How The Pilgrims Planted The Seeds For America’s Constitutional Rights And Liberties

The following essay is part of The Federalist’s 1620 Project, a symposium exploring the connections and contributions of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England to the uniquely American synthesis of faith, family, freedom, and self-government.

The Pilgrims who came ashore at Plymouth Rock in 1620 were followed by their theological cousins, the Puritans, who established Massachusetts Bay in 1630. They were not the first Europeans, not even the first Englishmen, to settle in North America. Yet they, more than any others, defined an American national identity and laid the foundations for an American political tradition committed to the rule of law and constitutionalism.

The Pilgrims were religious dissenters — theological separatists — who reluctantly concluded that the Protestant Church of England from which they separated themselves was irredeemably corrupt, whereas the Puritans, as their name suggests, held out hope that the church could still be purified. Both were profoundly religious people who had experienced oppression in England at the hands of authorities in church and state, and they crossed the Atlantic Ocean’s treacherous waters to escape religious persecution in the Old World and to seek religious liberty in the New World.

They were on a mission to establish Bible commonwealths grounded on biblical principles and laws as they understood them. These would be political communities devoted to their God and committed to the rule of law. Their bold experiments in self-government produced a constitutional tradition that blended biblical law interpreted through the lens of their Protestant theology, English common law adapted to the needs of their communities, and developing local customs. Key features of that tradition persist to the present day.