Thanksgiving is one of America’s unique holidays. Over time our celebration has developed into a day dedicated to remembering our bountiful blessings with family over an ample meal of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, green beans pumpkin pie and myriad other sides. There is a common belief that the Pilgrims in Massachusetts held the first Thanksgiving in 1621. However, historians have overlooked an even earlier celebration that took place in Virginia in 1619.

Tradition holds that about 50 Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts invited 90 Wampanoag Indians to celebrate surviving their first winter in New England (half of the original 102 Pilgrim colonists died within a year) and their first successful harvest. The feast included deer, lobsters, oysters, corn, grapes and plums. William Bradford and Edward Winslow attended the event and wrote separate accounts. Winslow wrote:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruits of our labor. 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 we brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor.” [1]

However, the Pilgrim Thanksgiving was not the first in America. In 1619, The Berkeley Company of London received a patent for 8,000 acres of land (25 miles south east of modern Richmond, Virginia) and recruited 35 colonists set sail from England for America aboard the Good Ship Margaret. Arriving in late November in Virginia, the Margaret visited Jamestown briefly before sailing up the James River. On December 4, 1619, settlers landed at the site of their patent. The Virginia Company had issued a list of instructions for the colonists to implement upon arrival. The first instruction required “We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantacon, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” [2] Accordingly, as the colonists gathered on the shore, the Margaret’s Captain John Woodlief knelt and led the colonists in a prayer of thanksgiving for a safe voyage.

According to historical sources, the annual prayer of thanksgiving was repeated for several years thereafter. Thus, the new Virginians celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America two years before the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. So why did the real first Thanksgiving in Virginia fall into obscurity?

In 1622 Opechancanough led the Powhatans in a coordinated attack on every English settlement in Virginia. The Indians killed between a third and a half of the colonial population including at least nine people at Berkeley. At that time Berkeley was on the frontier and deemed unsafe so the remaining settlers abandoned the site and the Thanksgiving celebration ended and was largely forgotten.

Judeo-Christian Thanksgiving celebrations have ancient origins dating back to the Old Testament. The Hebrews developed a tradition, berakah, or “thanks-offering for a successful harvest (Psalm 66) or to commemorate a special event such as one of King David’s victories over the Philistines (2 Samuel 22). Christians adopted a form of barakah through Holy Communion or Eucharist (from the Greek word Eucharistia meaning “thanks giving”) which remains a central rite for both Catholic and Protestant believers. Communion is a reminder and a symbolic homage to Christ for sacrificing His body and blood for all Christians. Americans have developed a unique practice of mixing secular and religious spheres in many ways and Thanksgiving includes both elements.

The Continental Congress passed the first Thanksgiving Proclamation by an American governing body after the victory at Saratoga in 1777. George Washington issued the first official Thanksgiving Proclamation for the new US Government in 1789 stating that Congress had requested that he:

“recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” [3]

Washington went on to state:

“That we may then all unite in rendering unto [God] our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed” [4]

The Proclamation concluded:

“and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions– to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually–to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed . . . To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us–and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.” [5]

Thus, Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation followed a religious theme thanking God for success in the Revolutionary War, in establishing the Constitution and praying for the government to be wise and judicious in overseeing a prosperous nation.

Several subsequent presidents issued thanksgiving proclamations for specific events. From time to time, individual states made similar proclamations as well. Among the American people, informal thanksgiving meals took place following the harvest celebration tradition both before and after the Declaration of Independence.

By the early 19th century, the US had two national holidays, Washington’s Birthday in the spring and the and the Fourth of July in the summer. Sarah Josepha Hale initiated an unrelenting campaign to recognize Thanksgiving as a third national holiday for fall. Beginning in 1827, she wrote books, articles, and petitions calling for a national holiday citing the Pilgrim’s feast of 1621. Hale’s conception of Thanksgiving combined religious and secular traditions as a means of creating a day of unity for all sections of the US which by the 1850s were being torn apart by increasing tensions over slavery. Hale was a committed abolitionist, but hoped a day of unity would serve as a catalyst to finding a way to end slavery peacefully.

Once the Civil War broke out, Hale implored President Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. Lincoln was receptive to the idea and established the last Thursday in November a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1863 to celebrate the victory at Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi. After the Civil War, modern Thanksgiving traditions took root through popular literature such as Jane Austen’s Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims. Since then American culture has grown and reinforced the grand event: family, fellowship, friendship at a cornucopia of turkey and the sides we all love.

I normally keep my personal opinions out of my articles as much as possible. However, I found Sarah Hale’s efforts to create a sense of American unity under nearly impossible circumstances inspiring. So I will offer my own Thanksgiving message.

As we all sit down at our family tables this year, perhaps we can set aside the modern controversies that divide us to celebrate all that for which we have to be thankful. For better or worse, we are all part of the same nation and we share far more commonalities than differences. Our ancestors: those 35 intrepid Englishmen who landed in Virginia in 1619, the Pilgrims and Puritans in the North, the first Africans who arrived 400 years ago and the many others of all races and nationalities who came since were all Americans. They suffered travails, hardships and death to help forge a free nation with many blessings we enjoy today. Let us pray that their sacrifices were not in vain and that we can find common ground.

And of course: GO LIONS!

For a really excellent oral account of the establishment of the Berkeley Plantation settlement, I highly recommend the Virginia History Podcast. This site also offers great entries for other early Virginia History and I highly recommend the site as a whole: https://vahistorypodcast.com/2017/11/17/special-episode-the-first-thanksgiving-virginia-1619/

Footnotes:

[1] Dexter, Henry Martin, (ed.), Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. Boston: Press of Geo. Rand & Avery, 1865, p. 133.

[2] Woodlief, H. Graham, History of the First Thanksgiving. http://www.berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving.html

[3] Washington, George, Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/thanksgiving-proclamation-of-1789/

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Sources:

Blitz, Matt, The First Thanksgiving Took Place in Virginia, Not Massachusetts. The Washingtonian, 11/18/2015. https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/11/18/the-first-thanksgiving-took-place-in-virginia-not-massachusetts/

Dexter, Henry Martin, (ed.), Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. Boston: Press of Geo. Rand & Avery, 1865.

McFarland, Ronald E. “Thanksgiving in Seventeenth-Century Poetry.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 6, no. 4 (1974): 294-306. doi:10.2307/4048200.

Smith, Andrew F. “The First Thanksgiving.” Gastronomica 3, no. 4 (2003): 79-85. doi:10.1525/gfc.2003.3.4.79.

Salam, Maya, Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving is Wrong. New York Times, 11/21/2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/us/thanksgiving-myths-fact-check.html

Washington, George, Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/thanksgiving-proclamation-of-1789/

Woodlief, H. Graham, History of the First Thanksgiving. http://www.berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving.html

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