and established their own tiny congregation in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, thus coming to be called Separatists. When the Crown tried to have them arrested and jailed for refusing to take part in Church of England rituals, the congregation fled in 1608 to Holland, which permitted the free practice of religion. The Separatists spent more than a decade in the Dutch city of Leiden. They were allowed to worship freely, but they struggled to make a living and they worried that their children were growing up more Dutch than English. So they pulled up stakes again and crossed the ocean to the New World.
At the time of the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims had a second reason to rejoice: their survival. They gave thanks for having made it through the previous winter, when cold, famine, and disease killed half of their original number. The fifty-three surviving Pilgrims included twenty-two men, four women, five teenage girls, nine teenage boys, and thirteen small children and infants.7
Peace with their Wampanoag neighbors was a third reason for the Pilgrims to give thanks. Their friendship with the Wampanoag people was a welcome and unexpected development. They had negotiated a peace treaty with Massasoit, the sachem, or chief, of the tribal confederation of Indians who inhabited coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island. When Massasoit and his men showed up at the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims welcomed them and entertained them for three days.
In sheer numbers, Massasoit and his men overwhelmed the Pilgrims at the celebration. In his letter to his unnamed friend in London, Winslow is specific about the number of Indians who joined them for their feast. Massasoit brought with him ninety men, he writes. That number—nearly double the size of the Pilgrim band—speaks volumes about the peaceful ties between the two peoples. If they had been so minded, the Wampanoag warriors might have overpowered the English easily enough. The Pilgrims had the advantage of possessing guns, but they had not had time to build a fort or other defenses, and the number of fighting-age men was a mere twenty-two. The settlers had taken pains earlier that year, during the time of the great sickness, to ensure that their Indian neighbors did not find out how low their numbers had dwindled, burying their dead at night. Now they were taking the risk of exposing their entire community in full view of Massasoit and his men.
The Pilgrims were on their guard—Winslow records that they “exercised their arms,” presumably in a display of power as well as for entertainment. But they sat down together with the Wampanoag as friends, and the friendship would endure for fifty years.
The Pilgrim leaders recognized the debt they owed the Wampanoag tribal confederation—which was a fourth reason to give thanks. Without the practical assistance of the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims’ first harvest in the New World almost certainly would have failed. Tisquantum, the Patuxet Indian whom the English dubbed Squanto, was indispensable. He taught them how to plant corn using fish as fertilizer, and he directed them to the best hunting grounds and fishing spots. Bradford praised Squanto as “a special instrument sent of God.”8
It was two years later, in 1623, that the Pilgrims held their first official “day of thanksgiving” as they understood the concept. The occasion was a rainfall that saved their harvest and their lives. If the harvest had failed, famine was sure to follow and the settlement of Plymouth might not have survived.
A drought began in the third week of May, just after planting—the worst possible timing. The Pilgrims’ winter food stores were depleted and their diet depended heavily on their luck at fishing. “God fed them out of the sea for the most part,” Bradford writes. A lobster, some fish, a drink of spring water—that was a typical meal. In the middle of July, as the corn began to shrivel and the ground was “parched like withered hay,” Bradford ordered a day of fasting “to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer.”
The day of the fast dawned hot, with clear, cloudless skies. There was no sign of rain. Then, toward evening, clouds formed, the sky grew overcast, and it began to rain. The rain fell “with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God,” Bradford records. The rain then started to fall heavily, in such abundance “that the earth was thoroughly wet and soaked.” The corn and other crops revived. It was “wonderful to see,” and the Indians were “astonished.” Bradford promptly called a day of thanksgiving.9
All the New England colonies followed the custom of designating days of public thanksgiving in response to specific events. The first of these designated days in the Massachusetts Bay Colony occurred in July 1630 after the colonists’ safe arrival. The second took place in February 1631, when a ship from England that had been believed to be lost at sea arrived in Boston Harbor bringing badly needed supplies for the hungry colonists.
The early Dutch settlers in what is today New York City also marked days of thanksgiving. One of the earliest recorded in New Netherland occurred in 1644, after Dutch troops launched a moonlight raid on an Indian village near Stamford, Connecticut. The bloody Dutch-Indian skirmishes continued over the next year, until the warring sides finally concluded a peace treaty. That prompted another call for a day of thanksgiving, on the sixth of September 1645. This proclamation specified that church services be held in the morning so that “God Almighty may be specially thanked, praised, and blessed.”10
Dutch days of thanksgiving were less solemn than New England ones. In New Amsterdam, a more mercantile environment than agricultural New England, work and amusements usually were forbidden only during the hours of the church services, not all day long. When afternoon or evening arrived, the Dutch were free to feast, play games, and enjoy military displays.11
In 1654, the Dutch issued a proclamation for a day of thanksgiving to celebrate a peace treaty between England and the Netherlands. The proclamation ordered citizens to attend worship services in the morning and then went on to tell them to enjoy themselves in the evening: “After the public worship shall be performed,” citizens were called upon “to indulge in all moderate festivities and rejoicings as the event recommends and their situation shall permit.”12
At some point in the 1600s, the New England colonies began to designate annual thanksgiving days, usually in the autumn, around the time of the harvest. These celebrations were deemed “general” thanksgivings—not for a specific event or blessing, but for continuing blessings. They were usually called by civil rather than religious authorities. These were steps toward the holiday we know today.
Connecticut was the first to make Thanksgiving an annual event. In 1639, the colony proclaimed the first in a series of thanksgivings for ordinary blessings. According to the Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, on August 26, 1639, the General Court of Connecticut “concluded that there be a public day of thanksgiving in these plantations upon the 18th of next month.”13
The custom of a thanksgiving for general blessings did not catch on in Massachusetts until later in the seventeenth century, and then only after a spirited theological debate. The losing side argued that an annual thanksgiving for general reasons would make people take God’s generosity for granted. In the words of one opponent, an annual thanksgiving would “tend to harden the people in their carnal confidence.”14
Under New England law, days of thanksgiving were treated like the Sabbath—as days of rest. Work and entertainments were banned. Violators faced fines and other punishments.
In 1696, an unlucky man by the name of William Veazie, a church warden in Houghs Neck, Massachusetts—now part of the city of Quincy, near Boston—was charged with failing to properly observe a day of public thanksgiving. According to court records, on the morning of that day, Veazie was seen at his farm plowing a field of corn “with an Indian Boy and Two Horses.” He pleaded guilty and was fined ten pounds.
That wasn’t all. The court further sentenced Veazie to “be set in the pillory in the market place in Boston tomorrow about noon, there to stand by the Space of An Hour.” Pillorying an offender in the heart of the city at