November 28, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the 1621 Thanksgiving has become one of the most recognizable stories in American culture, but many details we repeat today weren’t part of the original event. What actually happened was shaped by necessity, diplomacy, and the realities both groups faced. The latter holiday developed slowly as Americans looked for shared traditions. Robert Tracy McKenzie, a professor of history at Wheaton College, helps separate fact from myth and explains how the story evolved.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories.
In this show, we celebrate Thanksgiving, and it's the only
American holiday that's actually remained relatively innocent. It's not something
that we've been able to commercialize. But there is something
going on here that's more than just feasting, family and football.
(00:35):
Robert Tracy mackenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College.
He's also the author of The First Thanksgiving. He's here
to tell us the story of this quintessentially American holiday.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
The story of the Pilgrims in the First Thanksgiving, in
many respects, is one chapter in a much, much larger story,
a story that is grounded in an enormous phenomen that
we remember is the Protestant Reformation. In the early years
of fifteen hundreds, individuals like Martin Luther, the German theologian
(01:10):
in Monk, had begun to work toward reforming the Catholic Church,
changing some of its theological teachings, some of its church practices,
some of its governing structure, and Luther found that that
was essentially impossible to accomplish within the confines of the
Catholic Church. Ultimately, leading to a break with the Catholic Church.
(01:33):
In fifteen seventeen, on Halloween evening, Luther famously put up
his ninety five theses, his ninety five statements of protest
about Catholic teaching. This caused his relationship with the Pope
with the Catholic hierarchy to deteriorate pretty rapidly, leading ultimately
to the Pope declaring Luther heretic in fifteen twenty and
(01:56):
prompting Luther ultimately to break with the Catholic Church to
establish an independent church, a protesting church, and so Protestantism
was born. The Prottent Reformation reaches England now maybe a
generation later, during the reign of King Henry the Eighth,
and ultimately Henry himself also breaks with the Catholic Church
(02:19):
and establishes an independent Church of England church we often
remember as the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church in many respects,
though still retained a lot of the teaching, a lot
of the practices, a lot of the hierarchy of Catholicism.
So within England there's a core group of English Christians
(02:39):
who begin to work to purify the Church of England
of its Catholic remnants, and they begin to be referred to,
often quite sarcastically and critically as Protestants. The group that's
gathering at screwby By about sixteen hundred or so, is
actually best thought of as a radical kind of subset
(03:01):
of English Protestants. These are individuals who come to be
known as Separatists. The separatists basically not only believe that
the Anglican Church needed reformation, they'd actually arrived at the
conclusion that the Anglican Church was not a true church,
that it was so far in divergence from what they
believed was the true requirements of Scripture that they really
(03:24):
couldn't in good conscience associate or worship with Anglicans.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
They had to withdraw. They had to separate from the
Anglican Church.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And so we need to understand then this core group
is the most radical of the most radical protests in Christians.
In separating from the Anglican Church, they're actually defying the
established Church of England. They're actually defying the monarchy of England,
and so in a certain sense they are considered in
(03:56):
many respects outlaws against both church and state. This group
ultimately is going to face some persecution in Screwby. We
can exaggerate it, but we know that one member of
the congregation was in fact thrown into prison. Three other
leaders of the congregation were under suspicion. There were warrants
out for their arrest. They actually go into hiding, and
(04:20):
ultimately it led to the conclusion that this group was
simply not going to be allowed to worship separately, worship
faithfully as they understood it, and so they decided that
they would have no alternative but to leave England. Now,
when we remember the Pilgrim story, one of the ways
that we remember it incorrectly. I think it's really important
to go back and recapture this truth is that Pilgrims
(04:43):
don't leave England directly for New England. They don't leave
Screwby and head for North America. There's in fact an
intermediate step in their migration. They actually go not to
North America but to Holland, and so they're able to
get out of the country. It's a complicated and danger
us undertaking. But around the year sixteen oh eight they
(05:03):
make their way to Holland, settling first of all on Amsterdam,
where they stay for a matter of months and then
finally relocating about thirty miles to the southwest of the
town of Leiden, and it's Lighten where they reside for
the next twelve years, and it's from Leiden that they
migrate to North America in sixteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
We have to.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Understand that Leiden was although smaller than Amsterdam, it was
still a large city for its day.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It had a population of about forty thousand.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
These were individuals who had migrated from a tiny, rural,
agricultural village in England and they found themselves in a vibrant, growing,
industrializing city. It was foreign in many many ways. You know,
we sometimes talk about how the Pilgrims came to a
new world when they migrated to North America, but in
(05:53):
a real sense, they were going to a new world
when they migrated to Holland. It was so foreign from
what they knew, so different front that it's hard for
us to exaggerate the challenge. So now rural people were
living in a large city. Farm folk were having to
earn their living in industrial settings as employees in a
textile manufacturing line of work, and it was hard. And
(06:17):
yet one of the important things that they would have
stressed is that they experienced a great deal of religious freedom.
Holland generally was known for its religious toleration. It was
religiously diverse. But there were problems, starting with the economic challenges,
and they begin to worry about the future of their congregation.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And you've been listening to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the
story of the Pilgrims, their trek from England to Holland,
to the city of Leiden and a very different kind
of environment that they'd never experienced before, and soon to
be coming to the New world, a very new world.
(07:00):
The story of the Pilgrims, as told by Robert Tracy mackenzie.
It continues here on our American Stories leh Habib here
(07:31):
as we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
I'd like to remind you that all the history stories
you hear on this show brought to you by the
great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a
great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but
for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
find out about their terrific free online courses, their series
on Communism. It's one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
(07:54):
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American stories and with Robert Tracy mackenzie. He's a professor
(08:15):
of history at Wheaton College. He is also the author
of The First Thanksgiving. Let's pick up with the story
of the Pilgrims and the revival in Leiden.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Some of the adults were thinking about returning to England,
even with its restrictions on religious liberty. They thought, well,
at least we'll be able to eat there. At least
we want starve there. They found it a hard place
to raise their children. This is, in Bradford's word, a
licentious culture, a culture that really doesn't have the same
(08:46):
moral standards. Their lax in the way that they train
their children. They're critical of the Pilgrim parents is being
too stern in their child rearing practices, and that bothers
them as well. And it's in that context that they
began to consider looking for a new home, not in Europe,
but in fact across the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
In North America.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
You know, it's very common, I think, for us to
hear someone in referring to the Pilgrims to say that
they came to this country in search of religious freedom. Now,
the reality is what they are struggling with really is
the cares of this world. It's kind of daily challenges
that so many of us face, that so many of
(09:30):
us can relate to, Because even though they are motivated
by those kinds of economic concerns and family concerns, all
of their motivation in some way connects back to their
deep commitment not just to their families, but to their church.
And so their decision to migrate is not a decision
(09:50):
made by a bunch of individuals who happen to leave simultaneously.
