The Real Story of the First Thanksgiving

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. In this show, we celebrate Thanksgiving, and it’s the only American holiday that’s actually remained relatively innocent. It’s not something that we’ve been able to commercialize. But there is something going on here that’s more than just feasting, family, and football. Robert Tracy Mackenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College. He’s also the author of The First Thanksgiving. He’s here to tell us the story of this quintessentially American holiday.

Let’s take a listen.

The story of the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving, in many respects, is one chapter in a much, much larger story, a story that is grounded in an enormous phenomenon that we remember as the Protestant Reformation. In the early years of the fifteen hundreds, individuals like Martin Luther, the German theologian and monk, had begun to work toward reforming the Catholic Church, changing some of its theological teachings, some of its church practices, some of its governing structure. And Luther found that that was essentially impossible to accomplish within the confines of the Catholic Church, ultimately leading to a break with the Catholic Church. In fifteen seventeen, on Halloween evening, Luther famously put up his ninety-five theses, his ninety-five statements of protest about Catholic teaching. This caused his relationship with the Pope, with the Catholic hierarchy, to deteriorate pretty rapidly, leading ultimately to the Pope declaring Luther a heretic in fifteen twenty and prompting Luther ultimately to break with the Catholic Church to establish an independent church, a protesting church. And so Protestantism was born. The Protestant Reformation reaches England now, maybe a generation later, during the reign of King Henry the Eighth. And ultimately Henry himself also breaks with the Catholic Church and establishes an independent Church of England—a church we often remember as the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church, in many respects, though, still retained a lot of the teaching, a lot of the practices, a lot of the hierarchy of Catholicism. So within England, there’s a core group of English Christians who begin to work to purify the Church of England of its Catholic remnants, and they begin to be referred to, often quite sarcastically and critically, as Protestants. The group that’s gathering at Scrooby, by about sixteen hundred or so, is actually best thought of as a radical kind of subset of English Protestants. These are individuals who come to be known as Separatists. The Separatists basically not only believed that the Anglican Church needed reformation, they’d actually arrived at the conclusion that the Anglican Church was not a true church, that it was so far in divergence from what they believed were the true requirements of Scripture that they really couldn’t, in good conscience, associate or worship with Anglicans.

They had to withdraw. They had to separate from the Anglican Church.

And so we need to understand then, this core group is the most radical of the most radical Protestant Christians. In separating from the Anglican Church, they’re actually defying the established Church of England. They’re actually defying the monarchy of England, and so, in a certain sense, they are considered, in many respects, outlaws against both church and state. This group ultimately is going to face some persecution in Scrooby. We can exaggerate it, but we know that one member of the congregation was in fact thrown into prison. Three other leaders of the congregation were under suspicion. There were warrants out for their arrest. They actually go into hiding, and ultimately, it led to the conclusion that this group was simply not going to be allowed to worship separately, worship faithfully as they understood it. And so they decided that they would have no alternative but to leave England. Now, when we remember the Pilgrim story, one of the ways that we remember it incorrectly… I think it’s really important to go back and recapture this truth: Pilgrims don’t leave England directly for New England. They don’t leave Scrooby and head for North America. There’s, in fact, an intermediate step in their migration. They actually go not to North America but to Holland, and so they’re able to get out of the country. It’s a complicated and dangerous undertaking. But around the year sixteen oh eight, they make their way to Holland, settling first of all in Amsterdam, where they stay for a matter of months, and then finally relocating about thirty miles to the southwest, to the town of Leiden. And it’s Leiden where they reside for the next twelve years, and it’s from Leiden that they migrate to North America in sixteen twenty.

We have to.

Understand that Leiden was, although smaller than Amsterdam, still a large city for its day.

It had a population of about forty thousand.

These were individuals who had migrated from a tiny, rural, agricultural village in England, and they found themselves in a vibrant, growing, industrializing city. It was foreign in many, many ways. You know, we sometimes talk about how the Pilgrims came to a new world when they migrated to North America, but in a real sense, they were going to a new world when they migrated to Holland. It was so foreign from what they knew, so different from that it’s hard for us to exaggerate the challenge. So, now, rural people were living in a large city. Farm folk were having to earn their living in industrial settings as employees in a textile manufacturing line of work, and it was hard. And yet, one of the important things that they would have stressed is that they experienced a great deal of religious freedom. Holland generally was known for its religious toleration. It was religiously diverse. But there were problems, starting with the economic challenges, and they began to worry about the future of their congregation.

