11 nov 1620 - Mayflower Compact

Description:

signed by leaders of pilgrims who had come to the New World seeking religious tolerance, as some were Separatists. These pilgrims had negotiated with the Virginia Company about establishing a new settlement in the New World, even after the perils of the Jamestown settlement. The pilgrims wound up at Plymouth Bay, not under the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company, and were squatters, as they had no legal right to the land and no governmental authority to prove otherwise. The Compact was an agreement to form a crude government, a first step toward self-government. William Bradford, one of the leaders of the Plymouth community, was a self-taught scholar who was elected thirty times, but he always feared that non-Puritans would interrupt and ruin this experiment of a godly society. The Plymouth colony was eventually merged into the Bay Colony.