It is a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as
a group that the only way they're going to be
able to stay together is if they find together a
new home. The voyage of the Mayflower is something that
William Bradford, who wrote the main history of the Pilgrims
(10:12):
will and Bradford only talks about it in about a
page and a half and he doesn't share a lot
of details, but we do know that it was an
arduous and in many ways a terrifying experience for them
to begin with, they hadn't been able to leave England.
They went from Holland back to England en route to
North America. They hadn't been able to leave England nearly
(10:35):
as early in the calendar year as they had hoped.
And then when they finally were in position to leave
one of the ships they had hoped to take two ships,
one of the ships immediately begins to take on water
and they have to return for repairs, and that happens
not once but twice before they finally have to just
give up on the idea that the second ship, called
(10:55):
the speed Well, would be able to accompany them. All
of wish to say that they actually don't leave England
for good until September the sixth in the year sixteen twenty,
and their voyage will take sixty five days. And so
if you do the math, it comes out to an
average of just at two miles per hour for sixty
(11:17):
five days. Because of the bad weather, it would have
been almost certain that they would remain below decks for
the entire voyage, or almost for the entire voyage. It
was an area that was not tall enough to stand
up in, and for sixty five days they're in an
area that was about the size of a good sized
(11:38):
city bus, and in that space one hundred and two
pilgrim passengers. So as the Pilgrims were preparing to leave
from Leiden, it's probably good for us just to stop
for a moment and in our mind's eye, try to
imagine that parting. If you're William Bradford, for example, he's
leaving a three year old son behind just because it's
(11:58):
not possible. He just doesn't think it's possible for his
son to survive. Early on, he hopes that his son
would join him afterward, and those kinds of goodbyes were
being said repeatedly. And the way that Bradford describes the
departure in his history is very touching. He really tells
us that tears were flowing like water. But and here
(12:20):
is the passages that I love so much. That they
comforted themselves with what they believed to be true. And
what they believed to be true, among other things, was
that this world was not their home. As he put
it in his history, they reminded themselves that they were Pilgrims.
You know, that's the label that we use for this group,
that we use so much that it loses all of
(12:42):
its meaning, all of its power. But in saying they
knew that they were pilgrims, he's almost certainly quoting from
the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Hebrews in the
Christian New Testament, where the author says that various heroes
of the Christian faith knew that they were pilgrims, that
the world was not their home, just saying that they
found comfort in reminding themselves of that truth. They were
(13:04):
temporary sojourners in this land. Their ultimate hope lay elsewhere,
so they knew that they were pilgrims. One of the
things about this that really is, I think miraculous is
that there was only one fatality among the one hundred
and two pilgrim passengers on board the Mayflower. This was
not really at all to be expected. There had been
(13:26):
a voyage of Puritans actually just the year before, to
Virginia to resettle there, and a passenger list that had
one hundred and eighty individuals on it. Found that by
the end of that voyage one hundred and thirty had died,
and so surviving the voyage almost without loss of life
was pretty amazing. So they arrived on the coast of
(13:49):
New England in early November, actually the ninth of November specifically,
but they're considerably north of where they had expected to land.
They had entered into an agreement with a corporation that
had been authorized by the King of England to settle
what is today the area of Virginia, the Carolina's Maryland
on up to basically to Hudson River. But they landed
(14:13):
considerably north of that, actually off the coast of Cape Cod,
and so their first response is, well, we have to
turn south, we have to go to the area where
we've been authorized to settle, and they try to do that,
but the area there around Cape Cod is really treacherous
for navigation, and the captain, Captain Reynolds, tells them that
this is not going to happen. This is too dangerous.
(14:34):
We're not going to undertake this. And it's on the
twenty third of December, according to their records, twenty third
of December in the year sixteen twenty that they go
ashore on the site of what we know today is
the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The area actually had been
the site of a Native American village, a village inhabited
(14:56):
by a tribe called the Patuxent, but the accent had
been devastated by disease sometime probably not too long before
sixteen twenty, certainly after sixteen fifteen, so fairly recently the
Ptuccent had been literally wiped out. Historians are not sure
(15:17):
what the disease was. It may have been viral hepatitis.
So where the pilgrims Land is sort of like a
ghost village in essence, and they're arriving right at the
onset of a bitter New England winter, and if I
could just say this parenthetically, this really surprises them. They
know that they're going to be late in the year,
(15:39):
but they really were not expecting such severe weather. And
you might think why in the world not. If you
look at a map, you'll actually find that, in terms
of latitude, present day Massachusetts is pretty much on the
same line of latitude as Madrid, Spain. So the pilgrim
(16:00):
are actually traveling substantially south, about six hundred miles south
of London, and so they're actually expecting a temperate climate
even as late as sixteen twenty two. A couple years later,
one pamphlet that's advertising the settlement is saying that it's
going to be sort of like a garden spot. This
is going to be sort of like a place in
the Riviera. And what they get, of course, is very
(16:22):
very different. So the next few months are just awful.
One historian would later call this the starving time, and
that actually is a misunderstanding.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I think of what was going on.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
They actually have enough food to avoid starvation. What they
don't have is shelter, and so they mostly live on
board the Mayflower. But every day when they want to
work trying to build these structures, they have to find
a way to get to shore.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
And you're listening to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story
of the Pilgrims, and we learned that they were in
Leiden and they had religious freedom there, but the cultural
influences of the big city just didn't match up with
the interests of the Pilgrims and how they wanted to
raise their family. And so the congregation decides to head well,
(17:11):
to head to America. And by the way, what a
surprise to find out. Though they sailed six hundred miles south,
the brutal winters of New England were not to be expected.
When we come back. More of this remarkable story, the
Pilgrim's story, the story of Thanksgiving. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories, and with Robert
Tracy Mackenzie telling the story of the First Thanksgiving. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
The Mayflower had come with a long boat. They expected
to use this boat for fishing, but they had had
to disassemble the boat to fit it into the hold,
and it had been damaged en route, so it took
quite a while to repair that boat.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So for actually several.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Weeks, the adults who would go ashore to work would
have to wade through the frigid water in December and
January in Massachusetts, and not just a short space, because
the harbor was so shallow. The Mayflower is anchored probably
between three quarters of a mile and a mile from shore.
(18:55):
So the first thing they'll do every day is to
wade through this icy water up to their chest tests
for three quarters.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Of a mile or more.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And then the last thing they'll do, after having worked
all day, is to repeat the journey in the opposite direction.
And so you can imagine the real theory. I think
the more likely theory is that they will die in
droves from pneumonia, so that by spring of the one
hundred and two passengers originally on the Mayflower, fifty two
(19:23):
have died and every family is affected. There were twenty
six different family groups among the passengers, and only four
were spared from at least one death, so twenty two
of the families had at least one family member die.
