The usual dissenters come out of the woodwork every October to disparage Columbus and November to attack Thanksgiving. Here’s one from last year:
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is being called “a racist piece of trash” and a “white supremacist” after defending the legacy of the Mayflower Compact and criticizing an article in the New York Times that called the story of the Pilgrims a “myth” and re-examined the “cruel history” of Thanksgiving.
The latest example is that thanksgiving that was practiced in the early years of America’s founding was all about “racist genocide.” There was no such intent or action in the Plymouth colony. Smallpox indeed decimated many native peoples since there was no acquired immunity. There was no known cure. Europe had suffered many years from outbreaks of smallpox. It was inevitable that Europeans and others would make their way to the New World, and they would have brought smallpox and other communicable diseases with them. Smallpox had killed millions from every stratum of society. Between 1702 and 1703, nearly a quarter of the population of Quebec city in Canada died during a smallpox epidemic:
Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. Earlier deaths included six monarchs. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred a year….
U.S. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln all contracted and recovered from the disease. Washington became infected with smallpox on a visit to Barbados in 1751. Jackson developed the illness after being taken prisoner by the British during the American Revolution, and though he recovered, his brother Robert did not. Lincoln contracted the disease during his presidency, possibly from his son Tad, and was quarantined shortly after giving the Gettysburg address in 1863. Famous theologian Jonathan Edwards died of smallpox in 1758 following an inoculation.
Global eradication of smallpox did not happen until 1979.
America's Christian History: The Untold Story
Christianity is written on every page of America's amazing history. Gary DeMar presents well-documented facts which will change your perspective about what it means to be a Christian in America; the truth about America's Christian past as it relates to supreme court justices, and presidents; the Christian character of colonial charters, state constitutions, and the US Constitution; the Christian foundation of colleges, the Christian character of Washington, D.C.; the origin of Thanksgiving and so much more.
Buy NowBack to the racism question. The Plymouth colony served as a sanctuary for blacks. There’s speculation that “[s]ome blacks may have come from Virginia or from English colonies in the Caribbean.”
From 1623 to 1640, Colonists of black ancestry arrived in Plymouth Colony…. Although they did not have full equal rights with the English Pilgrims, they were accepted as members of the Plymouth community.
Black Pilgrims served in the Plymouth militia by the 1640s. The white English Pilgrims trusted the black Pilgrims enough to arm them with guns and weapons. These Pilgrims of black heritage would have been given military training including best usage of their weapons and marching in formation. The integrated Plymouth Pilgrim Militia included English, African-Americans and Native Americans.
The Pilgrims in 17th-century Plymouth accepted the concept that blacks had God-given rights. One of these was their right to attend the Pilgrim Congregational Church. People of black heritage had the right to learn the Pilgrim [Geneva] Bible. Pilgrims taught their children to read in order to understand the teachings in the Bible. This was an accepted method of education for all colonists. All Pilgrims of black heritage would have been included — even freemen, blacks who were indentured servants and those who were slaves. (Cape Cod Times)
Of course, I do not want to dismiss the truth that in early America the slave trade flourished and became one of our nation’s most grievous sins. In addition, Native peoples were treated ruthlessly, but this can’t be blamed on the first thanksgiving.
As Mary Grabar, author of “Debunking Howard Zinn,” wrote for The Federalist in 2019, [Howard] Zinn deconstructs the Pilgrims’ “first” Thanksgiving to advance his Marxist ideas of oppressors versus oppressed.
In these simplistic narratives, the Pilgrims are portrayed as wicked oppressors and the native people as angelic, oppressed victims. This is the narrative now being peddled in elementary schools around the country.
In her critique of Zinn-inspired literature used in Portland, Oregon, public schools, Grabar wrote: “It makes a cartoonish presentation of myriad people groups from the Bahamas and South America to New Mexico and New England. They are falsely oversimplified as universally peace-loving, Mother Earth-respecting, generous, and welcoming. All Indian tribes are lumped together as a mass of childlike people oppressed by the greedy capitalist explorers and settlers.” (National Interest)
The Plymouth colony learned the hard way that common ownership of property and goods is a failed economic model, something that today’s critics of some of the history of Thanksgiving have not learned. It was and is a form of slavery. William Bradford, the colony’s first governor, wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation that a communal lifestyle was “[f]or this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” When families were given their own land to work, the results were immediate. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been….”
On Thursday, September 24, 1789, the first House of Representatives voted to recommend—in its exact wording—the First Amendment of the newly drafted Constitution to the states for ratification. The next day, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request of President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said that he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”[1]
Roger Sherman spoke in favor of the proposal by reminding his colleagues that the practice of thanksgiving is “warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple…. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”[2]
A People Full of Thanksgiving
The colonists of another era were aware of the many instances of thanksgiving celebrations found in “holy writ.” Thanksgiving, as it was practiced by the colonists, was a religious celebration that shared the sentiments of their biblical forerunners, giving thanks to God for His faithful provision even in times of want. For these devoutly religious people, thanksgiving would have come naturally. “Twice en route the passengers [aboard the Mayflower] participated in a fast, and once (two days after sounding ground beneath the Arbella) a ‘thanksgiving.’ When the sailing season ended with all ships accounted for, ‘we had a day of thanksgiving in all the plantations.’”[3]
There are numerous claims to the first official Thanksgiving celebrated in the New World. One of the earliest recorded festivals occurred a half-century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. “A small colony of French Huguenots established a settlement near present-day Jacksonville, Florida. On June 30, 1564, their leader, René de Laudonnière, recorded that `We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching Him that it would please Him to continue His accustomed goodness towards us.’”[4]
In 1610, after a hard winter called “the starving time,” the colonists at Jamestown called for a time of thanksgiving. This was after the original company of 409 colonists had been reduced to 60 survivors. Extreme hardship did not deter the survivors from turning to God in thanksgiving. The colonists prayed for help that finally arrived by a ship filled with food and supplies from England. They held a prayer service to give thanks.
