Thanksgiving in American History - Part 1
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Our Thanksgiving holiday has its origin in the Puritan Thanksgivings of colonial New England. Both the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Boston Puritans were strict Calvinist protestants who rejected the religious calendar of holidays that the English people inherited from the Middle Ages. They believed that Christmas, Easter and the Saints' days were not part of a true Christian church, but man-made inventions which should be discarded. Instead, they observed only the three religious holidays for which they could find New Testament justification; the Sunday Sabbath, Days of Fasting and Humiliation and Days of Thanksgiving and Praise.
Re-creating Your Own Pilgrim Thanksgiving Worship Service
The Fast Day and the Thanksgiving Day holidays were essentially two sides of the same coin. Thanksgivings marked favorable ("mercies"), and Fast Days unfavorable ("judgements") circumstances in community life. They were declared in response to God's Providence, as the faithful believed that God's pleasure or displeasure with his people was signaled by worldly events. Both were scheduled on this contingent basis and were never assigned fixed positions in the calendar. However, Fast Days more often occurred in the spring (when there was nothing much to eat anyway), and Thanksgivings were usually declared after the harvest in the autumn. Thanksgivings or Fast Days could be declared at any time by individual churches, towns or the colonial governments. There could be more than one in a single year or none at all. Unlike the Catholic or Anglican Thanksgivings, they were never on Sunday to avoid conflict with the Sabbath. They usually fell on the weekday regularly set aside as "Lecture Day," which was Wednesday in Connecticut and Thursday in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Lecture Day was a mid-week church meeting (often coinciding with the market day) when topical sermons were enjoyed by the colonists.
Despite a number of claims for a chronological "First Thanksgiving" from other parts of the country such as Virginia, Florida and Texas, the holiday we know today evolved directly from this New England tradition. Strictly speaking, there never was a "First Thanksgiving" in the sense of a particular celebration that initiated the regular observance of the holiday we know today. The famous 1621 Pilgrim event, which was transformed into an archetypal First Thanksgiving in the late nineteenth century, was in fact not a true Thanksgiving at all. It was rather a secular harvest celebration which as far as we know was never repeated. The event had been entirely forgotten until a reference to it was rediscovered in the 1820s. The first real Calvinist Thanksgiving in New England was celebrated in Plymouth Colony, but it was during the summer of 1623 when the colonists declared a Thanksgiving holiday after their crops were saved by a providential shower.
When things were going well, or some special dispensation occurred such as the arrival of a crucial supply ship, a successful harvest or victory in war, New Englanders declared a day of Thanksgiving. Everyone gathered at the meetinghouse where they gave thanks to God for their blessings, and then went home to a celebratory dinner which might involve just the family, or be a community event including their friends and neighbors, as well. If things were going badly—there was not enough food to eat, the Native Americans showed signs of resistance, the crops were failing or disease caused a number of unexplained deaths—then a day of Fasting and Humiliation was called for. Again everyone went to church to ask God for His forgiveness and guidance. The people were reminded of their moral and religious responsibilities, and urged to control not only their own sinfulness but also that of other people in the community to avert God's displeasure. There was no big dinner to follow, although a modest meal could be taken in the evening.
The Puritans disputed whether only the unique or impressive acts of Providence could be acknowledged with Thanksgivings, or should the "generals," -- God's continuing care for His people in providing them with the necessities of life, be celebrated as well. While thanks were given on a regular basis at Sabbath services and in family prayers and graces, many people thought it suitable that the community as a whole set some time aside to thank God for these mundane considerations. It was in this spirit that the annually occurring autumn Thanksgiving evolved. Once the harvest was over and the year drawing to a close, the need to bring the community together in some sort of celebratory recognition of the year's blessings became crucial. In England or the other colonies, the Christmas holidays provided this important social function. In New England, where Christmas had briefly been illegal and not generally celebrated until the mid-nineteenth century, the annual autumn Thanksgiving took over the role Christmas played elsewhere in providing feasting and celebration at the onset of winter.
