A new age: the Mayflower Compact
The second installment of "The Cause" series
In this 250th year of the United States, on Sundays, I have begun a series called “The Cause.” “The Cause” was the initial name of the war for the independence of the United States.
Here is the first installment.
Below is the second one.
They knew the waters were filled with cod, but they caught none. The seamen among the slightly more than 100 passengers — a mix of religious seekers, adventurers and entrepreneurs — dreamed aloud about the riches to be obtained from the astounding number of breaching whales. Land had been sighted two days earlier. The passengers noted the forested shores as their badly damaged ship inched forward and dropped anchor in a shallow and circular bay 500 miles off course. They had sailed to the edge of history and the beginning of a new age, but the occasion lacked the grandeur of later commemorations. They were not at Plymouth Rock. Like all stories, there is always more.
They arrived on November 11, and the temperature had turned towards winter when the Mayflower dropped anchor and swung on the thick creaking rope and casings at rest and close to land. The ocean waters were already freezing, and the shallowness of the bay imposed a long walk to shore for the apprehensive, ambitious, and anxious passengers.
Only half of them were pilgrims seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of King Charles II, and they had little in common with their shipmates. They were not coming ashore in the Virginia colony established 13 years earlier at Jamestown. They were likely unaware that the first black slaves had arrived there aboard Dutch merchant vessels the year before.
They were also likely unaware that the Indigenous population of Wampanoag Indians was terrified of them because six years earlier 20 men from Patuxet had been lured onto a ship by an evil man named Thomas Hunt who kidnapped them, chained them in the bowels of the ship, and took them to Spain to be sold into slavery.
The 102 passengers would also have been unaware of what the Wampanoag called the “Great Dying.” Between 1616 and 1619, a great plague devastated the tribal population by killing tens of thousands of people from the present-day Maine coast to Cape Cod.
They were also unaware that among the naive Wampanoag that there was a single man who had been to London and spoke English. His name was Tisquantum, and he was the only kidnapped Wampanoag to ever return to Patuxet from across the Atlantic Ocean.
When Squanto, as he came to be known, approached the pilgrims in 1621, his ability to speak English was described by William Bradford in his book “Of Plymoth Plantation,” as a “special instrument sent of God.” Similarly, when the starving English sailors foraged for food and found the buried winter food stores of the Wampanoag, it was also attributed to God’s providence.
This then led to the first shootout and exchange of arrows with the Indigenous population, but that came later.
Before anyone left the ship, 41 male passengers gathered and signed an agreement. It was called a ‘compact.’ It obligated all of them towards the general good, majority rule and a rule of law.
They were not part of a military expedition, or bound to each other in any manner beyond a mutuality of shared interest, which could only be protected by common agreement and a shared conviction that, together, they were stronger than apart. They smashed the feudal age with a pen stroke. Before spring, half of them would be dead. The first baby came soon after their arrival. He was named Peregrine.
This is how the 19th century American historian Benson John Lossing described the condition of the 102 passengers within months of their arrival and ultimate perseverance:
After many hardships ... the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot December, 1620 upon a bare rock on the bleak coast of Massachusetts Bay, while all around the earth was covered with deep snow ... Dreary, indeed, was the prospect before them. Exposure and privations had prostrated one half of the men before the first blow of the ax had been struck to build a habitation one by one perished. The governor and his wife died in April 1621; and on the first of that month, forty-six of the one hundred emigrants were in their graves, nineteen of whom were signers of the Mayflower Compact.
The simple truth is that none would have survived, but for the grace of the kidnapped Tisquantum, who did not seek revenge, but relationship and understanding. He was the negotiator, interpreter and teacher between two alien cultures who could not comprehend one another. In the end, he aligned himself with the English against his people, who were the first of many tribes to be manipulated and abused by English common law. The pilgrims survived with fortitude, perseverance and grace from a kidnapped Indian.
The Wampanoag were devastated and manipulated by the English they saved and the ambitions of humans between them to improve their situation. The pilgrims were far from tolerant, and did not land in North America to evangelize political liberty. They did, however, accomplish something extraordinary in time. They built a new civilization from the wilderness that would become the United States.
Time and time again, American leaders would return to the spot where America’s first sins and hopes could be traced back towards. When they came it was to talk about what had been endured, learned, and the accumulated wisdom to discern where next to go. The pilgrims did not find paradise or build utopia. They struggled, murdered, stole, loved, died and built. The survivors had children, and those children married and had families.
They spread out and built a colony that built schools and churches and meeting rooms for discussion about mutual interests and disputes. They built a foundation that has been passed down and one that gives license to daring, dreaming and adventure. Fortitude, courage, determination and their achievements should never be obscured because of the frailties of human beings. The greatness of the sum, and the endurance of both the legacy of the pilgrims and Wampanoag people through 400 years, are decisive proof.
