They had been bobbing for weeks within Cape Cod’s fingertip; most of them had not yet stepped foot on land. Despite three months of animosity and sickness, they lined up to sign a binding social contract. The signers represented less than half of the ship’s passengers, and the majority were like-minded “Separatist” Pilgrims, but otherwise they were a pretty motley crew: merchants, preachers, a physician, a tailor, a soldier of fortune, an indentured servant, even a mutineer named Billington who would become the first hanged man on Plymouth Plantation. The document, of course, was the Mayflower Compact. Some four hundred years later, many hold up this paper as the earliest vestige of American democracy. If you read it the right way, you can almost see it: the undersigned came together in a “civill body politick” and agreed to obey laws that would be “most meete & convenient for the generall good of the Colonie.” When you read it in its proper context, however, you see that it guarantees the authoritarian system that the Separatists had in mind for New England.