And you’ve been listening to Robert Tracy Mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims, their trek from England to Holland, to the city of Leiden, and a very different kind of environment that they’d never experienced before. And soon to be coming to the New World, a very new world. The story of the Pilgrims, as told by Robert Tracy Mackenzie. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses, their series on Communism. It’s one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Robert Tracy Mackenzie. He’s a professor of history at Wheaton College. He is also the author of The First Thanksgiving. Let’s pick up with the story of the Pilgrims and the revival in Leiden.

Some of the adults were thinking about returning to England, even with its restrictions on religious liberty. They thought, “Well, at least we’ll be able to eat there. At least we won’t starve there.” They found it a hard place to raise their children. “This is,” in Bradford’s words, “a licentious culture, a culture that really doesn’t have the same moral standards.” They’re lax in the way that they train their children. They’re critical of the Pilgrim parents as being too stern in their child-rearing practices, and that bothers them as well. And it’s in that context that they began to consider looking for a new home, not in Europe, but in fact across the Atlantic Ocean.

In North America.

You know, it’s very common, I think, for us to hear someone, in referring to the Pilgrims, to say that they came to this country in search of religious freedom. Now, the reality is, what they are struggling with really is the cares of this world. It’s kind of daily challenges that so many of us face, that so many of us can relate to, because even though they are motivated by those kinds of economic concerns and family concerns, all of their motivation in some way connects back to their deep commitment not just to their families, but to their church. And so their decision to migrate is not a decision made by a bunch of individuals who happen to leave simultaneously. It is a congregational decision. They are basically deciding as a group that the only way they’re going to be able to stay together is if they find together a new home. The voyage of the Mayflower is something that William Bradford, who wrote the main history of the Pilgrims, will—and Bradford only talks about it in about a page and a half—and he doesn’t share a lot of details. But we do know that it was an arduous and, in many ways, a terrifying experience for them. To begin with, they hadn’t been able to leave England. They went from Holland back to England en route to North America. They hadn’t been able to leave England nearly as early in the calendar year as they had hoped. And then, when they finally were in position to leave, one of the ships—they had hoped to take two ships—one of the ships immediately began to take on water, and they had to return for repairs. And that happened not once but twice before they finally had to just give up on the idea that the second ship, called the Speedwell, would be able to accompany them. All of which is to say that they actually don’t leave England for good until September the sixth, in the year sixteen twenty, and their voyage will take sixty-five days. And so, if you do the math, it comes out to an average of just at two miles per hour for sixty-five days. Because of the bad weather, it would have been almost certain that they would remain below decks for the entire voyage, or almost for the entire voyage. It was an area that was not tall enough to stand up in, and for sixty-five days they’re in an area that was about the size of a good-sized city bus, and in that space, one hundred and two Pilgrim passengers. So, as the Pilgrims were preparing to leave from Leiden, it’s probably good for us just to stop for a moment and, in our mind’s eye, try to imagine that parting. If you’re William Bradford, for example, he’s leaving a three-year-old son behind just because it’s not possible. He just doesn’t think it’s possible for his son to survive. Early on, he hopes that his son would join him afterward, and those kinds of goodbyes were being said repeatedly. And the way that Bradford describes the departure in his history is very touching. He really tells us that tears were flowing like water. But—and here are the passages that I love so much—that they comforted themselves with what they believed to be true. And what they believed to be true, among other things, was that this world was not their home. As he put it in his history, they reminded themselves that they were Pilgrims. You know, that’s the label that we use for this group, that we use so much that it loses all of its meaning, all of its power. But in saying they knew that they were Pilgrims, he’s almost certainly quoting from the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Hebrews in the Christian New Testament, where the author says that various heroes of the Christian faith knew that they were pilgrims—that the world was not their home—just saying that they found comfort in reminding themselves of that truth. They were temporary sojourners in this land. Their ultimate hope lay elsewhere, so they knew that they were Pilgrims. One of the things about this that really is, I think, miraculous is that there was only one fatality among the one hundred and two Pilgrim passengers on board the Mayflower. This was not really at all to be expected. There had been a voyage of Puritans actually just the year before, to Virginia, to resettle there, and a passenger list that had one hundred and eighty individuals on it, found that by the end of that voyage, one hundred and thirty had died. And so, surviving the voyage almost without loss of life was pretty amazing. So they arrived on the coast of New England in early November—actually the ninth of November specifically—but they’re considerably north of where they had expected to land. They had entered into an agreement with a corporation that had been authorized by the King of England to settle what is today the area of Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, on up to basically the Hudson River. But they landed considerably north of that, actually off the coast of Cape Cod. And so their first response is, “Well, we have to turn south. We have to go to the area where we’ve been authorized to settle,” and they try to do that. But the area there around Cape Cod is really treacherous for navigation, and the captain, Captain Reynolds, tells them that this is not going to happen. “This is too dangerous. We’re not going to undertake this.” And it’s on the twenty-third of December, according to their records—the twenty-third of December in the year sixteen twenty—that they go ashore on the site of what we know today as the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The area actually had been the site of a Native American village, a village inhabited by a tribe called the Patuxent, but the Patuxent had been devastated by disease sometime probably not too long before sixteen twenty, certainly after sixteen fifteen. So, fairly recently, the Patuxent had been literally wiped out. Historians are not sure what the disease was. It may have been viral hepatitis. So where the Pilgrims land is sort of like a ghost village, in essence, and they’re arriving right at the onset of a bitter New England winter. And if I could just say this parenthetically, this really surprises them. They know that they’re going to be late in the year, but they really were not expecting such severe weather. And you might think, why in the world not? If you look at a map, you’ll actually find that, in terms of latitude, present-day Massachusetts is pretty much on the same line of latitude as Madrid, Spain. So the Pilgrims are actually traveling substantially south, about six hundred miles south of London. And so they’re actually expecting a temperate climate even as late as sixteen twenty-two. A couple of years later, one pamphlet that’s advertising the settlement is saying that it’s going to be sort of like a garden spot. This is going to be sort of like a place in the Riviera. And what they get, of course, is very, very different. So the next few months are just awful. One historian would later call this “the starving time,” and that actually is a misunderstanding,