There were eighteen married couples on the Mayflower and fourteen
have one of the two partners die. And much to
(19:46):
I think our amazement ought to amaze us. When the
weather allows the Mayflower to return to England in the
spring of sixteen twenty one, the survivors are given the
opportunity to return to England and the they refuse, and
now they are needing to be wholly absorbed in the
work of completing their settlement, planting crops, and hopefully preparing
(20:09):
for their survival during the next winter to come.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
It's in this context.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
That they have really their first significant encounter with Native
American peoples in the area, and in the spring of
sixteen twenty one they actually are visited on two occasions
by Native American visitors, two different individuals who actually are
able to speak English and they're they're floored by that.
The better known of these two was a Native American
(20:37):
man named Squanto. His full name was Tisquantum. Squanto story
is very fascinating. He had actually learned English because he
had been kidnapped by European fishermen sometime before the Great
Epidemic struck his tribal community. He had been kidnapped and
taken to Spain, where actually his freedom, after a time,
(20:58):
was purchased by some Spanish monks who facilitated his escape
to England. There he worked for a time as a
servant to an English sea captain. Ultimately is able to
get passage on a ship back to North America and
make his way overland to Protuccent to what is now Plymouth, where,
to his great horror, he finds that all of his
(21:20):
people have now been victims of the epidemic. He was
made a prisoner of another Native American tribe that was
in the area, and this was the Wampanoag tribe. The
Wampanoag had also been devastated by disease, though not wiped out,
and they're the peoples that will ultimately interact most intimately
with the Pilgrims in the immediate months and years to come.
(21:44):
There are a variety of ways that they helped the Pilgrims,
and some of these details you probably have heard from
your childhood. One of the things that the Wampanoag will
do is to help the Pilgrims master a form of
agriculture that's really appropriate for the terrain and the climate
of the area. And so these kinds of sort of
life hacks, we would say today, are things that the
(22:06):
Wampanoag teach to the Pilgrims that surely were very central
to their survival. And so that leads to a cause
for celebration in the fall of sixteen twenty one. The
sum total of evidence that we have about the event
that we call the First Thanksgiving comes from a letter
that was written by one of the Pilgrims, a man
(22:28):
named Edward Winslow, and he writes this letter toward the
end of sixteen twenty one, when there's an opportunity to
send it back to England with the ship that is
passing by. And in this letter he describes what has
occurred in some total of four sentences, which add up
to one hundred and fifteen words, he basically says that
(22:52):
with the harvest being in their Governor William Bradford basically said,
and I'm paraphrasing here, said let's celebrate. And so Bradford
sends four men of the community out into the woods
to hunt for fowl for birds as they were celebrating.
According to Winslow, the Indians, as he says, many of
(23:13):
the Indians came among us, and for three days they
entertained them and feasted together. So this is the sum
total of what we actually know. One hundred and fifteen
words and four sentences, and let's think about it for
just a moment. Actually, it doesn't tell us much about
what was on the menu. There's a reference to.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Fowl, but does it say turkey.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
By the way, the Pilgrim records that survived talk about
swans and geese and herons and cranes.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
And ducks, and so probably the main menu.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
At the gathering would have been these kinds of delicacies.
We also don't have any reference to candied yams, or
to pumpkin pie, or to any things that we associate
with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There's good reason for that.
The Pilgrims didn't have ovens. Pretty much everything that they
would have been able to fix at this time would
(24:05):
have been boiled or roasted. They didn't have sugar, they
didn't have flour for pie crusts. The reality is that
they probably are eating lots of water fowl. They're probably
eating what they would have called sauce, which basically means
fixings or trimmings like turnips and parsnips and cabbage and
(24:27):
collared greens. I often joe quite possible that they had
turnips and eels, and in fact, it's more likely that
they had turnips and eels than that they had turkey
and dressing. One other thing on the menu that we
want to call attention to is venison, and this is
in that four sentence account.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
From Edward Winslow.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
We're told that the Native American people who came brought
with them five deer, which leads us to think a
little bit about the presence of the Native Americans there.
One of the things that's not in the historical record
that we often assume as in the historical record is
the idea that the Pilgrims actually invited the Wampanoag to
(25:07):
be a part of their celebration. And Winslow doesn't say
that his language is much more oblique than that. It
says Indians came among us, and so it's at least
possible that they were unexpected guests.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
And we do know that the.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Wampanoag did from time to time come into the Pilgrim
settlement and often did expect to stay for some period
of time, and often did expect to enjoy some of
the Pilgrim's store of food, and so it wouldn't have
been the first time. The fact is the Pilgrims and
the Wampanoig were able to survive. As different as they were,
they were able to benefit one another. They avoided war,
(25:43):
and these are wonderful kinds of things to call attention to.
The account from Winslow says that the Pilgrims exercised their arms.
That's his wording, which basically means they got out their
guns and they sort of went through military drill. And
we might imagine sort of both sides in different ways,
trying to demonstrate their prowess, trying to make sure that
(26:05):
the other side knew that they were not to be
trifled with.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
And you're listening to Robert Tracy McKenzie tell the story
of the first Thanksgiving and so much more, including the
story of the Pilgrims. My goodness, that passage from the Mayflower,
fifty two passengers died, twenty two of the families lost
at least one family member, and not being prepared for
that brutal winter, my goodness, and then to learn that
(26:31):
they had to walk a mile each way back to
the Mayflower where they had to reside. And if you've
ever been in New England waters I grew up in
New Jersey, you can't know just how bitter cold it
is even in March, but the winter, it's quite remarkable.
And anytime you're complaining about cold water or about your life,
think about the story of the Pilgrims and what they
(26:53):
endured for the love of their God and for the
love of their church and their families. When we come
back more of this remarkable American story the First Thanksgiving
here on our American Stories, and we continue here with
(27:38):
our American stories and with Robert Tracy mackenzie, who's a
professor of history at Wheaton College. He's also the author
of The First Thanksgiving. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
The account from Winslow says that King Massis Wit, who
is the leader of the Wampanoag tribe, brought with him
about ninety men. And then let's think about the pilgrims themselves.
Fifty survivors, overwhelmingly male. Because females have died in greater
proportions than males. There are about five males for every
(28:13):
female among the pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving. Our estimate
is that by the end of all those deaths in
the winter, there was maybe only one pilgrim over forty
years old. The governor of the colony, Willing Bradford, is thirty.
Just one of the thought as you see them in
your mind's eye. Evidence from the time suggests that they
(28:35):
had not yet built much in the way of furniture.
They certainly would not have had lots of long tables.
You always see the pictures of the long tables set
up outside. They didn't have forks at all. Forks were
a relatively recent innovation in England, and it was often
thought very pretentious. To use a fork was a sign
that you were a fop, and so they would have
(28:55):
had knives and spoons. They would have almost certainly been
sitting on the ground. Not only young, they're colorful. You know,
the standard stereotype, which actually dates to the late eighteen hundreds,
shows Pilgrims not wearing all black, really tall hats. They
have buckles on every sort of part of their clothing.
