They left England because of religious persecution, but they did not come straight here. They spent a decade in the Netherlands waiting on a ship and on investors. When it was finally time to sail, those investors put about fifty so-called strangers on board alongside the Pilgrims: carpenters and tradesmen the Pilgrims did not know, who were not fleeing anything and had no reason to stay once they landed. Then the weather blew the ship far north of Virginia, and the strangers announced they no longer felt bound by the contract.
So the Pilgrims wrote something down. The Mayflower Compact is the first written agreement on governance between two groups of people, with no monarch on either side, in the history of the world. Even the Magna Carta was nobles negotiating with a king. This was neighbors: when we land, we will form a government of mutual consent and toleration, working together in freedom.
Lawrence Reed's point is that this is the quintessentially American idea, and it shows up 156 years before the Declaration of Independence said it beautifully. When people talk about the social contract as a philosopher's abstraction, this is the real thing: private, voluntary, and with no government standing over it.
Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America.
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teapartypatriots.org
00:00 — 1620: The Pilgrims and the Fifty Strangers
00:27 — Why They Went to Holland First
01:11 — Blown Off Course, and the Strangers Walk Away
02:05 — The First Governing Agreement Without a Monarch
02:51 — One Hundred Fifty-Six Years Before the Declaration
03:14 — The Real Social Contract
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