Mayflower

Did you know that the Mayflower Compact was signed 400 years ago last week? Well, I didn't. I learned recently from FamilySearch that six ancestors of mine sailed aboard the Mayflower in 1620. I am grateful for these ancestors who, along with others, immigrated to this country in search of religious freedom. Among them was my Danish great-grandfather Christian Jorgensen Plowman who, at age six, crossed the plains with a handcart company in the 1860s to a new home in Utah.

At the same time I learned this, I came across an article that explained just how pivotal and important the Mayflower Compact was in American and world history: “Before this mixed group stepped ashore, they signed an agreement, which we now call the Mayflower Compact. In that document, they set aside their deep divisions and voluntarily joined together to govern themselves with ‘just and equal laws.’ This was the very beginning of principled self-government among European settlers in the New World. The Mayflower Compact is not quite 200 words long, but those words pack almost as much meaning as Thomas Jefferson distilled into the Declaration of Independence 156 years later, or Abraham Lincoln in 1863 condensed into the Gettysburg Address.”