The other Thanksgiving story

Posted by Marc Hodak on November 22, 2007 under History | Comments are off for this article

The first Thanksgiving story, as they teach it in school:

Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony’s first successful harvest.

The Pilgrims would not have survived at Plimouth without the help of the native Wampanoag people and their leader Massasoit. So it was fitting that they joined the Pilgrim’s feast. Massasoit sent several men to hunt deer as a gift to the English for their feast.

And this entry from Wikipedia:

The early settlers of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts were particularly grateful to Squanto, the Native American and former British slave who taught them how to both catch eel and grow corn and also served as their native interpreter. Without Squanto’s assistance, the settlers might not have survived in the New World.

This story sounds so nice, full of cooperation, success, and good food.

Here’s the Thanksgiving story you might have missed:

The 1621 harvest left no surplus for the colonists. Neither did the 1622 harvest. The colonists were living hand to mouth, selling what they had to the natives in exchange for food and other assistance. Only after 1622 would their harvests yield the kind of plenty that they could share with their native neighbors.

What changed after 1622? The English, of course, gained some experience with their new habitat, picking up valuable lessons from natives like Squanto on how to grow corn and otherwise survive the harsh winters. But something else changed that a social studies student might consider important–the colony’s social structure.

Plymouth was originally organized around a communal division of labor and production; it was share and share alike. So, as one might ask today, “How’d that work for you?” We get a sense from William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation”

The strong… had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors everything else, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. Upon the point all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought themselves in the like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them.

Bradford clearly felt that this was not a failing of his people, but of the system under which they labored.

Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

“Another course” would be private property.

At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves …

This leap of faith yielded unequivocal results:

They had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression…By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the faces of things were changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.

I know that most students don’t clamor for a more complete set of facts about historical events, but who could object to the story of Thanksgiving also being a tale about the ultimate source of their (and our) plenty? Oh. Yea.