Carve out your turkeys and toast to your family. It’s Thanksgiving! It’s one of the biggest and most publicized holidays in the United States’ calendar, with family dinners, giant parades, and, of course, giving thanks.
But did you know that the stories told about the history of this glorious celebration of gratitude for all the blessings of this world are riddled with inaccuracies and myths?
American school children are taught in their American history classes about the first Thanksgiving where the pilgrims and the New England natives (not Indians, please) broke bread together in 1620. But there’s so much to unpack there, you’d think we just came back from a year long vacation. To be honest, I don’t even know where to start. Let’s see how this goes.
The First Thanksgiving – Separating the Myth from History
Let’s work our way back in reverse chronology. The widely told and accepted tale tells of the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower boat that came to ‘The New World,’ befriended Tisquantum, famously known as Squanto, who welcomed them in the new world, leading to the first Thanksgiving feast. But there are many inaccuracies in that narrative.
First of all, not all of the early settlers were pilgrims. In fact, only around 30%
of the Mayflower passengers were there for religious purposes. The rest sought economic opportunities.
Similarly, Squanto and his people were specifically from the Wampanoag tribe. This actually opens the door to a bigger conversation about Native Americans, but let’s save that for another time. For now, long story short, Native Americans is a rather overgeneralized term that clumps together hundreds of different tribes throughout the continent of North America.
As the factual historical accounts recount the story, the events that transpired around the first Thanksgiving feast involve the Wampanoag tribe enlisting the settlers’ military aid to fight off the threat posed by the Narragansett. Squanto helped interpret and translate for the Wampanoag tribe and the settlers because he had picked up quite a bit of English during his time going back and forth to Europe.
Squanto was kidnapped and brought to Europe to be sold into slavery in 1614, though he managed to break loose and escape. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing back home for him. Actually, Squanto’s abduction is concurrent with the events of John Smith and Pocahontas, but that’s a story for another day.
Although little is known about Squanto’s life until his return to Patuxet, Squanto did finally make it back home to his village. But by the time he made it back, it was now known as Plymouth.
Plymouth was the name given by the Mayflower passengers to the town they had settled. However, the word ‘settled’ here is a reach. The town of Plymouth was actually an abandoned village called Patuxet. The residents of Patuxet were eradicated by a disease, leaving behind a complete infrastructure that was ready to be moved in for the settlers. So, they did exactly that.
When Squanto returned to now Plymouth, he was devastated to find that his family, friends and his entire village were gone. In his plight, Squanto was captured by the Wampanoag who employed his newly learned English skills to interpret for him and the settlers to enlist their help in fighting off the invasion of the Narragansett. This battle against the Narragansett was followed by the settlers of Plymouth and the Wampanoag breaking bread together. And the rest, as they say, is history.
For more detailed accounts of the events surrounding the first Thanksgiving, and American history in general, the books Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann are an intriguing and informative read. I would highly recommend everyone who has even the faintest interest in history to indulge in these fascinating pieces of literature.
The Origins of The Traditional Thanksgiving Holiday
We have gone through the origins of the first Thanksgiving but that doesn’t tell us much about how the modern tradition came to be. Well, that’s another interesting story to tell.
Thanksgiving as we know it was set aside on the last Thursday of November by US President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, soon after the civil war. But his decision wasn’t his own, so to speak.
Influencing President Lincoln’s stance on Thanksgiving was one Sarah Josepha Hale. We know her as the author of the famous Mary Had A Little Lamb nursery rhyme. Hale had felt the citizens of The United States of America had few holidays that nationally brought them together. She has even articulated her admiration and longing for a holiday like Thanksgiving in her novel Northwood, published in 1827.
But it’s more than just Hale’s novel that influenced Abraham Lincoln to announce the Thanksgiving holiday in his famous Gettysburg address. Hale wrote a letter to President Lincoln in 1863, in which she outlined her mission to have a national holiday that unifies the entire nation. Her letter eloquently articulated with tones of sympathy and affection, which unsurprisingly did a great job of persuading President Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Of course, I don’t want to imply that Sarah Hale single-handedly gave us Thanksgiving. There were several other factors at play that drove President Lincoln’s decision, but we would be remiss to not acknowledge the significance of Hale and her letter.
Final Thoughts
Regardless of the circumstances and historical origins of the Thanksgiving holiday, it is a beautiful tradition that has the potential to keep us humble and grounded. In our modern-day, fast-paced lives, where we are always aspiring to move up, we tend to forget to stop and smell the roses every now and then and count our blessings. Happy Thanksgiving!
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