The custom of annually occurring autumnal Thanksgivings was established throughout New England by the mid-17th century. If Plymouth celebrated the first New England Thanksgiving and, with Boston, established Thursday as the standard day for the event, it was Connecticut which first made it an irregular yet annual holiday. A large part of the pleasurable anticipation associated with Thanksgiving occurred while everyone eagerly waited to hear when it would be scheduled. Once the authorities announced the date a few weeks before the event, each family happily began the process of preparation for the event, baking pies and arranging with relations for the dinner which marked the event. It would be fairest perhaps to say that all of New England shared in the creation of the Thanksgiving holiday. (continued)
Thanksgiving in American History - Part 2
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In 1777, the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the providential victory at Saratoga. The 1777 Thanksgiving proclamation reveals its New England Puritan roots. The day was still officially a religious observance in recognition of God's Providence, and, as on the Sabbath, both work and amusements were forbidden. It does not resemble our idea of a Thanksgiving, with its emphasis on family dinners and popular recreation. Yet beneath these stern sentiments, the old Puritan fervor had declined to the extent that Thanksgiving was beginning to be less of a religious and more of a secular celebration. The focus was shifting from the religious service to the family gathering. Communities still dutifully went to church each Thanksgiving Day but the social and culinary attractions were increasing in importance.
A contemporary account of a wartime Thanksgiving provides us alternative testimony to the austere official proclamation. Juliana Smith's 1779 Massachusetts' Thanksgiving description, written in a letter to her friend Betsey Smith (and recorded in her diary as well) provides a good example of what the late 18th century celebration meant to the participants.
National Thanksgivings were proclaimed annually by Congress from 1777 to 1783 which, except for 1782, were all celebrated in December. After a five year hiatus, the practice was revived by President Washington in 1789 and 1795. John Adams declared Thanksgivings in 1798 and 1799, while James Madison declared the holiday twice in 1815; none of these were celebrated in the autumn. After 1815, there were no further national Thanksgivings until the Civil War. As sectional differences widened in the Antebellum period, it was impossible achieve the consensus to have a national Thanksgiving. The southern states were generally unreceptive to a "Yankee" custom being pressed on them by the federal government. If the federal government neglected the tradition, however, the individual states did not. The New England states continued to declare annual Thanksgivings (usually in November, although not always on the same day), and eventually most of the other states also had independent observations of the holiday. New Englanders were born proselyters and wherever they went during the great westward migration they introduced their favorite holiday. Thanksgiving was adopted first in the Northeast and in the Northwest Territory, then by the middle and western states. At mid-century even the southern states were celebrating their own Thanksgivings.
By the 1840s when the Puritan holy day had largely given way to the Yankee holiday, Thanksgiving was usually depicted in a family setting with dinner as the central event. The archetypal tradition of harvest celebration had weathered Puritan disapproval and quietly reasserted its influence. Newspapers and magazines helped popularize the holiday in its new guise as a secular autumn celebration featuring feasting, family reunions and charity to the poor. Thanksgiving became an important symbol of the new emphasis on home life and the necessity of enforcing family virtues against the coarse masculine style and cutthroat business practices of the day. This "cult of domesticity" found Thanksgiving a valuable element for promulgating the feminist goals of social reform and the role of the (extended) family as a bastion against the callous workaday world. The holiday focused on the home and hearth where it was hoped a revolution in manners would begin to restore the civilized virtues which had been lost in the new commercial and industrial society.
It is interesting that the same person who was a leading figure in the domesticity movement, Sarah Josepha Hale, also labored for decades to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. A New England author and editor of the influential Godey's Ladies Book, Hale lobbied for a return to the morality and simplicity of days gone by. Each November from 1846 until 1863 Mrs. Hale printed an editorial urging the federal government to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She was finally gratified when Abraham Lincoln declared the first of our modern series of annual Thanksgiving holidays for the last Thursday in November, 1863. Lincoln had previously declared national Thanksgivings for April, 1862, and again for August 6, 1863, after the northern victory at Gettysburg. The southern states had independently declared Thanksgivings of their own, unsullied by Yankee influences, but would later resent the new national Thanksgiving holiday after the war.
Lincoln went on to declare a similar Thanksgiving observance in 1864, establishing a precedent that was followed by Andrew Johnson in 1865 and by every subsequent president. After a few deviations (December 7th in 1865, November 18th in 1869), the holiday came to rest on the last Thursday in November. However, Thanksgiving remained a custom unsanctified by law until 1941! In 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to the last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving. Considerable controversy (mostly following political lines) arose around this outrage to custom, so that some Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on the 23rd and others on the 30th (including Plymouth, MA). In 1940, the country was once again divided over "Franksgiving" as the Thanksgiving declared for November 21st was called. Thanksgiving was declared for the earlier Thursday again in 1941, but Roosevelt admitted that the earlier date (which had not proven useful to the commercial interests) was a mistake. On November 26, 1941, he signed a bill that established the fourth Thursday in November as the national Thanksgiving holiday, which it has been ever since. |
