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The Daily Signal
The Surprising
Story of the First Thanksgiving
Katrina Trinko & Daniel Davis
November 22, 2018
Thanksgiving is a special day in this country, not just because of the
turkey and football and relatives, but also because of the historical
memory that lies at the heart of it. The story of the pilgrims and the
Indians is our national story, which means we’d better get it right. To
do that, we had the honor of speaking with Dr. Tracy McKenzie over the
phone. Dr. McKenzie is professor of American history at Wheaton
College, where he serves as chair of the history department, and he’s
author of the book “The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells
Us About Loving God and Learning from History.” Here’s a lightly edited
transcript of our conversation.
Daniel Davis: Dr. McKenzie, I think all of us have seen and grown up
with those pictures of the Pilgrims eating a nice, big turkey
Thanksgiving meal, sometimes with the Indians at Plymouth. Give us the
straight scoop here—are those pictures accurate?
Tracy McKenzie: Well, I think you know the answer to that, Daniel. The
answer is, not very. Most images of that event really date to two to
two and a half centuries later. So the late 19th century is when most
of those images really began to crystallize.
If I were going to try to very briefly describe for you what I think
the setting would’ve looked like at the time, it would probably sound
to you a lot more like maybe a Fourth of July barbecue or something
like that. It would’ve been outdoors, the Pilgrims had almost no
furniture to speak of in 1621, so we would imagine them sitting on the
ground. They’d be eating with their hands, because they had very few
utensils—it would’ve been uncommon for them to have really anything
more than a knife. And certainly not a fork—those weren’t really in use
much among common people at that time.
So they’re sitting on the ground, they’re eating with their hands, and
they’re consuming copious quantities of a meat of some kind. The
evidence would say, lots of water fowl, which is something the record
does suggest. No specific reference to turkeys with regard to the
celebration. But we know from other sources that in the autumn, the sky
would just grow dark with the geese and ducks and swans and herons and
cranes, all of which could have been on the menu.
Most of the side dishes that we would expect would not have been there.
Sweet potatoes weren’t indigenous to the area. There were lots of
cranberries but no sugar, so if you wanted to have a really tart side
dish, I suppose you could. They wouldn’t have had pumpkin pie. They
almost certainly had stewed pumpkin, but they didn’t have sugar, they
didn’t have flower for crust, and they didn’t have ovens to bake pies
in. So that wouldn’t have been there either.
They also might have had eel—I’ll just add that because they bragged
very much about the fat and juicy eels available in the area. And with
regard to vegetables, their most common vegetables would’ve been
turnips and maybe cabbages and carrots. So I always say for a more
authentic Thanksgiving meal, I’ll sit on the ground and have turnips
and eel.
Katrina Trinko: Well, good luck making that catch on. I think I’m OK
with our revisions. I’d say we’ve improved it a little bit. But I think
you’d also touched upon other myths about what happened. One of them
being, of course, we talk so much about Thanksgiving and religious
freedom and the pilgrims coming here for religious freedom, but I
believe your book indicates that the story’s a little more complicated
than that.
McKenzie: That’s right, Kate. In fact, when I think about things that
we could learn from the Pilgrims, the kinds of questions we could ask
that really could lead to life-changing kinds of conversations with
them, the question of why the Pilgrims came to New England is right at
the top of that list.
Our common, brief explanation of their motive says that they came to
flee religious persecution and to find a place of religious liberty.
And that’s about 50 percent right. They certainly wanted to find a new
home where they would be able to worship God as they believed that the
Scripture required them to. But that’s not the same thing as saying
that they came fleeing religious persecution, or in fact that they
lacked religious freedom where they lived at the time.
We so often forget the part of the Pilgrims’ story that takes them from
England, not to New England directly, but actually to Holland. So from
about 1608 to 1620, they were living in Leiden, which was a city of
about 40,000 people—very large, cosmopolitan, and pluralistic. And the
Pilgrim writers say it was a place where they actually enjoyed
considerable religious liberty, and they actually believed that their
congregation was spiritually flourishing.
