The
First Thanksgiving Likely Occurred Here, & Not at Plymouth . . .
Thursday,
November 26, 1998
Ross
Mackenzie, Richmond Times-Dispatch
It is altogether
fitting and proper to conclude that the first Thanksgiving was held here.
Berkeley
Hundred
Now
begins the season for giving thanks -- something that more of us could
profit from doing more often. As an inevitable consequence, this also is
the season for refueling the debate about where the first Thanksgiving
occurred.
For centuries the
New England version went practically unchallenged. Many children know the
general story, even in this contemporary culture that so frequently
reviles its past.
In 1621, at Plymouth
Plantation in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims held a harvest festival. The
colonists were ever so thankful for their safe passage, for their survival
of that first awful winter, and for the good offices of the remarkable
Indians -- Samoset and Squanto.
As William Bradford,
governor of the colony, described it: "For summer being done, all things
[stood] upon them with a weather beaten face, and the whole country, full
of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage view." They were
understandably thankful.
But at the risk of
sounding chauvinistic, the truth is that the right to claim firstness,
like so many other "firsts" attributed to New England, probably belongs to
Virginia. Indeed, it is altogether fitting and proper to conclude that the
first Thanksgiving was held here.
The Virginia version
is not widely known -- particularly outside the South.
ON SEPTEMBER 16,
1619, a group of 38 English colonists headed by Captain John Woodlief
sailed from England aboard the Margaret. They landed at Berkeley
Hundred 10 weeks later. The settlers were sent by the London Company; it
owned thousands of acres in the area, and settled and supported Berkeley
Plantation.
Exhibit A in the
Virginia claim to firstness is this sentence in the company's instructions
to the settlers -- instructions to be opened upon reaching Virginia:
We ordaine
that the day of our ships arrivall 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.
These settlers held
that Thanksgiving at Berkeley Hundred on December 4, 1619 -- a year before
the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Surely Woodlief and his followers were
equally as grateful as the Pilgrims -- equally schooled in adversity,
equally determined to renew themselves with roots in the land. Surely they
were equally devout and equally thankful. To suggest that they were
disobedient and did not give thanks requires a superabundance of credulity
and moral pretension.
But lest we forget,
there were numerous trips to Virginia prior to Woodlief's: the Raleigh
expeditions of the 1580s, and the London Company's initial expeditions --
beginning with the one under Christopherr Newport that founded Jamestown
in 1607.
The London Company's
charter of May 23, 1609, was written principally by Sir Edward Sandys with
the concurrence of Sir Francis Bacon, the early philosopher of natural
right. It was probably the first document to say that government derives
its authority from the consent of the governed. It was the closest thing
to a constitution and bill of rights that colonists in Virginia had for
three years, until refined in 1612. The Sandys charter was written 11
years before the first Pilgrim reached Plymouth.
On November 18,
1618, the London Company issued instructions to Sir George Yeardley upon
his appointment as Governor of Virginia; those instructions provided for a
liberal form of government. At Jamestown, in 1619, Yeardley convened the
first legislative assembly in the New World. That was a year before the
landing at Plymouth.
THOSE WERE firsts of
considerable magnitude. They, and the events in Virginia during the 35
years prior to the Plymouth landing, tell us a good deal about the
Virginia colonists.
They were
God-fearing people. Just about every one of their existing documents
speaks of their duties and obligations to a God almost always described as
"almighty."
These also were
people of discipline and self-will. Contrary to so many of us today, they
were people determined not to tear down the old to make way for the ersatz
old. They retained their umbilical ties to the past, as Virginians --
inhabitants of the most English of states -- tend to do still. Their past
was England, and central to England were the church and God.
Even without the
instructions to Woodlief, is it not logical to assume that the colonists
in Virginia regularly prayed and gave thanks prior to 1621? Do we not have
to overlook too much to believe they did not? In 1962, the evidence proved
overwhelming to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., then an adviser
to President John Kennedy. In December of that year he repented of "an
unconquerable New England bias" on the question, and acknowledged that
Virginia's claim is "quite right." But despite the evidence, the bias
persists.
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