I think, of what was going on.

They actually have enough food to avoid starvation. What they don’t have is shelter, and so they mostly live on board the Mayflower. But every day when they want to work, trying to build these structures, they have to find a way to get to shore.

And you’re listening to Robert Tracy Mackenzie tell the story of the Pilgrims, and we learned that they were in Leiden, and they had religious freedom there, but the cultural influences of the big city just didn’t match up with the interests of the Pilgrims and how they wanted to raise their family. And so the congregation decides to head—well, to head to America. And, by the way, what a surprise to find out! Though they sailed six hundred miles south, the brutal winters of New England were not to be expected. When we come back. More of this remarkable story: the Pilgrims’ story, the story of Thanksgiving. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Robert Tracy Mackenzie, telling the story of The First Thanksgiving. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

The Mayflower had come with a longboat. They expected to use this boat for fishing, but they had had to disassemble the boat to fit it into the hold, and it had been damaged en route, so it took quite a while to repair that boat.

So for actually several…

weeks, the adults who would go ashore to work would have to wade through the frigid water in December and January in Massachusetts, and not just a short space, because the harbor was so shallow. The Mayflower is anchored probably between three-quarters of a mile and a mile from shore. So the first thing they’ll do every day is to wade through this icy water up to their chests for three-quarters

of a mile or more.

And then the last thing they’ll do, after having worked all day, is to repeat the journey in the opposite direction. And so you can imagine the real theory. I think the more likely theory is that they will die in droves from pneumonia, so that by spring, of the one hundred and two passengers originally on the Mayflower, fifty-two have died and every family is affected. There were twenty-six different family groups among the passengers, and only four were spared from at least one death, so twenty-two of the families had at least one family member die. There were eighteen married couples on the Mayflower, and fourteen had one of the two partners die. And much to, I think, our amazement ought to amaze us. When the weather allows the Mayflower to return to England in the spring of sixteen twenty-one, the survivors are given the opportunity to return to England, and they refuse. And now they are needing to be wholly absorbed in the work of completing their settlement, planting crops, and hopefully preparing for their survival during the next winter to come.

It’s in this context.

that they have really their first significant…