New coins to commemorate 250th anniversary of American independence. Here's how they'll look

[reACTIONary]

24. The Mayflower Compact would have be chosen...

... for its significance as an Ur-Document in American constitutional history.

It is considered to be of significance not because of its actual content, but because it provides the first concreate example of the American tendency towards self-government, rule of law, and written, explicitly thought-out and agreed to constitutional governance, rather than an amalgam or hodgepodge or traditional practices and tendencies.

It also provides an almost literal, and yet mythic, example of the enlightenment social contract theory of governance, emerging from a state of nature into civil society:

The Mayflower was blown off course, and did not make landfall where it was supposed to have. If it had, the colonists would have been integrated into an existing legal and social frame work. But having been blown off course, they faced the prospect of, quite literally, entering into a "state of nature." In Hobbs's formulation, the prospect loomed of facing a war of all against all. They did, almost picture perfect, what the advocates of social contract theory speculated about and advocated - they created a governing compact amongst themselves and almost unanimously and voluntarily signed up to its provisions.

The constitution of Rohde Island is more American in its content, but it was the Mayflower compact that (presumably) first exemplified the sprit of constitutional governance itself, that became the spirt of America and culminated in our Constitution as we know it today.

Oh! I forgot to add:

The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller.