November 10, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Thanksgiving is the only American holiday that has actually remained relatively innocent—it’s not something that we have been able to commercialize. But there’s something going on here more than feasting, family, and football. Robert Tracy McKenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College and is the author of The First Thanksgiving. He’s here to tell us the story of this quintessentially American holiday.
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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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Protestantism was born.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The president 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 and establishes
an independent Church of England church we often remember as
the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church in many respects, though
(02:28):
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 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
(02:53):
gathering at screwby By about sixteen hundred or so is
actually best thought of as a radical kind of subset
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
(03:14):
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
couldn't in good conscience associate or worship with Anglicans.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
They had to withdraw. They had to separate.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
From the Anglican Church. And so we need to understand
then this core group is the most radical of the
most radical protesting 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
(03:54):
sense they are considered in 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
(04:17):
actually go into hiding, and 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
(04:38):
think it's really important to go back and recapture this
truth is that Pilgrims 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
(05:02):
oh eight they 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.
(05:24):
We have to 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.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It continues here on Our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
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(07:52):
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the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot
com and we continue with our American Stories and with
(08:12):
Robert Tracy mackenzie. He's a professor 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 as 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 in North America.
(09:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
It's kind of daily challenges.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
That so many of us face, that so many of us.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Can relate to.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
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 made by a
bunch of individuals who happen to leave simultaneously. It is
(09:54):
a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as a group
that the only the 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 will and
Bradford only talks about it in about a page and
(10:14):
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 as early in
(10:36):
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 the speed Well,
(10:56):
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 five days.
(11:18):
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 city bus, and
(11:39):
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 not possibly. He
just doesn't think it's possible for his son to survive.
(12:02):
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 that and here is the passes
that I love so much. That they comforted themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
With what they believed to be true.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
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 its meaning, all of its power. But
in saying they knew that they were pilgrims. He's almost
(12:47):
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, and Bradford,
I'm just saying that they found comfort in reminding themselves
of that truth. They were temporary sojourners.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
In this land.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
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 a voyage of Puritans actually just the
(13:29):
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 New England in early November, actually
(13:51):
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 considerably north of that,
(14:14):
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. We're not
(14:35):
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 by a
(14:56):
tribe called the Patuxent. The accent had been devastated by
disease sometime probably not too long before sixteen twenty, certainly
after sixteen fifteen, so fairly recently the pituccent had been
literally wiped out. Historians are not sure what the disease was.
(15:18):
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, but they really were not
(15:40):
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 Pilgrims are actually traveling substantially south, about six
(16:03):
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 very different. So the next few
(16:24):
months are just awful. One historian would later call this
the starving time, and that actually is a misunderstanding I
think of what was going on. 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
(16:46):
these structures, they have to find a way to get
to shore.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And you're listening to our Thanksgiving special and you're listening
to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims,
and we learn that they were in Leiden and they
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, to head
(17:13):
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 is a part of
our Thanksgiving special here on our American Stories, and we
(18:08):
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. So for actually
several weeks, the adults who would go ashore to work
would have to wade through the frigid water in December
(18:41):
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. So the first thing they'll do every day
is to wade through this icy water up to their
chest for three quarters of a mile or more. And
(19:02):
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 have
(19:23):
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 I
(19:46):
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 they and now they are
needing to be wholly absorbed in the work of completing
their settlement, planting crops, and hopefully preparing for their survival
(20:10):
during the next winter to come. It's in this context
that they have really their first significant encounter with Native
American peoples in the area.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And in the spring of.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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 floored by that the
better known of these two was a Native American man
named Squanto. His full name was Tisquantum. Squanto story is
(20:43):
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, was
purchased by some Spanish monks who facilitated his escape to England.
(21:04):
There he worked for a time as a servant to
an English sea captain.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Ultimately is able to.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
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
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
(21:30):
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.
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
(21:52):
do is to help the Pilgrims master a form of
agriculture that's really appropriate for the terrain and the climate
of the area area. And so these kinds of sort
of life hacks, we would say today, are things that
the Wampanoag teach to the Pilgrims that surely were very
central to their survival. And so that leads to a
(22:13):
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 named Edward Winslow. And he writes this letter toward
the end of sixteen twenty one, when there's an opportunity
(22:33):
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 with the harvest being in their Governor William Bradford
(22:57):
basically said, and I'm paraphrasing here, said, let's say 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 the Indians came among us, and for three
days they entertained them.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And feasted together.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Actually, it doesn't tell us much about what was on
the menu.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
There's a reference to fowl, but does it say turkey.
By the way, the Pilgrim records that survive talk about
swans and geese and herons and cranes and ducks, and
so probably the main menu 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
(23:54):
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 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
(24:14):
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 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
(24:34):
they had turkey and dressing. The one other thing on
the menu that we want to call attention to is
a venison, and this is in that four sentence account
from Edward Winslow. 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
(24:55):
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 Wampanoig to 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
(25:17):
it's at least possible that they were unexpected guests. And
we do know that the 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.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
The first time.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
The fact is the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag were able
to survive. As different as they were, they were able
to benefit one another. They avoided war, 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
(25:56):
and they sort of went through military drill, and we
might imagine and sort of both sides in different ways
trying to demonstrate their prowess, trying to make sure that
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
(26:52):
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 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, William 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 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,
(29:15):
But the records from the Colony of the Property of
People when they die suggests that their clothes were bright colors.
