The Pilgrims Sign the Mayflower Compact
Blown off course, a shipload of settlers writes its own rules for governing
Quick facts
- Signed
- November 1620, aboard the Mayflower off Cape Cod
- Signers
- 41 adult male colonists
- Colony founded
- Plymouth
- Significance
- Early written framework of colonial self-government
What happened
In November 1620 a ship called the Mayflower carried English religious separatists, later called the Pilgrims, along with other passengers, toward a landing in northern Virginia. Storms pushed them far off course to Cape Cod, outside the territory their patent covered. To hold the group together in a place where their legal authority did not reach, 41 adult male passengers signed a short agreement, the Mayflower Compact, in which they covenanted to combine themselves into a civil body politic and to make and obey just and equal laws for the good of the colony. They went on to found Plymouth Colony. The original document is lost; its wording survives through the writings of the Plymouth leader William Bradford, and Pilgrim Hall Museum holds an early printing.
Why it matters
The Mayflower Compact is often treated as the first written framework of self-government in what became the United States, a small group agreeing to govern itself by consent rather than by a distant authority. It carried real weight in shaping later American ideas that legitimate government rests on the agreement of the governed, a thread that runs through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
How we know
The text of the Compact and the account of the 1620 voyage come from William Bradford's manuscript history Of Plymouth Plantation and from the 1622 account known as Mourt's Relation, both first-hand Pilgrim sources.
Sources
- HISTORY. Mayflower Compact · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Pilgrim Hall Museum. The Mayflower Compact · General sourcepilgrimhall.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineHistory of the United States32 events · A hundred English colonists on a swampy island, a constitution argued out over one Philadelphia summer, a country that doubled its size for four cents an acre and fought a civil war over who counted as free, and the superpower that came out the other sideView all →