Op-ed:
On Thanksgiving
By: Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor / Right Side
Patriots on Right Side Patriots Radio
The Thanksgiving story, as we know it, began on July 22, 1620,
when a group of English colonists known as Pilgrims gathered in the Dutch
port city of Delfshaven to board the pinnace ship Speedwell. Sailing from there to the British city of Southampton, these colonists met up with
others who had already boarded the Mayflower, the Speedwell's sister
ship if you will. Departing Southampton on August 6th, the passengers
and crew were hoping for a swift and uneventful ocean crossing to
Virginia.
Sadly, that didn't happen as the Speedwell leaked not once but
twice, forcing both ships to turn back. And the Pilgrims who didn't
call it quits while docked in the port city of Plymouth waited
anxiously while the Speedwell's remaining passengers and cargo were
transferred to the Mayflower, an already seriously overcrowded
ship...a ship which then became their home for almost a month.
Finally setting sail for America from Plymouth on September 6,
1620, the now 102 passengers along with a crew of 37 men headed by
Master Christopher Jones
were packed tight in the small ship...a ship that measured about 100
feet long from stem to stern and just 24 feet wide. And while the
crew was housed in small cabins above the main deck, the Pilgrims and
the others onboard...those the Pilgrims called “strangers”... were
forced to live in suffocating, windowless spaces no more than five
feet in height... spaces that existed between the main deck and the
cargo hold. And while the first month of sailing saw mostly calm
seas, by early October an “unrelenting series of North Atlantic
storms” tossed and battered the Mayflower for weeks on end
forcing the crew to lower the sails and let the Mayflower “bob
helplessly in the towering waves.”

And how do we know this? In the only surviving journal, a
journal titled “Of Plimoth Plantation,”
authored by Mayflower passenger and Mayflower Compact signer William Bradford (who years later became the 30-year governor of the Massachusetts Plymouth Colony) was also this vivid description of the actual 66-day crossing. Writing that,
“They were encountered many times with cross winds and met with
many fierce storms with which the ship was shroudly shaken, and her
upper works made very leaky, and one of the beams in the midships was
bowed and cracked, which put them in some fear that the ship could
not be able to perform the voyage,” allowed
us to visualize just how perilous the Pilgrims journey was.
And if this wasn't bad enough
seasickness and other assorted ills permeated the entire voyage, yet
surprisingly only one of the Pilgrims aboard died during the actual
crossing itself. However, 52 of the 102 passengers aboard (consisting
almost equally of both Pilgrims and “strangers”) died
during their first winter in Plymouth.
But now it's time we separate
fact from fiction, first in regards to exactly why the Pilgrims came
to the New World and second, to understand that Thanksgiving as we
celebrate it today is really a blend of the Pilgrims New
England custom of “rejoicing after a successful
harvest”...something actually based upon ancient English
harvest festivals...and the Puritans tenets of Thanksgiving being but
a solemn religious observance combining prayer and to a much lesser degree
feasting.

And here it must now be known that
for those we call Pilgrims, contrary to popular belief, religious freedom
was not...I repeat not...the deciding factor as to why they came to
the New World for religious freedom was something the Pilgrims
enjoyed for more than a decade before ever setting sail on the
Mayflower. How so? While we known that in the 1500s England
broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and created a new church
called the “Church of England,”
what many don't know is that those we refer to as Pilgrims
actually were “separatists”
(as in those who rejecting the new church). And it was a small group of
“separatists” who
left England in 1608 and found both sanctuary and religious
freedom in the Dutch city of Leiden, a city that was far more
religiously diverse and tolerant than were those in England...a city
where according to “separatist” member Edward Winslow,
they enjoyed “much peace and liberty.”
So logic alone should then dictate that religious tolerance and
freedom was not the driving force that drove the Pilgrims to risk
their lives first in a dangerous ocean crossing and then in the wilds
of an untamed land.
So what did drive the Pilgrims to
America? Simply, poverty did, for the reality is that the Pilgrims
were actually what we now call “economic migrants.”
Possessing religious freedom in Leiden was surely a good thing but
living in overt poverty was quite another. For the Pilgrims, who were
farmers in Northern England, now being but low paid laborers who
worked long hours weaving, spinning, and making cloth, was what their
fellow “separatists” still home in England were not
willing to do. In fact, in his “Of Plimoth Plantation”
journal, William Bradford also wrote that instead of joining their
fellow “separatists” in Leiden, “Some preferred and
chose the prisons in England rather than this liberty in Holland with
these afflictions,” meaning living both in poverty and what
some Pilgrim elders considered to be moral debauchery.
And as time went on poverty became more widespread for not only
did the all-important wool market collapse, but the Thirty Years War
was looming large. Couple that with Pilgrim elders fearing that Dutch
society was “corrupting their children,” which again can
be witnessed in the words of William Bradford who wrote in his
journal that their children were “drawn away by evil examples
into extravagant and dangerous courses,” as well as
losing their English identity.
Now being unable to return to their beloved England for fear of
arrest, the Pilgrims instead looked to the economic opportunities the
New World offered them. And with English merchants already having
financed numerous colonial settlements, the Pilgrims embraced not
only the economic opportunities afforded them but the ability to
continue to freely worship and to preserve their and their children's
English identity.

