November 29, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Thanksgiving is the only American holiday that has remained relatively innocent—it’s not something we've been able to commercialize. But something is happening here more than feasting, family, and football. Robert Tracy McKenzie, professor of history at Wheaton College and author of The First Thanksgiving, tells 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 as 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 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 still
(02:29):
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 gathering at screwby
(02:55):
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 conclusion that the
Anglican Church was not a true church, that it was
(03:17):
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 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 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 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
(04:19):
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 undertaking,
but around the year sixteen oh eight they make their
(05:03):
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. We have to understand
(05:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
It was foreign in many many ways.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
You know, we sometimes talk about how the Pilgrims came
to a new world when they migrated to North America,
but in 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 rent that it's
hard for us to exaggerate the challenge. So now rural
people were living in a large city. Farm folk were
(06:08):
having to earn their living in industrial settings as employees
in a textile manufacturing line of work, and it was hard.
And 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.
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
On Our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
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(07:52):
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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.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
They thought, well, at least we'll be able to eat there.
At least we want starve there.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
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 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
(08:59):
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. 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
(09:21):
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 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
(09:43):
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 a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as
a group that the only they're going to be able
to stay together is if they find together a new home.
(10:06):
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
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,
(10:26):
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
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
(10:47):
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 would be able to accompany them. All of wish
to say. Then 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
(11:10):
you do the math, it comes out to an average
of just at two miles per hour for sixty 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
(11:31):
for sixty five days they're in an area that was
about the size of a good sized city bus, and
in that space, one hundred and.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Two Pilgrim passengers.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
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.
Early on, he hopes that his son would join him afterward.
(12:05):
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 is the passes that
I love so much. That they comforted themselves with what they.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
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 certainly,
(12:47):
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 saying
that they found comfort in reminding themselves of that truth.
They were temporary sojourners in this land. Their ultimate hope
(13:08):
lay elsewhere, so they knew.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
That they were pilgrims.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
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 year
before to Virginia to resettle there, and a passenger list
(13:34):
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 the
ninth of November specifically, but they're considerably north of where
(13:56):
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, actually
off the coast of Cape Cod. And so their first
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
This is too dangerous.
Speaker 3 (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 Puck 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 Pilgrims
(16:00):
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 of 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 I think of what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
They actually have.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
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 (16:49):
And you're listening to our Thanksgiving special, and you're listening
to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims,
and we 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, 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's 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 think
(19:46):
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 during the
(20:11):
next winter to come. It's in this context 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,
(20:32):
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 very fascinating. He had
actually learned English because he had been kidnapped by European
fishermen sometime before the Great Epidemic struck his tribal community.
(20:53):
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. 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.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
The Wampanoag had also.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
The climate of the area.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
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 cause for celebration. In
the fall of sixteen twenty one, the sum total of
evidence that we have about the event that we call
(22:22):
the First Thanksgiving comes from a letter that was written
by one of the Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
A man named Edward Winslow.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
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 with the harvest
(22:53):
being in their Governor William Bradford basically said, and I'm
paraphrasing here said, let's say debate. 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
(23:13):
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 fowl, but
does it say turkey. By the way, the Pilgrim records
(23:36):
that survived 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 any things that we associate with
a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There's good reason for that. The
(23:59):
Pilgrims didn't have. 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 water fowl. They're probably eating what
they would have called sauce, which basically means fixings or
(24:22):
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 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
(24:44):
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 Native Americans there. One of the things
that's not in the historical record that we often assumes
in the historical record is the idea that the Pilgrims
(25:05):
actually invited the Wampanoag 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 it's at least possible that they were unexpected guests.
And we do know that the Wampanoa did from time
to time come into the Pilgrim settlement and often did
(25:26):
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 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
(25:49):
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
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 M. Mackenzie 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
(26:31):
learn that 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
(26:52):
and what they 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
(27:37):
continue here with 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 (27:51):
The account from Winslow says that King massis Wit, who
is the leader of the Wampanoag tribe brought with him
about ninety men. 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 female among the
(28:14):
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 had not yet
(28:35):
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 had knives and spoons.
(28:57):
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, but the records
from the Colony of the Property of People when they
(29:19):
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, which really
(29:41):
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 extraordinary circumstance.
(30:04):
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 they're doing at
this gathering in the fall of sixteen twenty one is
(30:26):
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 I'd
like to share with you has to do with when
(30:48):
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,
was in a letter that was written and taken back
(31:08):
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. But a copy of the pamphlet is not
actually discovered in North America until the eighteen twenties, until
two centuries after the First Thanksgiving is discovered by a
(31:32):
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, and 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
(31:56):
that ever occurred in New England. By the eighteen forties,
New England had come to celebrate Thanksgiving every fall. It
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.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
New England holiday.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
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. But I think the 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 the plant. As it turns out, the cares
(37:02):
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.
