Free Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan Page A

been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.
    Once more it had been shown that, whatever their faith in a common road to heaven, Jacobean Englishmen desired individual economic salvation on earth, and that the only way to secure their prosperity and cohesion in the New World was by assuaging their land-hunger: which, fortunately, was easy. In New England, as in Virginia, the most alluring advertisement for the colonies was to be that which we find in such remarks as WilliamHilton’s, made from Plymouth in 1621: ‘We are all freeholders, the rent day doth not trouble us…’
    And, as in Virginia, the political necessities of American life also made themselves felt promptly. When the
Mayflower
company contemplated its future after reaching Cape Cod it seemed plain that such a group, far from all the sanctions and blessings of regular English government, could not thrive without an agreed constitution. Accordingly the Saints (remembering the covenant by which they, like all Separatist churches, had established themselves) and the Strangers (that is, the non-Saints) agreed on the
Mayflower
Compact – signed on 11 November by most of the company’s adult males. In content it was no more than a covenant constituting the signatories a body politic, which would issue and abide by its own laws; but the manner in which it was arrived at was, if not democratic, at least self-governing, like the Separatist churches; 16 and the constitution which evolved from it, though in substance paternalistic (for the Governor and his council made all decisions), had similar characteristics: notably the provision for the annual election of the Governor by all properly qualified adult males. Seen against a modern American background there is nothing very striking in the Pilgrims’ political arrangements; but set against the background of Stuart England they are eloquent of what was different about the New World. Government, indeed survival, was possible there only with the consent of the governed; political institutions therefore became in the first instance instruments for securing that consent. The
Mayflower
Compact was the first of innumerable agreements arrived at by the American people as they founded new settlements. Its example was unconsciously but exactly followed in seventeenth-century New England, in eighteenth-century Kentucky, throughout revolutionary America, and everywhere on the nineteenth-century frontier: in Texas, California, Iowa and Oregon. These agreements enabled generations of settlers to feel that their lives, property and prospects were secure under the rule of law, and they conditioned American political assumptions, so that the leaders of revolutionary Maryland could assert without fear of contradiction that ‘All government of right originates from the people, is founded in compact only.’ 17 All this prepared the way for the greatest compact of all, the Constitution of the United States. The Pilgrims were thus forerunners of even more than was prophesied to them from England in 1623, when their associates wrote: ‘Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to breakthe ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honour shall be yours to the world’s end.’ The Pilgrims had shown what could be done; and others soon profited from their example.
    For England had now entered on a half-century of chronic trade depression, and her greatest export, cloth – especially in its traditional form, the so-called Old Draperies – was hardest hit of all. An ill wind blew throughout East Anglia and the South-West, where Puritanism, outside London, was at its strongest; and presently a new force began to make itself felt in the Church of England: the bigoted moderation of