Mayflower Compact

Background

In early seventeenth-century England, opinion was divided over the established church that had emerged from the English Reformation. The Puritans sought to carry reform further within the Church of England, while the Separatists held that the established church could not be reformed and founded churches of their own. Some Separatists fled persecution to Leiden in the Netherlands and formed a community of faith there, and it was this group that planned the migration to America. In the United States they are known as the Pilgrim Fathers. Although Korean Protestant churches often refer to the entire group as "Puritans," strictly speaking they were Separatists who had broken away from the Church of England.

The group obtained permission from the Virginia Company to settle at the northern edge of its jurisdiction, near the mouth of the present-day Hudson River. Besides the Separatists, the ship carried emigrants seeking new land and work. The Separatists called themselves "Saints" and the others "Strangers."

Course of Events

• September 16, 1620 (September 6 in the Julian calendar then in use): The Mayflower departed Plymouth, England, with 102 passengers, fewer than half of whom were Separatists.
• November 1620: Storms and dangerous shoals forced the ship to abandon its southward course, and it anchored at the northern tip of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. Because this lay outside the authorized territory, some passengers reportedly objected that once ashore they would be under no obligation to obey anyone.
• November 11, 1620 (November 21 in the Gregorian calendar used today): Before landing, forty-one adult men signed the compact aboard ship. Indentured servants were among the signers, and those who could not write made a mark in place of a signature. The signers pledged, while remaining loyal to the English king, to combine themselves into a "civil body politic" and to frame and obey just and equal laws and offices for the general good. Immediately after the signing, John Carver, a deacon of the Separatist church in Leiden, was confirmed as the colony's first governor.
• December 1620: The settlers established a settlement at Plymouth.

Results and Influence

When Carver died in April 1621, William Bradford was chosen as governor. The compact was originally intended as a provisional agreement for self-government until a formal grant could be obtained, but even after a new patent was received in 1621, it remained the foundation of government in Plymouth Colony. It was suspended in 1686 when the colony was absorbed into the Dominion of New England, restored in 1689, and ended permanently in 1691 when Plymouth was merged into the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The original document does not survive. Its text has been preserved, however, in Mourt's Relation, published in London in 1622; in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation; and in New England's Memorial, published in 1669 by Bradford's nephew Nathaniel Morton. The list of the forty-one signers first appeared in Morton's book.

Assessment

• In the United States, the compact is honored as the first governing document written by the colonists themselves and as the starting point of self-government by the consent of the governed. Korean media likewise sometimes describe it as "America's first self-governing constitution."
• The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the compact as an adaptation of the church covenant (a mutual pledge made by church members) to civil life.
• The historian Samuel Eliot Morison, however, offered a different assessment in a 1936 lecture, describing the compact as merely an agreement by Englishmen who found themselves without any separate governing authority to govern themselves until the king's will was made known. Commentators also note that the compact is a short text of just over two hundred words, contains no specific legal provisions, and explicitly affirms loyalty to the king.
• In Korean Protestant churches, the Mayflower migration and the compact are sometimes cited in sermons and lectures as an example of Puritan faith forming the foundation of American society.