Aboard the Mayflower, by necessity, the Pilgrims and "Strangers" made a written agreement or compact among themselves. The Mayflower Compact was probably composed by William Brewster, who had a university education, and was signed by nearly all the adult male colonists, including two of the indentured servants. The format of the Mayflower Compact is very similar to the written agreements used by the Pilgrims to establish their Separatist churches in England and Holland.
Under these agreements the male adult members of each church decided how to worship God. They also elected their own ministers and other church officers. This pattern of church self-government served as a model for political self-government in the Mayflower Compact.
The colonists had no intention of declaring their independence from England when they signed the Mayflower Compact. In the opening line of the Compact, both Pilgrims and "Strangers" refer to themselves as "loyal subjects" of King James. The rest of the Mayflower Compact is very short. It simply bound the signers into a "Civil Body Politic" for the purpose of passing "just and equal Laws.
Immediately after agreeing to the Mayflower Compact, the signers elected John Carver one of the Pilgrim leaders as governor of their colony. They called it Plymouth Plantation. When Governor Carver died in less than a year, William Bradford, age 31, replaced him.
Each year thereafter the "Civil Body Politic," consisting of all adult males except indentured servants, assembled to elect the governor and a small number of assistants.
Bradford was re-elected 30 times between and In the early years Governor Bradford pretty much decided how the colony should be run.
Few objected to his one-man rule. As the colony's population grew due to immigration, several new towns came into existence. The roving and increasingly scattered population found it difficult to attend the General Court, as the governing meetings at Plymouth came to be called.
By , deputies were sent to represent each town at the other General Court sessions. Not only self-rule, but representative government had taken root on American soil. The English Magna Carta, written more than years before the Mayflower Compact, established the principle of the rule of law.
In England this still mostly meant the king's law. The Mayflower Compact continued the idea of law made by the people. This idea lies at the heart of democracy. From its crude beginning in Plymouth, self-government evolved into the town meetings of New England and larger local governments in colonial America. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, the Mayflower Compact had been nearly forgotten, but the powerful idea of self-government had not.
Born out of necessity on the Mayflower, the Compact made a significant contribution to the creation of a new democratic nation. The complete text of the Mayflower Compact. What two groups comprised the passengers on the Mayflower?
How were they different from each other? How similar? Puritans believed that covenants existed not only between God and man, but also between man and man. The Pilgrims had used covenants in establishing their congregations in the Old World. The Mayflower Compact is such a covenant in that the settlers agreed to form a government and be bound by its rules.
The Compact is often described as America's first constitution, but it is not a constitution in the sense of being a fundamental framework of government. Its importance lies in the belief that government is a form of covenant, and that for government to be legitimate, it must derive from the consent of the governed.
Since the Mayflower passengers had obtained a patent for Virginia, when they instead landed in New England this patent was no longer valid. Legally, it was superseded when the Pilgrims obtained a patent from the Council of New England for their settlement at Plimoth in Today, local governments similar to the one created by the Mayflower Compact can be found throughout America.
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