The mythology of the Pilgrims is expressed each year in the annual Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation. Consider for example, the first sentence from the proclamation of 1999:

Well over three and a half centuries ago strengthened by faith and bound by a common desire for liberty, a small band of Pilgrims sought out a place in the New World where they could worship according to their own beliefs.

In just this first sentence the proclamation refers to freedom to worship twice: that the Pilgrims were bound by a common desire for liberty and they wanted a chance to worship freely. However, this is more myth than reality.

A sub-sect of the Puritan movement, Pilgrims had given up on efforts to fix England. Instead they wanted to separate themselves from the disorder they saw in English life and create a new, more perfect community. In1620, a small group (twenty-seven adults) made plans to sail to the New World. Five in the group had suffered from religious persecution in England, and from these five people grew the myth that the Pilgrims came to America seeking religious freedom. In reality they wanted to sail to America because they hoped to establish in the New World the "Kingdom of God" foretold in the book of Revelation.

The Pilgrims did not have the money to pay for the trip. They were able to interest a group of London investors in paying for the cost of sailing the Mayflower across the Atlantic. In return for the investors’ financial support of the colony, the Pilgrims agreed that one-half of everything they made, grew or earned for seven years would go to the investors in repayment of the initial investment.

Of the seventy adult passengers on the Mayflower, only twenty-seven adults were Pilgrims. Forty-three of the adult passengers the Pilgrims called "Strangers." The forty-three strangers had no religious interest in the colony. The Strangers were personal servants, indentured servants, or adventurous pioneers. Their goal was to seek their fortune in the New World, not to find religious freedom.

In December 1620, in a snow storm, this small group of seventy adults and thirty-two children landed at what we now call Plymouth, Massachusetts. December is not a good time of the year to move to Massachusetts. They found fresh water and deserted corn fields. The fields were the remains of a Wampanoag village called Patuxet. Four years earlier every person in the village had died of disease, probably small pox brought to the area by other European explorers.

The new settlers suffered from illnesses of scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis— six died in December, eight in January, and seventeen in February. In March, William Bradford wrote, "This month thirteen of our number die . . . scarce fifty remain, the living scarce able to bury the dead." Their situation was desperate.

Salvation came in the form of two members of the Wampanoag Nation. In the spring a man named Samoset walked into the settlement and speaking in English he said, "Welcome Englishmen." He told the Pilgrims that he was from a region to the north, what we now call Maine. There he learned to speak English from the fishermen who frequented the coastal waters. Samoset introduced the settlers to Squanto.

Squanto was from the village of Patuxet, the exact site where the Pilgrims built Plymouth. When exploring the coast in 1614, a Captain John Hunt had lured twenty-seven Wampanoag men on to his ship, including Squanto. Captain Hunt kidnaped these men and sold them into slavery in Spain. In Spain priests who opposed slavery intervened and secured Squanto’s release. He made his way to London, where he lived for at least two years. He returned by fishing boat to the northern coastal waters and from Newfoundland made his way to home arriving just four months before the settlers.

These two men from the Wampanoag Nation knew something of the power of the White people, and they did not fully trust them. But their tribal religion taught that they were to give charity to the helpless and hospitality to anyone who came to them with empty hands. So Squanto stayed with the Pilgrims and taught them how to survive.

His help made the difference for them between survival and starvation. He brought them deer meat and beaver skins. He taught them how to cultivate native corn and other new vegetables, and how to build Indian-style houses. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicine. He explained how to dig and cook clams, how to get sap from the maple trees, and use fish for fertilizer. By the time fall arrived things were going better for the Pilgrims. The corn which they planted had grown well. They were living in their Indian-style wigwams and had also managed to build one European-style building out of squared logs, their Meeting House where worship services were held.

The event we now know as "the First Thanksgiving" was a traditional English harvest celebration to which the colonists invited the Wamapanoag. The harvest celebration began at some unknown date between September 21 and November 9, 1621. Edward Winslow’s letter, is the only contemporary eye witness account of the event itself. He wrote:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. 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 they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

In spite of this optimistic letter, the small colony struggled under near starvation conditions throughout 1622. In the spring of 1623 the settlers abandoned communal farming. Instead they gave each family its own plot to farm. Each family’s survival became dependent on their success with their crop. Governor William Bradford recorded a sharp decrease in the malingering, excuses, and illnesses that had kept many from their farming chores before. As a result, the harvest of 1623 was much more successful.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Thanksgiving developed as a regional holiday, celebrated in New England usually in November. It was not tied in anyway to the events of 1621 because the story of the Pilgrim Harvest celebration of 1621 was lost and forgotten.

The mother of our modern national Thanksgiving was a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. A New England author and editor of the influential Godey’s Ladies Book, each November from 1846 until 1863 Sarah Hale printed an editorial urging the federal government to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

For Sara Hale Thanksgiving was a symbol of home life and family virtues as opposed to the coarse, cutthroat business practices and the callous work day world. She hoped Thanksgiving would help restore the civilized virtues which had been lost in the new commercial and industrial society.