This thanksgiving celebration was not commemorated formally every year. An annual commemoration of thanksgiving came nine years later in another part of Virginia. “On December 4, 1619, 38 colonists landed at a place they called Berkeley Hundred [in Virginia]. ‘We ordain,’ read an instruction in their charter, ‘that the day of our ship’s arrival . . . in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.’”[5]
Edward Winslow, in his important chronicle of the history of the Plymouth colony, reports the following eyewitness account of the colony’s thanksgiving celebration:
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 among 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.[6]
While none of these Thanksgiving celebrations was an official national pronouncement (no nation existed at the time), they do support the claim that the celebrations were religious and specifically Christian in their origin and purpose. “Thanksgiving began as a holy day, created by a community of God-fearing Puritans sincere in their desire to set aside one day each year especially to thank the Lord for His many blessings. The day they chose, coming after the harvest at a time of year when farm work was light, fit the natural rhythm of rural life.”[7]
The chain of times set apart for thanksgiving was not even broken during a time of war. Thanksgiving was joined with a spirit of repentance. On October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November 1863 would be set aside as a nationwide celebration of thanksgiving. His proclamation stated:
No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. . . . I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday in November next as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father who dwelleth in heaven.
Beginning with Lincoln, United States’ Presidents proclaimed that the last Thursday in November would be set aside for a National Day of Thanksgiving. Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the celebration to the third Thursday in November “to give more shopping time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”[8] Ever since this pragmatic and commercial approach to Thanksgiving was promoted, its original meaning has steadily been lost.
The 1776 Project (with Foreword by Gary DeMar)
Released just two days before the close of President Trump’s first term, Joe Biden pulled The 1776 Report from the White House website and ended the Commission using an unprecedented number of executive orders signed within hours of inaugural proceedings being completed. Why is the Left so determined to rewrite history? Are they terrified that Americans will dig deeper into the failed policies of socialism and communism? Is it because their ‘progress’ demands regression into government control, elitist power, and the censorship of a formerly free people? Decide for yourself. Think for yourself. And enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own this beautiful 1776 Project as a lasting gift to the American people: the gift of history unaltered.
Buy NowThe erosion of the original intent of Thanksgiving as it was practiced by the colonists and sanctioned by presidents and Congress can best be illustrated by the way some textbooks handle the subject. One elementary school social studies book has thirty pages of material “on the Pilgrims, including the first Thanksgiving. But there is not one word (or image) that referred to religion as even a part of the Pilgrims’ life. One mother whose son is in a class using this book wrote . . . that he came home and told her that ‘Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.’ The mother called the principal of this suburban New York City school to point out that Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims thanked God. The principal responded by saying ‘that was her opinion’—the schools could only teach what was in the books!”[9]
There is no doubt that these early Christian settlers thanked the Indians for their generosity in supplying venison to supplement the Pilgrims’ meager Thanksgiving rations of parsnips, carrots, turnips, onions, radishes, and beets from their household gardens. As the historical record shows, however, thanksgiving was ultimately made to the God of the Bible. “Governor Bradford, with one eye on divine Providence, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving to God, and with the other eye on the local political situation, extended an invitation to neighboring Indians to share in the harvest feast…. This ‘first Thanksgiving’ was a feast called to suit the needs of the hour, which were to celebrate the harvest, thank the Lord for His goodness, and regale and impress the Indians.”[10]
Early celebrations of thanksgiving were expressions of deep gratitude to God for life itself. Many who partook of the bounty from God’s creation set before them were thankful just to be alive. How times have changed in America.
[1]The Annals of the Congress, The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Compiled From Authentic Materials by Joseph Gales, Senior (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1:949–50.
[2]Annals of the Congress, 950.
[3]David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 166.
[4]Diana Karter Appelbaum, Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), 14–15.
[5]Jim Dwyer, ed., Strange Stories, Amazing Facts of America’s Past (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1989), 198.
[6]Edward Winslow, How the Pilgrim Fathers Lived, 2:116. Emphasis added. CD Sourcebook of American History (Mesa, AR: Candlelight Publishing, 1992). Also see Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, ed. Jordan D. Fiore (Plymouth, MA: Plymouth Rock Foundation, [1622] 1985), 67–69.
[7]Appelbaum, Thanksgiving, 186. The celebration of Christmas, in addition to Thanksgiving, has become an ordeal in censorship. Silent Night and other sacred songs have been stripped from public school Christmas pageants and replaced with Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman. Public school officials and school teachers are made to substitute “winter holiday” for Christmas. In St. Paul Minnesota, an affirmative action officer for the state tax department, banned what she called the “unwelcome greeting of Merry Christmas” via the department’s electronic mail. (“‘Merry Christmas’ offense, bureaucrat rules,” Atlanta Journal/Constitution (December 11, 1994), A11).
[8]Edmund H. Harvey, Jr., ed., Readers Digest Book of Facts (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, [1985] 1987), 125.
[9]Paul C. Vitz, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1986), 3.
[10]Paul C. Vitz, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1986), 3.