On November 11, 1620, on a ship at sea, America’s answer to the Magna Carta was born. It appeared in the form of a short document. A covenant, really, between the Pilgrims who’d fled persecution in England, and the “strangers” (artisans and other essential workmen) who’d joined them for the journey. After storms blew the ship off course — for wintry New England, instead of balmy Virginia — the men had been at each other’s throats.

This document was meant as a kind of peace treaty, to keep the company alive till they finally sighted land. More than that, it would serve as the moral basis for social and political order thereafter. Likewise, the mission of that community of Pilgrims would serve as the template for the entire American founding. The New England colonies would pioneer the fight against Parliament’s power on American shores.

The Ur-Americans

I speak of the Mayflower Compact. Once a staple of America’s history classrooms, this document has almost been forgotten, despite how central the Pilgrims were to America’s dawning identity.

Yes, many other communities would be founded, for many diverse reasons — from Catholic-friendly Maryland to the refuge for indentured servants that became the slave state of Georgia. As David Hackett Fisher explains in exquisite scholarly detail in Albion’s Seed, there were four broad groups of settlers whose original folkways and worldviews flowed like creeks to form the mainstream of early American culture.

• The Puritans of Massachusetts, who’d largely traveled from East Anglia, England. These religious separatists were the “Reformation of the Reformation.” Back home, their faction was fighting against the power of England’s king to control local churches’ faith and worship. They would within 20 years wage and win a civil war that ended with the beheading of King Charles I.
• The Cavaliers of the upper South, and their indentured servants, who’d come from the south of England. These people hailed from regions and classes that would support the royal and Anglican cause in the English Civil War. But they were keen to acquire property and protect their property rights. The experience of local self-government in colonies like Virginia would form them as ready opponents to British efforts to micromanage and tax the colonists from London.
• The Quakers of Pennsylvania, who sought and found religious freedom in America. This group’s quietism and pacifism would keep them from playing a major role in the War of Independence. Their importance would emerge later on, in the founding of business and educational ventures.
• The Scots-Irish who would settle the frontier areas of the South. These clannish, fiercely independent and individualistic settlers would form the backbone of Southern culture, apart from the genteel Tidewater aristocrats. Country music, “redneck” stereotypes, charismatic churches, and other features of what today’s elitists consider “deplorable” can be traced to this settler subculture.

A Real Social Contract

The Mayflower Compact was the first document of popular government in American history. Unlike the royal charters of various colonies, the Compact emerged from the ground up, instead of from the top down. Let’s read its terms, with an eye to how the themes laid out here would play out in subsequent centuries.

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, etc.:

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith, and the honor 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 politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue thereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be though 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 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.

A Hand-Made Political Community

Yes, the signers doff their caps to the king. But he does not serve as the source of public order. The signers “combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” They, and not the English Parliament will “enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws.” This is a social contract, a real one — instead of the purely imaginary pacts depicted by Thomas Hobbes or John Locke in works of theory.

The political community which these Pilgrims will go on to found in the wilds of Massachusetts will be created ex nihilo, and molded by experiment and experience. Its example and influence will shape many other colonies in other parts of the country. Crucially, pioneers who’d go on to settle the great American Middle West would largely come from New England — fleeing its stony, unyielding soil for vast, fertile prairies. They’d bring to the new American states much of the Puritan heritage of self-government and Christian mission.

The 17th Century Changed Everything

What’s really distinctive about America, even setting it apart from other English-speaking democracies, emerged from the events of the 17^th century. Namely, the ongoing struggle between royal power and Parliament’s, between the “high” Anglican church and “low” church Protestants, between rural gentry and capitalists based in cities. (For a marvelously granular study of this epic conflict, which recurred right up through 1861, see Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins Wars.) And at crucial moments in that ongoing struggle, the question of gun rights would be intertwined with religious freedom. Communities threatened with persecution would try to defend themselves against either royal power or hostile, intolerant mobs. Those without access to weapons would fail.

The Second Great Awakening would see the faith of the Puritans in New England spread all through the colonies, seeding the middle colonies and the South with independent, entrepreneurial churches. The religious preoccupations and fierce independence of the New England Protestants would thus inflect much of America.

In a sense, we are all the heirs of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. And the Second Amendment that uniquely protects our gun rights is the fruit of the sober, watchful concern for religious freedom that obsessed our Founding Fathers — as future columns will prove in detail.

This article is part of the series, God, Guns and the Government.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”