The 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,
(29:40):
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
lengthy preaching, prayer and singing, not on feasting, certainly, not
on games, not on military drill. And so what they're
(30:23):
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 theory that
(30:45):
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, for more than two centuries
after it occurred. The main description of it, as I've mentioned,
(31:06):
was in a letter that was written and taken back
to England. Was actually published in England as part of
the pamphlet, but then it gradually sort of went out
of circulation and there was just no historical record of
this event.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But a copy of.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
The pamphlet is not actually discovered in North America until
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 of
New England.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
And in a.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
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 in New England. By the eighteen forties,
New England had come to celebrate Thanksgiving every fall. It
(32:03):
had 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. It was a New England holiday,
but it was a cherished New England holiday. And then
this minister in eighteen forty one tells New Englanders and here's.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Where it all started.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
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 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.
(32:40):
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 a prominent ladies magazine, and she's contacting Lincoln
every fall and saying, you need to declare this as
(33:00):
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
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
(33:23):
predominantly when 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 centered around
entertainment within the home, centered around a fine meal, and
so forth. And so she keeps lobbying Lincoln, and in
eighteen sixty three, Lincoln finally relents, and he issues a
(33:43):
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
in early eighteen sixty five. But what Lincoln has done
is to establish a precedent, and from that point on
(34:03):
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
this is over. Bradford lives into the sixteen fifties and
for most of his time in New England he is
(34:25):
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
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,
(34:48):
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 larger colony, beginning with
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
(35:11):
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
Pilgrims had a ten year head start on Massachusetts Bay,
and they had slowly begun to build flocks of sheep
(35:32):
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
away from Plymouth, to move away from the church there,
because they saw more economic opportunity somewhere else. So it's
(35:54):
actually a story that in some sense is bittersweet. It
was a story of great sacrifice to keep the church
together under adverse conditions, followed by a gradual weakening of
the 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
(36:17):
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 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 often in terms
(36:39):
of adversity, and so we look to the Pilgrim story
and we see an example of perseverance, courage, ultimately victory
in adversity.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
But I think the.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Pilgrim story tells us that adversity 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 plant. As it turns out,
the cares of this world sort of traveled with the Pilgrims.
There's no getting away from them, and in the end,
the temptation to have a desire for other things was there.
(37:12):
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,
(38:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Protestantism was born.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The president 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 and establishes
an independent Church of England church we often remember as
the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church in many respects, though
(02:28):
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 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
(02:53):
gathering at screwby By about sixteen hundred or so is
actually best thought of as a radical kind of subset
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
(03:14):
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
couldn't in good conscience associate or worship with Anglicans.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
They had to withdraw. They had to separate.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
From the Anglican Church. And so we need to understand
then this core group is the most radical of the
most radical protesting 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
(03:54):
sense they are considered in 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
(04:17):
actually go into hiding, and 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
(04:38):
think it's really important to go back and recapture this
truth is that Pilgrims 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
(05:02):
oh eight they 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.
(05:24):
We have to 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.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It continues here on Our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell
and love America like we do, we're asking you to
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please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars
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(07:52):
and go to the donate button and help us keep
the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot
com and we continue with our American Stories and with
(08:12):
Robert Tracy mackenzie. He's a professor 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 as 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 in North America.
(09:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
It's kind of daily challenges.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
That so many of us face, that so many of us.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Can relate to.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
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 made by a
bunch of individuals who happen to leave simultaneously. It is
(09:54):
a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as a group
that the only the 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 will and
Bradford only talks about it in about a page and
(10:14):
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 as early in
(10:36):
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 the speed Well,
(10:56):
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 five days.
(11:18):
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 city bus, and
(11:39):
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 not possibly. He
just doesn't think it's possible for his son to survive.
(12:02):
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 that and here is the passes
that I love so much. That they comforted themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
With what they believed to be true.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
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 its meaning, all of its power. But
in saying they knew that they were pilgrims. He's almost
(12:47):
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, and Bradford,
I'm just saying that they found comfort in reminding themselves
of that truth. They were temporary sojourners.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
In this land.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
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 a voyage of Puritans actually just the
(13:29):
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 New England in early November, actually
(13:51):
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 considerably north of that,
(14:14):
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. We're not
(14:35):
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 by a
(14:56):
tribe called the Patuxent. The accent had been devastated by
disease sometime probably not too long before sixteen twenty, certainly
after sixteen fifteen, so fairly recently the pituccent had been
literally wiped out. Historians are not sure what the disease was.