But the records from the Colony of the Property of
(29:19):
People when they die suggests that their clothes were bright colors.
That Governor William Bradford has a red cape and a
purple vest. The Pilgrims actually thought of Thanksgiving as a
very solemn holy day, so we use the word holiday,
(29:41):
which really is an illusion of holy day, and it's
very unlikely that what we remember is the first Thanksgiving
is actually something that they would have called a Thanksgiving.
They believe that the Bible authorized God's people to declare
these special kinds of holy celebrations in response to some
(30:01):
extraordinary circumstance. But when that happened, they anticipated gatherings that
would have been solemn, that would have been centered on
link the preaching, prayer and singing, not on feasting, certainly,
not on games, not on military drill. And so what
(30:23):
they're doing at this gathering in the fall of sixteen
twenty one is they're having just a kind of harvest
celebration that they would have known from their youth in
rural England. A good question that comes to mind is
just why is it that we attach such significance to
the Pilgrim celebration of sixteen twenty one. And I think
there's probably a variety of answers, But I have a
(30:44):
theory that I'd like to share with you has to
do with when Americans actually discovered this event. And that
may strike you as odd even to put it that way,
but the reality is the American people didn't remember this
gathering for a very long time, actually, for more than
two centuries after it occurred. The main description of it,
(31:05):
as I've mentioned, was in a letter that was written
and taken back to England. It was actually published in
England as part of a pamphlet, but then it gradually
sort of went out of circulation and there was just
no historical record of this event. But a copy of
the pamphlet is not actually discovered in North America until
(31:26):
the eighteen twenties, until two centuries after the First Thanksgiving
is discovered by a sort of amateur historian who's a
minister in New England, and he actually includes it in
a history that he is writing about the origins.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Of New England.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And he in a book that was published in the
year eighteen forty one, two hundred and twenty years after
the event. And in this book he tells his readers
when he repeats the description by Edward Winslow, and here
is the first Thanksgiving that ever occurred.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
In New England.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
By the eighteen fouries, New England had come to celebrate
Thanksgiving every fall. It become a really sort of treasured tradition.
Thanksgiving actually wasn't celebrated in the South, it wasn't celebrated
in much of the Western United States.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
It was a New.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
England holiday, but it was a cherished New England holiday.
And then this minister in eighteen forty one tells New
Englanders and here's where it all started. This was the
origin of the celebration. And so all of a sudden,
individuals have discovered, they believe the source of their tradition,
and pretty quickly they begin to emphasize it as one
(32:31):
of those sort of seminal moments in the early history
of the country. As late then as the eighteen forties,
Thanksgiving is still pretty much a regional holiday. It does
get a boost about twenty years later, during the American
Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. During
this period, of course, is being lobbied by a female
writer named Sarah Josepha Hale, who is an editor of
(32:54):
a prominent ladies magazine, and she's contacting Lincoln every fall
and saying, do you know need to declare this as
a national holiday. And the way that Hale makes her
case is to say that all of the holidays at
that point that were recognized nationally, they were for men.
And there were really just two holidays national holidays at
(33:15):
the time. One was the fourth of July. She thought
of that as a male holiday. The other was George
Washington's birthday, and that would also have been a time
predominantly where men gathered together, where there were speeches and
so forth. And she thought that Thanksgiving is the perfect
woman's holiday. It was a domestic holiday. It's centered around
entertainment within the home, centered around a fine meal, and
(33:36):
so forth. And so she keeps lobbying Lincoln, and in
eighteen sixty three Lincoln finally relents, and he issues a
proclamation in the fall of that year calling for Thanksgiving
toward the end of November of eighteen sixty three. He
actually repeats that in subsequent proclamation in the fall of
eighteen sixty four, and then, of course he is assassinated
(33:57):
in early eighteen sixty five. But what Lincoln has done
is to establish a precedent, and from that point on
presidents would issue a national proclamation declaring a day of Thanksgiving,
usually on the fourth or the final Thursday of the month.
One other question we might want to think about before
we concluded, what happens to the Plymouth Colony after all
(34:18):
this is over. Bradford lives into the sixteen fifties and
for most of his time in New England he is
the governor of the Plymouth Colony, and he writes at
length about what is occurring, and what he is describing
is a time of fragmentation of the Pilgrim community. And
(34:38):
the reason why this is so is prosperity. And that's
not what we expect to hear. I suppose the Pilgrims
had struggled for years to keep body and soult together,
and then toward the end of the sixteen twenty something
had happened that really changed their economic fortunes, and that
was the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So the
Massachusetts Bay Colony is a far large colony, beginning with
(35:02):
what's sometimes called the Great Puritan Migration that leads to
the migration of thousands, not just of a couple of hundred,
but thousands of Puritan migrants over a period of years
to New England. And the center of that Massachusetts colony
will be only about thirty thirty five miles to the
north at Boston. But the individuals who are coming need
supplies just like the Pilgrims had needed them. And the
(35:24):
Pilgrims had a ten year head start on Massachusetts Bay,
and they had slowly begun to build flocks of sheep
and herds of cattle, And so they find in the
migrants to Massachusetts Bay a ready market. And the bottom
line is, at least as when Bradford tells the story,
is that many of the Pilgrims consciously decided to move
(35:45):
away from Plymouth, to move away from the church there
because they saw more economic opportunity somewhere else. So it's
actually a story that in some sense is bittersweet. It
was a story of great sacrifice to the church together
under adverse conditions, followed by a gradual weakening of the
(36:06):
church in a time of prosperity, so much so that
when Bradford actually ends his history of Plymouth Plantation by
suggesting that the small group of survivors that still lived
in Plymouth were much like, as he put it, a
mother that had been abandoned by her children. And that's
a sorrowful, mournful kind of note that Bradford ends with
(36:31):
the significance of this though, I think is also great
for us as we remember the story, because we think
of the challenges that we face offten in terms of adversity,
and so we look to the Pilgrim story and we
see an example of perseverance, courage, ultimately victory in adversity.
But I think the Pilgrim story tells us that adversity
(36:51):
comes in a variety of forms. You remember the parable
of Jesus about the cares of this world being a
kind of thorn that can choke out the fruitfulness of
a plant. As it turns out, the cares of this
world sort of traveled with the Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
There's no getting away from them.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
And in the end, the temptation to have a desire
for other things was there. So it's a complicated story,
but as we dig into its complexity, it becomes richer,
and it challenges us in new ways, takes on a
relevance that it would lack otherwise.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
And a great job is always by Greg Hangler on
the production and the storytelling. And a special thanks again
to Robert Tracy McKenzie his book The First Thanksgiving. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects to pick it up,
and he's so right. It is rich, it is complicated,
and surviving success can be as hard, or possibly harder
(37:45):
than adversity. And what I was most struck by in
the stories, they're a profound belief that they were pilgrims
and what that word meant to them, because the heroes
of the Christian faith, they said, were indeed pilgrims. Two
centuries go by before we even discover the story. It
is a regional thing at best. The Thanksgiving celebration Lincoln,
(38:08):
Abraham Lincoln, changed that. The story of Thanksgiving here on
our American story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories.
