time in Jamestown, when 80 percent of the colonists died.
After the new settlers rowed ashore, Captain Woodlief commanded them to kneel, and he led them in a prayer of thanksgiving for their safe arrival. This was done in accordance with the charter that had been issued by their sponsors in England. The instruction to hold such a service upon their arrival in Virginia was the first of ten orders listed in a letter that the Berkeley Company had handed to Captain Woodlief prior to the settlers’ departure from England. In addition to the instruction that the settlers give thanks on the day of their arrival, the letter further ordered them to make the date of their arrival an annual day of thanksgiving:
We ordain that the day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia should be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.10
The Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was a strictly religious affair, in keeping with other instructions the settlers received from their sponsor: Follow the rites of the Church of England, use the Book of Common Prayer, and attend daily prayers or forfeit supper. No Native Americans were present at the service, and there is no record of the settlers partaking in a festive meal.
As Virginians like to point out, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving service in 1619 was the first “official” Thanksgiving in the sense that December 4 became the date of an annual observance. The settlers carried on the tradition for two more years, but Berkeley Hundred was destroyed on March 22, 1622, in a coordinated attack by the Powhatan Indians on English settlements in Virginia. Many settlers died in the attack, including a large number at Berkeley Hundred. Soon afterward, the settlement was abandoned and the survivors returned to England.
The story of Virginia’s First Thanksgiving was lost to history for more than three hundred years. It was finally rediscovered in 1931 when Dr. Lyon Tyler, a retired president of William and Mary College and son of President John Tyler, was researching a book on early Virginia history at the New York Public Library. There he happened upon the Nibley Papers, a cache of documents that chronicled the Margaret’s voyage to Virginia and recorded the establishment, settlement, and management of the Berkeley Hundred. The Nibley Papers included the original instructions to Captain Woodlief to mark an annual day of thanksgiving. That “one little fact” made the rediscovery of the Nibley Papers “conspicuous in American history,” Tyler concluded. It proved, he crowed, that the Virginia Thanksgiving of 1619 anticipated the one in Plymouth by two years.11
Dr. Tyler’s discovery of the Nibley Papers sparked a campaign to revive the Virginia Thanksgiving, which had last been celebrated in 1621. A Virginia state senator, John J. Wicker Jr., took up the cause in the late 1950s. He traveled to Boston, where he met with the governor of Massachusetts in an effort to persuade him that Virginia was the site of the true First Thanksgiving. (No luck on that score—no surprise.) Wicker’s enthusiasm for his cause drove him to don the garb of a seventeenth-century English settler and go on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to plead the case for Virginia to replace Plymouth as the home of the First Thanksgiving. In 1958, three hundred thirty-seven years after the third annual Thanksgiving Day at Berkeley Plantation, Virginians revived the tradition begun by the original settlers there and held a “Virginia Thanksgiving Festival.” (The Virginia Thanksgiving Festival is now an annual event, celebrated on the first Sunday of November.)
Four years later, in November 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation that, to most readers, would have sounded completely routine. It began:
Over three centuries ago in Plymouth, on Massachusetts Bay, the Pilgrims established the custom of gathering together each year to express their gratitude to God for the preservation of their community and for the harvests their labors brought forth in the new land. Joining with their neighbors, they shared together and worshipped together in a common giving of thanks.
Plymouth, Pilgrims, harvests, gratitude to God—all in keeping with the long string of presidential Thanksgiving proclamations. It contained nothing out of the ordinary. But John Wicker saw something wrong.
The Virginia state senator immediately shot off a telegram to Kennedy. “Your Presidential Proclamation erroneously credits Massachusetts Pilgrims with America’s First Thanksgiving observances,” he complained. “America’s First Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in Virginia in 1619, more than a year before the Pilgrims ever landed and nearly two years before the Massachusetts Thanksgiving.” He concluded: “Please issue an appropriate correction.”
Wicker received his reply three weeks later in the form of an apologetic letter from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the eminent historian who was then a special assistant to the president. “You are quite right,” Schlesinger informed Wicker, “and I can only plead an unconquerable New England bias on the part of the White House staff.” He promised that the error would not be repeated. The Richmond New Leader trumpeted Schlesinger’s apology with the headline: “President Concedes: Virginia Receives Thanksgiving Credit.”12
True to his word, Schlesinger made sure that JFK did not slight Virginia the following year. On November 5, 1963—seventeen days before his assassination—Kennedy issued a Thanksgiving proclamation, which began: “Over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving.” Previous presidents had not seen fit to mention Virginia’s place in the history of Thanksgiving. Virginians were pleased to note that their state was named first, followed by the president’s home state of Massachusetts.
During a visit to Berkeley Plantation in 2007, President George W. Bush gave a tip of the hat to its claim on the First Thanksgiving: “The good folks here say that the founders of Berkeley held their celebration before the Pilgrims had even left port,” Bush told the crowd. “As you can imagine, this version of events is not very popular up north.”13
In addition to San Elizario, St. Augustine, and Berkeley Plantation, there are several other claimants to the title of First Thanksgiving.
Palo Duro Canyon, Texas. On May 29, 1541, a large troop of Spanish explorers held a ceremony of thanksgiving in the panhandle of Texas, probably at Palo Duro Canyon, not far from the present-day city of Amarillo. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado had led an army of one thousand five hundred men north from Mexico far up into what is now Texas. They were searching for gold and eventually traveled all the way to Kansas in their quest.
At Palo Duro Canyon, the explorers stopped to give thanks to God. A Franciscan missionary celebrated a thanksgiving Mass, while local people looked on in amazement, according to legend. The priest was Juan de Padilla, who was later killed by Indians, thus becoming one of the first Christian martyrs in the United States.
Fort Caroline, Florida. Next up are French Protestants. On June 30, 1564, a group of Huguenots celebrated a thanksgiving in their new settlement at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River, near what is now Jacksonville. Like the Pilgrims, they were seeking religious freedom when they fled their homes in Roman Catholic France to establish a colony in the New World. Also like the Pilgrims, they established friendly relations with the local inhabitants, the Timucua Indians.
The Huguenot leader, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, wrote an account of the 1564 Thanksgiving in Florida:
I commanded a trumpet to be sounded, that, being assembled, we might give God thanks for our favorable and safe arrival. Then we sang a hymn of thanksgiving unto God, beseeching him of His grace to continue his accustomed goodness towards us, his poor servants, and aid us in all enterprises that might turn to His glory and the advancement of our King.
The French would have consumed most of their food
