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History Series: Thanksgiving
History of Thanksgiving
the Secular & the Sacred
The origin of Thanksgiving Day in America has been attributed to a harvest feast held by the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. In 1621, Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony proclaimed a day of “thanksgiving and prayer” to celebrate the Pilgrims’ first harvest in America, the year after their arrival on the merchant ship Mayflower.
However, the picture you usually see featuring a few Native American men joining the Pilgrims at the feast is somewhat inaccurate. From the original settler Edward Winslow’s letter to a friend in 1621, we know that the Wampanoag Chief, Massasoit, was accompanied by some 90 of his men to visit Plymouth for three days of fish, fowl, and venison.
But of the 102 English settlers who had spent their first year on the Massachusetts coast, about half the passengers had died by this time. This would have left about half the remaining fifty-three English survivors as men. So the Native men outnumbered the Pilgrim men by over three to one!
What was the original intention of the Pilgrims coming to America, how was it that they didn’t land at their intended destination, when was the “First Thanksgiving,” and how did it become a modern holiday?