In this show, we celebrate Thanksgiving, and it's the only
American holiday that's actually remained relatively innocent. It's not something
that we've been able to commercialize. But there is something
going on here that's more than just feasting, family and football.
(00:35):
Robert Tracy mackenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College.
He's also the author of The First Thanksgiving. He's here
to tell us the story of this quintessentially American holiday.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
The story of the Pilgrims in the First Thanksgiving, in
many respects, is one chapter in a much, much larger story,
a story that is grounded in an enormous phenomen that
we remember is the Protestant Reformation. In the early years
of fifteen hundreds, individuals like Martin Luther, the German theologian
(01:10):
in Monk, had begun to work toward reforming the Catholic Church,
changing some of its theological teachings, some of its church practices,
some of its governing structure, and Luther found that that
was essentially impossible to accomplish within the confines of the
Catholic Church. Ultimately, leading to a break with the Catholic Church.
(01:33):
In fifteen seventeen, on Halloween evening, Luther famously put up
his ninety five theses, his ninety five statements of protest
about Catholic teaching. This caused his relationship with the Pope
with the Catholic hierarchy to deteriorate pretty rapidly, leading ultimately
to the Pope declaring Luther heretic in fifteen twenty and
(01:56):
prompting Luther ultimately to break with the Catholic Church to
establish an independent church, a protesting church, and so Protestantism
was born. The Prottent Reformation reaches England now maybe a
generation later, during the reign of King Henry the Eighth,
and ultimately Henry himself also breaks with the Catholic Church
(02:19):
and establishes an independent Church of England church we often
remember as the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church in many respects,
though still retained a lot of the teaching, a lot
of the practices, a lot of the hierarchy of Catholicism.
So within England there's a core group of English Christians
(02:39):
who begin to work to purify the Church of England
of its Catholic remnants, and they begin to be referred to,
often quite sarcastically and critically as Protestants. The group that's
gathering at screwby By about sixteen hundred or so, is
actually best thought of as a radical kind of subset
(03:01):
of English Protestants. These are individuals who come to be
known as Separatists. The separatists basically not only believe that
the Anglican Church needed reformation, they'd actually arrived at the
conclusion that the Anglican Church was not a true church,
that it was so far in divergence from what they
believed was the true requirements of Scripture that they really
(03:24):
couldn't in good conscience associate or worship with Anglicans.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
They had to withdraw. They had to separate from the
Anglican Church.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And so we need to understand then this core group
is the most radical of the most radical protests in Christians.
In separating from the Anglican Church, they're actually defying the
established Church of England. They're actually defying the monarchy of England,
and so in a certain sense they are considered in
(03:56):
many respects outlaws against both church and state. This group
ultimately is going to face some persecution in Screwby. We
can exaggerate it, but we know that one member of
the congregation was in fact thrown into prison. Three other
leaders of the congregation were under suspicion. There were warrants
out for their arrest. They actually go into hiding, and
(04:20):
ultimately it led to the conclusion that this group was
simply not going to be allowed to worship separately, worship
faithfully as they understood it, and so they decided that
they would have no alternative but to leave England. Now,
when we remember the Pilgrim story, one of the ways
that we remember it incorrectly. I think it's really important
to go back and recapture this truth is that Pilgrims
(04:43):
don't leave England directly for New England. They don't leave
Screwby and head for North America. There's in fact an
intermediate step in their migration. They actually go not to
North America but to Holland, and so they're able to
get out of the country. It's a complicated and danger
us undertaking. But around the year sixteen oh eight they
(05:03):
make their way to Holland, settling first of all on Amsterdam,
where they stay for a matter of months and then
finally relocating about thirty miles to the southwest of the
town of Leiden, and it's Lighten where they reside for
the next twelve years, and it's from Leiden that they
migrate to North America in sixteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
We have to.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Understand that Leiden was although smaller than Amsterdam, it was
still a large city for its day.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It had a population of about forty thousand.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
These were individuals who had migrated from a tiny, rural,
agricultural village in England and they found themselves in a vibrant, growing,
industrializing city. It was foreign in many many ways. You know,
we sometimes talk about how the Pilgrims came to a
new world when they migrated to North America, but in
(05:53):
a real sense, they were going to a new world
when they migrated to Holland. It was so foreign from
what they knew, so different front that it's hard for
us to exaggerate the challenge. So now rural people were
living in a large city. Farm folk were having to
earn their living in industrial settings as employees in a
textile manufacturing line of work, and it was hard. And
(06:17):
yet one of the important things that they would have
stressed is that they experienced a great deal of religious freedom.
Holland generally was known for its religious toleration. It was
religiously diverse. But there were problems, starting with the economic challenges,
and they begin to worry about the future of their congregation.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And you've been listening to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the
story of the Pilgrims, their trek from England to Holland,
to the city of Leiden and a very different kind
of environment that they'd never experienced before, and soon to
be coming to the New world, a very new world.
(07:00):
The story of the Pilgrims, as told by Robert Tracy mackenzie.
It continues here on our American Stories leh Habib here
(07:31):
as we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
I'd like to remind you that all the history stories
you hear on this show brought to you by the
great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a
great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but
for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to
find out about their terrific free online courses, their series
on Communism. It's one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
(07:54):
go to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we continue with our
American stories and with Robert Tracy mackenzie. He's a professor
(08:15):
of history at Wheaton College. He is also the author
of The First Thanksgiving. Let's pick up with the story
of the Pilgrims and the revival in Leiden.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Some of the adults were thinking about returning to England,
even with its restrictions on religious liberty. They thought, well,
at least we'll be able to eat there. At least
we want starve there. They found it a hard place
to raise their children. This is, in Bradford's word, a
licentious culture, a culture that really doesn't have the same
(08:46):
moral standards. Their lax in the way that they train
their children. They're critical of the Pilgrim parents is being
too stern in their child rearing practices, and that bothers
them as well. And it's in that context that they
began to consider looking for a new home, not in Europe,
but in fact across the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
In North America.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
You know, it's very common, I think, for us to
hear someone in referring to the Pilgrims to say that
they came to this country in search of religious freedom. Now,
the reality is what they are struggling with really is
the cares of this world. It's kind of daily challenges
that so many of us face, that so many of
(09:30):
us can relate to, Because even though they are motivated
by those kinds of economic concerns and family concerns, all
of their motivation in some way connects back to their
deep commitment not just to their families, but to their church.
And so their decision to migrate is not a decision
(09:50):
made by a bunch of individuals who happen to leave simultaneously.
It is a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as
a group that the only way they're going to be
able to stay together is if they find together a
new home. The voyage of the Mayflower is something that
William Bradford, who wrote the main history of the Pilgrims
(10:12):
will and Bradford only talks about it in about a
page and a half and he doesn't share a lot
of details, but we do know that it was an
arduous and in many ways a terrifying experience for them
to begin with, they hadn't been able to leave England.