So they were not motivated to leave Holland primarily because of
religious persecution—they hoped to find a similar kind of religious
liberty in North America. The motives that they share for leaving can
be put into two broad categories.
>>> Purchase Tracy McKenzie’s book “The First Thanksgiving:
What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History“
One has to do with the attributes of the surrounding culture—the way
that the Pilgrim writers describe it, they characterize it as a very
permissive culture, a culture that is difficult for them as parents
trying to raise their children faithfully. They believe that they’re
“losing” their children—that’s actually the language they used—that
they’re losing their children to the surrounding culture in some ways.
And then they also emphasized the economic context. Most of the
individuals that had left England for Leiden were rural, they were
farmers by trade. But in Leiden, they are in this very industrial kind
of city, they’re working as weavers, as piece workers, pretty much from
dawn to dusk, six days a week, and they’re struggling to survive. And
so they’re hoping to find a new home where life will simply be a little
less arduous.
The reason I think that’s very important is that, when we describe the
Pilgrim story as a story of fleeing persecution, we’ll nod our head
admiringly in a sense, but very few of us, at least in the United
States, can wholly relate to what we think we’re describing. But the
Pilgrims’ concerns, at least the ones they were emphasizing, are
actually much more mundane, and I think much more relatable. They’re
talking about the cares of the world that are weighing them down. And I
think it makes their story immediately, totally pertinent and relevant
to us.
Davis: Well something else that you discuss in your book, which comes
later on after they’ve left Holland and head to America, is the
Mayflower Compact. And of course, a lot of Americans remember the
Mayflower Compact as a seminal document, if not for our government, at
least for our historical memory and sense of identity. Can you flesh
out what the Mayflower Compact was, and how we should remember it?
McKenzie: Great question, Daniel. I can tell you just really quickly
what it was, and then we might debate how we should remember it. But
the Mayflower Compact is the kind of covenant—that’s the term they
would have used—that the free adult males on the Mayflower ultimately
signed off on after they arrived off the coast of Massachusetts and
more or less identified a place to make a permanent home for themselves.
They had been blown off course, which is a pretty familiar part of the
story, they landed significantly farther north than they had
anticipated. And that’s significant because where they actually ended
up was beyond the northern-most boundary of the Virginia Company’s
domain. That was a joint stock corporation that had been chartered by
King James I, and had given the Pilgrim group a kind of permission and
authority to settle within their boundaries.
So arriving off the coast of Cape Cod, they’re really in a sense
outside the boundaries of authority of exiting the English presence
there—and in a certain sense, operating in a kind of state of nature
almost, if you want to think of it that way. And so, in agreeing to a
covenant to basically arrive jointly at a law that they will mutually
pledge to submit to, they are establishing a kind of framework for
self-government.
That, however, I think is a little misleading—at least in the way that
we remember it. Because you’re right that we tend to remember the
Mayflower Compact as one of those founding documents of the American
story. And I think in so doing, we tend to impute values to the
Pilgrims in the 1620s that they would not have held. The Mayflower
Compact actually begins with a kind of pledge of submission to the
king, and if anything, it is at least as much an assertion of the
divine right of the British monarch as it is to some sort of natural
right to self-government.
An 1876 depiction of the Pilgrims’ arrival titled “The landing of the
Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass. Dec. 22nd 1620” by Currier & Ives.
(Photo: akg-images / Joseph Martin/Newscom)
The Pilgrims, what we know from later on in their experience in
Plymouth, they didn’t hold a lot of the political values that we today
often impute to them. They certainly weren’t democratic, they were
absolutely hierarchical in their political values, they tended to
identify certain elites among their midst that they believed were sort
of naturally endowed with qualities that qualified them to lead and
others to follow, and they saw that as a kind of obligation.
So one of the first laws passed in 1627 in Plymouth made it illegal for
someone who is chosen as governor to decline. If you declined, you
would’ve been hit with an enormous fine. They didn’t have adult male
suffrage, or at least not universal adult male suffrage, and they were
very hierarchical. So I think the temptation, I think, will be for us
to imagine the Pilgrims as sort of proto-democrats that envisioned the
future to be pretty much what we now take for granted.
