American Government and Politics Today, Brief Edition, 2014-2015

CHAPTER TWo • FoRGiNG A NEW GovERNmENT: THE CoNsTiTuTioN 21

tively short. Because amending it is difficult, it also has relatively few amendments. The

Constitution has remained largely intact for more than two hundred years. To a great

extent, this is because the principles set forth in the Constitution are sufficiently broad that

they can be adapted to meet the needs of a changing society.

How and why the U.S. Constitution was created is a story that has been told and

retold. It is worth repeating, because knowing the historical and political context in which

this country’s governmental machinery was formed is essential to understanding American

government and politics today. The Constitution did not result just from creative thinking.

Many of its provisions were grounded in the political philosophy of the time.

The dele gates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 brought with them two

important sets of influences: their political culture and their political experience. In the

years between the first settlements in the New World and the writing of the Constitution,

Americans had developed a political philosophy about how people should be governed

and had tried out several forms of government. These experiences gave the founders the

tools with which they constructed the Constitution.

THE ColoNiAl BACkGRouNd

In 1607, a company chartered by the English government sent a group of settlers to

establish a trading post, Jamestown, in what is now Virginia. Jamestown was the first

permanent English colony in the Americas. The king of England gave the backers of this

colony a charter granting them “full power and authority” to make laws “for the good

and welfare” of the settlement. The colonists at Jamestown instituted a representative

assembly, a legislature composed of individuals who represented the population, thus

setting a precedent in government that was to be observed in later colonial adventures.

separatists, the Mayflower, and the Compact

The first New England colony was established in 1620. A group made up in large part of

extreme Separatists, who wished to break with the Church of England, came over on the

ship Mayflower to the New World, landing at Plymouth (Massachusetts). Before going

onshore, the adult males—women were not considered to have any political status—drew

up the Mayflower Compact, which was signed by forty-one of the forty-four men aboard

the ship on November 21, 1620.

The reason for the compact was obvious. This group was outside the jurisdiction

of the Virginia Company of London, which had chartered its settlement. The Separatist

leaders feared that some of the Mayflower passengers might conclude that they were no

longer under any obligations of civil obedience. Therefore, some form of public author-

ity was imperative. As William Bradford (one of the Separatist leaders) recalled in his

accounts, there were “discontented and mutinous speeches that some of the strangers

[non-Separatists] amongst them had let fall from them in the ship; That when they came

ashore they would use their owne libertie; for none had power to command them.”^1

The significance of the Compact. The compact was not a constitution. It was a politi-

cal statement in which the signers agreed to create and submit to the authority of a gov-

ernment, pending the receipt of a royal charter. The Mayflower Compact’s historical and

political significance is twofold: it depended on the consent of the affected individuals,

and it served as a prototype for similar compacts in American history.

LO 1: Explain how the colonial

experience prepared Americans for

independence, the restrictions that

Britain placed on the colonies, and

the American response to those

restrictions.

Representative

Assembly

A legislature composed of

individuals who represent

the population.

1. John Camp, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New
   England (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).

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