Thanksgiving symbols

What Edward Winslow’s letter says

There are two sources for the autumn of 1621 at Plymouth, Pilgrim Hall Museum notes: Edward Winslow’s letter in Mourt’s Relation, and William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. Winslow’s is the only eyewitness account. Written to a friend in England and printed in London in 1622, it says that once the harvest was in, the governor sent four men fowling “that we might after a more special manner rejoice together”, and that Massasoit came “with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted”. His men killed five deer and gave them to the governor and others.

The letter names two foods, fowl and venison, as Plimoth Patuxet Museums points out, and says nothing of turkey, pie or cranberries. Bradford, writing of that autumn but not of the feast, mentions a “great store of wild turkeys”. Winslow doesn’t call the gathering a thanksgiving. Pilgrim Hall calls it a secular harvest festival and a one-time event, with no proclamation; a Day of Thanksgiving, to the Pilgrims, was a religious day spent in church. Nor does the letter say why so many Wampanoag came. Plimoth Patuxet names their leader Ousamequin, with 90 Pokanoket men, and quotes the Wampanoag and Penobscot historian Nancy Eldridge: “it is probable that [Ousemequin’s attendance at the celebration] was a political show of force.” The museum calls the gift of five deer essential to the diplomacy of those three days.

How it came to be called the first Thanksgiving

New England’s own Thanksgiving grew, Pilgrim Hall writes, out of Puritan days of thanksgiving and civic ones, into an annual day of prayer and feasting proclaimed by the governor. In the 1830s, according to Plimoth Patuxet, New Englanders looked back at the 1621 feast and began to call it the “First Thanksgiving”, because it resembled their own holiday. In 1841 the antiquarian Alexander Young printed Winslow’s passage with a footnote: “This was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.” After the Civil War, Pilgrim Hall notes, Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the first popular figures to connect the holiday with Plymouth.

Other places have a claim. The National Park Service suggests that the first thanksgiving in the Americas may have been a feast held by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and the Teya in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, on 23 May 1541. Pilgrim Hall lists that and others, at St Augustine in 1564, in Maine in 1607 and in Virginia in 1610 and 1619, and says they have no direct connection to the modern holiday.

Sarah Josepha Hale and Lincoln’s proclamation

Hale’s novel Northwood (1827) put the roast turkey “at the head of the table” and gave the pumpkin pie “the most distinguished niche”. That year, the National Park Service says, she began writing essays in Boston’s Ladies’ Magazine calling for a national Thanksgiving. From 1846, as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, she campaigned in editorials and petitioned state governors and presidents to keep the last Thursday in November as one national day. On 28 September 1863 she wrote to Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s proclamation of 3 October 1863, issued “In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity”, invited Americans “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise”. It asked them to commend to God’s care the widows, orphans and mourners of the war. The Park Service notes that Secretary of State William Seward wrote it. It was not the first national thanksgiving: in 1789 Congress asked George Washington to recommend one, and he named Thursday 26 November. What was new, the National Archives says, is that from 1863 Thanksgiving was kept every year on the last Thursday of November.

Roosevelt moves the date

In 1939 the last Thursday of November fell on the last day of the month. Concerned, the National Archives says, that a shorter Christmas shopping season might hold back the economic recovery, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier. Thirty-two states followed him and 16 kept the last Thursday, so for two years the country had two Thanksgivings. Congress settled it in 1941. The House voted for the last Thursday; the Senate changed that to the fourth, which differs only in years when November has five Thursdays; and Roosevelt signed the resolution on 26 December 1941.

A day of mourning on Cole’s Hill

Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, above Plymouth Rock, on Thanksgiving Day for a National Day of Mourning. It began with Wamsutta (Frank B.) James of the Aquinnah Wampanoag. Invited to speak in 1970 at the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing, he was told, Pilgrim Hall Museum records, that his message was too inflammatory, and he gave his speech on Cole’s Hill instead. “Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct,” he said, “we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts.” The group he helped found that year, the United American Indians of New England, organizes the day.

In 1998 the Town of Plymouth put up a plaque on Cole’s Hill on the group’s behalf. It reads, in part: “Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures.”

Giving thanks in Native traditions

Pilgrim Hall notes that in 1621 the Pilgrims gave thanks to God, and the Wampanoag to the Creator, every day. Plimoth Patuxet adds that Native people across the continent keep their own traditions of giving thanks throughout the year. The Aquinnah Wampanoag hold Cranberry Day, which the tribe calls its most important holiday, on the second Tuesday in October; it ends with a community potluck “to celebrate and give thanks to the Creator for another year's harvest”. Among the Seneca, Arthur Parker recorded in 1910, the leader of the Green Corn Thanksgiving rose and said “Diettino'nio dioke'ko, we give thanks to our sustainers”: the corn, beans and squash of the Three Sisters.