November 1988

The First Thanksgiving

Our story of the first Thanksgiving comes from a unique, largely forgotten, book by George F. Willison, Saints and Stranges (Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945).

Willison gives us a subtitle:Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families, with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Limbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock.

The Saints of Willison's title were the religious members of the group who arrived on the Mayflower and the Strangers were those with them who were not members of the Separatist Church.

For two hundred years, the only things known about the Pilgrims were the scanty and conflicting stories handed down by word of mouth. Many present day ideas of whom the Pilgrims were have been formed mostly by poets like Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), author of "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England" and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" by Henry W. Longfellow. Their very name, "Pilgrims", did not come into use until 1840. Their descendants called them the "Forefathers."

The reason for this lack of documentation was that the most complete record, the journal of Governor William Bradford was lost.

In 1855 two students and writers on Massachusetts history, John Wingate Thornton and the Reverend John S. Barry, came upon quotes of acounts that could have been written only by Bradford, in a book by the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. He had consulted Bradford's original manuscript in the library of the Lord Bishop of London at Fulham Palace. It probably had been taken from Boston by Tory Gov. Hutchinson during the Revolution.

Bradford's account of the people that had come to be called The Pilgrims revealed them as very different people from what the poets had imagined. Willison tells us all in his fascinating Saints and Strangers:

"But it is something else again that the mythmakers so completely missed the essential character and spirit of the Pilgrims. Their portraits of the latter are little more than self-portraits, all done in the pale and sentimental manner of the nineteenth century at its worst. Under their brushes the Pilgrims appeared as a group of anemic Victorians doing a sort of pious charade in costumes out of grandmother's closet, which is the general impression of them that still persists. Nothing could be more unfortunate, for the popular and almost universal conception of the Pilgrims as a meek, drab, and uncomplaining lot, with eyes ever humbly fixed on the ground at their feet or turned tearfully upward toward the Pearly Gates in misty rapture, is a caricature at which the Pilgrims themselves would have been the first to laugh—and they were not much given to laughter, least of all when at their expense.

"The Pilgrims were not nineteenth century pietists, or quietists. They were not pale plaster saints, hollow and bloodless. They were men—and women, too—of courage and conviction, strong and positive in their attitudes, prepared to sacrifice much for their principles, even their very lives. Far from being Victorians, they were children of another and a greater age, the Elizabethan, and in their lives reflected many of the qualities of that amazing age—its restlessness and impatience with old ways, its passionate enthusiasms, its eager curiosity and daring speculation in all fields, its boldness in action, its abounding and apparently inexhaustible energies.

"Never did the Pilgrims quietly resign themselves to defeat, no matter what the odds against them. They launched themselves upon the most hazardous of ventures not once but many times, and no obstacle or untoward circumstance could stay them or divert them from their course. Far from being humble and soft-spoken, they were quick in their own defense, fond of controversy, and sharp of tongue, engaging in many a high pitched quarrel with friends and foes alike, even among themselves. Given to speaking their minds plainly, they expressed themselves in the language of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in the torrential and often rafter-shaking rhetoric of Elizabethan England, with no slightest regard for the proprieties and polite circumlocutions of a later day. . .

"The Pilgrims were Elizabethan, too, in their acceptance of the simpler joys of life. They practised no macerations of the flesh, no tortures of self-denial. They appreciated the pleasures of the table and of the bottle, liking both 'strong waters' and beer, especially the latter, never complaining more loudly of their hardships than when necessity reduced them to drinking water, which they always regarded with suspicion as a prolific source of human ills. They were not monks or nuns in their intimate relations as their usually numerous families and more than occasional irregularities attest. Fond of the comforts of connubial bed and board, they married early and often and late, sometimes within a few weeks of losing a mate. Only on the Sabbath did they go about in funereal blacks and grays. Ordinarily they wore the russet browns and Lincoln green common among the English lower classes from which they sprang. Unlike their Puritan neighbors at Boston, with whom they are so often confused to their disadvantage, they passed no laws against 'gay apparel.' Many of the Pilgrims had large and varied wardrobes. That of Ruling Elder William Brewster, one of the most exemplary of 'ye Saincts,' contained for wear on occasion—though presumably not on the same occasion—a red cap, a white cap, a quilted cap, a lace cap, a violet coat, and '1 Paire of greene drawers.'

