Mayflower Compact

The Mayflower Compact is a brief self-governance agreement signed on 21 November 1620 (11 November by the Old Style calendar then in use) by 41 adult male passengers aboard the ship Mayflower while anchored in Provincetown Harbor off Cape Cod, before the Plymouth colonists went ashore. Drafted because the ship had landed well outside the territory covered by its original Virginia Company patent, leaving the colonists' legal authority to govern themselves in doubt, the compact bound its signers into a "civil Body Politick" and committed them to frame and obey "just and equal Laws" enacted for the colony's general good, with authority resting on the consent of the governed rather than a royal charter. Though modest in its actual legal force and largely superseded within a few years by proper English charters, the compact has been celebrated since the nineteenth century, somewhat beyond its original scope, as an early landmark of constitutional self-government and popular sovereignty in what became the United States. No original manuscript survives; the earliest surviving text was copied into Plymouth governor William Bradford's own history, Of Plymouth Plantation.