Participation in the “civil body politic” referenced in the excerpt would have been most available to which of the following?
Answer: Participation in the “civil body politic” referenced in the excerpt would have been most available to all adult male colonists except indentured servants.
The Mayflower Compact and 17th-Century Corporations: Exploring the Concept of a Civil Body Politic
As we mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower Compact, it is worth reflecting on the origins and legacy of this historic document in early American history. The Compact served as a placeholder to acknowledge that the colonists were operating outside the region of North America that their patent authorized them to settle. While it did not solve the problem of their need for a new patent for their colony, it did represent a best effort at coloring their actions as legal or quasi-legal.
The language of the Compact is both concise and vague. In its brief 195 words, it does not propose specific laws or a form of government, and it characterizes the collective that the people aboard the Mayflower intended to create with a famous but somewhat opaque phrase: “civil body politic.” What did this expression mean to the settlers at that time?
During the 17th century, the phrase “body politic” was routinely used in the law to refer to corporations of all sorts. However, the category of corporation was both more broadly conceived in the 17th century than the modern word corporation and more transitional. In addition to private for-profit companies, corporations in the 17th century included hospitals, charities, colleges, some trade guilds, towns, public utilities, and even certain individuals who occupied important posts in public institutions. Fewer business endeavors benefited from incorporation at that time than now, especially among joint-stock companies. Furthermore, it was a period in which the Crown experimented with new directions in the use of the corporate form.
The word corporation itself is derived from the Latin word corpus, which means body, via the verb corporare, which means to embody. This usage rests on the widespread and longstanding European tradition of using the metaphor of a body to describe human communities. One pervasive idea was that the people in a community acted together in such a way that they became the mutually dependent parts of a single living organism, with the king standing in as the head. This metaphor has roots in antiquity and can be traced in various forms through medieval Europe and England where it was used for a variety of organizations, but especially the church and the state. Along somewhat different lines, it was repeated by lawyers in Tudor England that the King has two bodies, a natural one that is mortal and will die, and a “body politic,” an institutional personality representing his sovereignty that can never die.
The idea that smaller collective bodies within the kingdom could have and benefit from distinctive traits such as corporate personality and perpetual life already appeared in English sources from the 13th century. By the 17th century, the law regularly used the expression “body politic” to make a distinction between natural persons – i.e. even human beings who are not the king – and artificial persons, which were often secular organizations, companies, or associations.
Generally, the creation of a corporation required the state’s authority. The state was willing to extend the privilege of incorporation on the grounds that the companies promote its preferred public policies. For instance, to provide assistance for the needy, it incorporated hospitals and charities, or to grow markets, it established fairs and trade guilds. In the 17th century, the Crown chartered corporations to further its efforts to build colonies in foreign lands. As a result, the language of corporations appears in the charters of early American colonies, including the Mayflower Compact.
The Compact’s “civil body politic” may have been meant to refer to a body politic that was “civil” as opposed to “ecclesiastical,” which is a distinction that is found in corporations of the time. And since some see the Compact as a civil parallel to the church covenants that were an important feature of the practice of the separatist community who settled Plymouth, this meaning is suggestive. Or it may have been meant as a civil.
See more at abizibee.com