of the virtue of gratitude. They gave thanks in their morning prayers and again in the grace they said before and after every meal, and once more in their evening devotions. As they went about their work, the Pilgrims would sing psalms, hymns of praise and thanksgiving. The congregation sang psalms, too, in their Sunday worship services. The music and text they followed came from the Ainsworth Psalter, a book of psalms published in Holland in 1612 and one of the volumes they brought with them on the Mayflower. In some sense, the Pilgrims viewed every day as a thanksgiving day, certainly including the days of the 1621 feast that has come to be known as the First Thanksgiving.
There is no written record of prayers spoken by the Pilgrims on that occasion, or any other day. This is not surprising. The Pilgrims did not believe in reciting set prayers, which they viewed as forced and inauthentic, and they rejected the Church of England’s magisterial Book of Common Prayer, which contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language. John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor when they resided in England and Holland, warned of “counterfeit” prayers. He wrote: “We may say prayers, and sing prayers and read prayers, and hear prayers, and yet not pray.”6 Set prayers were considered a barrier between the individual and God. Rather, the Pilgrims practiced extemporaneous, individual prayer. Each person was responsible for communicating directly with the Almighty, using the words of his choice.
As we learn from Bradford’s journal, Winslow’s letter, and other documents of the day, the Pilgrims had numerous reasons to give thanks that autumn.
The most important was the chance to practice their religion freely. This was the reason they had uprooted themselves from their refuge in Holland and risked everything to settle in the wilderness of North America.
The Pilgrims were Puritans, or English Protestant reformers who followed the teachings of John Calvin. The name “Puritan” derived from their aim to “purify” the Church of England, which they believed clung too closely to its Roman Catholic roots. While some Puritans were willing to work for reform within the Church of England, others took a more radical view. They broke away and established their own tiny congregation in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, thus coming to be called Separatists. When the Crown tried to have them arrested and jailed for refusing to take part in Church of England rituals, the congregation fled in 1608 to Holland, which permitted the free practice of religion. The Separatists spent more than a decade in the Dutch city of Leiden. They were allowed to worship freely, but they struggled to make a living and they worried that their children were growing up more Dutch than English. So they pulled up stakes again and crossed the ocean to the New World.
At the time of the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims had a second reason to rejoice: their survival. They gave thanks for having made it through the previous winter, when cold, famine, and disease killed half of their original number. The fifty-three surviving Pilgrims included twenty-two men, four women, five teenage girls, nine teenage boys, and thirteen small children and infants.7
Peace with their Wampanoag neighbors was a third reason for the Pilgrims to give thanks. Their friendship with the Wampanoag people was a welcome and unexpected development. They had negotiated a peace treaty with Massasoit, the sachem, or chief, of the tribal confederation of Indians who inhabited coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island. When Massasoit and his men showed up at the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims welcomed them and entertained them for three days.
In sheer numbers, Massasoit and his men overwhelmed the Pilgrims at the celebration. In his letter to his unnamed friend in London, Winslow is specific about the number of Indians who joined them for their feast. Massasoit brought with him ninety men, he writes. That number—nearly double the size of the Pilgrim band—speaks volumes about the peaceful ties between the two peoples. If they had been so minded, the Wampanoag warriors might have overpowered the English easily enough. The Pilgrims had the advantage of possessing guns, but they had not had time to build a fort or other defenses, and the number of fighting-age men was a mere twenty-two. The settlers had taken pains earlier that year, during the time of the great sickness, to ensure that their Indian neighbors did not find out how low their numbers had dwindled, burying their dead at night. Now they were taking the risk of exposing their entire community in full view of Massasoit and his men.
The Pilgrims were on their guard—Winslow records that they “exercised their arms,” presumably in a display of power as well as for entertainment. But they sat down together with the Wampanoag as friends, and the friendship would endure for fifty years.
The Pilgrim leaders recognized the debt they owed the Wampanoag tribal confederation—which was a fourth reason to give thanks. Without the practical assistance of the Wampanoag, the Pilgrims’ first harvest in the New World almost certainly would have failed. Tisquantum, the Patuxet Indian whom the English dubbed Squanto, was indispensable. He taught them how to plant corn using fish as fertilizer, and he directed them to the best hunting grounds and fishing spots. Bradford praised Squanto as “a special instrument sent of God.”8
It was two years later, in 1623, that the Pilgrims held their first official “day of thanksgiving” as they understood the concept. The occasion was a rainfall that saved their harvest and their lives. If the harvest had failed, famine was sure to follow and the settlement of Plymouth might not have survived.
A drought began in the third week of May, just after planting—the worst possible timing. The Pilgrims’ winter food stores were depleted and their diet depended heavily on their luck at fishing. “God fed them out of the sea for the most part,” Bradford writes. A lobster, some fish, a drink of spring water—that was a typical meal. In the middle of July, as the corn began to shrivel and the ground was “parched like withered hay,” Bradford ordered a day of fasting “to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer.”
The day of the fast dawned hot, with clear, cloudless skies. There was no sign of rain. Then, toward evening, clouds formed, the sky grew overcast, and it began to rain. The rain fell “with such sweet and gentle showers as gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God,” Bradford records. The rain then started to fall heavily, in such abundance “that the earth was thoroughly wet and soaked.” The corn and other crops revived. It was “wonderful to see,” and the Indians were “astonished.” Bradford promptly called a day of thanksgiving.9
All the New England colonies followed the custom of designating days of public thanksgiving in response to specific events. The first of these designated days in the Massachusetts Bay Colony occurred in July 1630 after the colonists’ safe arrival. The second took place in February 1631, when a ship from England that had been believed to be lost at sea arrived in Boston Harbor bringing badly needed supplies for the hungry colonists.
The early Dutch settlers in what is today New York City also marked days of thanksgiving. One of the earliest recorded in New Netherland occurred in 1644, after Dutch troops launched a moonlight raid on an Indian village near Stamford, Connecticut. The bloody Dutch-Indian skirmishes continued over the next year, until the warring sides finally concluded a peace treaty. That prompted another call for a day of thanksgiving, on the sixth of September 1645. This proclamation specified that church services be held in the morning so that “God Almighty may be specially thanked, praised, and blessed.”10
Dutch days of thanksgiving were less solemn than New England ones. In New Amsterdam, a more mercantile environment than agricultural New England, work and amusements usually were forbidden only during the hours of the church services, not all day long. When afternoon or evening arrived, the Dutch were free to feast, play games, and enjoy military displays.11
In 1654, the Dutch issued a proclamation for a day of thanksgiving to celebrate a peace treaty
