The other first Thanksgiving
Lincoln intended the holiday as a healing respite from America's civil war
More or less everyone is familiar with the mythology surrounding “the first Thanksgiving”, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation celebrated their first successful harvest in the New World. The event was attended by about 90 Wampanoag Indians, who weren’t initially invited (awkward) but turned up midway through and were asked to join. The colonists and the natives feasted together and the event came to symbolize a supposed harmony between the two. At other times, local Indians had helped the Pilgrims survive, creating the myth of a shared enterprise and friendship.
Of course, in reality things were a lot more complicated. Most of the Indians in the area of Plymouth had died in epidemics after being exposed to diseases from the Old World. Far from acting out of the kindness of his heart, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe, which had itself been devastated by disease, was trying to establish an alliance with the Pilgrims against his rivals, the Narragansett. The tribe came to deeply regret helping the Pilgrims after they were slowly killed and driven from their land by white settlers. Today, many Wampanoag mark November 24th as a day of mourning.
This tortured history has made the first Thanksgiving a controversial and unfortunate piece of American national identity. The Pilgrim feast was not even actually the first American Thanksgiving - a settler community known as the Berkeley Hundred in Virginia created a similar annual celebration two years earlier. But they were wiped out in 1622 in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, which killed a third of Virginia’s colonists in a single day and eventually nearly wiped out the Virginia colony entirely. Still, not that long ago they were also remembered - in 1963, shortly before his death, President Kennedy remembered how “over three centuries ago, our forefathers in Virginia and Massachusetts, far from home, in a lonely wilderness set aside a time of Thanksgiving.”
But Thanksgiving has another starting point, one which I always like to remember on this day. This beginning is less ambiguous, less controversial, less laden with guilt. It came in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln first began the modern tradition of proclaiming Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Prior to this, Thanksgiving had been observed sporadically and at different times in different states. The country was divided in more fundamental ways still, ravaged by a bloody civil war, but the Union triumph at Gettysburg several months earlier had provided a glimmer of hope. Henceforth, Robert E. Lee’s armies would be on the defensive. And in January of that year, the Emancipation Proclamation had highlighted the moral stakes of a war which was no longer just about preserving the Union but also about making it more perfect.
In this atmosphere, Lincoln saw Thanksgiving as a moment of respite, and as an opportunity to provide the sort of spiritual rebirth which the American nation sorely needed if it was ever to become whole again, if it was ever to be cleansed of the sin of slavery. Without even mentioning the Pilgrims, or feasting, or the Wampanoag, Lincoln instead proposed Thanksgiving as a day to celebrate the good things in life: peace, prosperity, and good relations with our neighbors. At a time when America is mired in another period of deep division - one which has even been likened to an incipient civil war - his proclamation on that day is still worth reading:
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
I don’t believe in the Providence of God (though my reader might). But I do believe that there is much to be thankful for, and that focusing on it more often can help us to heal the wounds left by everything else. So happy Thanksgiving - I’ll be raising a glass to Abe.