Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick

      Forefathers Day elevated the Pilgrims to the national consciousness and helped to secure their place in American history and, eventually, their association with Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims and their story were widely known by the time the nineteenth century began—and Webster’s high-publicity bicentennial speech gave them a further boost.

      It took a while longer, however, for this historical thread to be woven into the Thanksgiving story. For that we must look to the discovery of an obscure footnote in a scholarly volume that was published in 1841. James W. Baker calls it the “missing link” between the First Thanksgiving of 1621 and the Thanksgiving holiday that Americans celebrate today. Baker’s historical detective work uncovered a believeit-or-not fact about the First Thanksgiving: Before the 1840s, no published document about the Pilgrims made reference to a thanksgiving or a harvest festival in 1621.¹⁵

      The missing-link footnote appeared in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, a collection of original documents from the early years of Plymouth Colony. Among the entries was a copy of Edward Winslow’s 1621 letter in which he described the harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Winslow’s letter had originally been published in London in 1622, in a booklet titled Mourt’s Relation. But the booklet soon disappeared from circulation, and while its contents had been summarized in subsequent publications, the passage on the First Thanksgiving was not mentioned. In 1820, a copy of Mourt’s Relation was discovered in Philadelphia, and in 1841, Alexander Young included Winslow’s letter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was the first time since its original publication in 1622 that the complete text of the letter—with the description of the 1621 feast—was published. Young added a footnote, which read: “This was the First Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England. On this occasion they no doubt feasted on the wild turkey as well as venison.”¹⁶

      The only other eyewitness account of the First Thanksgiving, found in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, made a similar journey before being rediscovered in 1855. After Bradford’s death in 1657, the manuscript passed to his family, among them his nephew Nathaniel Morton, who used it as the basis for his influential history of Plymouth. Morton also copied portions into town records. Early in the eighteenth century, the manuscript found its way to Thomas Prince, who referred to it in his 1738 history of New England. Neither Morton nor Prince, however, mentioned Bradford’s account of the First Thanksgiving. After Prince’s death, the manuscript was kept in a library in the steeple of the Old South Meeting House in Boston, where it disappeared during the Revolutionary War when British troops occupied the church. The trail then went cold for nearly a century until, in the 1850s, it turned up in the library of the bishop of London—presumably having been carried to England by British soldiers who had looted the Meeting House during the war. When the complete text of Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation was finally published in 1855, it included the passage describing what came to be considered the original Thanksgiving celebration. It was the first time that passage appeared in print.¹⁷

      Baker says that Alexander Young’s 1841 identification of the 1621 event as the “First Thanksgiving” was slow to gain traction with the public. The Thanksgiving holiday was already well established, Baker notes, and had “developed a substantial historical tradition quite independent of the Pilgrims.”¹⁸

      Still, by the 1860s, popular culture had enthusiastically adopted the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving story, which was being retold in painting and song and literature. The artistic renderings sometimes contained more fiction than fact, but the basic story came through loud and strong, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the Pilgrims’ place in Thanksgiving was here to stay. The poets and the painters and the novelists may not have gotten all of the details right, but the essence of the story of the First Thanksgiving was right on target.