11.29.2021 Thanksgiving
Hi friends,
I wanted to send this out on Thanksgiving eve. But I was on a long road trip out to the Oregon coast and seldom had internet - or permission from my wife to work. So with Thanksgiving still on your mind - and on your waist - I’m taking the liberty of touching base. The Civil Conversations Project, dedicated to ending racism and closing the great political divide, has been sending out quarterly-yet-sporadic newsletters via MailChimp. Occasionally, when I’ve wanted to speak to you directly I’ve sent an email. But we are switching over to, or maybe I should say adding, not switching, to Substack. Substack is what I would call an informal newsletter-esque forum. It allows me to share information with you that I think you would like to have. I can ruminate. And importantly, you can comment and converse. It has always been the desire of this project to find a way to create community. I am hoping that this is a step in that direction. I anticipate a weekly mailing. At times I am sure that it will be more, and at other times less.
At any rate, I subscribe to a Substack from Heather Cox Richardson. Heather is a brilliant professor of history at Boston College. She tends to write about current political situations but adds deep, historic context as well as current background that the news media misses. Her web site, called Letters From An American, is here:
(sign up!) Anyway, you know how I’m always saying that if you peel away a layer, you find race. Usually the layer that I’m referring to is negative. But if you peel back the layer about the genesis of Thanksgiving, you find a positive action based on race.
While it is true that the Pilgrims did share a meal with the indigenous Wampanoag tribe that was intended by the pilgrims to celebrate a successful harvest after two difficult years where they lost many to malnutrition, that meal did not start a tradition nor a holiday. Nor was it the happy myth that we learned in school.
The feast, intended only for the Pilgrims, started with a joyful firing off of their guns. The Wampanoag, thinking that they were under attack, quickly showed up with ninety warriors ready to fight. They didn't know this was how white people partied - by wasting hard-to-come-by ammunition. Instead of fighting, the Pilgrims invited them to share their dinner. But there was a catch. The Pilgrims didn’t have enough food to feed the Wampanoags. The “guest” left and returned with 5 deer and basically fed themselves.
As it turned out, there was no fighting that day, but there was plenty soon thereafter. The relationship between the peoples native to that region and the new Europeans was deadly, and tragic. It was not until 2007 that the federal government finally recognized the Wampanoags and in 2021, they are still awaiting the return of a small piece of their land. Oh the myths we weave! Many Native Americans recognize the day that we Anglos know as Thanksgiving, as their national ‘Day of Mourning’. At any rate, on to Heather’s happier information of the genesis of the actual holiday. And I’ll see you on Substack.
"Thanksgiving is rooted in a defense of democracy during the Civil War.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841, a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York Governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15, he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And they won."