Because Thanksgiving is a national celebration, most people have heard about the Pilgrims. Unfortunately, despite this and despite learning about them in grade school (perhaps because of it considering the way that grade school simplifies and stupifies history for children) many Americans are ignorant of who the Pilgrims were, what they did that matters so much, why they came to North America in the first place, and the huge impact they had on North American English history and the United States as a result. From them we gain essential advancements in the cause of limited government, the rule of law, human freedom, and lessons about the failures of socialistic communal property ownership embedded in the very roots of American identity, culture, and history. With Thanksgiving around the corner, now is a great time to be reminded of not only why the Pilgrims are an important part of the history of what would become the United States of America, but why they’re still relevant to us now, more than ever.
Who They Were
The Pilgrims were a branch of the English Puritans movement. The Puritans were Protestants who believed that the Church of England retained too much of Catholicism’s unbiblical customs, beliefs, and religious rituals. Seeking to purify the Church of England, the Puritans worked to rid Anglicanism of its Catholic influence and reform the English church so that it looked and functioned more like primitive Christianity as described in the New Testament. Based on their reading of the New Testament, Puritans sought to eliminate crucifixes and crosses from religious worship, ostentatious vestments and robes, and, perhaps most radical of all, remove the monarch as the head of the Church of England.
The congregations of the New Testament church had been overseen by a pastor/bishop and elders with the Apostles directing the church at large, not an earthly ruler molding doctrines and rites to suit his or her desires. Because the Puritans adhered to the Bible as best they understood it, they defended this idea of worship and called for a rejection of the right of the monarch to proscribe Christian doctrine or worship in any manner. This was blatantly illegal under the Act of Uniformity of 1559, which required English citizens to worship in and through the Church of England that was headed by the King or Queen of England. When the Puritans refused to obey this law they were seen as challenging the authority of the monarchy itself, a step away form full blown treason. They were fined, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, and exiled from the country as a result.
In 1608 AD, as refugees fleeing persecution, the Puritans we now call the Pilgrims fled their native soil for Holland, where they believed they would be able to live their religion. There they faced two essential problems as later laid out by Puritan leader William Bradford. First, as they lived in Holland their children were beginning to assimilate into the culture of the Dutch and adopt Dutch mannerism. The Pilgrims were wary of this both because they didn’t want their children to lose their religious distinctiveness and because, despite being driven from England, the Puritans still honored their English heritage and didn’t want their children to lose their devoutness or their Englishness.
The other essential problem is that Holland’s famed religious tolerance had begun to fade. In contradiction to the accepted narrative, which asserts that the Pilgrims had peaceful lives in religiously tolerant Holland, the truth is the opposite. In 1619, the government of Holland began passing laws that would require the Pilgrims to join with the state approved form of Christianity or face legal repercussions:
Laws were enacted that required all provincial magistrates and government officials be members in good standing in the Dutch Reformed Church, all public schools to teach the Reformed doctrine, and all marriages to be conducted in the faith. “Anabaptist, Lutheran, and Humanist heretics were dealt [in the law] with…public refutations and other kinds of harassment” similar to the Puritan torments used later in the Massachusetts Bay colony. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, “Calvinism was, without any doubt, the dominant religion and, more importantly, the only one with an official right to public worship.”
Designed for the Good of All, pg. 23
Likewise, Dr. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, former Director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, explained that:
In 1619, just after the synod ended, the States General published an edict prohibiting holding separate religious gatherings or conventicles outside the official Reformed Church or supporting dissenting clergy.
…In England, however, most people were unaware of the changes. The English knew about the theological decisions of the Synod of Dort; but legal change outside the synod’s acts received far less publicity. People continued to learn about The Netherlands from the books that published the text of the Union
of Utrecht. The religious toleration of the Dutch thereby remained famous in England, while toleration mandated by law had become a memory inconsistent with mid-seventeenth-century reality.…Danger was real. In 1619, one of the Pilgrims, James Chilton, was surrounded by youths in Leiden who stoned him, leaving him wounded and unconscious on the street.
