The Mayflower Compact

November 11, 1620 | The signers aboard the Mayflower | Aboard the Mayflower, off Cape Cod

Headnote, written for Huzzah

The Mayflower was bound for the northern parts of Virginia and made land at Cape Cod instead, hundreds of miles outside the patent that gave the voyage its authority. Some aboard had already said that when they went ashore nobody would have any power to command them. The compact is the answer to that, written in a ship’s cabin before anyone landed.

It is not a theory of government. It is a practical solution to a specific problem, agreed by the men who had the problem, and that is what makes it the beginning. They combine themselves into a civil body politic, promise to frame just and equal laws, and promise obedience to what they frame. Nothing in it is philosophical. Every word of it is a commitment they had to keep the next morning.

Forty one signed. They were not all of one mind, and several were servants bound to others aboard. What they had in common was that nobody else was coming to govern them.

The document

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620.

Mr. John Carver

Mr. William Bradford

Mr Edward Winslow

Mr. William Brewster.

Isaac Allerton

Myles Standish

John Alden

John Turner

Francis Eaton

James Chilton

John Craxton

John Billington

Joses Fletcher

John Goodman

Mr. Samuel Fuller

Mr. Christopher Martin

Mr. William Mullins

Mr. William White

Mr. Richard Warren

John Howland

Mr. Steven Hopkins

Digery Priest

Thomas Williams

Gilbert Winslow

Edmund Margesson

Peter Brown

Richard Britteridge

George Soule

Edward Tilly

John Tilly

Francis Cooke

Thomas Rogers

Thomas Tinker

John Ridgdale

Edward Fuller

Richard Clark

Richard Gardiner

Mr. John Allerton

Thomas English

Edward Doten

Edward Liester.

Source and provenance

Text from the Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, which prints it from Francis Newton Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws, Government Printing Office, 1909. The spelling is Thorpe’s modernisation rather than the seventeenth century original, which does not survive in the signers’ hands. The forty one names below are Thorpe’s list and its spellings, Craxton and Ridgdale among them. The date is Old Style, and falls on November 21 by the calendar we now use.

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