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 oh bye 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 as 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 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 still
(02:29):
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 gathering at screwby
(02:55):
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 conclusion that the
Anglican Church was not a true church, that it was
(03:17):
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 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 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 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
(04:19):
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 undertaking,
but around the year sixteen oh eight they make their
(05:03):
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. We have to understand
(05:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
It was foreign in many many ways.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
You know, we sometimes talk about how the Pilgrims came
to a new world when they migrated to North America,
but in 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 rent that it's
hard for us to exaggerate the challenge. So now rural
people were living in a large city. Farm folk were
(06:08):
having to earn their living in industrial settings as employees
in a textile manufacturing line of work, and it was hard.
And 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.
(06:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
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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(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.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
They thought, well, at least we'll be able to eat there.
At least we want starve there.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
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 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
(08:59):
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. 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
(09:21):
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 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
(09:43):
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 a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as
a group that the only they're going to be able
to stay together is if they find together a new home.
(10:06):
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
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,
(10:26):
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
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
(10:47):
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 would be able to accompany them. All of wish
to say. Then 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
(11:10):
you do the math, it comes out to an average
of just at two miles per hour for sixty 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
(11:31):
for sixty five days they're in an area that was
about the size of a good sized city bus, and
in that space, one hundred and.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Two Pilgrim passengers.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
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.
Early on, he hopes that his son would join him afterward.
(12:05):
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 is the passes that
I love so much. That they comforted themselves with what they.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
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 certainly,
(12:47):
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 saying
that they found comfort in reminding themselves of that truth.
They were temporary sojourners in this land. Their ultimate hope
(13:08):
lay elsewhere, so they knew.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
That they were pilgrims.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
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 year
before to Virginia to resettle there, and a passenger list
(13:34):
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 the
ninth of November specifically, but they're considerably north of where
(13:56):
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, actually
off the coast of Cape Cod. And so their first
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
This is too dangerous.
Speaker 3 (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 Puck 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 Pilgrims
(16:00):
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 of 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 I think of what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
They actually have.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
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 (16:49):
And you're listening to our Thanksgiving special, and you're listening
to Robert Tracy mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims,
and we 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, 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's 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 think
(19:46):
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 during the
(20:11):
next winter to come. It's in this context 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,
(20:32):
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 very fascinating. He had
actually learned English because he had been kidnapped by European
fishermen sometime before the Great Epidemic struck his tribal community.
(20:53):
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. 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.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
The Wampanoag had also.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
The climate of the area.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
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 cause for celebration. In
the fall of sixteen twenty one, the sum total of
evidence that we have about the event that we call
(22:22):
the First Thanksgiving comes from a letter that was written
by one of the Pilgrims.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
A man named Edward Winslow.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
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 with the harvest
(22:53):
being in their Governor William Bradford basically said, and I'm
paraphrasing here said, let's say debate. 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
(23:13):
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 fowl, but
does it say turkey. By the way, the Pilgrim records
(23:36):
that survived 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 any things that we associate with
a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There's good reason for that. The
(23:59):
Pilgrims didn't have. 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 water fowl. They're probably eating what
they would have called sauce, which basically means fixings or
(24:22):
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 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
(24:44):
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 Native Americans there. One of the things
that's not in the historical record that we often assumes
in the historical record is the idea that the Pilgrims
(25:05):
actually invited the Wampanoag 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 it's at least possible that they were unexpected guests.
And we do know that the Wampanoa did from time
to time come into the Pilgrim settlement and often did
(25:26):
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 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
(25:49):
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
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 M. Mackenzie 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
(26:31):
learn that 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
(26:52):
and what they 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
(27:37):
continue here with 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 (27:51):
The account from Winslow says that King massis Wit, who
is the leader of the Wampanoag tribe brought with him
about ninety men. 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 female among the
(28:14):
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 had not yet
(28:35):
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 had knives and spoons.
(28:57):
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, but the records
from the Colony of the Property of People when they
(29:19):
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, which really
(29:41):
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 extraordinary circumstance.
(30:04):
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 they're doing at
this gathering in the fall of sixteen twenty one is
(30:26):
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 I'd
like to share with you has to do with when
(30:48):
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,
was in a letter that was written and taken back
(31:08):
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. But a copy of the pamphlet is not
actually discovered in North America until the eighteen twenties, until
two centuries after the First Thanksgiving is discovered by a
(31:32):
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, and 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
(31:56):
that ever occurred in New England. By the eighteen forties,
New England had come to celebrate Thanksgiving every fall. It
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.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
New England holiday.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
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. But I think the 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 the plant. As it turns out, the cares
(37:02):
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.
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 oh bye 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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