Catalogue

Mayflower

The Mayflower Compact and the Seeds of American Democracy

In September 1620, the Mayflower set sail from England to the New World. The ship was a merchant vessel, which normally transported sweet wine or wool rather than the one-hundred-and-two men, women and children she now carried. Among them was a little band of Puritan Separatists we know as the Pilgrims. They were headed for Northern Virginia and had a charter to create a community there where they could live and worship, free from persecution by King James of England. As the wind filled the sails and their ship bravely launched into the Atlantic, they looked to the horizon with hearts full of hope.

But their faith was soon tested as gales shook the masts and icy waves crashed over the rail. Rations ran low and hunger, seasickness and scurvy swept through the ship. The Pilgrims shouted their prayers over the roar of the wind, and over the groans from the cargo hold below. And they worried about the challenges – and possible dangers – that awaited them. For, if they made landfall, they would immediately have to carve a new settlement out of a rumored harsh wilderness. But first they had to survive thousands of miles of stormy ocean.

Two months later, they awoke to a clear, crisp November morning and the joyful sight of a tall ridge of dunes before them. They had been delivered from the raging sea, but in the process, blown hundreds of miles off-course to the shores of Cape Cod.

The majority of the Mayflower's passengers were not part of the Pilgrim’s flock. They were called the “Strangers.” Under the terms of the charter, all of the passengers were to stick together, but the alliance between the Pilgrims and the Strangers was an uneasy one. And once they realized they weren’t in Virginia, many of the Strangers declared the charter was void. They threatened to mutiny and go off on their own as soon as the ship anchored. It looked like the fledgling colony would be torn apart before it got started.

The Pilgrims believed that to survive, everyone had to stay united. They had to create a community that fit the needs of Separatist and Stranger alike. They outlined that vision in the document known as the Mayflower Compact. It was a contract in which the colonists claimed authority to rule themselves, not in the name of King James but, of their own free will. Collectively, they would have the power to elect leaders and make “just and equal laws” for the general good of the colony.

As their ship lay anchored in Provincetown Harbor, nearly every free man on the ship signed the Compact. In doing so, they established the first government in the New World based on the voluntary consent of the people. Some of the greatest themes of American democracy – equality, inalienable rights, and government through consent of the governed were signed with a flourish. But they had their birth a century and a half earlier, as a tiny band of Pilgrims and Strangers prepared to step ashore a wintry wilderness in the New World and start life anew.

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation...”

- Narration by Josh Delaney, as inspired by an OpEd article about The Mayflower Compact by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe

- Excerpt from William Bradford’s: Of Plymouth Plantation; Inscribed on the National Monument to the Forefathers located in Plymouth, MA