The Mayflower Compact

Summary

The Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers. Some were members of an English Separatist congregation that had lived in exile at Leiden in Holland; others had been recruited in England by the London merchants who financed the voyage. Their patent from the Virginia Company allowed them to settle in the northern part of the Virginia territory, near the Hudson River, but storms and the shoals off Cape Cod brought them to land well to the north, outside that grant. William Bradford later wrote that some of the passengers began to say that once ashore no one would have power to command them. The compact was the leaders' answer. The text opens with the words In the Name of God, Amen, and the signers describe themselves as loyal subjects of King James. They say they have undertaken the voyage for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and the honour of their king and country, to plant a settlement in the northern parts of Virginia. They then covenant and combine themselves together into a civil body politic, for their better ordering and preservation, and agree that by virtue of this agreement they will enact and frame just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, as shall be thought most meet for the general good. They promise all due submission and obedience to those laws, and they sign at Cape Cod on the eleventh of November, in the eighteenth year of King James's reign in England. Forty-one men signed. The library text lists them beginning with John Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow and William Brewster, and including Myles Standish, the company's military captain, John Alden, Samuel Fuller, Stephen Hopkins and John Howland. Carver was chosen governor; after his death in the spring of 1621 Bradford succeeded him and served for most of the next thirty-five years. The signers' list comes from Nathaniel Morton's New England's Memorial (1669), since the signed original is lost. The compact was first printed in Mourt's Relation (London, 1622) and copied into Bradford's manuscript history Of Plymouth Plantation. It governed Plymouth until the colony gained further patents and remained a separate jurisdiction until it was joined to Massachusetts in 1691. Later Americans, especially in the early nineteenth century, honoured it as an early written example of self-government by consent and of covenant ideas carried from church life into civil life, and it is regularly read beside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The library text follows the Avalon Project transcription from Bradford.

Top Lessons

• A covenant before God and one another

  The signers bind themselves solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another. The language echoes the church covenants of English Separatist congregations, carried here from church order into civil order.

• Law made for the general good

  The compact promises just and equal laws suited to the general good, and asks every signer to submit to them. It joins a duty of the lawmakers to a duty of the governed in a single sentence.

• Order in a crisis

  Bradford records that some passengers questioned anyone's authority once they landed outside their patent. The compact gave the company a lawful basis for government before they went ashore.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The compact itself contains nothing medical, but it was signed on the eve of the settlement's first winter, when, according to Bradford's history, about half the company died of what he called the general sickness, likely a mix of scurvy, exposure and infectious disease; retrospective diagnosis is uncertain. Several signers, including Governor Carver, died within months. Samuel Fuller, a signer, served as the settlement's physician.

• Signers' list

  Samuel Fuller, the company's physician and a deacon of the church, appears among the signers.