America was made by people from a different world.
America was made by people from a different world.
T he first Thanksgiving was celebrated after the harvest 400 years ago this autumn, in 1621. The exact date is unknown. The feast was celebrated by the Pilgrims, the breakaway Puritan sect that founded Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts in 1620, and it was joined by the neighboring Native American tribe, the Wampanoags. Our thanks to Providence should be no less heartfelt today. We can give thanks, as well, for how far we have come and for those who came here before us.
The World of the Pilgrims
In understanding the Pilgrims — what they dared and why, and how they interpreted events around them — it is useful to recall the world that tossed them onto our shores. The Americans of the Civil War era seem familiar to us: They lived in a world of railroads, steamboats, photographs, and the instant communications of the electromagnetic telegraph. They read and debated Darwin and Marx and gave us Edison. The Founding Fathers are more distant but still recognizably modern in their thinking and their arguments.
But 1620 is truly another world. The Pilgrims were not medieval, but they were closer in time and outlook to the High Middle Ages than to our own day. The voyage of the Mayflower was closer to the end of the Crusades than it was to the Eisenhower administration. The Black Plague still returned in waves in Europe. More time elapsed between the first Thanksgiving and the birth of George Washington than elapsed between the death of James Madison and the birth of Joe Biden.
In 1620, Shakespeare had been dead for only four years. Still in the future were Galileo’s 1632 confrontation with the Inquisition and Hobbes’s 1652 publication of Leviathan. Rembrandt was 14 years old; Milton was twelve. Descartes was just beginning to write. Newton, Locke, Montesquieu, Swift, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Louis XIV, and Peter the Great had not been born yet, much less Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mozart, or Burke. English-language novels were unknown: Pilgrim’s Progress would not be written for another half a century, Robinson Crusoe, for another century.
In 1620, much of the warfare in the Mediterranean was still powered by slave-rowed galleys. England shared a common king with Scotland, but the two were still separate realms; Britain would not be a united kingdom for another eight decades. Russia was still a distant backwater whose explorers had yet to reach the Pacific coast of Siberia. Prussia was just one of hundreds of obscure German states, ruled by an elector; the father of its first king was born in 1620. The Ming Dynasty still reigned in China. The Taj Mahal had not yet been built.
The world of 1620 was still convulsed with brutal religious warfare. For two and a half centuries between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire was a constant threat to the Christian powers of Europe. The Ottoman army took 80,000 captives back to slavery in the Vienna campaign alone. Slave-raiding corsairs plied the waves as far north as Ireland and as far west as Brazil in the early 1600s, dragging thousands of Britons and other Europeans to North African slavery. Our history would look quite different if one of them had captured the Mayflower. Captain John Smith of Jamestown himself had been a slave in Turkey after being captured in battle in service of the Austrian emperor.
Christians had also been at war with each other over religion since the Protestant Reformation a century earlier. The Catholic Spanish Armada’s ill-starred effort to attack Protestant England was as much within living memory in 1620 as the fall of the Berlin Wall is today. The Thirty Years’ War, which began in 1618, was arguably the deadliest of all of Europe’s many terrible wars relative to the population. Parts of Germany saw their populations cut in half.
Religious strife would later underlie the battles between Parliament and the crown, between England, Scotland, and Ireland, and between England, France, and Holland that led to the English Civil War of the 1640s, the beheading of King Charles I in 1649, the rise of Oliver Cromwell, and later the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. Indeed, more Pilgrims and other Puritans left Massachusetts for England in the 1640s than the other way around, most of them returning to side with Cromwell against the royalists. Thomas Rainborowe’s Parliamentary Army included Massachusetts militiamen who crossed the ocean to fight against the monarchists in 1644.
The Pilgrims’ Voyage
The Pilgrims set sail from Plymouth, England, on the cramped Mayflower in September 1620. The ship survived a ten-week ocean crossing but was unseaworthy by the time it returned to England and was dismantled by 1624. If you are ever in Plymouth, Mass., you should take a tour of the Mayflower II, a full-size replica built in the 1950s as a gift from Britain and recently refurbished. It will make you think hard about the courage required for 102 passengers and 30 crewmen to cross the North Atlantic in a wooden sailing vessel a little over 100 feet long and 25 feet wide that rode the top of colossal ocean swells and was buffeted by waves as high as the masts.
