The Mayflower Compact to the Town Meeting: How Colonial New England Governed Itself
Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Ep. 17
The Mayflower Compact to the Town Meeting: How Colonial New England Governed Itself
In November 1620, the Mayflower dropped anchor far outside the only patent its passengers held. Before anyone went ashore, forty-one men promised to make just and equal laws and to obey them. The paper named no office and stated no right. The habit it began lasted a century and a half.
New Englanders elected their officers, voted their own taxes, wrote down their laws, and ran their own churches long before one of their ministers explained the practice in the language of natural law. The record runs from the Massachusetts Bay charter through the May 1631 court that widened the vote and narrowed it in one sitting, the Body of Liberties of 1641, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and Rhode Island's "lively experiment" of 1663.
When the Dominion of New England laid a tax without an assembly, the Ipswich town meeting refused it in 1687, and its leaders pleaded Magna Carta at trial. Thirty years later their minister, John Wise, recast the practice through Pufendorf in his Vindication of 1717. Jonathan Mayhew's 1750 sermon on Romans 13 and Edmund Burke's 1775 "salutary neglect" complete the record.
The Honest Reckoning counts who stood how far from the meetinghouse door: women and non-members, the banished, the Quakers hanged in Boston, the people Liberty 91 let the colony hold as property, and the Pequot and Narragansett. Samuel Appleton, jailed for his town's right of consent in 1687, had commanded Massachusetts troops at the Great Swamp in 1675.
Companion to Article 17, published Sunday, October 11. On Tuesday, Episode 17B carries the question into the present day.
Did it leave people more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 — A ship outside its patent, 1620
1:27 — The Mayflower Compact
3:02 — Introduction: Self-Government Before Theory
4:30 — Jamestown, 1619, and the short answer
6:48 — The Massachusetts Bay charter
8:08 — Winthrop on civil liberty
8:48 — May 1631: the vote widened and narrowed
10:09 — 1634: the freemen read the charter
10:53 — The Body of Liberties, 1641
12:06 — Magna Carta and Coke's books
12:41 — The town: Dedham and the selectmen
13:48 — Liberty 12: the right to speak
14:19 — 1647: non-freemen in town affairs
15:25 — The church covenant and the meetinghouse
16:36 — Hooker and the Fundamental Orders
17:25 — Rhode Island's "lively experiment"
18:18 — The Dominion of New England
19:12 — Ipswich refuses the tax, 1687
20:39 — Samuel Appleton's winter
21:09 — 1689: Boston rises
21:49 — John Wise and Pufendorf
23:44 — Adams, Gridley, and the 1772 reprint
24:40 — The Great Awakening and its name
25:53 — Mayhew's sermon of 1750
27:53 — Burke and "salutary neglect"
28:57 — What distance did and did not do
29:47 — The Honest Reckoning: inside the room
30:16 — The disfranchised and the banished
31:04 — The Quaker executions
31:49 — Liberty 91
32:53 — Mystic, 1637
34:41 — What London did not stop
35:20 — King Philip's War and Samuel Appleton
36:33 — Skeptic's Case: only neglect?
38:18 — Skeptic's Case: a standard it never held?
39:57 — The Liberty Test
41:19 — Incorporation, and two interviews
43:34 — The answer
44:56 — 1763, and the road ahead
📚 Article 17, with full endnotes: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/self-government-before-theory-a-hundred-and-fifty-years-of-practice
🎙️ The John Thomas (Week 6) and Jared McClain (Week 14) interviews: https://www.consequentialactions.com/posts/categories/podcast--the-interviews
Consequential Actions Podcast · Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 · Episode 17: "Self-Government Before Theory"
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Consequential Actions is a libertarian, non-interventionist analysis of American constitutional and foreign policy. New episodes weekly.
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