Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick
with baby Peregrine asleep inside, while she prepared food for the outdoor feasting? In The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Brownscombe paints Peregrine in his cradle, with Susanna seated nearby.
What of the cooking pot that belonged to Myles Standish and his late wife, Rose, who had died in January? Did the four surviving wives press the Standish cooking pot into service when they set about feeding the Pilgrims and their many Wampanoag guests? Constance Hopkins, then fourteen years old, surely lent a hand as the women worked. I can picture her wearing that wide-brimmed beaver hat with the peaked top. And what of Governor Bradford himself? Did he read aloud from his Bible to the assembled Pilgrims? Did he take a break from the hubbub and seek a quiet corner to read the Scriptures by himself?
Many of the Pilgrim artifacts have sorrowful stories associated with them—the cradle that rocked a fatherless child, the cooking pot that often would have been empty for lack of food to put in it, the sword whose owner was prepared to use it against the “savages” he expected to encounter. In the face of such sadness, deprivation, and terror, how is it that in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims came together with grateful hearts to celebrate their first harvest in the New World and give thanks?
There are two eyewitness accounts of the First Thanksgiving. William Bradford, Plymouth’s longtime governor, penned one.2 Edward Winslow is the author of the other. Both accounts are brief but vivid. Bradford’s weighs in at one hundred sixty-seven words. Winslow’s is only one hundred fifty-one words.3 Read them and you find yourself in familiar territory. As described by the two Pilgrim leaders, the event that Americans have come to call the First Thanksgiving was remarkably similar to the holiday we mark today. There was feasting and game playing, and an all-round mood of good cheer.
In their separate accounts, Bradford and Winslow each make much of the bounty on hand in New England, an abundance that presages the dining tables at modern-day Thanksgiving dinners. Bradford tells of the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” He also notes the “cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store.” Winslow offers an anecdote about the rich natural resources of the American continent that would have wowed his readers back in England. The governor dispatched a shooting party for the occasion, he writes, and the four Pilgrims killed enough birds in one day to serve the community for almost a week.
It is from Winslow that we learn that a large group of Wampanoag warriors joined the Pilgrim feast. In telling how the Pilgrims welcomed the Wampanoag to their celebration, Winslow homes in on other attributes of the holiday, then and now: hospitality, generosity, neighborliness. He describes, too, how the guests returned the favor. The Wampanoags’ “greatest king Massasoit” and his men “went out and killed five deer,” which they “bestowed on our Governor [Bradford], and upon the Captain [Myles Standish] and others.” So, too, a modern guest, upon accepting an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, is likely to ask his host: What can I bring?
The central similarity between the First Thanksgiving and today’s holiday is something less tangible: the spirit of thankfulness. From the first, as Bradford and Winslow imply, Thanksgiving has been a time to stop and take stock of the blessings enjoyed by family and community. As the English settlers overcame the trials they faced that first year in Plymouth, qualities that Americans have come to honor as integral to our national identity were on full display: courage, perseverance, diligence, piety. These are the virtues that helped to shape the American character.
The Pilgrims displayed another virtue, one they practiced every day and which stood at the heart of the First Thanksgiving. Cicero called it the greatest of the virtues and the parent of all the rest: gratitude.
And yet, here is an odd thing—odd, at least, for the modern-day reader of the Pilgrims’ accounts. The word “thanksgiving” does not appear in either description. Neither Bradford nor Winslow referred to the feast as Thanksgiving.
If you could travel back in time to 1621, tap a Pilgrim on the shoulder, and ask him to define “Thanksgiving Day,” his answer might surprise you. For the Pilgrims, a “day of thanksgiving” was not marked by feasting, family, and fellowship—the happy hallmarks of the holiday we now celebrate. It was a different matter altogether.
The Pilgrims brought with them from England a religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, along with their counterpart, days of fasting and humiliation. Days of thanksgiving, usually including a communal meal, were called in response to specific beneficences such as a successful harvest, propitious weather, or a military victory.4 Fast days were called to pray for God’s help and guidance in time of trouble or difficulty. For the Pilgrims, then, a “thanksgiving day” was imbued with religious meaning, and set aside for prayer and worship.
Some contemporary observers like to stress this historical usage, arguing that the event known today as the First Thanksgiving was therefore not a true “thanksgiving day.” These naysayers aren’t just being Thanksgiving Scrooges. They are right that the Pilgrims would not have viewed the harvest feast of 1621 as a thanksgiving in their understanding of the word. But it is also true that the spirit of gratitude was very much present on that occasion. The Pilgrims may not have called it a thanksgiving, but there is no reason we shouldn’t do so.
William DeLoss Love, a nineteenth-century scholar of the religious days of thanksgiving in New England, eloquently expressed this point of view when, in 1895, he wrote about the First Thanksgiving: “It was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts.”5
The day we love, to use Love’s affectionate words, owes a debt to both of these traditions—the harvest feast of 1621 and the New England colonies’ religious days of thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims were world-class practitioners of the virtue of gratitude. They gave thanks in their morning prayers and again in the grace they said before and after every meal, and once more in their evening devotions. As they went about their work, the Pilgrims would sing psalms, hymns of praise and thanksgiving. The congregation sang psalms, too, in their Sunday worship services. The music and text they followed came from the Ainsworth Psalter, a book of psalms published in Holland in 1612 and one of the volumes they brought with them on the Mayflower. In some sense, the Pilgrims viewed every day as a thanksgiving day, certainly including the days of the 1621 feast that has come to be known as the First Thanksgiving.
There is no written record of prayers spoken by the Pilgrims on that occasion, or any other day. This is not surprising. The Pilgrims did not believe in reciting set prayers, which they viewed as forced and inauthentic, and they rejected the Church of England’s magisterial Book of Common Prayer, which contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language. John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor when they resided in England and Holland, warned of “counterfeit” prayers. He wrote: “We may say prayers, and sing prayers and read prayers, and hear prayers, and yet not pray.”6 Set prayers were considered a barrier between the individual and God. Rather, the Pilgrims practiced extemporaneous, individual prayer. Each person was responsible for communicating directly with the Almighty, using the words of his choice.
As we learn from Bradford’s journal, Winslow’s letter, and other documents of the day, the Pilgrims had numerous reasons to give thanks that autumn.
The most important was the chance to practice their religion freely. This was the reason they had uprooted themselves from their refuge in Holland and risked everything to settle in the wilderness of North America.
The Pilgrims were Puritans, or English Protestant reformers who followed the teachings of John Calvin. The name “Puritan” derived from their aim to “purify” the Church of England, which they believed clung too closely to its Roman Catholic roots. While some Puritans were