Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1863-1930, The Mayflower Compact 1620, Oil on Canvas. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy/Wikipedia Commons

By CHRIS BROWN
and
ASENATH KEPLER
New Mexico’s Mayflower Society

This Thanksgiving marks 70 years since New Mexico’s Mayflower Society was founded by descendants of the ship’s 102 passengers. Our mission is to keep the Pilgrim story alive and relevant to New Mexicans today.  More important than the first Thanksgiving that half of the passengers survived to celebrate only with help from their native benefactors, Plymouth’s settlers laid the groundwork for democratic government in America.

Chris Brown

Blown off course and anchored at the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620, the passengers were outside the reach of the king’s laws under far away Virginia’s charter. Yet they needed to establish order and purpose among their “very mixed lot” of “saints” and “strangers”. So the Pilgrim leaders set quill to paper to “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic.” They invited their indentured servants to sign, not just English freemen who alone had the right to vote back home.

This agreement historians call the Mayflower Compact established the first government by the people on American soil. Plymouth was the first place in America where people made their own rules, though remaining loyal to King James. While Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay were run by the king’s appointees, Plymouth elected its governors. Foreshadowing our U.S. Constitution, its founding covenant underlaid future actions to “enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices.”

The religious Separatists among the Mayflower’s passengers were separating from the Church of England with its appointed clergy and elaborate liturgy. They brought with them long experience electing their own church leaders. By framing distinct civil and church covenants they presaged our constitutional separation of church and state.

Life in early Plymouth was tough but surprisingly peaceful. In 1621 the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag “People of the Dawn” formed a treaty for their mutual defense and benefit. It lasted fifty years, more than any U.S. tribal treaty. Plymouth created the first public schools by taxing themselves twelve pounds a year to pay teachers, established a safety net for veterans’ widows and impoverished orphans, and required men’s wills to include their wives.

Asenath Kepler

America’s first jury trials were held in what Los Alamos calls the Community Building: town meeting hall, courthouse, church and defensive fort. There, religious outcasts and fortune-seekers alike combined to create a community with liberty and justice under law.

Plymouth’s 1859 National Monument to the Forefathers honors five Pilgrim principles: faith, education, morality, law and liberty. They did not always live up to them. Unfortunately, in 1623 Pilgrim men killed several members of a neighboring tribe to preempt a rumored attack. This prompted their mentor, Rev. John Robinson, to counsel “where blood once begins to be shed, it is seldom staunched for a long time after.” Religious freedom the Pilgrims sought for themselves was not warmly extended to waves of Quakers and Baptists arriving with “strange beliefs.” Pilgrim writers railed against Catholic “popery”. Yet Roger Williams, an uncompromising Separatist minister at Plymouth in 1631 went on to found Rhode Island, America’s beachhead for full freedom of conscience and professions of faith.

Longtime governor William Bradford wrote, “As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many” a path to individual liberty and common purpose under law. Genealogists say ten million Americans are descendants of the Mayflower’s ground-breaking passengers. Are you one of them? The New Mexico Mayflower Society’s 150 members invite you to join us in discovering your family’s distant roots. Begin with the resources of TheMayflowerSociety.org. Learn about our college scholarships, educational events, and how to join at nm-mayflower.org.

Editor’s note: Chris Brown is Governor of New Mexico’s Mayflower Society. Asenath Kepler is a past Governor and former Counsellor General of the national society. Both are longtime Santa Fe residents active in public affairs.