Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick
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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 supplies during their long voyage across the Atlantic, so it is possible that the meal that followed the Mass was provided largely by the Timucua. The Timucua were excellent hunters, according to the Jacksonville Historical Society, and they also maintained large granaries in which they stored food they had grown, such as corn, beans, and squash. Their diet was rich in seafood, including oysters, shrimp, and mullet, along with the occasional alligator, which they preferred to eat smoked.14
The year after the Huguenots gave thanks in Florida, their colony was wiped out by Spanish raiders sent by Philip II. These were the same men, led by General Menéndez, who celebrated a thanksgiving upon their arrival in Florida in 1565. The king had issued orders to “hang and burn the Lutherans,” the word “Lutheran” being a catchall Spanish term for Protestants. Menéndez obliged.
Popham Colony, Maine. New England has just one rival to Plymouth for the title of First Thanksgiving. That event took place in 1607, at an English settlement founded where the Kennebec River meets the Atlantic Ocean—about twenty-five miles northeast of what is now the city of Portland. Arriving there in late summer, the Popham Colony settlers built Fort St. George and joined with local Abenaki Indians that autumn for a prayer meeting and feast of local seafood.
The colony of about one hundred Englishmen was named after its main financial backer, Sir John Popham, and his nephew, Captain George Popham, who served as the colony’s president. Half the settlers returned to England in December when it became clear that their winter provisions were inadequate. The others followed suit the next year. No one knows why the remaining colonists gave up and went home. Perhaps they didn’t want to face another harsh New England winter, or maybe relations with the Indians had soured. There also appears to have been a leadership vacuum after George Popham died in February 1608, and then, several months later, his successor decided to return to England upon learning that he had inherited an estate.
Popham Colony has been called the early American settlement that history forgot. Archeologists found the remnants of the settlement, including Fort St. George, only in 1994, working from a map that had been discovered in a library in Madrid in 1888.15
Jamestown, Virginia. In June 1610, the starving colonists of Jamestown held a Thanksgiving prayer service to give thanks for the arrival of an English supply ship carrying desperately needed food. The winter of 1609–1610 had been so severe that most of the colonists died. Fewer than one hundred of the five hundred original colonists survived.
There is one more thanksgiving celebrated by Europeans in the New World that bears mention as one of the earliest recorded in North America. It happened in Canada. The year was 1578, during the third voyage of Martin Frobisher, an English explorer who was seeking the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. The location of the event was just off the southeast corner of Baffin Island, now part of the province of Nunavut, in the area that would be named Frobisher Bay.
It was summer, but the subarctic weather was fierce, and Frobisher’s fleet of fifteen ships had been scattered. On July 31, 1578, after safely sailing past “a great island of ice” at the entrance to the harbor, Frobisher encountered two ships that he feared had been lost. The men “greatly rejoiced” at their “happy meeting.” Then they “highly praised God” and, falling to their knees, “gave Him due, humble and hearty thanks.” The minister traveling with them “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankful to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places” and “willed them to enjoy and accept thankfully whatsoever adventure his divine Providence should appoint.”16
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