Thanksgiving

Tomorrow—Thanksgiving. To whom? Ah, now there’s a politically incorrect question. Anyway it’s the day that supposedly dates all the way back to the Pilgrims. Two hundred and forty years later Lincoln called for a national day of Thanksgiving (he had no doubt as to whom).
During the Depression, FDR moved the day backward to the fourth Thursday in November to give retailers more time to sell their wares. But his pronouncements, both here and during the war, left one in no doubt as to whom he was thanking.
Virginia may well have held a “thanksgiving” a year or so before, but the one at Plymouth Colony gets the credit for being the remembered one.
An interesting colony, Plymouth, and an interesting sequence of events that kept it alive to celebrate.
First of all, Pilgrims are not Puritans. Puritans—who arrived in Boston ten years after the Pilgrims—believed the Church of England could be purified. They came to America with the idea of practicing up and returning to England to purify the Anglican Church.
Pilgrims felt it was too far gone to be purified, and the only thing to do was go far away—thus the name “pilgrim”. They first went to Holland—but when Holland threatened to end their twenty year truce with Spain and go back to war—the Pilgrims got out of Holland. They were looking for a place to stay.
They planned to join the new colony in Virginia, founded thirteen years before. They were blown off course and wound up at Cape Cod. It was a hellish first winter. Half of them died. The only reason any survived was that the captain of the Mayflower stayed with them until spring, supplying them with what food he could. That couldn't last.
In spring, he had to sail back to England—leaving behind a sickly little band of city folk with no idea how to make food or what there was in this weird new world fit to eat. At that point a Wampanoag Indian walked into their camp.
To their astonishment he spoke perfect English. Not only that but he had grown up on the site they now occupied. He could tell them when the fish would run in the spring—and how to catch them. He showed them what to hunt and how. He taught them how to plant corn. In short, he kept them alive—along with any hope for future New England colonial development.
He also explained that the tribe he came from had been wiped out by a plague (probably small pox) a few years earlier. By dumb luck—providence if you will—the Pilgrims had landed on the one piece of real estate for a thousand miles in either direction that no one else claimed. No enemy would try to wrest it from them.
And just how had that Indian—Squanto we call him—come to rescue them? Years before he had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and shipped to Europe to be sold as a slave. Some monks had rescued him and helped him get to England. But he missed the plague.
He had worked there for years, mastering the language and customs. Finally he had made passage back to his home world—only to find everyone dead of the pox. He had a complete nervous breakdown, and a neighboring tribe took pity on him and cared for him.
As he recovered, the Pilgrims arrived. Scouts reported they were starving and dying like flies. The chief who had pitied him suggested Squanto return to his old home, now Plymouth, and help out these poor helpless newcomers. So he did.
So the Pilgrims weren’t just being thankful for a decent harvest. They were out of Holland; they had survived a starving winter; they were on free and clear land; they had been taught how to make food by someone who knew the terrain.
Just incidentally, their survival had ensured the creation of something called the United States—and its governmental forms. That they survived at all we can be thankful for.