important to remember the obvious: The true First Thanksgivings in what became the United States were celebrated not by new arrivals from Europe, but by the indigenous people who had resided in North America for thousands of years. There is no written record of such events, but tribal traditions and ethnological research indicate that Native American tribes practiced thanksgiving rituals at the harvest season as well as at other times of the year. The Green Corn Festival still celebrated by a number of tribes is one example. One Indian authority describes it as a religious ceremony in which the early corn is presented as a sacred offering to the Great Spirit.
Pilgrim Edward Winslow provides an intriguing look at the spiritual beliefs of the Wampanoag and how they gave thanks in his book Good Newes from New England, first published in 1624. On his way home to Plymouth after caring for the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit while he was gravely ill, Winslow stopped overnight at the home of another Indian leader, Conbatant, whom he described as a “notable politician, yet full of merry jests.”
Winslow and Conbatant hit it off. They enjoyed each other’s company and their discussions ranged widely, facilitated by Hobbamock, the Wampanoag who served as the Pilgrims’ chief interpreter. At dinner, Conbatant, observing that Winslow bowed his head and spoke some words before and after the meal, asked what he was doing. He was praying, Winslow explained. A theological conversation ensued. Winslow described his Christian beliefs, which, he told Conbatant, dictated how he and his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth lived their lives. He spoke of the Ten Commandments, of which Conbatant and his men expressed approval—all, that is, except the Seventh, the commandment against adultery, to which they objected on the ground of “too many inconveniences” in a man being tied to one woman.
“Whatsoever good things we had, we received from God,” who nourishes and strengthens our bodies, Winslow told Conbatant. That is the reason for bowing our heads and offering prayers of thanks before and after we eat, he explained. Conbatant and his men nodded their heads in agreement, saying they believed the same things. “The same power that we called God,” Winslow records, “they called Kiehtan.”17
These pre-Plymouth thanksgivings—Spanish, English, Huguenot, Native American—are all historically noteworthy, although none influenced the holiday that Americans celebrate today, except, perhaps, in the sense that they encouraged an attitude of gratitude and reinforced the custom of giving thanks to God. None of the early thanksgivings will supplant our familiar holiday either on the national calendar or in the hearts of Americans. Their significance lies in reminding us of our varied origins, the diversity of religious traditions in our pluralistic history, and the universality of the human wish to give thanks. They, too, are part of the American experience. The common thread among them is a desire to express gratitude to God even in the midst of hardship or misfortune.
Al Borrego of San Elizario could have been speaking for the partisans of all the competing First Thanksgivings when he said, “Our national Thanksgiving is not determined by when it happened. It’s based on what it’s about.”
America Discovers the Pilgrims
They knew they were pilgrims.
—William Bradford
It is impossible today to imagine Thanksgiving without the Pilgrims. The two are linked inextricably in the modern imagination. But this wasn’t always the case. The Pilgrims didn’t take their place at the Thanksgiving table until the nineteenth century.
The holiday we celebrate in late November developed first from the religious days of thanksgiving that were observed in all the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanksgiving was a day for worship, homecoming, and a grand meal. But the Pilgrims? Who were they? The harvest feast they shared with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621, an event universally known and beloved today, was lost to history for two centuries. It wasn’t until long-missing Pilgrim documents were discovered in the nineteenth century that the story of their feast at Plymouth was brought to light.
Those are two roots of our Thanksgiving Day: the religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, and the Pilgrims’ feast with the Wampanoag in 1621. There is also a third root: a now mostly forgotten winter holiday that is celebrated in Plymouth on the anniversary of the day the Pilgrims landed there in 1620. For a glimpse of this holiday, find your way to Plymouth on December 21—but don’t plan to sleep late the next morning. Anyone not awake before first light on December 22 can expect to be catapulted from bed at dawn by three blasts of a cannon. Happy Forefathers Day!
If you haven’t heard of Forefathers Day, you are not alone. Today it is mostly unknown outside Plymouth, where it is still celebrated with gusto by a small group of enthusiasts at two venerable local organizations. One is the Old Colony Club, whose founders created Forefathers Day in 1769. The other is the Pilgrim Society, which was founded in 1819 to memorialize the Pilgrims.
Long before most of their fellow Plymouth residents are awake on Forefathers Day, members of the Old Colony Club begin celebrating the day. They gather before dawn for an early-morning march to the top of Cole’s Hill, where, as the sun comes up, they have an uninterrupted view of Plymouth Harbor and the replica of the Mayflower that lies at anchor there. Standing near a statue of the Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit, club members conduct a ceremony of remembrance, after which they fire off a salute on the club’s cannon. The Pilgrim Society’s celebrations include a festive dinner at which a noteworthy figure delivers an oration on the Pilgrims. These features of the Forefathers Day celebrations—parade, service of remembrance, cannon volley, banquet, oration—have changed very little since they first took shape in the eighteenth century.
In the history of Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day looms large for one important reason: It gave us the Pilgrims—both their designation as “Pilgrims” and a recognition of their importance in American history.
Before the first Forefathers Day was celebrated in 1769, the Pilgrims had fallen into obscurity. Their deeds were receding from memory, overtaken by those of the more successful and better-known Massachusetts Bay Colony, into which Plymouth had been absorbed in 1692. When they were spoken of, the men and women who had arrived on the Mayflower were called “First Comers” or “Old Comers” or “First Planters.” The name “Pilgrims” didn’t come into use until the 1790s, after a preacher employed it in a Forefathers Day sermon, and a poet used it in a Forefathers Day ode. The word itself, however, was first applied to the Plymouth settlers by William Bradford, the longtime governor of the colony. In his description of the settlers’ tearful farewell as they departed Holland, he wrote: “They knew they were pilgrims and . . . lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”1
Like Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day is a homegrown holiday. It was created in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, when Americans were seeking heroes and inspirational stories rooted in their own continent and their own New World experiences. For this, they turned to the original settlers of New England, the men and women who had sailed on the Mayflower.
As the thirteen colonies trod the path to rebellion, war, and independence, Americans began to see themselves in the Pilgrims. Like the eighteenth-century American revolutionaries, the Pilgrims sought freedom from the tyranny of the English Crown. A century and a half after the Mayflower had delivered the Pilgrims to the New World, the heirs of the Pilgrims were prepared to go to war to finish the job their forefathers had begun. They would liberate themselves for good from English oppression.