And after receiving a patent from the Virginia Company to
establish a settlement within its jurisdiction, the Merchant
Adventurers...a group of 70 London businessmen...supplied the capital
needed to finance the Pilgrims quest and did so by purchasing shares
in a joint-stock company. The backers paid for the Mayflower,
its crew, and a year’s worth of supplies, and in return the
Pilgrims were required to work for the company during their first
seven years in America. But even here the Pilgrims saw economic
pluses because every colonist over the age of 16 would be receiving
one stock share for their having emigrating to America and working
the land...land which would then be theirs along with any future
profits garnered after their seven-year contract was up.

Life in the new Plymouth colony was hard and it took years for the
Pilgrim's investors to garner any profits at all, while it took the
Pilgrims until 1648 to pay off their debt. And besides, by the early 1630s
the Puritans had established the more successful Massachusetts Bay
Colony, where by 1691 the two colonies, together with other lesser
colonies, merged to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay. So why
even mention the Puritans then? Because it was the Puritans not the
Pilgrims who came to America solely for religious reasons, and it's
the Puritans religious tenets that Thanksgiving really emanates from.
How so? First, it's important to know that while the Puritans
believed they could still live the “congregational way”
within their local churches as per their own ecclesiastical tenets
and do so without having to completely cut ties with the newly
established Church of England, the Pilgrims believed that any
membership in or dealings with said
church violated biblical precepts for true Christians,
thus causing a permanent riff between the two groups. And second,
while the economics of poverty was the driving force that drove the
Pilgrims to America, the Puritans, who were not poverty stricken, saw
investment opportunities in owning land in America and believed that
by being far away from England they could bring people to what they
considered to be the “ideal English church.”

Simply, the Puritans were
religious missionaries with conversion on their minds who
came to the New World “with money and resources and divinely
ordained arrogance,” while the
Pilgrims were more accepting of religious
tolerance thanks to their time spent in Leiden. To the Puritans their and their church's way alone was the only right way to salvation, and so it remained.
So how do these religious
differences between the Pilgrims and the Puritans affect the story of
Thanksgiving? First, know that in no way do these differences negate
the basic premise of the first Thanksgiving being a “Harvest
Feast.” Said feast did indeed
take place but not in November as Thanksgiving is celebrated today
but in October, with it lasting three days and being attended by 90
Wampanoac Indians and 53 Pilgrims. But still some minor revisions to
the story are needed. Yes, the Wampanoac, who for generations already
had harvests feasts of their own, “broke bread” with
the Pilgrims, but little known is that this particular feast had as
much to do with a peace treaty being made between two
nations...England and the Wampanoac nation...as it did with the
harvest success of the now one-year old Plymouth colony itself.
How so? This can be explained in
a letter written and sent to friend in England by aforementioned
Mayflower passenger and feast attendee “E.W.”
(Edward Winslow) who wrote: “And God be praised, we had a
good increase...Our harvest being gotten in, our governor (William
Bradford) sent four men on fowling that so we might after a special
manner rejoice together...”
and that, “These things I thought good to let you
understand...that you might on our behalf give God thanks who hath
dealt so favourably with us.”
This letter alone explains the reality
and truths of the first Thanksgiving as it being but a simple harvest feast and
the welcoming of peace between two peoples, which a later day poem and
politics helped to morph into what has become a truly American
holiday.
And that poem was Longfellow’s “The
Courtship of Miles Standish” written in 1848,
along with the 1855 recovery of Governor William Bradford’s lost
journal “Of Plimoth Plantation,” both of which peeked
public interest in the Pilgrims and the Wampanoac Indians...peeked
that interest to where Thanksgiving as we know today became
nationally important. And while the Continental Congress had
proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving in 1777, it was not the
joyous food-laden Thanksgiving we know today, but an austere and
somewhat somber event where religious leaders recommended that
“servile labor and such recreations (although at other times
innocent) may be unbecoming the purpose of this appointment [and
should] be omitted on so solemn an occasion.”

And
those words were way more aligned with Puritan
thinking than they were with thoughts of the Pilgrims. Remember,
Puritan settlers in New England originally celebrated days of
"thanksgiving"
in prayer with food and feast playing little part, and yet they
did give thanks to the “good Lord”
for their successes in the New World.
Remember, it
was not until the middle of the Civil War that President Abraham
Lincoln proclaimed a
National Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of
November 1863...which happened to be November 26th just as it is this
year. Urged to do so by a series of editorials written by Sarah
Josepha Hale, what Lincoln did with his proclamation was try to bring
both families and a divided nation together, and he hoped to do so
with something as simple as a meal shared and a joint prayer of
thanks. Then in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the date
up a week, setting Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November
solely to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. But in 1941,
Congress made it an official holiday, doing away with the what had
been a required annual presidential decree.
And so
this year as we celebrate Thanksgiving...albeit a covid-dictated
one...we must not lose sight of the true meaning of Thanksgiving
where we, as did the Pilgrims and Puritans, gather together with
family and friends to share not just in nature's bounty but to thank
God the Father for all He has bestowed upon us and upon our great
nation.
And to that I say, amen.
Copyright © 2020 Diane Sori / The Patriot Factor / All rights reserved.
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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Craig Andresen's blog The National Patriot to read his latest article, Thanksgiving With Covid Stuffing.
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