The Pilgrims made landfall in November 1620, halfway between modern Boston and Cape Cod. They had intended to land in Virginia, which was warm, already had its own colonial government, and was already colonized by English settlers from whom they could buy or trade for food and other provisions. Instead, they found themselves in a place unsettled and unclaimed by Europeans, at the onset of a brutal Massachusetts winter. The early 17th century was the worst of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that lasted from about 1300 to 1850. The winter of 1620–21 was a cruel one.
The first problem the Pilgrims faced, even before going ashore: They were on their own, without civil authority. On November 21, 1620, the 41 adult male Pilgrims drew up and signed an agreement, now known as the Mayflower Compact, pledging to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, . . . [and] enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.” While they acknowledged the king of England as their sovereign, the reach of his laws across the water would be very limited for the foreseeable future. They would govern themselves.
In 1619, Virginia formed the first democratic assembly in the Western Hemisphere. The Mayflower Compact, coming a year later, gave us the first written constitution. As Calvin Coolidge observed on its 300th anniversary: “They drew up a form of government which has been designated as the first real constitution of modern times.” Democratic and constitutional: two of the four pillars of the exceptional American system, already taking form.
The Pilgrims brought with them the germ of a third element: liberalism, the protection of individual liberties. What they sought specifically was religious freedom. The Mayflower Compact began by reciting that the Pilgrims had “undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia.”
The Pilgrims were not, in any recognizable modern way, a liberal community. They fled from the Anglicanism of King James I (who published the famous standard Bible in 1611) not because they wished to found a religiously diverse community, but because they wished to found their own cohesive religious community, where their own version of Puritanism would reign. Indeed, Plymouth Plantation would be effectively a theocracy for many years after 1620. But by setting sail seeking the freedom to practice their own faith, the Pilgrims were placing religious liberty, in dissent from the faith of the crown, at the center of the American story. It was the first of all our freedoms.
Providence Provides
You can’t eat constitutions or liberty. With insufficient food and inadequate winter clothing, and unable to build permanent shelters away from the ship on frozen ground, nearly half of the Pilgrims did not live to see the spring of 1621, let alone the first Thanksgiving or the flourishing of the new colony. Forty-five of the 102 passengers perished. With the aid and instruction of the Wampanoags, the local Native American tribe, the Pilgrims were able to plant corn and other crops in the spring, establishing the basis for their survival.
Contrary to myth, the Wampanoags were not unfamiliar with the white man, and neither were they naïvely charitable in aiding the newcomers. This was over a century after Columbus and Cortés; Europeans had been up and down the Atlantic coast, even if they had established few permanent settlements in North America. John Smith had explored the region in 1614 and named it “New England.” Tisquantum, known to the settlers as Squanto, spoke English because he had been captured five years earlier by an English ship that sold him into slavery in Spain.
Between 1616 and 1619, the local tribes lost at least two-thirds of their own people — as high as 80 to 90 percent for some tribes — to a colossal pandemic of European diseases for which they had no immunity. Just as in 2020–21, people found a rampaging disease baffling and disruptive of their way of life, and they were relieved to see it subside. The Pilgrims’ relations with the tribes were uneasy from the beginning, but the pandemic had left the Wampanoags in straits nearly as desperate as their own. Not for the last time, a Native American tribe saw strategic alliance with the Europeans and their superior weapons as the lesser evil compared with some of their old tribal enemies.
When they discovered that the Pilgrims were having a harvest feast to give thanks for their survival, the Wampanoags — who had not been invited — joined in and brought their own offerings of food. The tableaux was not exactly what we picture today: The Pilgrims did not wear buckled hats, the Wampanoags did not wear the feathered headdresses favored by tribes of the Great Plains, and turkey was not on the menu. But there was peace, and feasting, and the giving of thanks for how all assembled had survived their trials.
Likely unmentioned at the feast, but reflected in their writings, the Pilgrims also believed that the Lord had provided for them by the wave of disease that cleared the land of its inhabitants, much as the God of the Old Testament had intervened time and again to sweep away everyone who stood on the path of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery to the Promised Land.
From those humble beginnings, the English colonies in North America would grow swiftly in prosperity, and the New England colonies that began with the Pilgrims led the way. New Englanders had arguably the highest birth rate in the world in the 17th century, quadrupling their population between 1650 and 1700. By the time of the American Revolution, New England had a per capita income comparable to that of Britain and likely a higher median income than anywhere else on earth, with bigger families, more land, and better education than the typical family in England. Even in colonial times, with the blessings of liberty came the blessings of prosperity.
The voyage of the Mayflower was an act of courage and a pious leap of faith. Its landing in Massachusetts rather than Virginia was an accident of weather and navigation. When we give thanks today, we remember both the hand of man and the hand of Providence.