Dutch Contributions to Religious Toleration, pgs. 599-600
Clearly, things were going poorly and getting worse. Faced with persecution in Holland and in England, the Pilgrims began looking for a way out, a way to find some place where they could be left alone enough to create the society they wanted, to test their theology and ideology against reality. So, they sat sail for North America.
The Seeds of Liberty
Once the Pilgrims arrived in North America alongside the non-Pilgrim seamen in late 1620, the two groups realized that they had to create some system that would allow them to overcome their differences and cooperate together if they hoped to survive the coming harsh winter. The agreement that they came to, known now as the Mayflower Compact, is one of the most important documents ever penned. In it the seeds of voluntary association, limited local government, the rule of law, and the idea that all political power comes directly from the people, was buried deeply into the loam of North America in a way that would lay the foundations for liberty more firmly and durably than even in England itself.
Because it is so short, here is the text of the Mayflower Compact itself. I have bolded the relevant parts which prove the above claims and which I will expand upon after the quotation:
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, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour 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 Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought 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 eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620[Names of the signatories follow.]
Seed 1: Voluntary Association
…solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick.
The Puritans were not forced to come to North America as many after them would as punishment for a crime. The Puritans came of their own free will and choice. Once here they were not interested in just replicating the old forms of government found in Europe. To be sure, they pledged their loyalty to the king. They were, after all, still Englishmen. But the government they formed in the New World was a new government. It was not one where you were forced to be part of it. Rather each person there chose to be part of that society and to be governed by the customs and laws that society formed.
The lesson for us today is clear. All government should be voluntary and consensual. People have the right to secede from the old ways of government and to form new ones as they wish. When both John Locke and Thomas Jefferson would later talk about the rights of the people to abolish, alter, and create anew the governments which they followed, neither man was being theoretical. Recent history had already gave them a perfect example of this principle in action as a functional reality in the Puritans. That their laws and customs may not be the kinds we would wish to live under just emphasizes how important the idea of voluntary government is for how society best thrives. Voluntary Association ensures that all people have the right to the kinds of government that will best fulfill their ideals.
Seed 2: Laws Based On Justice
…do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony.
Puritan laws would not be based on royal fiat or parliamentary order. They were not ruled by the orders of men living thousands of miles away. The Puritans “enact[ed], constitut[ed], and fram[ed],” their own laws for themselves. The Puritans were self-governing, making their own laws for themselves according to the ideas and customs they believed would most likely create the kind of society in which they wished to live. Law is meant to be made by the people most directly effected by it, not by strangers thousands of miles away who neither know them personally nor care about them or their needs.
In the world that the Pilgrims lived there was only one kind of law, those dictated to you by the ruling government authorities. The English Parliament had wrested from the king some of the absolute power he had, in theory, held in the past. But just because an oligarchy controlled the laws doesn’t mean that those laws were just or righteous or did anything other than serve the political elites and those connected to them. The entire system was still based on injustice and inequality, with the authority to dominate given to those in government and the chains of obedience forced on everyone else. This the English colonists would learn intimately in the 1760s. The Puritans challenged this entire idea.
Puritan laws were meant to be based in justice and apply equally to all people. That means the law had a moral dimension. Puritan law was based on shared concrete ideas about what was right, what was wrong, what was good, and what was evil and written in such a way as to promote or meet the demands of moral righteousness and while defeating evil. In other words, Puritan laws were meant to be just, to ensure that human behavior and government actions were governed by mutually agreed upon morals and be held accountable when they did not. Likewise, there was no separate treatment for those with political power and for those without it. The governor of the colony could not get away with doing that which an ordinary member of the colony couldn’t do nor could the government do that which an ordinary member of the colony could do.
The lesson for us here is that laws should be made locally, by the people affected by them, grant no special privileges, powers, or immunities to anyone, and that all law should apply equally to both the enforcer of the law and those subject to it. Real law is based on morality, designed to promote righteousness and curtail or punish evil actions. Laws cannot violate morality or justice. Such laws are not laws, merely the unlawful orders of despotic rulers.
