This
blog is in the midst of telling a story – it began with the last posting and
the reader is invited to go back and catch the first segment of this tale. It has to do with the Puritanical origins of
this nation. And the story goes back to
the disappointment Europeans felt over the discovery of the Americas. During the 1500s, Europeans invested in
western voyages so as to find a shortcut to the lucrative markets of the Far
East. No such route was found, but those
voyages began the tumbling of various streams of “dominoes” that are still
toppling today.
The last posting kept the reader in
Europe, actually England, and this posting has a few more developments to relate
emanating from that nation. The previous
posting left off with Elizabeth I’s (1533-1603) trying to handle the religious
strife that befell her country. Mainly
there was the ongoing battle with Catholics who wanted to regain their prominence
and that conflict even included an attempted foreign invasion from Spain – the
Spanish Armada.
This
religious strife began before she was queen and was particularly intense during
her predecessor’s reign, that of “Bloody Mary.”
Back then, religious disagreements could and were bloody indeed, and in
those earlier years Catholics had a supportive queen, Mary I and her husband,
Philip. Her aim was to reestablish Catholic
dominance after her father, Henry VIII, split with the Roman church and made the
Anglican Church dominant. Mary died in
1558 after a relatively short reign of about five years. What one needs to remember, religion and
political leadership of a country were highly interwoven with each other at
that time.
After Mary died and Elizabeth became
queen, she, Elizabeth, established the Anglican Church as official and barred open
membership to other religions; and that included not only Catholics, but other
upstart Protestant sects such as the Calvinists. The sanctions against the Calvinists were
mostly mild but starting in the early 1600s, more radical forms of that religion’s
beliefs (the last posting reviews its tenets) began to be promulgated.
Eventually,
and this transcends Elizabeth’s reign, the more ardent, radical Congregationalists
or extreme Puritans made their presence known.
They took the Calvinist beliefs in the unconditional election; that is,
humans are subject to God’s determination as to who is saved and who is not,
and irresistible grace; that is, once chosen, a person will not reject God’s
grace (the “U” and “I” of the acronym TULIP) up several notches.
They, according to Guelzo, “… wanted
membership in the[ir] church limited to only those who could give testimony and
evidence of having received God’s grace, even if that meant separating … from
the rest of England’s presumably impure society.”[1] And the split with the crown grew after
Elizabeth’s death in 1603. Her successor,
James of Scotland, intensified the government’s crackdown on these radicals.
With
his and his successor’s policies, the Congregationalists or Puritans started to
look for escape from the island nation.
And one group of them first sought refuse in the Puritanical Netherlands.
Donald S. Lutz,[2]
described these people’s experiences before getting to their eventual destination,
the New England coastline.
He
has
extensively analyzed the connection between these Puritans and original
constitutional formulations in American development by studying how early
American settlers from England and then Holland went about organizing
themselves. Starting with the Puritans
who landed at Plymouth in 1620, certain federalist elements were established.
Lutz points out that the
Puritans (this group specifically known as the Pilgrims) were interested in
simplifying the religious practices of the English churches. Being persecuted in England, they sought to “create
a new city of God – a society run according to the dictates of the Bible.”[3]
Adopting the notion of a
covenant, originally from Hebraic tradition and law of the Old Testament, the
Puritans established a society and a “politick” on the following elements: a
bonding between the members of the covenant, a calling upon God to witness the
bonding, and the consent of each member to join the resulting communal union. This latter element is a basic component; each
member was free to bond and did so of his own volition.
Of course, all of this
was accomplished by the drawing up and signing of the Mayflower Compact. He
writes,
During the 1600s,
over 100 other founding documents similar to the Mayflower Compact would be written by American colonists. Some of
these agreements would create single settlements, while others (such as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut) would
join several existing covenanted communities into a broader association. In
each case the people created by the agreement would be identified by those who
signed the document. It is a peculiarly American trait that founding documents
like the Declaration of Independence
and the United States Constitution
have signatures at the end. This expectation is part of the legacy of early
agreements like the Mayflower Compact;
just as “We the People” is derived from “We the undersigned.”[4]
And the Mayflower Compact introduced several
other important ideas basic to the nation's political perspective.
First, it established the
principle of adding or admitting new members to a covenant. Not all the signers
of the Mayflower Compact were
Puritans. A non-Puritan, though, was not given subordinate status. A new
addition was awarded equal status with every individual of the original group.
This provision was the
beginning of a standard that led to the constitutional provision that all new
states, as they joined the national union, would be granted equal status with
the original thirteen states (as demonstrated, for example, by equal
representation in the Senate and extends to new citizens as well).
The second significant
aspect of the Mayflower Compact was
its Lockean logic. Before John Locke ever wrote a word, Puritans in America
were living out his prescriptions by creating a society first and then creating
a “politick” to govern it. “On the Mayflower we find the colonists doing
essentially everything that Locke would later recommend.”[5]
One last contribution of
the Mayflower Compact was its clear
statement of political values which included commitments to justice, equality,
respect for law, and community. Not mentioned was individualism. Instead, the
following language dominates the document:
… these Presents,
solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and of one another, convenant and
combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering
and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid … for the General good
of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.[6]
Defined in religious contexts, the Puritans brought with them strongly felt values and principles that would evolve in the formative, colonial years and provide the basis of future bills of rights principles.
This covenant did not
present a model for governmental structure. As such, it was not the first
formal constitution in America. That
distinction belongs to the Fundamental
Orders of Connecticut, 1639. But it
did contain important elements; they are the forming a union based on consent a priori to actual governance,
formulation of a formal agreement based on a covenant (a promise which called
on God as witness to the agreement), and an integral commitment to equality – which,
by the way, appears before any commitment to individuality or individual
rights.
But before this tale
totally shifts to North America, there are still some important developments to
relate that took place in England. More
would happen there that prompted further exodus from that nation to North
America. The events also affected the
formal format by which these early settlers departed England and helped
determine the formal arrangements the settlers had with the mother country.
[1]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I
– transcript books – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 25.
In the original, this quote begins with “The Separatists …” indicating
the other term used to identify these believers.
[2]Donald S. Lutz, “The Mayflower Compact,
1620,” in Roots of the Republic: American
Founding Documents Interpreted,” ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI:
Madison House, 1990), 17-23. What this
posting includes is an edited rendition of what this blog posted earlier in this
blog. See Robert Gutierrez, “At the Beginning:
Mayflower Compact,” Gravitas: A
Voice for Civics (January 13, 2012), accessed March 4, 2021, https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/preview/1954479639890698872/7769498729070174796
.
[3]Ibid., p. 18.
[4]Ibid., 19.
[5]Ibid., 21.
[6] Eric Bruun and Jay Crosby, “Combine Ourselves into a Civil Body Politick:
The Mayflower compact,” in Our Nation's Archive: The history of the United
States in Documents (New York, NY: Tess Press, 1999/1620), 46-47, 47.
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