A History of the American People

An important event occurred on the voyage, when the Mayflower was two months out from
England, and the discomforts of a crowded voyage were leading to dissension. On November 21,
the colony's leaders assembled in the main cabin and drew up a social compact, designed to
secure unity and provide for future government. In effect it created a civil body politic to provide
just and equal laws,' founded upon church teaching, the religious and secular governance of the colony to be in effect indistinguishable. This contract was based upon the original Biblical covenant between God and the Israelites. But it reflected also early-17th-century social-contract theory, which was later to receive such notable expression in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1655) and John Locke's Treatise of Civil Government (1690). It is an amazing document for these earnest men (and women) to have agreed and drawn up, signed by all forty-oneheads of
households' aboard the tiny vessel in the midst of the troubled Atlantic, and it testified to the
profound earnestness and high-purpose with which they viewed their venture.
What was remarkable about this particular contract was that it was not between a servant and a
master, or a people and a king, but between a group of like-minded individuals and each other,
with God as a witness and symbolic co-signatory. It was as though this small community, in
going to America together, pledged themselves to create a different kind of collective
personality, living a new life across the Atlantic. One of their leaders, William Bradford, later
wrote a history, Of Plymouth Plantation, in which he first referred to them as Pilgrims. But they
were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine, and then returning home to resume
everyday life. They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which
was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly towards a millenarian goal. They saw
themselves as exceptions to the European betrayal of Christian principles, and they were
conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.
Behind the Pilgrims were powerful figures in England, led by Sir Robert Rich, Earl of
Warwick, who in 1612 at the age of twenty-five had become a member of the Virginia Company,
and was later to be Lord High Admiral of the parliamentary forces during the English Civil War.
Warwick was an adventurer, the Ralegh of his age, but a graduate of that Cambridge Puritan
college, Emmanuel, and a profoundly religious man. Together with other like-minded Puritan
gentry, he wanted to reform England. But if that proved impossible he wanted the alternative
option of a reformed colony in the Americas. Throughout the 1620s he was busy organizing
groups of religious settlers, mainly from the West Country, East Anglia and Essex, and London-
where strict Protestantism was strongest-to undertake the American adventure. In 1623 he
encouraged a group of Dorset men and women to voyage to New England, landing at Cape Ann
and eventually, in 1626, colonizing Naumkeag." John White, a Dorset clergyman who helped to
organize the expedition, insisted that religion was the biggest single motive in getting people to
hazard all on the adventure: The most eminent and desirable end of planting colonies is the propagation of Religion,' he wrote.This Nation is in a sort singled out unto this work, being of
all the States enjoying the liberty of the Religion Reformed, and are able to spare people for such
an employment, the most orthodox in our profession.' He admitted: `Necessity may oppress
some: novelty draw on others: hopes of gain in time to come may prevail with a third sort: but
that the most sincere and Godly part have the advancement of the Gospel for their main scope I
am confident.’
The success of this venture led to a third Puritan expedition in 16 28 which produced the
settlement of Salem. A key date was March 4, 1629 when the organizers of these voyages
formed the Massachusetts Bay Company, under royal charter, which had authority to transfer
itself wholly to the American side of the ocean. It promptly dispatched six ships with 350 people