Colony . The compact was signed (1620) on board the Mayflower by the adult male passengers; it created the first American settlement that was based upon a social contract. In it, the colonists combined together in a "civil Body Politick" whose purpose was to frame just and equal laws for the general good of the colony. The compact remained the basis of government in Plymouth for ten years, and all later governments in the colony developed out of the compact.

Mayflower Compact (21 November 1620).The first written framework of government in English America, the Mayflower Compact was an agreement made among the forty‐one adult male passengers aboard the Mayflower on arrival at Cape Cod. It bound the signers to form a civil government and to obey its laws for their “better Ordering and Preservation,” while pledging them to enact “just and equal Laws for the General Good of the Colony.”

The compact aimed to legitimize the new government and to prevent disorder, especially among those recruits who were not Pilgrims and who, according to Governor William Bradford, wanted to “use their own libertie.” The issue of legitimacy was important, since the settlers lacked a valid charter, having landed several hundred miles north of their intended destination in Virginia. The only recorded copy of the document is in an anonymous account of the voyage called Mourt's Relation (1622). Modeled on Puritan church covenants, it contained few specifics about the structure of government and had questionable legal status other than common consent. Nevertheless, it established a government in which people were bound to obey laws voted by the majority of adult males and served as a precedent for more elaborate covenants like the “Fundamental Orders” of Connecticut (1639).

Although the Mayflower Compact is commonly regarded as having embodied the democratic principles of self‐government and consent, it was far from establishing an actual democracy of universal adult suffrage. Voting rights, initially limited to adult males, became gradually more exclusive until Plymouth was absorbed by the short‐lived Dominion of New England in 1686 and then annexed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691.
See also Colonial Era; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; Puritanism

Bibliography

William Bradford , Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–47, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 1952.
Jack P. Greene, ed., Settlements to Society 1607–1763: A Documentary History of Colonial America, 1975.
Mark L. Sargent , The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth, New England Quarterly 61 (1988): 233–51.

Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy