The Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact

The event

A congregation of English Separatists — Protestants who believed the Church of England remained too closely tied to Catholic tradition and structure and sought to worship entirely outside its authority, rather than reform it from within as most Puritans preferred — had earlier fled England for the more tolerant Netherlands to escape persecution for their religious nonconformity, settling in the city of Leiden.

Concerned about economic hardship and the gradual assimilation of their children into Dutch culture, a portion of this congregation arranged passage to the recently chartered Virginia territory in North America, departing England in September 1620 aboard the ship Mayflower with a mixed group of separatist "Saints" and other non-separatist colonists (sometimes called "Strangers") also aboard for the voyage.

Blown off course, the Mayflower landed considerably north of its intended Virginia destination, near Cape Cod in present-day Massachusetts, outside the jurisdiction of their original charter. Before disembarking, the adult male passengers drafted and signed the Mayflower Compact, a brief agreement establishing a basic framework of self-government and mutual civic cooperation for the fledgling colony — an early and influential example of a written social contract in what would become the United States.

The resulting Plymouth Colony, established in the winter of 1620-21, suffered devastating losses during its first winter, with roughly half the original settlers dying of disease and exposure, but survived with crucial assistance from the local Wampanoag people, an interaction later commemorated, in a highly simplified and often historically distorted form, in the American Thanksgiving tradition. The Pilgrims' pursuit of religious self-determination, alongside the larger, related wave of Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay Colony beginning in 1630, established patterns of religious dissent, congregational church governance, and civic self-organization that significantly shaped later American religious and political culture.

Other witnesses

• Mayflower Compact, 1620 (full text)
• William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 41: The American Puritans — free full issue
• Wikisource: The Mayflower Compact — primary source