By Cameron Hilditch
November 26, 2020 6:30 AM
www.nationalreview.com
The Pilgrims Signing the Compact, on board the Mayflower, Nov. 11th, 1620, engraving by Gauthier (Library of Congress)
A tale of, and a tribute to, those who planted the seeds of American liberty
On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower arrived
on the eastern coast of North America. She had weathered the slings and
arrows of maritime misfortune for almost ten weeks at that point, but
the passengers thought the discomfort of crossing a small price to pay
for passage to the Promised Land. After all, these were radical
Protestants, and to them a land undefiled by any previous association
with the Catholic Church was more to be desired than Canaan itself, with
all its rivers of milk and honey.
And so the settlers settled and gave thanks with the natives and
worked and lived and died. Though centuries have passed since the last Mayflower
pilgrim was entrusted to the earth in a makeshift Massachusetts
cemetery, the symbolic freight of the ship and its voyage has only
grown. It’s safe to say no other passage from the Old World to the New —
with the possible exception of the Titanic — is likely to be commemorated in a column such as this one 400 years later.
There’s good reason for the Mayflower’s staying power in the
American psyche, but it may not be immediately obvious. It wasn’t the
first ship to alight in the New World (we have Columbus Day to remind us
of that). Nor was it the first ship to carry English passengers to
America: Virginia had been granted a royal charter and settled decades
earlier. The Mayflower pilgrims have no claim to uncharted
waters or undiscovered countries. Their pathbreaking endeavor wasn’t
geographic at all. It was political and, more specifically,
constitutional.
The ship had set out for Virginia but ended up landing on Cape Cod
instead, which was beyond the legal domain of the Virginia Company. To
head off lawlessness and anarchy, the passengers and crew of the ship
quickly came together to draft and undersign the Mayflower Compact,
which functioned as a governing document for the community. Its purpose
was to establish “a civil body politic,” in order to make “just and
equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices” for the new
colony.
This compact, more than anything else, is what cemented the place of the Mayflower
pilgrims in the annals of American folklore. Other settlers had been
governed by written charters before, but those had always been granted
by a king or a queen across the water. The Mayflower Compact, by way of
contrast, was a written constitution framed by the people and for the
people. The temptation to view the document as an historical overture,
sounding notes and themes that would be played again in the old
courthouse in Philadelphia, was irresistible for latter-day Americans
looking back on it from a post-Revolutionary perspective.
After the Constitution was ratified in 1787, the Mayflower Compact
came to be understood as a kind of colonial prototype for our current
governing document. Similar to the first Christians, who interpreted
prophets like Moses and Jonah as prefigurements of Christ, Americans
have traditionally read the Mayflower Compact as a document that
presages the full flowering of American liberty.
John Quincy Adams called it the “first example in modern times of a
social compact or system of government instituted by voluntary agreement
conformable to the laws of nature, by men of equal rights and about to
establish their community in a new country.”
Later in the 19th century, historian George Bancroft claimed that in
“the cabin of the Mayflower . . . humanity recovered its rights, and
instituted government on the basis of ‘equal laws’ for ‘the general
good.’”
But perhaps the most salient expression of Mayflower mythology came from Calvin Coolidge, who spoke at the 300th anniversary ceremony a century ago:
The compact which they signed was an event of the
greatest importance. It was the foundation of liberty based on law and
order, and that tradition has been steadily upheld. They drew up a form
of government which has been designated as the first real constitution
of modern times.
The Mayflower Compact has endured in our national memory for so long
because it inaugurated a project on these shores that we’re still
engaged in today: the project of free government under a written
constitution.
Until the American Revolution, most free countries in the world
preferred an unwritten constitution of customs and norms established
over time. This model allowed almost all matters of public concern to be
hammered out by the rough-and-tumble process of electoral politics. The
British constitution still functions this way today. The Founding
Fathers, however, established a government framed by a written
constitution. A supreme law exists in this land, around 7,200 words
long, that governs and restricts the actions of civil magistrates.
In his brilliant book on the subject, Greg Weiner called the American
constitution “Madison’s metronome.” It was written and ratified to
regulate the convulsive political passions of the early republic and
channel them into sustainable and productive thoroughfares that would
steady the more erratic political rhythms of the Union. In this respect,
it served as a more refined and civilized successor to the Mayflower
Compact of the previous century.
The Mayflower pilgrims confronted more elemental threats
than the framers of the Constitution: Starvation, exposure, disease, and
the animal enmity these things bring out in people were the chief
obstacles to their continued survival. Still, faithfulness to their
governing covenant saw the pilgrims through these threats and helped
them to keep the political beat of ordered liberty throughout the
riotous years of early colonial life. It provided a prototypical
structure and rhythm for liberty in America, saving it from an early
death in the Hobbesian wilderness of the New World. The traditions of
self-government inaugurated in the Mayflower Compact serve to remind us
that freedom and form make happy bedfellows and that we owe the fruit of
their union in the shape of our Constitution to the brave men and women
of ages past.
Mayflower II
The newly renovated Mayflower II,
a replica of the original ship that sailed from England in 1620, passes
Bug Light on the way back to its berth in Plymouth, Mass., August 10,
2020.
Brian Snyder/Reuters