Trinko: So we’ve talked a lot about some of our misunderstandings or
historical revisions of Thanksgiving. Could you talk a bit about how
this modern myth of Thanksgiving got created in the United States and,
even if not historically accurate, what was the sentiment driving it?
McKenzie: Great question, Kate. Historical traditions evolved often in
very sort of haphazard ways, and often there will be a number of
variables that are at play in developing the kinds of historical
memories that we have. One of the things I think is so fascinating
about the evolution of the Thanksgiving holiday is the relationship
between that holiday and memory of the Pilgrims. And it’s a really
tenuous kind of relationship.
The main source that we have about the Plymouth colony was the history
that their longtime Governor William Bradford wrote, which he called,
“Of Plymouth Plantation.”
“Of Plymouth Plantation,” in manuscript form, disappeared for a period
of well over a century. It was probably passed around and then
gradually sort of vanished from view. And it was actually rediscovered
in the middle of the 1800s, so more than two centuries later, in the
library of the Bishop of London. And it was brought back to the United
States with great fanfare in the 1850s.
But by that time, it was already the case that in New England, there
had developed this regular pattern of celebrating fall thanksgivings.
Often there would be days of humiliation and fasting in the spring,
when the planting was finished, asking God’s blessing on the growing
crop, and then they’d have a day of thanksgiving in the fall after the
harvest. And that was very much a regional tradition.
As late as the Civil War, Thanksgiving was primarily celebrated in New
England and in areas settled by New England migrants. Most Southerners,
for example, wanted nothing to do with Thanksgiving. They associated it
with pharisaical, self-righteous Yankees, and they just didn’t observe
it. Conversely, New England tended not to celebrate Christmas.
The Pilgrims very famously didn’t celebrate Christmas. They said,
“There’s not a place in Scripture that authorizes the celebration of
Jesus’ birth. There’s no scripture that tells us when it occurred.” And
they saw it as an invention that the Catholic Church had basically
created. And so you have this really interesting pattern in which the
South celebrates Christmas, and the North celebrates Thanksgiving, and
never the two shall meet.
The first time that you really would say that Thanksgiving becomes a
national holiday is during the American Civil War. And that would not
have been realized at the time—we see it more from hindsight. But
Abraham Lincoln in 1863 issued a proclamation in the fall, making the
fourth Thursday in November of that year a day of national
Thanksgiving. And he primarily means it as a day of thanksgiving for
the way that God was aiding Northern armies in the war against the
South. And that also doesn’t endear Southerners to a Thanksgiving
holiday.
It’s really the late 19th century, it’s really the 1880s, 1890s before
Thanksgiving is broadly celebrated around the United States. And I
joke—but also sort of mean it seriously—that one of the things that
ultimately reconciles Southerners to Thanksgiving is the development of
football.
And by the 1890s, the national championship game for what was the
forerunner of the NCAA was being held annually in New York City on
Thanksgiving Day. And well before 1900, the tradition of having
football games on Thanksgiving Day is sweeping across the country. And
Southerners find out that the holiday isn’t that bad after all.
Davis: That’s such an interesting evolution there, and of course
looking at Thanksgiving, just in the last hundred years, how we’ve had
the introduction of Black Friday and the shopping and all of that
leading up to Christmas.
Trinko: Macy’s parade.
Davis: Macy’s parade, yes. So Dr. McKenzie, this is so interesting. I’m
just curious, what would you say about remembering Thanksgiving? Today,
I think a lot of us would be very surprised to learn that the founding
era was not an era in which Thanksgiving was a public tradition. When
we remember Thanksgiving, almost 400 years ago now at the beginning of
the New World, how should we remember Thanksgiving? How can we rightly
honor the Pilgrims who came here, and how can we celebrate Thanksgiving
in a way that is right?
