Guest Author - Linda Sue Grimes

Recorded celebrations of a thanksgiving service in early America begin in 1541. The Thanksgiving Day celebration as we know it in 21st century America is based primarily on a series of events that occurred between September 21 and November 11, 1621 at Plymouth. To understand the development of this day of gratitude, it is useful to look at the earlier recorded events.

The Spanish
On May 23, 1541, the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his fellow explorers celebrated a thanksgiving with a Christian service in gratitude to God for providing them food, water, and good grasslands for their livestock in the Texas Panhandle.

The French
The next recorded thanksgiving service was held near what is today Jacksonville, Florida, on June 30, 1564, by French Huguenot colonists whose celebration offered praise to God for their good fortune. Although the Spanish destroyed this settlement in 1565, this "first Thanksgiving" was memorialized by the Fort Carolina Memorial on the St. Johns River.

The British
The next thanksgiving event occurred on August 9, 1607, when Captain George Popham’s English settlers were accompanied by the Abnaki Indians along the Kennebec River in Maine. The English and the Indians celebrated the harvest with a feast and a prayer service. These colonists named that location Fort St. George, but the site did not continue to develop, and only a year later the colonists abandoned this location.

In 1619 English settlers at Berkeley Plantation formed a charter that required that December 4 be a day of thanksgiving to God; the charter reads in part: "Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty god." Captain John Woodleaf officiated at that service. This settlement continued its thanksgiving services for the next two years, but by 1622 this community had vanished.

The Pilgrims
William Bradford, second governor of the Plymouth Settlement, affirms the purpose of the pilgrimage to the new world in these words: "a great hope for advancing the kingdom of Christ."

After arriving at Plymouth Rock on December 11, 1620, the Mayflower Pilgrims experienced a disastrous first winter. The journey across the Atlantic had taken seven weeks and had weakened the determined travelers. During that arduous winter many died of pneumonia. They lacked housing and the strength and ability to build fast enough to accommodate the group. Many remained housed on the Mayflower. By spring their number of 102 persons had dwindled to 56.

The Pilgrims were saved by an Indian, an English-speaking member of the Wampanoag Nation named Squanto. Squanto, who had learned English from earlier English-speaking explorers, taught these Pilgrims how to grow vegetables, how to build houses, how to recognize poisonous plants, how to use fertilizer, and how to tap maple trees. Through this generous native and his tribe, the immigrants learned valuable skills for living in a place that was severe and utterly foreign to them. The Wampanoags shared their food and gave the Pilgrims clothing while they taught them how to acquire their own.

By autumn of the next year, 1621, the Pilgrims harvested a bounty of crops for which they were truly thankful. One of the Pilgrims, Edwin Winslow, wrote a letter back home to England, and that letter gives us clear picture of the events that led to what we now treasure as the first Thanksgiving:
Our corn did prove well, and, God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Historians have suggested that this three-day event probably included September 29, which is the traditional English celebration of Michaelmas, a Christian feast held to honor the archangel, Michael. It is thought that the Pilgrims in gratitude to Squanto and the Wampanoag leader Massasoit for their help invited them to bring their families to help them celebrate their harvest, and the families turned out to include around ninety individuals
The Plimoth Plantation has suggested that the feast is likely to have included lobster, goose, boiled turkey, pudding of Indian corn meal with dried whortleberries, cod, duck, stewed pumpkin, venison brought by the Indians, savory pudding of hominy, fruit and Holland cheese.

The Drought
The settlers were not able to hold on to the gratitude and spirit of friendship and achievement of the year 1621, and the next five years they did not continue their thanksgiving celebrations. Then they experienced a devastating drought that even the Indians could not explain, having never experienced such weather before. The Pilgrims called together by Governor Bradford began to question their motives. They discovered that they had become vain and greedy, and they felt they are being punished with drought for their ungodly ways. Soon after the group acknowledged their vanity, the weather changed and so did their harvest.

By fall their harvest was over-abundant, and they shared their surplus with Chief Massaoit and his tribe again. The Indians had not had such a good harvest, so the Pilgrims, once again, invited them to share a celebration of thanksgiving.

By June 1676 Indian and English relations had deteriorated as King Philip’s War raged. With their victory over the Indians, the government of Charlestown, Massachusetts declared June 29, as a day of thanksgiving.

A New Century of Thanksgiving
With a victory over the British at Saratoga, the thirteen colonies held the first thanksgiving celebration on December 18, 1777, with the following proclamation, offered in part: "It is therefore recommended by Congress, that Thursday the 18th day of December next be set apart for Solemn Thanksgiving and Praise.”

The first National Day of Thanksgiving was proclaimed by President George Washington, who set aside November 26, 1789, to honor the formation of the United States government. However, despite the presidential proclamation, the holiday did not yet become the yearly tradition we recognize today. After President Washington, only Presidents Adams and Madison continued to call for national thanksgiving days. Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams decided that such a proclamation violated the separation of church and state idea that was becoming a debated issue by this time.

The Tradition Finally Begins
Sarah Josepha Hale, as influential editor of Godey's Lady's Book, demonstrated the old adage of the might of the pen as she called for a national holiday for Thanksgiving; in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving an official national holiday.

Twentieth Century Tweaking
While the holiday itself was fixed by the Lincoln proclamation, the actual day was not settled upon until 1942, when the legislature declared the fourth Thursday in November to be the official date for the yearly event. Under President Franklin Roosevelt the day was celebrated on November 23rd which was the next-to-last Thursday, which FDR had declared to be the official date, but various state governments vacillated between the last Thursday and the next-to-last until in 1942 the congress finally fixed the date as the fourth Thursday in November.

Reference:
The True Story of Thanksgiving by Dennis Rupert
Edward Winslow's letter Winslow’s original letter (the quoted version in this essay has been modernized)
President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

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Books by Linda Sue Grimes:
Jiggery-Jee's Eden Valley Stories
Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith
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