(15:18):
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, but they really were not
(15:40):
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 Pilgrims are actually traveling substantially south, about six
(16:03):
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 very different. So the next few
(16:24):
months are just awful. One historian would later call this
the starving time, and that actually is a misunderstanding I
think of what was going on. 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
(16:46):
these structures, they have to find a way to get
to shore.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And you're listening to our Thanksgiving special and you're listening
to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims,
and we learn that they were in Leiden and they
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, to head
(17:13):
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 is a part of
our Thanksgiving special here on our American Stories, and we
(18:08):
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. So for actually
several weeks, the adults who would go ashore to work
would have to wade through the frigid water in December
(18:41):
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. So the first thing they'll do every day
is to wade through this icy water up to their
chest for three quarters of a mile or more. And
(19:02):
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 have
(19:23):
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 I
(19:46):
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 they and now they are
needing to be wholly absorbed in the work of completing
their settlement, planting crops, and hopefully preparing for their survival
(20:10):
during the next winter to come. It's in this context
that they have really their first significant encounter with Native
American peoples in the area.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And in the spring of.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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 floored by that the
better known of these two was a Native American man
named Squanto. His full name was Tisquantum. Squanto story is
(20:43):
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, was
purchased by some Spanish monks who facilitated his escape to England.
(21:04):
There he worked for a time as a servant to
an English sea captain.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Ultimately is able to.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
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
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
(21:30):
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.
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
(21:52):
do is to help the Pilgrims master a form of
agriculture that's really appropriate for the terrain and the climate
of the area area. And so these kinds of sort
of life hacks, we would say today, are things that
the Wampanoag teach to the Pilgrims that surely were very
central to their survival. And so that leads to a
(22:13):
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 named Edward Winslow. And he writes this letter toward
the end of sixteen twenty one, when there's an opportunity
(22:33):
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 with the harvest being in their Governor William Bradford
(22:57):
basically said, and I'm paraphrasing here, said, let's say 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 the Indians came among us, and for three
days they entertained them.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And feasted together.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Actually, it doesn't tell us much about what was on
the menu.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
There's a reference to fowl, but does it say turkey.
By the way, the Pilgrim records that survive talk about
swans and geese and herons and cranes and ducks, and
so probably the main menu 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
(23:54):
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 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
(24:14):
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 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
(24:34):
they had turkey and dressing. The one other thing on
the menu that we want to call attention to is
a venison, and this is in that four sentence account
from Edward Winslow. 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
(24:55):
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 Wampanoig to 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
(25:17):
it's at least possible that they were unexpected guests. And
we do know that the 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.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
The first time.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
The fact is the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag were able
to survive. As different as they were, they were able
to benefit one another. They avoided war, 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
(25:56):
and they sort of went through military drill, and we
might imagine and sort of both sides in different ways
trying to demonstrate their prowess, trying to make sure that
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
(26:52):
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 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, William 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 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,
(29:15):
But the records from the Colony of the Property of
People when they die suggests that their clothes were bright colors.
The 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,
(29:40):
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
lengthy preaching, prayer and singing, not on feasting, certainly, not
on games, not on military drill. And so what they're
(30:23):
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 theory that
(30:45):
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, for more than two centuries
after it occurred. The main description of it, as I've mentioned,
(31:06):
was in a letter that was written and taken back
to England. Was actually published in England as part of
the pamphlet, but then it gradually sort of went out
of circulation and there was just no historical record of
this event.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But a copy of.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
The pamphlet is not actually discovered in North America until
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 of
New England.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
And in a.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
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 in New England. By the eighteen forties,
New England had come to celebrate Thanksgiving every fall. It
(32:03):
had 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. It was a New England holiday,
but it was a cherished New England holiday. And then
this minister in eighteen forty one tells New Englanders and here's.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Where it all started.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
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 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.
(32:40):
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 a prominent ladies magazine, and she's contacting Lincoln
every fall and saying, you need to declare this as
(33:00):
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
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
(33:23):
predominantly when 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 centered around
entertainment within the home, centered around a fine meal, and
so forth. And so she keeps lobbying Lincoln, and in
eighteen sixty three, Lincoln finally relents, and he issues a
(33:43):
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
in early eighteen sixty five. But what Lincoln has done
is to establish a precedent, and from that point on
(34:03):
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
this is over. Bradford lives into the sixteen fifties and
for most of his time in New England he is
(34:25):
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
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,
(34:48):
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 larger colony, beginning with
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
(35:11):
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
Pilgrims had a ten year head start on Massachusetts Bay,
and they had slowly begun to build flocks of sheep
(35:32):
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
away from Plymouth, to move away from the church there,
because they saw more economic opportunity somewhere else. So it's
(35:54):
actually a story that in some sense is bittersweet. It
was a story of great sacrifice to keep the church
together under adverse conditions, followed by a gradual weakening of
the 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
(36:17):
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 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 often in terms
(36:39):
of adversity, and so we look to the Pilgrim story
and we see an example of perseverance, courage, ultimately victory
in adversity.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
But I think the.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Pilgrim story tells us that adversity 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 plant. As it turns out,
the cares of this world sort of traveled with the Pilgrims.
There's no getting away from them, and in the end,
the temptation to have a desire for other things was there.
(37:12):
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,
(38:07):
Abraham Lincoln, changed that. The story of Thanksgiving here on
our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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