MAYFLOWER COMPACT

An agreement signed by the passengers of the Mayflower, while the ship lay at anchor in Provincetown harbor, Mass., on Nov. 11, 1620. Under the compact the settlers agreed to be ruled by the majority and to submit to the laws made by their government. Such an agreement became necessary when the Mayflower inadvertently landed at Cape Cod rather than Virginia, where the Pilgrim Fathers had a royal patent, and some members of the group refused to recognize the legal authority of their leaders, whose jurisdiction under the patent did not extend beyond the borders of Virginia. To ensure the proper ordering of the colony, the signers of the compact pledged to "combine ourselves together in a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue thereof 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, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." The compact was not a constitution; nor was it a declaration of independence from the king. It was, rather, a social contract, important as an example of government by consent of the governed as well as of the remarkable capacity of the English people for self-government. These so-called Pilgrim Fathers were a group of Puritans, originally from the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, England, who fled to Holland to preserve their religious purity. After a period of unhappy exile in Holland, they immigrated to America. They differed from other Puritans in that they had no wish to remain within the Church of England and broke with it entirely. The Mayflower Compact was the first of many such agreements by which groups of New Englanders established civil governments. These were actually extensions of the religious covenants by which members of each Congregational church mutually bound themselves in a fraternal religious association.

Bibliography: j. t. blodgett, "The Political Theory of the Mayflower Compact," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 12 (1911) 204–213. a. lord, "The Mayflower Compact," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, NS 30 (1920) 278–294.

[e. delaney]