The Thanksgiving tradition in the United States began in the 1620s with the English settlers of Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims’ practice of observing a day of thanksgiving was adopted by the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1670s, and the Continental Congress followed suit with declarations of days of thanksgiving during the Revolutionary War. Official declarations occurred frequently throughout the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency in the 1930s that Thanksgiving became a perpetual national holiday in the United States. With the official status of Thanksgiving secured, the folk tradition of the Thanksgiving celebration by American families continued to grow and develop, taking on its familiar, contemporary form.
The popular account of the First Thanksgiving is partly myth, and came about as a result of Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, published in 1841. Young reprinted texts from the earliest period of settlement in Plymouth Colony, including “Mourt’s Relation,” written in 1621, and William Bradford’s “Of Plimouth Plantation,” written between 1630 and 1651. In “Mourt’s Relation,” the author depicts an event in the fall of 1621 in which the English settlers and around ninety native Wampanoag, led by tribal chief Massasoit, gathered and feasted on a harvest of Indian corn and wild game. This celebration lasted for several days and included the firing of guns and “other recreations.”
Bradford’s “Of Plimouth Plantation” mentions this event in passing, but then details another “day of thanksgiving” in 1623, not so much a harvest festival as a solemn religious observance to thank God for special deliverance from starvation. In 1621, Bradford became governor of Plymouth Colony when its first governor, John Carver, died while working in his field within a year of the Pilgrim’s landing. In the summer of 1623, heat and drought threatened to destroy the settlers’ crops and put the whole colonial enterprise at risk. Bradford recorded in his “History” that the settlers set apart a “solemne day of humiliation to seek the Lord by humble and fervente prayer,” to which God answered with days and weeks of rain, and eventually a bountiful harvest. Bradford was careful to note that the Indians “that lived amongst them” were astonished and impressed with this act of divine providence, and the Pilgrims “sett aparte a day of thanksgiving” to express their gratitude to God (Bradford 1630–1648, 152–153).
These two accounts refer to two different events in Plymouth Colony’s early history, and yet Young’s reprint of these texts encouraged popular writers in the nineteenth century to conflate these two events. This publication came at a time when New England had begun to recover from a regional identity crisis. New Englanders had taken a leading role in the American Revolution and the creation of the American republic, but then gradually lost influence over the direction of national politics beginning with the election of Virginian Thomas Jefferson to the presidency. Regional opposition to Jefferson’s policies and the War of 1812 sparked the Hartford Convention, in which delegates from New England states met together to consider seceding from the Union.
This sense of political and cultural alienation led New England writers to search their own regional past to assert the New England origins of the United States. The creation of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1791) and the American Antiquarian Society (1812) provided key institutional support for this effort. Editors and publishers sold compilations of early writings, of which Young’s Chronicles was a prominent example. New England experienced a cultural renaissance that included well-known writers like Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and New Englanders took leadership roles in the ferment for social and cultural reform, including the public school movement, women’s suffrage, and abolition. This emphasis on New England’s national intellectual leadership energized New England myths regarding the origins of American cultural traditions, and the myth of the First Thanksgiving thereby gained footing.
The sectional crisis of the 1850s and the Civil War that followed served as another catalyst for the Thanksgiving tradition in the United States. Presidents had called for days of thanksgiving throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, but typically these followed major victories in battle or the conclusions of major national crises. None bore any relation to the traditional end-of-harvest celebration depicted in “Mourt’s Relation.” In the 1850s, American religious institutions and political parties divided along sectional lines and in 1861, a bloody war began pitting rival armies of American citizens. Both governments, Union and Confederate, called for days of thanksgiving following battlefield victories, and then in 1863, Sarah Hale published another in a long series of appeals in Godey’s Lady’s Book calling for the Lincoln administration to establish a permanent national Thanksgiving observance.
In her appeal, Sarah Hale chose language that demonstrates the strength of the Thanksgiving tradition in the United States, as well as the growing tendency to conflate the customary harvest festival with the solemn religious observance of a day of thanksgiving. She argued: “That the American People shall have a national Thanksgiving Festival after the ingathering of their harvests is now a settled matter.” Then, she concluded, “Is it not, therefore, peculiarly appropriate that ‘we the People of the United States,’ who acknowledge only the Supreme Ruler of the Universe as our Sovereign, should pay this yearly tribute of gratitude and thanks in national unanimity?” (Hale 1863). President Lincoln shared her desire for national observances and issued thanksgiving proclamations in April 1862, and then again in October 1863. Lincoln’s last proclamation created a precedent of setting the last Thursday of November as the date of the annual thanksgiving observance, which was followed thereafter by subsequent presidents until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proclamation moved the date to one week earlier.