Seed 3: Limited Government
…unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.
The Puritans were law breakers. Though the British government made it illegal for Puritans to meet together and worship, the Puritans did it any way. Even though they could be beaten, humiliated, tortured, and imprisoned, the Puritans refused to back down from practicing their religion as they believed God had commanded it. They understood well the truth that Algernon Sydney would latter express so eloquently:
That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.
Which is why in the Mayflower Compact they made it clear that there is a limit to the submission and obedience that is due to a every political system or set of laws. What is just we obey, not because it is a decree of the state but because ever man should act justly and rightly in all his dealings. Thereby we give that law its due obedience. But laws that are unjust? These we are duty bound to disobey, to resist, to rebel against, to abolish. Because they are not laws. They are merely the edicts of power hungry men, tyrannies forced upon men by those in power. The Puritan knew, as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson later enunciated, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”
And that is one of the most powerful lessons we can draw from our Puritan founders. Disobedience is the only just reaction to legal but unjust orders. Those who shrink form this duty enable evil and functionally place chains upon their bodies, minds, and souls while those who enforce unjust laws and thereby enforce injustice do so at the danger of their own souls. Liberty can only be maintained by those who disobey at the first smallest inkling of injustice. And if this throws the state into chaos, then it was already in chaos having been given over to the hands of wicked men. With that truth revealed and the adherence to justice reasserted, order can be reestablished through the restoration of justice and morality as the ruling principles of society.
Final Thoughts
I would not want to live in a Puritan society. They certainly did things that I find abhorrent. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a great deal that we can learn from them that matters now. In many ways the Puritans were farther ahead in liberty and the protections of human rights than modern, libertine America. Yes, the Puritan persecution and execution of Mary Dyer was horrendous and the Witch Trials are infamous (though those weren’t actually carried out by the Puritans, all of whom had died by 1692.) But they’re nothing compared to the evils of centralized governments. The Puritans never would have or could murder 2 million Iraqis as part of the Global War on Terror, for example. That is but a fraction of the millions murdered by the United States in the last 25 years.
The Puritans exiled dozens of people like Anne Hutchison and Roger Williams for their opposing religious views. This may not even be considered a rights violation as the Puritans privately owned their homes and towns. Therefore they had the right to decide who could or could not live there in much the same way that HOAs function today. Private wners of a private community have the unalienable right to decide what the rules of their community should be and the authority to eject from their property those who refuse to abide by their rules. Even at their worst, the Puritans don’t hold a candle to the millions of people that the US government has hunted down, robbed, and exiled from the country (i.e. deported) for the crime of not being born in the USA.
The Puritans, though they created strict laws for themselves, never acted to prevent people in neighboring colonies, such as small Rhode Island, from enacting their own laws and never invaded other colonies to force them to become Puritans or serve Puritan goals. The United States centralized government, in contrast is bombing Africa, kidnapping the leaders of other nations, and starting wars in Asia – all at the same time! The Puritan government, at its worst, was nowhere near as murderous, oppressive, or evil as the centralized United States government.
In contrast, Puritan ideas about government – that it should be local, small, controlled by the public, be governed by just laws that apply equally to all people, and that government should be voluntary – are some of the most important in the world. These principles not only limit the evils that government can perpetuate, but they maximize the amount of good that people can have in life. Small, unobtrusive governments that operate locally and are made up of local people find it extremely difficult to become outright tyrannical. This leaves people free to pursue the lives they choose with the people they choose, which unlocks their ability to pursue (and hopefully discover) happiness. These principles minimize the harm governments do to the public and maximize the ability of people to buy, sell, trade, invent, innovate, build, and discover the things that make their lives and the lives of others better, lifting the standard of living for all people.
For all their demonization today by self-absorbed and ignorant hedonists, the political ideals of the Puritans are as important and powerful as ever.