"In still other respects the Pilgrims mirrored their age, which was one of great confusion and contention, not unlike our own, with two irreconcilable philosophies of life engaged in mortal combat. . . in the great revolutionary movement known as the Reformation.

"That movement was not wholly religious in character. It had profound social, economic, and political implications as well, a fact quickly sensed, to their great and growing alarm, by those in power everywhere. . . That conflict centered on the fiercely contested right to freedom of conscience, merely one aspect of the still larger right to freedom of thought and speech. . . They were valiantly engaged, all of them, in a desperate struggle for a better order of things, for a more generous measure of freedom for all men, for a higher and nobler conception of life based upon recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual. . . Yet such was the acceleration of the movement that within the Pilgrims' lifetime their co-religionists in England chopped off a king's head, deposed his 'antichristian' bishops, and set up a revolutionary new state of their own—a Commonwealth, they significantly called it. . . "News of this, when it came at last, was hailed in far-off Plymouth with shouts of triumph. Never was there better cause for celebration, exclaimed Bradford. Not only had he and his brethren had a 'seede time.' Beyond all expectation, they had 'seene ye joyeful harvest.''

From this later time in Bradford's life let us go back to Willison's account of their first Thanksgiving after their first harvest in Massachusetts.

"Indian summer soon came in a blaze of glory, and it was time to bring in the crops. All in all, their first harvest was a disappointment. Their twenty acres of corn, thanks to Squanto, had done well enough. But the Pilgrims failed miserably with more familiar crops. Their six or seven acres of English wheat, barley and peas came to nothing, and Bradford was certainly on safe ground in attributing this either to 'ye badnes of seed, or latenes of ye season, or both, or some other defecte.' Still, it was possible to make a substantial increase in the individual weekly food ration which for months had consisted merely of a peck of meal from the stores brought on the Mayflower . This was now doubled by adding a peck of maize a week, and the company decreed a holiday so that all might, 'after a more special manner, rejoyce together.'

"The Pilgrims had other things to be thankful for. They had made peace with the Indians and walked 'as peaceably and safely in the woods as in the highways in England.' A start had been made in the beaver trade. There had been no sickness for months. Eleven houses now lined the street—seven private dwellings and four buildings for common use. There had been no recurrence of mutiny and dissension. Faced with common dangers, Saints and Strangers had drawn closer together, sinking doctrinal differences for a time. Nothing had disturbed the peace but a duel, the first and last fought in the colony, with Stephen Hopkins' spirited young servants, Edward Dotey and Edward Leister, as principals.

"As the day of the harvest festival approached, four men were sent out to shoot waterfowl, returning with enough to supply the company for a week. Massasoit was invited to attend and shortly arrived—with ninety ravenous braves!

"The strain on the larder was somewhat eased when some of these went out and bagged five deer. Captain Standish staged a military review, there were games of skill and chance, and for three days the Pilgrims and their guests gorged themselves on venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams and other shellfish, succulent eels, white bread, corn bread, leeks and watercress and other 'sallet herbes,' with wild plums and dried berries as dessert—all washed down with wine, made of the wild grape, both white and red, which the Pilgrims praised as 'very sweete & strong.' At this first Thanksgiving feast in New England the company may have enjoyed, though there is no mention of it in the record, some of the long-legged 'Turkies' whose speed of foot in the woods constantly amazed the Pilgrims. And there were cranberries by the bushel in neighboring bogs. It is very doubtful, however, if the Pilgrims had yet contrived a happy use for them. Nor was the table graced with a later and even more felicitous invention—pumpkin pie.

"The celebration was a great success, warmly satisfying to body and soul alike, and the Pilgrims held another the next year, repeating it more or less regularly for generations. In time it became traditional throughout New England to enjoy the harvest feast with Pilgrim trimmings, a tradition carried to other parts of the country as restless Yankees moved westward. But it remained a regional or local holiday until 1863 when President Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving, setting aside the last Thursday in November for the purpose, disregarding the centuries-old Pilgrim custom of holding it somewhat earlier, usually in October as on this first occasion."

(George F. Willison's book is thoroughly documented with 25 pages of notes at the end, lists of the names of all the people who came on the Pilgrim ships, a list of the officers of the Old Colony and the Pilgrim Church, and a selective bibliography of 7 pages.)

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