OCTOBER 1621
ON OCTOBER 3, 1863, three months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Lincoln declared that the United States would celebrate an official Thanksgiving on November 26. Federal Thanksgiving celebrations were not a regular custom at the time. George Washington had held one in 1789, but after 1815 no president declared one until Lincoln. There was, however, a memory of an older tradition. Early modern Englishmen regularly celebrated municipal or royal thanksgivings.1 The Pilgrims at Plymouth were known to have celebrated a three-day thanksgiving feast with the Wampanoag Indians sometime in the fall of 1620, between late September and early November.
Our knowledge of this depends on one source, a pamphlet known as Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (1622). It was written by Edward Winslow and William Bradford between November 1620 and November 1621. “Mourt” referred to the London publisher George Morton. This is the description of the event in its entirety:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more 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 amongst 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 on 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.2
Bradford’s much more detailed account of the early days of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation, makes no mention of the event, though he describes the “small harvest” and colonists’ satisfaction when they faced the winter “plentifully provisioned.” Bradford’s account, however, supplies something more important than a feast: he describes a community that is at peace and thriving inwardly. “For while some had thus been employed in affairs away from home” – exploring the area with Squanto and trading with the Indians – “others were occupied in fishing for cod, bass, and other fish, of which they caught a good quantity, every family having their portion.” Wild fowl were caught in abundance, and families had so much food that “many wrote at length about their plenty to their friends in England, – not feigned but true reports.”3
Mourt’s Relation lays it on thicker:
For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels and othus [clams or cockles] at our doors: oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will; all the spring-time the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs: here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson: abundance of roses, white, red, and damask; single, but very sweet indeed. The country wanteth only industrious men to employ, for it would grieve your hearts (if as I) you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited, and withal, to consider those parts of the world wherein you live to be even greatly burdened with abundance of people. These things I thought good to let you understand, being the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of, and that you might on our behalf give God thanks who hath dealt so favorably with us.4
Mourt’s Relation is plainly attempting to entice new colonists to this precarious settlement. “Industrious men” are needed to enjoy all those eels and sweet plums. But there lies behind the inducement a genuine spirit of delight. These are not the words of someone concocting a false story, but those of someone reveling in a dream very near to experience. “Not feigned,” but a true report in the sense of being spoken from the heart.
The last sentence, referring to “the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of,” deserves special attention. The word “experimentally” stands where we would say “experiential,” and it has a deep meaning in the Reformed theology of the Pilgrims. It refers to divinely implanted, salvific knowledge. The author of the letter, presumably Edward Winslow, could not make a more solemn affirmation of his fidelity to the truth.
More is to come. In early November, the Indians reported to the colonists that they had spotted a ship off of Cape Cod and thought it might be French. The Plymouth colonists, fearing that a foreign ship could be hostile, prepared by taking up arms, “whereupon every man, yea boy that could handle a gun, were ready, with full resolution that if she were an enemy, we would stand in our just defense.” The ship, however, turned out to be an English vessel, the Fortune, which brought thirty-five new settlers “to remain and live in the plantation.” Mourt’s Relation celebrates the ship’s arrival as an opportunity to prove to the world “we have not been idle, considering the smallness of our number all this summer.” They load up the Fortune for its return trip with animal pelts – “two hogsheads of beaver and otter skins” – that they hope will persuade London merchants “to furnish us with things needful for further employment, which will also encourage us to put forth ourselves to the uttermost.”5
The little colony, in other words, has begun to think of itself as a fledgling commercial success, and a strong “we” has emerged during that first year of privation and struggle.
Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation adds some vital detail. The men aboard the Fortune had been disheartened by what they saw on Cape Cod. They feared starvation and attack by the Indians, and even after they landed at Plymouth, some of them “began to plot to seize the sails, lest the ship should go, and leave them there.” Bradford describes most of the thirty-five newcomers as “healthy young men, many of them wild enough, who had little considered what they were undertaking.”6 These were not signers of the Mayflower Compact, but immigrants to a social order springing from that compact.
