Posted by
Steve on Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:19:26 AM
Since this is Thanksgiving week, it is appropriate to write an article about Thanksgiving. It started after the Pilgrims survived their first full year living on Cape Cod at Plymouth. Of the 202 people that left England on the Mayflower, only 53 were left alive. Fortunately for me, two of them were my ancestors (Richard Warren and Stephen Hopkins). Before they left the Mayflower, they wrote the Mayflower Compact. It was basically a contract between the Pilgrims and God.
When the Pilgrims first started Plymouth, they tried a new system of government where all worked and put into a common pot. Then, all drew out of the common pot all they needed to survive. It did not take long for some to realize that if they put in a little less they could still benefit. Those that worked the hardest felt slighted and started working less. By the time of the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims were near starvation because of idleness. That winter they decided to keep the common lands near Plymouth and give everyone private lands further out.
It did not take long before these private lands were producing far more than the common land. Finally they realized that the common land policy was a failure and distributed the common land to everyone. We call this common land policy communism today. It had no real name back then. Some politicians today are trying to get us to go back to the common land policy that failed the Pilgrims and almost caused their colony to fail. Private ownership and capitalism caused the Plymouth colony to thrive. Plymouth encouraged others to come to New England and the rest is history.
Back to that first Thanksgiving feast, most of the food for the feast was supplied by the Native Americans who came. Today, we eat Turkey, mashed potatoes, bread, vegetables, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce. Then, they ate venison, Turkey, other small birds, fish, corn, and possibly cranberries.
The purpose of the Thanksgiving feast was to thank God for allowing the 53 members of the Plymouth Colony to survive to that point and for the harvest they had just completed. They invited their neighbors in to enjoy the feast. Fortunately for them, the neighbors brought plenty of food to fill out the menu. At that time the relations between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans was good. A generation later the two sides were fighting and killing each other. But at this time, there was no animosity between the two groups. Each side saw the benefit of having the other side as allies. They had cooperated in defending the colony and the tribe from attack by other tribes. They respected each other for what they could do in battle. There was honor between the two because each kept their word. It took another generation and new colonists who did not understand the hardships endured by the Pilgrims to undo the good relations that had been established at this time.
The paintings we see of the First Thanksgiving are always idealized. We see noble savages and clean, well-fed Pilgrims. Some of that may be true, but I am sure that most of us would be appalled by the squalor that existed during that first feast. In fact, the unsanitary conditions that existed would probably make most us not partake in the meal. Most of the paintings were done a hundred or more years after the First Thanksgiving and so could only imagine what the true conditions were like. So, we get to see the Pilgrims through the eyes of 18th and 19th century painters who were part of their time, not the Pilgrims time.