They went from Holland back to England en route to
North America. They hadn't been able to leave England nearly
(10:35):
as early in the calendar year as they had hoped.
And then when they finally were in position to leave
one of the ships they had hoped to take two ships,
one of the ships immediately begins to take on water
and they have to return for repairs, and that happens
not once but twice before they finally have to just
give up on the idea that the second ship, called
(10:55):
the speed Well, would be able to accompany them. All
of wish to say that they actually don't leave England
for good until September the sixth in the year sixteen twenty,
and their voyage will take sixty five days. And so
if you do the math, it comes out to an
average of just at two miles per hour for sixty
(11:17):
five days. Because of the bad weather, it would have
been almost certain that they would remain below decks for
the entire voyage, or almost for the entire voyage. It
was an area that was not tall enough to stand
up in, and for sixty five days they're in an
area that was about the size of a good sized
(11:38):
city bus, and in that space one hundred and two
pilgrim passengers. So as the Pilgrims were preparing to leave
from Leiden, it's probably good for us just to stop
for a moment and in our mind's eye, try to
imagine that parting. If you're William Bradford, for example, he's
leaving a three year old son behind just because it's
(11:58):
not possible. He just doesn't think it's possible for his
son to survive. Early on, he hopes that his son
would join him afterward, and those kinds of goodbyes were
being said repeatedly. And the way that Bradford describes the
departure in his history is very touching. He really tells
us that tears were flowing like water. But and here
(12:20):
is the passages that I love so much. That they
comforted themselves with what they believed to be true. And
what they believed to be true, among other things, was
that this world was not their home. As he put
it in his history, they reminded themselves that they were Pilgrims.
You know, that's the label that we use for this group,
that we use so much that it loses all of
(12:42):
its meaning, all of its power. But in saying they
knew that they were pilgrims, he's almost certainly quoting from
the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Hebrews in the
Christian New Testament, where the author says that various heroes
of the Christian faith knew that they were pilgrims, that
the world was not their home, just saying that they
found comfort in reminding themselves of that truth. They were
(13:04):
temporary sojourners in this land. Their ultimate hope lay elsewhere,
so they knew that they were pilgrims. One of the
things about this that really is, I think miraculous is
that there was only one fatality among the one hundred
and two pilgrim passengers on board the Mayflower. This was
not really at all to be expected. There had been
(13:26):
a voyage of Puritans actually just the year before, to
Virginia to resettle there, and a passenger list that had
one hundred and eighty individuals on it. Found that by
the end of that voyage one hundred and thirty had died,
and so surviving the voyage almost without loss of life
was pretty amazing. So they arrived on the coast of
(13:49):
New England in early November, actually the ninth of November specifically,
but they're considerably north of where they had expected to land.
They had entered into an agreement with a corporation that
had been authorized by the King of England to settle
what is today the area of Virginia, the Carolina's Maryland
on up to basically to Hudson River. But they landed
(14:13):
considerably north of that, actually off the coast of Cape Cod,
and so their first response is, well, we have to
turn south, we have to go to the area where
we've been authorized to settle, and they try to do that,
but the area there around Cape Cod is really treacherous
for navigation, and the captain, Captain Reynolds, tells them that
this is not going to happen. This is too dangerous.
(14:34):
We're not going to undertake this. And it's on the
twenty third of December, according to their records, twenty third
of December in the year sixteen twenty that they go
ashore on the site of what we know today is
the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The area actually had been
the site of a Native American village, a village inhabited
(14:56):
by a tribe called the Patuxent, but the accent had
been devastated by disease sometime probably not too long before
sixteen twenty, certainly after sixteen fifteen, so fairly recently the
Ptuccent had been literally wiped out. Historians are not sure
(15:17):
what the disease was. It may have been viral hepatitis.
So where the pilgrims Land is sort of like a
ghost village in essence, and they're arriving right at the
onset of a bitter New England winter, and if I
could just say this parenthetically, this really surprises them. They
know that they're going to be late in the year,
(15:39):
but they really were not expecting such severe weather. And
you might think why in the world not. If you
look at a map, you'll actually find that, in terms
of latitude, present day Massachusetts is pretty much on the
same line of latitude as Madrid, Spain. So the pilgrim
(16:00):
are actually traveling substantially south, about six hundred miles south
of London, and so they're actually expecting a temperate climate
even as late as sixteen twenty two. A couple years later,
one pamphlet that's advertising the settlement is saying that it's
going to be sort of like a garden spot. This
is going to be sort of like a place in
the Riviera. And what they get, of course, is very
(16:22):
very different. So the next few months are just awful.
One historian would later call this the starving time, and
that actually is a misunderstanding.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I think of what was going on.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
They actually have enough food to avoid starvation. What they
don't have is shelter, and so they mostly live on
board the Mayflower. But every day when they want to
work trying to build these structures, they have to find
a way to get to shore.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
And you're listening to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story
of the Pilgrims, and we learned that they were in
Leiden and they had religious freedom there, but the cultural
influences of the big city just didn't match up with
the interests of the Pilgrims and how they wanted to
raise their family. And so the congregation decides to head well,
(17:11):
to head to America. And by the way, what a
surprise to find out. Though they sailed six hundred miles south,
the brutal winters of New England were not to be expected.
When we come back. More of this remarkable story, the
Pilgrim's story, the story of Thanksgiving. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories, and with Robert
Tracy Mackenzie telling the story of the First Thanksgiving. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
The Mayflower had come with a long boat. They expected
to use this boat for fishing, but they had had
to disassemble the boat to fit it into the hold,
and it had been damaged en route, so it took
quite a while to repair that boat.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
So for actually several.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Weeks, the adults who would go ashore to work would
have to wade through the frigid water in December and
January in Massachusetts, and not just a short space, because
the harbor was so shallow. The Mayflower is anchored probably
between three quarters of a mile and a mile from shore.
(18:55):
So the first thing they'll do every day is to
wade through this icy water up to their chest tests
for three quarters.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Of a mile or more.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And then the last thing they'll do, after having worked
all day, is to repeat the journey in the opposite direction.
And so you can imagine the real theory. I think
the more likely theory is that they will die in
droves from pneumonia, so that by spring of the one
hundred and two passengers originally on the Mayflower, fifty two
(19:23):
have died and every family is affected. There were twenty
six different family groups among the passengers, and only four
were spared from at least one death, so twenty two
of the families had at least one family member die.
There were eighteen married couples on the Mayflower and fourteen
have one of the two partners die. And much to
(19:46):
I think our amazement ought to amaze us. When the
weather allows the Mayflower to return to England in the
spring of sixteen twenty one, the survivors are given the
opportunity to return to England and the they refuse, and
now they are needing to be wholly absorbed in the
work of completing their settlement, planting crops, and hopefully preparing
(20:09):
for their survival during the next winter to come.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
It's in this context.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
That they have really their first significant encounter with Native
American peoples in the area, and in the spring of
sixteen twenty one they actually are visited on two occasions
by Native American visitors, two different individuals who actually are
able to speak English and they're they're floored by that.