Mrs. Hale’s crusade received a boost in 1854, the year Bradford’s history Of the Plimouth Plantation was discovered. The manuscript had been handed down within the Bradford family for generations until shortly before the Revolutionary War. When the British evacuated Boston during the war, Bradford’s hand written history, the only existing copy, disappeared. It was missing for about seventy-five years until located in the library of the Bishop of London in Fulham Palace in 1854. Today the origin manuscript it is in the State House in Boston.

The discovery of Bradford’s history prompted a greater American interest in the history of the Pilgrims. In response to the need to bring the North together during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first of our modern annual Thanksgiving holidays for the last Thursday in November, 1863. Lincoln went on to declare a similar Thanksgiving observance in 1864, establishing an example that was followed by every subsequent president.

Over the years Thanksgiving mythology has been modified to reflect the needs of the times. In the second half of the nineteenth century when the Pilgrims were represented in drawings, they were less likely to be sharing their feast with their Native American neighbors, and more likely to be shown in conflict with Indians—indicated in illustrations by a hail of arrows. The Indian Wars in the West produced a sense of fear, which was expressed in this fashion.

The representation of the Pilgrims at war with the Indians began to shift after the western Indian wars were over. By the First World War, sentimental regard for the "vanishing Red Man" resulted in illustrations of Pilgrims and the Wampanoags sitting down to dinner in peace and harmony.

By the time of the Pilgrims’ 300th anniversary celebration in 1920, national leaders used the image of the Pilgrims and the native Americans to pull together the many, diverse European immigrants into a common national identity.

In the Second half of the last century saw another shift in the mythology of the Pilgrims. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s resulted in a re-examination of the treatment of the Wampanoag people. In Plymouth every year at Thanksgiving local citizens dressed in Pilgrim clothing and paraded through the town, recreating the first Autumn harvest celebration of 1621. In the late 1960s these Plymouth recreations were the object of protests and demonstrations by Native Americans. In 1970 the planners asked a Native American to speak at the ceremony to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrim’s arrival. He said:

Today is a time of celebrating for you — a time of looking back to the first days of white people in America. But it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. When the Pilgrims arrived, we, the Wampanoags, welcomed them with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end. That before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a tribe. That we and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them. Let us always remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white people. Although our way of life is almost gone, we, the Wampanoags, still walk the lands of Massachusetts. What has happened cannot be changed. But today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

Today the mythology of the Pilgrims continues to shift. Yesterday’s Post included an article on the religion page with the title "The Puritans weren’t so Puritanical." It quoted Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell as saying:

There’s now a complete consensus that the popular image of the Puritans is almost totally inaccurate. The Puritans were typical people of their time in that they enjoyed the pleasures of the seventeenth century. . . . They liked to sit and talk. They liked to eat well when they had the food to eat. They enjoyed sex. They also liked to play games, like an early version of shuffleboard.

The reporter concludes with this sentence:

Whatever really happened in 1621, [Professor] Norton gives the Puritans some credit for our modern day of turkey, pumpkin pie and pro football.

I suspect that this respected historian, Mary Beth Norton, groaned when she saw the way the reporter associated her comments about the Puritans with a justification for pumpkin pie and pro-football, neither of which were part of the 1621 event. But the quote illustrates the way the popular culture of each generation uses the old story to justify whatever Thanksgiving activity in which we are engaged.

What happened to the church that the Puritans founded in 1620? In the year 1800 the descendants of the Pilgrims who still attended the original Pilgrim Church took a radical step. They voted to call as their minister, a clergyman, who preached that Jesus was a human being and not God, and that the Trinity was not reasonable. In other words, about two hundred years ago the original Plymouth Pilgrim church became Unitarian in theology. The theological conservatives in the congregation quit the church, moved down the street and built their own Congregational Church, which is now a member of the United Church of Christ. But today the original pilgrim church is an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Association, along with about two hundred other New England churches that were founded by the Pilgrims.

Some of the descendants of New England Puritans moved to Washington D.C. and established All Souls Unitarian Church. Eventually All Souls became so big that these Puritan descendants established churches in the suburbs, including Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church. To find a modern version of a plain Puritan meeting house, a worship space with windows but no symbols, you need only look around you on Sunday mornings.

Today I give thanks to all the Pilgrims, to all the Native Americans, to all the African Americans, to all the Asian Americans, and to all who have come to call this land their home. Here they lived and loved and worked and quarreled and fought and died and they changed the land and became one with the land. Today, the Sunday before Thanksgiving I remember all those who have given our world to us, and I give thanks.

The Title of this sermon and some of the information contained in it comes from a paper by Robert A. Furman, M.D. "The Pilgrims: Myth and Reality," Which can be found at: http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/csmhi/furman.cfm

A an excellent list of books on this topic can be found at the "Mayflower Web Page Bookstore."

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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