The following day was Sunday, so the party rested and worshipped. On Monday, they departed the island and sailed the short distance across the harbor to the place that would become their new home.
Forefathers Day was born in 1769, when seven upstanding men of Plymouth decided to form a social club. Their motives were a mix of the sacred and the profane.
First, the profane: According to the minutes of the club’s inaugural meeting, the founders wished to have a private venue where they could gather away from the local hoi polloi. They wanted to be free from “intermixing with the company at the taverns in this town.” A “well-regulated club” would increase “the pleasure and happiness of the respective members” and also “conduce to their edification and instruction.” They incorporated their new society under the name Old Colony Club.4
The new club wasn’t just about drinking. It had a higher purpose too, one that the founders considered a sacred duty. The seven original members, proud of their town’s history, decided to solemnize the anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims by means of an annual celebration. The inaugural Forefathers Day was also known as “Old Colony Day” or the “First Celebration of the Landing of our Forefathers.”5
Club records provide a detailed account. The first Forefathers Day dinner took place at 2:30 in the afternoon at a local inn. The meal began with an Indian pudding, which was followed by a course of succotash and then one of clams, oysters, and codfish. Next came venison that had been roasted on a jack that the Pilgrims had brought with them on the Mayflower. The venison course was followed by “sea fowl”—probably gulls or cormorants—and eels. Dessert was apple pie, cranberry tarts, and cheese.
Succotash—a stew of corn and beans—became the traditional culinary feature of Forefathers Day dinners, as essential to the celebration of that holiday as turkey is to Thanksgiving. The word “succotash” is an Anglicized version of the Narragansett word sohquttahhash, whose literal meaning is corn beaten into small pieces. Tradition has it that the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to make succotash.
It is fair to say that succotash is an acquired taste. The author of an 1883 cookbook warns that “strangers are rather shy of this peculiar mixture.”6 At Forefathers Day dinners in Plymouth in the twenty-first century, a tureen of succotash is set out on a table across from the bar during the cocktail hour. Guests are invited to help themselves. The line at the bar is longer.7
Toasting is another Forefathers Day tradition. Several toasts were offered at the first Forefathers Day dinner in 1769, including one to those “kings under whose indulgent care this colony has flourished and been protected.” According to James Thacher, who wrote an authoritative history of Plymouth that was published in 1835, the group conversed in “an agreeable manner” about “our forefathers.” The agreeable manner did not last long, and in 1773 the Old Colony Club folded. Thacher is discreet about the breakup, which was precipitated by disagreement about the most contentious issue of the day: independence for the thirteen colonies. Thacher hints at the acrimony that must have pervaded club events when he writes blandly that “unfortunately, some of the members were attached to the royal interest.” In other words, the membership of the Old Colony Club, like the citizens of the thirteen colonies, was sharply divided over whether to toast George III or curse him. Among club members loyal to the Crown was Edward Winslow Jr., a descendant of the Pilgrim of the same name. At the outbreak of war in 1776, the younger Winslow fled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after fighting at the Battle of Lexington on the side of the British.
But Loyalists were in the minority in Plymouth. By the time the Old Colony Club disbanded in 1773, most Plymoutheans had joined in support of Bostonians’ protests against the Crown, and they welcomed the erection of a liberty pole in a place of honor in the town square. As Thacher tells it, they condemned “the tyrannical attempts of the British government to enslave our country,” voted to boycott British goods, deplored taxation without their consent, and opposed the British quartering of soldiers in Boston.8 Forefathers Day celebrations resumed in 1774 under the auspices of the town of Plymouth. A century later, in 1875, the Old Colony Club was revived and took up its early tradition once again.
Forefathers Day reached its zenith of popularity during the nineteenth century, when it was marked by public dinners, orations by distinguished public figures, grand balls, and myriad after-dinner toasts to the Pilgrims, Chief Massasoit, George Washington, the republic, and other patriotic subjects.
An English visitor to Plymouth on Forefathers Day 1824 described the celebrations in an anonymous article in a British journal. The festivities began with a “salute of artillery and a peal from the bells,” he wrote. In the church, “a brilliant and venerable assemblage” listened to an anniversary address on “the virtues, disinterestedness and sacrifices of the Pilgrim Fathers.” More than five hundred people partook of a dinner at Pilgrim Hall, where dozens of toasts were offered in honor of the Pilgrims and “the devout thanksgivings of two hundred years ago,” as well as to the memory of George Washington, to the “spirit of our popular elections,” and to that portion of the human race “guilty of a skin not colored like our own.” In the evening there was a “splendid” ball and a supper.9
Another English visitor, writing about Forefathers Day 1838, was struck by American egalitarianism, which was evident at the celebrations. “There was a great mixture . . . of classes,” he observed. “Every person that can save up the requisite sum of three dollars, and who feels no scruples of a religious nature as to joining in such entertainments, makes a point of attending the annual ball.” Nowhere was the egalitarian spirit of the Forefathers Day ball more evident than in the dress of partygoers. Only a dozen or so of the men were attired in “what would be considered a proper ball-dress at home,” the Englishman wrote. As for the ladies, the visitor was too bewitched to pay much attention to what they were wearing. The women of Plymouth were “specimens of feminine beauty hardly to be surpassed, I think, in any country in the globe.”10
In contrast to Thanksgiving, which is a family-centered, homey holiday, Forefathers Day was more masculine, being celebrated in the public sphere in which men circulated. Ambitious politicians made their way to Plymouth to deliver Forefathers Day orations, hoping to catch the public eye. One scholar analogizes the Forefathers Day oration of the nineteenth century to the modern-day, first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary in that it provided an opportunity for the speakers to attract national attention.11
John Quincy Adams, who would become the nation’s sixth president in 1825, delivered the Forefathers Day oration in 1802, when he was thirty-five years old. He celebrated the Pilgrims as early democrats and praised the Mayflower Compact—the civil contract by which they consented to be governed—as having laid the ground for the Constitution and America’s republican form of government.
The best-known Forefathers Day address was given by Daniel Webster, who delivered a stirring oration at the bicentennial in 1820. Two hundred years ago on this day, “the first scene of our history was laid,” he told the crowd.12 He went on to catalogue the Pilgrims’ virtues, which included laying the ground for “more perfect civil liberty” and “a higher degree of religious freedom” than the world had previously known.13 He lauded their respect for private property and the rule of law. He also used the opportunity to denounce the slave trade in powerful images:
I hear the sound of the hammer. I see the smoke of the furnace where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, foul and dark as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.14