The better known of these two was a Native American
(20:37):
man named Squanto. His full name was Tisquantum. Squanto story
is very fascinating. He had actually learned English because he
had been kidnapped by European fishermen sometime before the Great
Epidemic struck his tribal community. He had been kidnapped and
taken to Spain, where actually his freedom, after a time,
(20:58):
was purchased by some Spanish monks who facilitated his escape
to England. There he worked for a time as a
servant to an English sea captain. Ultimately is able to
get passage on a ship back to North America and
make his way overland to Protuccent to what is now Plymouth, where,
to his great horror, he finds that all of his
(21:20):
people have now been victims of the epidemic. He was
made a prisoner of another Native American tribe that was
in the area, and this was the Wampanoag tribe. The
Wampanoag had also been devastated by disease, though not wiped out,
and they're the peoples that will ultimately interact most intimately
with the Pilgrims in the immediate months and years to come.
(21:44):
There are a variety of ways that they helped the Pilgrims,
and some of these details you probably have heard from
your childhood. One of the things that the Wampanoag will
do is to help the Pilgrims master a form of
agriculture that's really appropriate for the terrain and the climate
of the area. And so these kinds of sort of
life hacks, we would say today, are things that the
(22:06):
Wampanoag teach to the Pilgrims that surely were very central
to their survival. And so that leads to a cause
for celebration in the fall of sixteen twenty one. The
sum total of evidence that we have about the event
that we call the First Thanksgiving comes from a letter
that was written by one of the Pilgrims, a man
(22:28):
named Edward Winslow, and he writes this letter toward the
end of sixteen twenty one, when there's an opportunity to
send it back to England with the ship that is
passing by. And in this letter he describes what has
occurred in some total of four sentences, which add up
to one hundred and fifteen words, he basically says that
(22:52):
with the harvest being in their Governor William Bradford basically said,
and I'm paraphrasing here, said let's celebrate. And so Bradford
sends four men of the community out into the woods
to hunt for fowl for birds as they were celebrating.
According to Winslow, the Indians, as he says, many of
(23:13):
the Indians came among us, and for three days they
entertained them and feasted together. So this is the sum
total of what we actually know. One hundred and fifteen
words and four sentences, and let's think about it for
just a moment. Actually, it doesn't tell us much about
what was on the menu. There's a reference to.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Fowl, but does it say turkey.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
By the way, the Pilgrim records that survived talk about
swans and geese and herons and cranes.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
And ducks, and so probably the main menu.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
At the gathering would have been these kinds of delicacies.
We also don't have any reference to candied yams, or
to pumpkin pie, or to any things that we associate
with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There's good reason for that.
The Pilgrims didn't have ovens. Pretty much everything that they
would have been able to fix at this time would
(24:05):
have been boiled or roasted. They didn't have sugar, they
didn't have flour for pie crusts. The reality is that
they probably are eating lots of water fowl. They're probably
eating what they would have called sauce, which basically means
fixings or trimmings like turnips and parsnips and cabbage and
(24:27):
collared greens. I often joe quite possible that they had
turnips and eels, and in fact, it's more likely that
they had turnips and eels than that they had turkey
and dressing. One other thing on the menu that we
want to call attention to is venison, and this is
in that four sentence account.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
From Edward Winslow.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
We're told that the Native American people who came brought
with them five deer, which leads us to think a
little bit about the presence of the Native Americans there.
One of the things that's not in the historical record
that we often assume as in the historical record is
the idea that the Pilgrims actually invited the Wampanoag to
(25:07):
be a part of their celebration. And Winslow doesn't say
that his language is much more oblique than that. It
says Indians came among us, and so it's at least
possible that they were unexpected guests.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
And we do know that the.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Wampanoag did from time to time come into the Pilgrim
settlement and often did expect to stay for some period
of time, and often did expect to enjoy some of
the Pilgrim's store of food, and so it wouldn't have
been the first time. The fact is the Pilgrims and
the Wampanoig were able to survive. As different as they were,
they were able to benefit one another. They avoided war,
(25:43):
and these are wonderful kinds of things to call attention to.
The account from Winslow says that the Pilgrims exercised their arms.
That's his wording, which basically means they got out their
guns and they sort of went through military drill. And
we might imagine sort of both sides in different ways,
trying to demonstrate their prowess, trying to make sure that
(26:05):
the other side knew that they were not to be
trifled with.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
And you're listening to Robert Tracy McKenzie tell the story
of the first Thanksgiving and so much more, including the
story of the Pilgrims. My goodness, that passage from the Mayflower,
fifty two passengers died, twenty two of the families lost
at least one family member, and not being prepared for
that brutal winter, my goodness, and then to learn that
(26:31):
they had to walk a mile each way back to
the Mayflower where they had to reside. And if you've
ever been in New England waters I grew up in
New Jersey, you can't know just how bitter cold it
is even in March, but the winter, it's quite remarkable.
And anytime you're complaining about cold water or about your life,
think about the story of the Pilgrims and what they
(26:53):
endured for the love of their God and for the
love of their church and their families. When we come
back more of this remarkable American story the First Thanksgiving
here on our American Stories, and we continue here with
(27:38):
our American stories and with Robert Tracy mackenzie, who's a
professor of history at Wheaton College. He's also the author
of The First Thanksgiving. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
The account from Winslow says that King Massis Wit, who
is the leader of the Wampanoag tribe, brought with him
about ninety men. And then let's think about the pilgrims themselves.
Fifty survivors, overwhelmingly male. Because females have died in greater
proportions than males. There are about five males for every
(28:13):
female among the pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving. Our estimate
is that by the end of all those deaths in
the winter, there was maybe only one pilgrim over forty
years old. The governor of the colony, Willing Bradford, is thirty.
Just one of the thought as you see them in
your mind's eye. Evidence from the time suggests that they
(28:35):
had not yet built much in the way of furniture.
They certainly would not have had lots of long tables.
You always see the pictures of the long tables set
up outside. They didn't have forks at all. Forks were
a relatively recent innovation in England, and it was often
thought very pretentious. To use a fork was a sign
that you were a fop, and so they would have
(28:55):
had knives and spoons. They would have almost certainly been
sitting on the ground. Not only young, they're colorful. You know,
the standard stereotype, which actually dates to the late eighteen hundreds,
shows Pilgrims not wearing all black, really tall hats. They
have buckles on every sort of part of their clothing.
But the records from the Colony of the Property of
(29:19):
People when they die suggests that their clothes were bright colors.