McKenzie: That’s a good question, and one that even now I’m still
working through myself. But I do have a few thoughts. For all of the
work that I, as a historian, do, in sort of scraping away the kinds of
myths that have developed over the years, I find that the true story is
actually more interesting and more inspiring than the myths that we
have developed over time. I do find a great deal about the Pilgrims’
story really admirable.
When you stop and think about the venture that they were a part of, the
great personal toll that it had inflicted on them, when you think about
that celebration, it was a celebration predominately of widowers and
orphans. There had been 18 wives on the Mayflower, 14 of whom had died
in the first winter. And so most of the married couples now were
separated by death.
Large numbers of the children had lost a parent, there were some
children present who had lost all parents and siblings. It was an
overwhelmingly male, now single gathering, and also a young gathering,
in that about half of the group was teenagers or younger. And so to
have any kind of celebration in that context I think is a real tribute
to a kind of steadfast faith that I totally admire.
The other thing that I always think of, personally, about the Pilgrims
at this time and other times in the year, is just the sense of identity
that they themselves have. It’s a tragic thing in a sense that we have
lost the weight of the term that they used for themselves, or that
William Bradford used in describing them—this concept of pilgrim.
So it means nothing to us except a kind of label for the passengers of
the Mayflower. But when Bradford calls them Pilgrims, he’s actually
writing about their departure from Leiden. And he knew, and they knew,
that many of them would likely die in the undertaking, that the chances
of seeing loved ones that they were saying goodbye to were slim. And
Bradford says that they were deeply moved, that their tears flowed like
water.
But he says that they looked up to the heavens and they comforted their
spirits, because they knew that they were pilgrims—by which he meant,
they recognized that their hope, ultimately, was not in their immediate
prosperity, it was not in any kind of bounty that they might encounter
in a new world. Their hope was ultimately in God’s sovereign love and
care for them, and the promise of eternity.
And that’s just a vision of that idea of pilgrimage that I think we’ve
entirely lost. And so one of the things I try to do, and I challenge
others to do, is just to tell ourselves, to remind us that we are
pilgrims, in that sense, we’re sort of bound together with them, if we
cling to that same sense of identity.
Trinko: So much to think about there. One little bit less serious
question, I believe you also mentioned the contrary to all the picture
books I read as a child and costumes in school plays, the pilgrims did
not wear black with huge white collars.
McKenzie: I am so sorry.
Trinko: What did they actually wear?
McKenzie: Yeah. They didn’t wear black, and they didn’t wear those
incredible high hats, and they didn’t wear enormous buckles on every
sort of appendage. Yeah. Again, that’s another example of how in our
mind’s eye, we have an image of the Pilgrims that pretty much dates to
the late 19th century.
Here we can speak with a little bit of confidence because the Pilgrims,
among many things, were amazing record keepers. And so even as early as
the late 1620s, we began to have surviving records of their wills, and
one of the things that happened when someone would die, of course, is
they would typically make a list of all their property that was to be
divided among heirs. And in the early 17th century, one of the most
valuable kinds of property people had was clothing. And so they would
list their clothing and actually talk about it in some detail. So the
Pilgrims loved bright, bold colors.
And so that’s another thing, I suppose, when we’re imagining them
sitting on the ground eating with their hands, let’s imagine them
wearing orange and red and yellow, not black. They weren’t wearing
buckles because they actually disliked any kind of adornment like that.
The women didn’t wear jewelry of any kind and so forth. So they
wouldn’t have had that, but lots of bright colors. In fact, the will
for William Bradford, the inventory of his estate shows that he had a
red vest and a purple cape, among other things. So these folks would’ve
been pretty striking, I think, in their fashion sense if nothing else.
Davis: That’s remarkable. Well, Dr. McKenzie, it’s a pleasure to have
you on the podcast. The book is called “The First Thanksgiving,”
published by InterVarsity Press. Dr. McKenzie, thank you for calling in.
McKenzie: Daniel and Kate, thank you so much. It’s been my pleasure.
Trinko: All right. And you have a happy Thanksgiving.
McKenzie: Same to you.
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