FDR’s move reflected enormous changes in American social and economic life in the early twentieth century. Migration from farm to city, the growth of a professional middle class, and the rise of large-scale retailing and advertising transformed the United States into a modern consumer society by the 1920s. FDR’s decision to move the national day of Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November was a response to retailers who wanted to widen the gift-buying window between Thanksgiving and Christmas. By the early twentieth century, the tradition of linking Thanksgiving to Christmas in a general “holiday season” centered on consumer spending had already been established by the 1930s. Although some regions of the United States celebrated Thanksgiving on the traditional day, other areas followed the president’s lead and celebrated Thanksgiving a week earlier, which FDR’s critics referred to as “Franksgiving.” FDR’s decision to stretch the holiday season was affirmed by Congress on December 26, 1941, when it enacted a law declaring Thanksgiving to occur on every fourth Thursday in November.
The famous painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) chose to represent FDR’s “freedom from want” as a Thanksgiving dinner around the family table, which is perhaps the most enduring image of the modern Thanksgiving observance. The early American tradition of a community harvest festival and corporate religious observance had changed, by the mid-twentieth century, into a custom practiced within the intimate confines of the family home. In the present day, family gatherings feature a turkey dinner with potatoes, squash, beets, and pumpkin pie, followed by a few hours of board games and television viewing. If anything, the format of contemporary family observances strengthened the growing association of Thanksgiving with consumerism, with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on television announcing the start of the holiday shopping season, hours of commercials for holiday specials, and early “Black Friday” shopping excursions the day after Thanksgiving to take advantage of retail promotions. Today, it’s understood and practiced as the opening event of a weeks-long holiday season that continues through Christmas into New Year’s Day.
Squanto (d. 1622)
Inextricably bound up with the Thanksgiving legendary mythos in the American consciousness is Squanto, the Wampanoag who famously taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn with fish, thus ensuring a bountiful harvest. A perennial part of the Thanksgiving pageants of generations of American school children, Squanto represents the traditional “positive” Indian stereotype, the epitome of the “noble savage” archetype that is the reverse side of the coin from the other common, negative stereotype of Native Americans in the collective imagination, that of the ruthless, subhuman savage. Kidnapped and sold into slavery by Englishmen, Squanto returned to his native land to find his tribe decimated by disease. The fact that Squanto himself died of smallpox while acting as an interpreter for the Pilgrims helps to highlight the selfless sacrifice motif associated with the stereotype his figure manifests in the popular narrative of his life, while his fate also underscores the harsh realities of first contact with Europeans among Native Americans.
C. Fee
Jeffrey B. Webb
See also Founding Myths
Further Reading
Baker, James W. 2009. Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press.
Bradford, William. 1630–1648. Of Plimouth Plantation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Colman, Penny. 2008. Thanksgiving: The True Story. New York: Henry Holt.
Hale, Sarah. 1863. “Shall Thanksgiving Day Be an American National Festival?” Godey’s Lady’s Book.
Hillstrom, Laurie Collier. 2011. Thanksgiving: The American Holiday. Chicago: KWS.
Thanksgiving—Primary Document
“Mourt’s Relation” and the First Thanksgiving (1621)
The following excerpt from “Mourt’s Relation” describes a feast in late 1621 that brought the English Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony together with members of the local Wampanoag tribe. Historians believe the account was written by colonial leaders Edward Winslow and William Bradford and published in London in 1622 by George Morton (the origin of the title “Mourt’s Relation”). The event recorded in this document is sometimes associated with another, more decidedly religious “day of thanksgiving” in 1623, which has been the source of the modern myth of the First Thanksgiving. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.
Loving, and old Friend,
Although I received no letter from you by this ship, yet forasmuch as I know you expect the performance of my promise, which was, to write unto you truly and faithfully of all things, I have therefore at this time sent unto you accordingly. Referring you for further satisfaction to our more large relations.
You shall understand, that in this little time, that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us; very loving and ready to pleasure us; we often go to them, and they come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them, the occasions and relations whereof you shall understand by our general and more full declaration of such things as are worth the noting, yea, it has pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us, so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end. Yea, an Isle at sea, which we never saw, hath also, together with the former, yielded willingly to be under the protection, and subjects to our sovereign lord King James, so that there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly, neither would have been but for us; and we for our parts walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just. The men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles.
For the temper of the air, here it agreeth well with that in England, and if there be any difference at all, this is somewhat hotter in summer, some think it to be colder in winter, but I cannot out of experience so say; the air is very clear and not foggy, as hath been reported. I never in my life remember a more seasonable year than we have here enjoyed; and if we have once but kine [cows], horses, and sheep, I make no question but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels and othus [?] at our doors: oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will; all the spring-time the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs: here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson: abundance of roses, white, red, and damask; single, but very sweet indeed. The country wanteth only industrious men to employ, for it would grieve your hearts (if as I) you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited, and withal, to consider those parts of the world wherein you live to be even greatly burdened with abundance of people. These things I thought good to let you understand, being the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of, and that you might on our behalf give God thanks who hath dealt so favorably with us.
Source: Winslow, Edward and William Bradford. Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. London: George Morton, 1622; Boston: J. K. Wiggin, 1865.