It is a test of such a social order whether it can accommodate and absorb a substantial contingent of outsiders. The captain of the Fortune did his part to calm their fears. He offered to take to Virginia any who wanted to leave Plymouth. This seemed to settle the restless immigrants: “So they were all landed.” They arrived with no food, few clothes, and very little equipment. So, with the onset of winter, Plymouth had to absorb not just newcomers but newcomers who could not fend for themselves. Extraordinarily, “The plantation was glad of this addition of strength,” even though it “wished many of them had been of better class.”7
The Fortune carried with it a letter from Thomas Weston in London, who had helped outfit the Mayflower expedition. Weston was angry that colonists had not yet returned a financial profit for his venture, had kept the Mayflower at Plymouth over the previous winter, and then sent her home empty. Bradford wrote back, accepting some blame but disputing other points that Weston had presumably picked up from the ship’s crew:
Those who told you we spent so much time in discoursing and consulting, etc., their hearts can tell their tongues they lie. They care not, so that they salve their own sores, how they wound others. Indeed it is our calamity that we are, beyond expectation, yoked with some ill-disposed people, who, while they do no good themselves, corrupt and abuse others.8
This is an important clue that the “Strangers,” that is, the secular Englishmen who were not part of the company of religious pilgrims, continued to trouble the little community.
Ample evidence attests to Plymouth’s falling short of any utopian ideal. Like any human community, it had fractures, lawbreakers, and abundant challenges. Yet within a year of its founding and a disastrous first winter, it had emerged as a place with a highly functional division of labor that produced crops, fish, fowl, and trade goods. It had sufficient esprit de corps to send armed expeditions against hostile Indians and muster the inhabitants to defend against the chance of a French attack. It had the leadership and wisdom to negotiate a strong treaty with the Wampanoag, which would last a quarter century. It had the flexibility to absorb a substantial number of unruly young men who had no prior commitment to the community’s values. It had sufficient surplus to entertain ninety Indian guests for a three-day feast. The Indians significantly outnumbered the colonists – there were only fifty left – at that first Thanksgiving, which is itself evidence of the little community’s self-confidence.
Plymouth also had the confidence to rebuff an angry creditor. Above all, it had a sense of common identity, a “we” that spoke for “us.”
That sense of “we” could have been merely tribal. The circumstances favored such parochialism. But Plymouth was not just that. It had the horizon that it was an English colony and it leaned on that status for English support; it saw itself as part of a New World; and it had its aspiration to be something greater. John Winthrop’s famous sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he pronounced that the new community would be “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” lay almost ten years in the future (March 31, 1630), but Bradford’s writing adumbrates the idea.
A key ingredient in this emerging identity was the colony’s gratitude. The relative material abundance it had gathered by October 1621 was not something it took for granted. The colonists knew full well that it could have been otherwise. They might have attributed their survival to mere good fortune, and indeed the Fortune did opportunely arrive. But mostly, they thanked God for his providence, and they did indeed hold a Thanksgiving celebration.
The opposites of gratitude are envy and resentment. The 1619 Project presents such feelings as righteous, justified, and to be savored as though they were delicious. Valorizing a sense of perpetual victimization can serve, like gratitude, as a social charter of sorts, but it is a charter for endless conflict and bottomless demands for reparations. In her original 1619 essay, Hannah-Jones doesn’t mention reparations for slavery, but soon after, she avowed that seeking reparations was her true purpose. She says at the end of a long interview on the Karen Hunter Show, in December 2019, that when she was asked by her Times editor what her ultimate goal was, she replied, “My ultimate goal is that there will be a reparations bill passed.” In fact she spends considerable time in that interview talking about other occasions on which she has advocated for reparations, and explaining what she means by reparations. Such reparations, she says, are not just for slavery but for the one hundred years after slavery, and they will have to consist of cash payments to every black American who has a slave ancestor. Their purpose will not be to erase racism, bring about racial harmony, or fully pay what whites owe blacks; they will simply be a form of “restitution” for what has been wrongfully taken away from blacks.9 Hannah-Jones rehearsed this theme many times and many places, as in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: “If you read the whole project, I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations. You can’t read it and not understand that something is owed.”10 When she says that’s her goal for the 1619 Project, she unflinchingly sticks to the logic of the emotions she has tried to put in play.
Her arguments on this culminated in another New York Times Magazine cover story in June 2020, “What Is Owed.” To those who had followed her statements since the 1619 Project was published, the essay was unsurprising and broke no new ground. It is just a fuller declaration that blacks have been ill-treated and, in that light, should be paid a lot of money. She freely admits that such payments will do nothing to improve race relations and won’t expunge any moral debt. They are simply “what is owed.”11
There is no gratitude to be found in the 1619 Project, only bitterness and anger. It is a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics. Communities can be built in ways more gracious and yet still practical. That’s the real lesson of the Mayflower Compact.