That Governor William Bradford has a red cape and a
purple vest. The Pilgrims actually thought of Thanksgiving as a
very solemn holy day, so we use the word holiday,
(29:41):
which really is an illusion of holy day, and it's
very unlikely that what we remember is the first Thanksgiving
is actually something that they would have called a Thanksgiving.
They believe that the Bible authorized God's people to declare
these special kinds of holy celebrations in response to some
(30:01):
extraordinary circumstance. But when that happened, they anticipated gatherings that
would have been solemn, that would have been centered on
link the preaching, prayer and singing, not on feasting, certainly,
not on games, not on military drill. And so what
(30:23):
they're doing at this gathering in the fall of sixteen
twenty one is they're having just a kind of harvest
celebration that they would have known from their youth in
rural England. A good question that comes to mind is
just why is it that we attach such significance to
the Pilgrim celebration of sixteen twenty one. And I think
there's probably a variety of answers, But I have a
(30:44):
theory that I'd like to share with you has to
do with when Americans actually discovered this event. And that
may strike you as odd even to put it that way,
but the reality is the American people didn't remember this
gathering for a very long time, actually, for more than
two centuries after it occurred. The main description of it,
(31:05):
as I've mentioned, was in a letter that was written
and taken back to England. It was actually published in
England as part of a pamphlet, but then it gradually
sort of went out of circulation and there was just
no historical record of this event. But a copy of
the pamphlet is not actually discovered in North America until
(31:26):
the eighteen twenties, until two centuries after the First Thanksgiving
is discovered by a sort of amateur historian who's a
minister in New England, and he actually includes it in
a history that he is writing about the origins.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Of New England.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And he in a book that was published in the
year eighteen forty one, two hundred and twenty years after
the event. And in this book he tells his readers
when he repeats the description by Edward Winslow, and here
is the first Thanksgiving that ever occurred.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
In New England.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
By the eighteen fouries, New England had come to celebrate
Thanksgiving every fall. It become a really sort of treasured tradition.
Thanksgiving actually wasn't celebrated in the South, it wasn't celebrated
in much of the Western United States.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
It was a New.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
England holiday, but it was a cherished New England holiday.
And then this minister in eighteen forty one tells New
Englanders and here's where it all started. This was the
origin of the celebration. And so all of a sudden,
individuals have discovered, they believe the source of their tradition,
and pretty quickly they begin to emphasize it as one
(32:31):
of those sort of seminal moments in the early history
of the country. As late then as the eighteen forties,
Thanksgiving is still pretty much a regional holiday. It does
get a boost about twenty years later, during the American
Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. During
this period, of course, is being lobbied by a female
writer named Sarah Josepha Hale, who is an editor of
(32:54):
a prominent ladies magazine, and she's contacting Lincoln every fall
and saying, do you know need to declare this as
a national holiday. And the way that Hale makes her
case is to say that all of the holidays at
that point that were recognized nationally, they were for men.
And there were really just two holidays national holidays at
(33:15):
the time. One was the fourth of July. She thought
of that as a male holiday. The other was George
Washington's birthday, and that would also have been a time
predominantly where men gathered together, where there were speeches and
so forth. And she thought that Thanksgiving is the perfect
woman's holiday. It was a domestic holiday. It's centered around
entertainment within the home, centered around a fine meal, and
(33:36):
so forth. And so she keeps lobbying Lincoln, and in
eighteen sixty three Lincoln finally relents, and he issues a
proclamation in the fall of that year calling for Thanksgiving
toward the end of November of eighteen sixty three. He
actually repeats that in subsequent proclamation in the fall of
eighteen sixty four, and then, of course he is assassinated
(33:57):
in early eighteen sixty five. But what Lincoln has done
is to establish a precedent, and from that point on
presidents would issue a national proclamation declaring a day of Thanksgiving,
usually on the fourth or the final Thursday of the month.
One other question we might want to think about before
we concluded, what happens to the Plymouth Colony after all
(34:18):
this is over. Bradford lives into the sixteen fifties and
for most of his time in New England he is
the governor of the Plymouth Colony, and he writes at
length about what is occurring, and what he is describing
is a time of fragmentation of the Pilgrim community. And
(34:38):
the reason why this is so is prosperity. And that's
not what we expect to hear. I suppose the Pilgrims
had struggled for years to keep body and soult together,
and then toward the end of the sixteen twenty something
had happened that really changed their economic fortunes, and that
was the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. So the
Massachusetts Bay Colony is a far large colony, beginning with
(35:02):
what's sometimes called the Great Puritan Migration that leads to
the migration of thousands, not just of a couple of hundred,
but thousands of Puritan migrants over a period of years
to New England. And the center of that Massachusetts colony
will be only about thirty thirty five miles to the
north at Boston. But the individuals who are coming need
supplies just like the Pilgrims had needed them. And the
(35:24):
Pilgrims had a ten year head start on Massachusetts Bay,
and they had slowly begun to build flocks of sheep
and herds of cattle, And so they find in the
migrants to Massachusetts Bay a ready market. And the bottom
line is, at least as when Bradford tells the story,
is that many of the Pilgrims consciously decided to move
(35:45):
away from Plymouth, to move away from the church there
because they saw more economic opportunity somewhere else. So it's
actually a story that in some sense is bittersweet. It
was a story of great sacrifice to the church together
under adverse conditions, followed by a gradual weakening of the
(36:06):
church in a time of prosperity, so much so that
when Bradford actually ends his history of Plymouth Plantation by
suggesting that the small group of survivors that still lived
in Plymouth were much like, as he put it, a
mother that had been abandoned by her children. And that's
a sorrowful, mournful kind of note that Bradford ends with
(36:31):
the significance of this though, I think is also great
for us as we remember the story, because we think
of the challenges that we face offten in terms of adversity,
and so we look to the Pilgrim story and we
see an example of perseverance, courage, ultimately victory in adversity.
But I think the Pilgrim story tells us that adversity
(36:51):
comes in a variety of forms. You remember the parable
of Jesus about the cares of this world being a
kind of thorn that can choke out the fruitfulness of
a plant. As it turns out, the cares of this
world sort of traveled with the Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
There's no getting away from them.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
And in the end, the temptation to have a desire
for other things was there. So it's a complicated story,
but as we dig into its complexity, it becomes richer,
and it challenges us in new ways, takes on a
relevance that it would lack otherwise.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
And a great job is always by Greg Hangler on
the production and the storytelling. And a special thanks again
to Robert Tracy McKenzie his book The First Thanksgiving. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects to pick it up,
and he's so right. It is rich, it is complicated,
and surviving success can be as hard, or possibly harder
(37:45):
than adversity. And what I was most struck by in
the stories, they're a profound belief that they were pilgrims
and what that word meant to them, because the heroes
of the Christian faith, they said, were indeed pilgrims. Two
centuries go by before we even discover the story. It
is a regional thing at best. The Thanksgiving celebration Lincoln,
(38:08):
Abraham Lincoln, changed that. The story of Thanksgiving here on
our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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