of popularity during the nineteenth century, when it was marked by public dinners, orations by distinguished public figures, grand balls, and myriad after-dinner toasts to the Pilgrims, Chief Massasoit, George Washington, the republic, and other patriotic subjects.
An English visitor to Plymouth on Forefathers Day 1824 described the celebrations in an anonymous article in a British journal. The festivities began with a “salute of artillery and a peal from the bells,” he wrote. In the church, “a brilliant and venerable assemblage” listened to an anniversary address on “the virtues, disinterestedness and sacrifices of the Pilgrim Fathers.” More than five hundred people partook of a dinner at Pilgrim Hall, where dozens of toasts were offered in honor of the Pilgrims and “the devout thanksgivings of two hundred years ago,” as well as to the memory of George Washington, to the “spirit of our popular elections,” and to that portion of the human race “guilty of a skin not colored like our own.” In the evening there was a “splendid” ball and a supper.9
Another English visitor, writing about Forefathers Day 1838, was struck by American egalitarianism, which was evident at the celebrations. “There was a great mixture . . . of classes,” he observed. “Every person that can save up the requisite sum of three dollars, and who feels no scruples of a religious nature as to joining in such entertainments, makes a point of attending the annual ball.” Nowhere was the egalitarian spirit of the Forefathers Day ball more evident than in the dress of partygoers. Only a dozen or so of the men were attired in “what would be considered a proper ball-dress at home,” the Englishman wrote. As for the ladies, the visitor was too bewitched to pay much attention to what they were wearing. The women of Plymouth were “specimens of feminine beauty hardly to be surpassed, I think, in any country in the globe.”10
In contrast to Thanksgiving, which is a family-centered, homey holiday, Forefathers Day was more masculine, being celebrated in the public sphere in which men circulated. Ambitious politicians made their way to Plymouth to deliver Forefathers Day orations, hoping to catch the public eye. One scholar analogizes the Forefathers Day oration of the nineteenth century to the modern-day, first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary in that it provided an opportunity for the speakers to attract national attention.11
John Quincy Adams, who would become the nation’s sixth president in 1825, delivered the Forefathers Day oration in 1802, when he was thirty-five years old. He celebrated the Pilgrims as early democrats and praised the Mayflower Compact—the civil contract by which they consented to be governed—as having laid the ground for the Constitution and America’s republican form of government.
The best-known Forefathers Day address was given by Daniel Webster, who delivered a stirring oration at the bicentennial in 1820. Two hundred years ago on this day, “the first scene of our history was laid,” he told the crowd.12 He went on to catalogue the Pilgrims’ virtues, which included laying the ground for “more perfect civil liberty” and “a higher degree of religious freedom” than the world had previously known.13 He lauded their respect for private property and the rule of law. He also used the opportunity to denounce the slave trade in powerful images:
I hear the sound of the hammer. I see the smoke of the furnace where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, foul and dark as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.14
Senator William Seward of New York, a leader of the new Republican Party, made the trek to Plymouth in 1855. His Forefathers Day address praised the Pilgrims as advocates of political equality, freedom of conscience, and “the spirit of freedom, which is the soul of the republic itself.” In 1920, the year of the tercentennial, Vice President– elect Calvin Coolidge said of the Pilgrims: “No like body ever cast so great an influence on human history.”
The most enthusiastic Forefathers Day celebrations were held in Plymouth and Boston. But as was the case with Thanksgiving, the holiday traveled westward as New Englanders carried it with them across the expanding country. New England Societies in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Charleston, Buffalo, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities also marked the day. Several still do.
Forefathers Day elevated the Pilgrims to the national consciousness and helped to secure their place in American history and, eventually, their association with Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims and their story were widely known by the time the nineteenth century began—and Webster’s high-publicity bicentennial speech gave them a further boost.
It took a while longer, however, for this historical thread to be woven into the Thanksgiving story. For that we must look to the discovery of an obscure footnote in a scholarly volume that was published in 1841. James W. Baker calls it the “missing link” between the First Thanksgiving of 1621 and the Thanksgiving holiday that Americans celebrate today. Baker’s historical detective work uncovered a believeit-or-not fact about the First Thanksgiving: Before the 1840s, no published document about the Pilgrims made reference to a thanksgiving or a harvest festival in 1621.15
The missing-link footnote appeared in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, a collection of original documents from the early years of Plymouth Colony. Among the entries was a copy of Edward Winslow’s 1621 letter in which he described the harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Winslow’s letter had originally been published in London in 1622, in a booklet titled Mourt’s Relation. But the booklet soon disappeared from circulation, and while its contents had been summarized in subsequent publications, the passage on the First Thanksgiving was not mentioned. In 1820, a copy of Mourt’s Relation was discovered in Philadelphia, and in 1841, Alexander Young included Winslow’s letter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was the first time since its original publication in 1622 that the complete text of the letter—with the description of the 1621 feast—was published. Young added a footnote, which read: “This was the First Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England. On this occasion they no doubt feasted on the wild turkey as well as venison.”16
The only other eyewitness account of the First Thanksgiving, found in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, made a similar journey before being rediscovered in 1855. After Bradford’s death in 1657, the manuscript passed to his family, among them his nephew Nathaniel Morton, who used it as the basis for his influential history of Plymouth. Morton also copied portions into town records. Early in the eighteenth century, the manuscript found its way to Thomas Prince, who referred to it in his 1738 history of New England. Neither Morton nor Prince, however, mentioned Bradford’s account of the First Thanksgiving. After Prince’s death, the manuscript was kept in a library in the steeple of the Old South Meeting House in Boston, where it disappeared during the Revolutionary War when British troops occupied the church. The trail then went cold for nearly a century until, in the 1850s, it turned up in the library of the bishop of London—presumably having been carried to England by British soldiers who had looted the Meeting House during the war. When the complete text of Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation was finally published in 1855, it included the passage describing what came to be considered the original Thanksgiving celebration. It was the first time that passage appeared in print.17
Baker says that Alexander Young’s 1841 identification of the 1621 event as the “First Thanksgiving” was slow to gain traction with the public. The Thanksgiving holiday was already well established, Baker notes, and had “developed a substantial historical tradition quite independent of the Pilgrims.”18
Still, by the 1860s, popular culture had enthusiastically adopted the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving story, which was being retold in painting and song and literature. The artistic renderings sometimes contained more fiction than fact, but the basic story came through loud and strong, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the Pilgrims’ place in Thanksgiving was here to stay. The poets and the painters and the novelists may not have gotten all of the details right, but the essence of the story of the First Thanksgiving was right on target.