OPINION: There's more to the Pilgrim story than Thanksgiving

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 survived to celebrate with help from their Native benefactors, Plymouth’s settlers laid the groundwork for democratic government in America.

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 simple founding covenant underlaid future actions to “enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices.”

The Separatists among the Mayflower’s passengers who devised the compact 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 more than 50 years. Plymouth created the first public schools by taxing themselves 12 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.

America’s first jury trials were held in what Albuquerque calls an intergenerational community center: courthouse, meeting hall, 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 these ideals. In 1623, Pilgrim men killed several members of a hostile 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.” They wrote and railed against Catholic “papists.” Yet Roger Williams, an uncompromising Separatist as a Plymouth minister, in 1636 went on to found Rhode Island, America’s beachhead for full freedom of conscience and professions of faith.

Longtime Gov. 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 10 million Americans are descendants of the Mayflower’s ground-breaking passengers. Are you one? 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.