This Week in History: A brief history of Thanksgiving
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
It should come as no surprise that Thanksgiving – the holiday during which millions of American families gorge themselves on Turkey, pies and stuffing – has become warped from its original design.
Let’s take a brief look at the history of thanksgiving days in European and American North America.
1514: Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and his men conduct a service of thanksgiving for the abundant food and water they find along the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.
1564: French Huguenot colonists settle in the area of Jacksonville, Florida and sing “a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God.”
1607: When Jamestown colonists arrive in Virginia, they immediately erect a wooden cross and give thanks to God for their safe passage across the ocean.
1619: English colonists at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia decree that the day of their arrival, December 4, “shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”
1621: The Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, hold a feast to celebrate the harvest and God’s bounty.
1777: During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress designates December 18 of that year a day “for solemn Thanksgiving and praise” for the Patriot army’s victory at Saratoga. This is the first national American day of thanksgiving.
1789: President George Washington proclaims November 26 to be a day for “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 – for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted – for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us…”
1863: President Abraham Lincoln gives an official proclamation setting the last Thursday of November a National Day of Thanksgiving. The President says, in part,
“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity [sic] and Union.”
Up to this point, Thanksgiving Day, whenever it landed, served as a time to take stock of one’s blessings. These days often occurred at the end, or in the middle of, great hardships – from dangerous crossings of vast oceans and a reprieve from starvation brought about by a good harvest, to the fighting for one’s independence and steadfastly enduring the ravages of a civil war.
In moments like these, when human will was pitted against the many and diverse pains of this world and all seemed lost, time was set aside to recognize the small blessings – to be grateful to be alive and to have the chance to continue to fight whatever great struggle you currently found yourself in.
Nationalist agendas and corporate greed gradually ate away at the spirit of such a holiday. Beginning in the 1890s, the imagery of Thanksgiving became increasingly focused on the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians, which was used as a way of teaching children into what good citizenship looked like.
Never before was the holiday so heavily associated with the Pilgrims – after all, their “thanksgiving” day had only been one among many observed over the centuries. There wasn’t anything special about it. In fact, only by a great stretch of the imagination could it be considered the first American Thanksgiving. That honor should instead belong to the Thanksgiving of 1777 or 1789.
The holiday was further corrupted in 1941 when, at the behest of President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress pushed Thanksgiving back, from the last to the fourth Thursday of November. By then, the holiday had become heavily commercialized, and President Roosevelt wanted more time between Thanksgiving and Christmas so that people would purchase more goods and boost the depressed economy.
A holiday based on humble gratitude had become a tool to indoctrinate children and a chance to boost the economy. It’s continued much the same to this day. In fact, with Black Friday starting before Thanksgiving dessert is even served, the day has become an even greater boost to the economy than Roosevelt could ever had imagined.
So as you sit down with your family on the fourth Thursday of November, try to forget Thanksgiving altogether and in its place remember what it means to give thanks.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.