The origins of Thanksgiving and its meaning in American history is a time for reflections as the holiday approaches.
Most associate Thanksgiving with the Mayflower Compact. It’s easy to make more of the document than was actually true. In November 1620, it was signed by 41 out of 102 Mayflower males in search of religious toleration who pledged to abide by the laws of the majority. These Puritans were really Separatists Pilgrims. The other 61 on board considered them to be religious radicals. The Pilgrims referred to the non-signers as “strangers.” The Compact applied to a religious sect 3,000 miles from their mother country who still pledged loyalty to their king. In other words, the real irony is that the document considered by many to mark the origins of democracy came from a people more aligned with a religious sect than a democratic society.
Their original destination was the Virginia colony. But because of a storm and dangerous shoals around Cape Cod, the captain was forced to land them at Provincetown Harbor situated in the wrist of the cape’s arm. After a harsh winter when many of the settlers died, they moved to Plymouth and gave thanks to the Wampanoag Indians for the harvest and enabling them to survive a harsh winter. It has become customary to call this celebration the first Thanksgiving.
For them, the fall of 1621 and subsequent falls was a time of gathering the harvest of corn, squash, beans, barley and peas and the post-fowling season when hunters had killed enough ducks and geese to feed the settlement. The traditional harvest celebration was a secular event. It dates to the Middle Ages. Native Americans also had similar harvest celebrations dating back hundreds of years. In the Virginia Colony, a collective Thanksgiving prayer was held on December 4, 1619 near the current site of the Berkely Plantation. Subsequently, dubious claims were made to this event as the first Thanksgiving.
The official Thanksgiving began with President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation October 3, 1863. In the words of historian Nathaniel Philbrick, Lincoln was looking for a “cathartic celebration of nationhood,” an event to foment a spirit of unity and national identity in the midst of a bitter Civil War.
After the Civil War, as the memory of the Indian wars of the Wild West dimmed, the nation turned a nostalgic gaze upon America’s Native population. Thanksgiving and its reassuring image of Indian English cooperation became the predominant myth of the Pilgrims. In the popular imagination, the nation’s history began with the Pilgrims and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution.
So now we have a national holiday that never originated among the group with whom it is associated, to commemorate a founding based upon principles of religious freedom that did not exist and sealed by a compact that had nothing to do with democratic origins with which it is linked.
Thanksgiving is more than simply an issue of origins and first celebration. It goes to the heart of how we view ourselves, what we think we are, and draws selectively upon the events of the past to craft a story of how we were created. Like the Thanksgiving turkey, it sometimes gets over-stuffed with strange ingredients.
Crandall Shifflett, professor emeritus of history at Virginia Tech, is the creator and director of the award-winning Virtual Jamestown project. He has been a leader in digital history initiatives, directed K-12 teacher workshops, and collaborated with centers of geographic information systems, archaeologists and specialists in the application of advanced technology in the humanities.