Two hundred years passed from 1620 to 1820, but what happened in that bay was remembered and celebrated because a new civilization had taken root there. It was unique in the annals of human history. It deserved both commemoration and castigation.
Daniel Webster was a modern man. He felt no confusion or indifference towards the evil of American slavery. He understood its incompatibility with freedom, and that is why he spoke of slavery from the place where American freedom was born. The United States was nearly 50 years old in 1820 when Webster asked his audience to imagine and journey 100 years into the future with him for a conversation with our ancestors.
George Washington had been dead for a generation, and Adams and Jefferson were nearing the ends of their long lives when Webster said:
And when from the long distance of a hundred years, they shall look back upon us, they shall know, at least, that we possessed affections, which running backward and warming with GRATITUDE for what our ancestors have done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity and meet them with cordial salutation, ere yet they have arrived on the shore of being.
Advance, then, ye future generations.
We would hail you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own human duration.
We bid you welcome to this land of the fathers.
We greet your accession to the great inheritance which we have enjoyed.
We welcome you to the blessings of good government and religious liberty. We welcome you to the treasures of science and the delights of learning.
We welcome you to the transcendent sweets of domestic life, to the happiness of (friends) parents and children.
Webster confronted the evil of slavery. He venerated the achievements of the imperfect people who sailed into the bay and imagined an optimistic future where the pursuit of happiness was linked to freedom.
Forty more years would pass before the evil of slavery would ignite one of the bloodiest civil wars in world history. It would last for four years. When it was over there was no more slavery in North America. America was far from just, but it had endured. The republic had survived.
In 1907, the 47-year-old president of the United States of America arrived in the shallow circular bay from his home at Oyster Point aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower. News reports said the thunder from the guns of eight American battleships could be heard 60 miles away. They saluted the president who had ordered their hulls painted white before sending them on a global circumnavigation to demonstrate the power and reach of the sprawling republic that was being transformed daily by the greatest wave of immigration in human history.
Fifteen hundred United States marines greeted the 26th president as he stepped ashore to lay the cornerstone for what would become an imposing granite tower. It was to honor the achievements and legacy of the people who had sailed quietly and alone and into the bay nearly 300 years earlier.
The young president who had taken office after an assassin’s bullet killed the third president in 40 years marked a new generation of American leaders. The last of the Civil War combat veterans had seen the presidency and the American West was on the edge of being ‘tamed.’
The 20th century was underway. Electricity, airplanes, railroads and automobiles were rapidly transforming society. Profound economic inequality threatened freedom, and so when Teddy Roosevelt travelled to the tip of Cape Cod he talked about the “great malefactors of wealth,” who were destabilizing the common good and the pursuit of happiness. He journeyed to the shores where a new age began. He renewed the compact first made there by those long dead passengers.
Today, the Pilgrim Monument dominates the skyline in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is the place from which a great tide of human progress and freedom arose.
The pilgrims were named such in a speech long after they were dead. Their leaders talked about building a “City on a Hill.” It didn’t turn out quite how they imagined. That is how life works. Sometimes, it turns out better.
Freedom means freedom for everyone in 2026 America. That is what is new in the American story. There have always been people and forces trying to take freedom away. That isn’t a new story; it’s an old one. That is the nature of this moment: this vast, free, pluralistic society in which people can pursue happiness by dreaming, imagining and becoming whatever it is they wish to be.
The world that John Winthrop envisioned was never fulfilled, but its possibilities have endured. The city remains unbuilt, but not unconstructed. It is there for the taking with enough imagination and daring.
What ever differences exist between Americans in 2026 they are not that different from the difficulties faced by the pilgrims. They, like us, are bound together by a mutuality of interest that is not ordained or commanded by any force outside of ourselves.
Studying the meaning of life and its purpose is the unfinished work of a thousand lifetimes, as is the meaning of freedom. We share this heritage and can build it together.
John Withrop’s “City on a Hill,” 1630
Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke, and to provide for our posterity, is to followe the counsell of Micah, to doe justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. Soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome, power, goodness and truthe, than formerly wee have been acquainted with. Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are a goeing.
I shall shutt upp this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithfull servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israell, Deut. 30. Beloved there is now sett before us life and good, Death and evill, in that wee are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walke in his wayes and to keepe his Commandements and his Ordinance and his lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that wee may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may blesse us in the land whither wee goe to possesse it. But if our heartes shall turne away, soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worshipp and serve other Gods, our pleasure and proffitts, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, wee shall surely perishe out of the good land whither wee passe over this vast sea to possesse it; Therefore let us choose life that wee, and our seede may live, by obeyeing His voyce and cleaveing to Him, for Hee is our life and our prosperity.
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Thank you.
One of the best synopsis of our fraught and often mistold origin story. It would be wonderful to acknowledge the cruelty, correct the oversights and failings as we repair and build upon what was nobly started two hundred and fifty years ago.