Thanksgiving...

How it all began and become enshrined. Who knew...?

I had no love for history while in school. It was boring and required memorizing things that just didn’t seem important. Today, quite a few decades later, not only can I not remember what date some-body-or-other signed the Magna Carter, I can’t even remember what the Magna Carter is.

But I’ve learned to love history. If I could have a do-over, I’d get an advanced degree in American history and then I would go into public land management law enforcement as soon as I escaped from the Marine Corps. But that’s a whole other story.

If I didn’t research, write, and talk about our democracy so much I’m sure I’d think that the Constitution of the United States was written in 1776 and not years later in… well… I’ll let you look it up because that way it might stick.

If not for this work that I do, and the research that goes into it, I’d surely think that the Articles of the Confederation had something to do with the Confederacy when in fact they were actually America’s first Constitution.

I wouldn’t know that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single enslaved person and that Abraham Lincoln was a self-acknowledged White Supremacist who nevertheless understood that slavery and race was tearing this democracy apart. I wouldn’t know the term “The Civil Rights Amendments”, and I wouldn’t know what the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th amendments were even about.

I wouldn’t know how horrifically cruel American slavery was, nor would I know that it made the entire country - north and south - wealthy and to some extent, the entire Western world. Wealth that is still enjoyed by White America today.

It seems to me that history, if nothing else, is tremendously interesting. But it has also been exceedingly instrumental in defining who America is, who we declared ourselves to be, and who we are today. It is a tragedy that so little American history includes the vast and important history of Black Americans nee’ Africans. And with many American school districts and state governments curtailing the teaching of Black Americans in American history, we’ll know even less. Florida’s recent law mandates, among other things, “Discussions about race should not make students feel guilty for actions taken in the past by people of their same race or origin.”

Never mind that most Black American students felt both guilt embarrassment because our American history has always been narrated from the point of view of White Americans and that White Americans did all the cool, heroic, visionary stuff while the contribution of Black Americans was they fought and died for their own Civil Rights, excelled in sports and music, and, well…that’s pretty much it. In spite of that, there’s never been a law that addressed the guilt and embarrassment felt by Black students.

When I was a kid, growing up on a farm in NH with a horse and the space that 200 acres provides, I envisioned myself as a Lewis and Clarke (I had never heard of York, the Black slave who accompanied the expedition and was tremendously critical to it’s success. But no matter. I would not have elected to play the part of a slave) or a White cowboy, or Wyatt Earp, the White sheriff. But never Bass Reeves, Black and possibly the most effective and courageous sheriff to ever wander the west corralling bad guys. I’d never heard of Bass Reeves. Or Mathew Henson, the Black explorer and the first human to stand at the North Pole. I wrote about both of them here in the pages of Writer’s On The Range.

History class, to my knowledge, never tied the establishment of Thanksgiving Day, arguably America’s favorite holiday, to American slavery and if it were not for Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson, few of us, including myself, would have a clue. But before getting into that, below, this is a time explicitly set aside for giving thanks. It seems to me like the world is coming apart, yet there are things I’m grateful for every day. I’m grateful that at 75 I’m still fit, in good health, have an adventurous spirit, and as far as I know, do not suffer from that condition called…um…called somethingorother. Um…it’ll come to me.

After an extremely rough and dangerous years long journey into adulthood, I’m grateful that my son became someone I’m proud of everyday.

I’m grateful for my friends. Extraordinary people who lead the way and whom I could not do without.

I’m grateful that my lifestyle does not require a ton of money and that I have enough. It was touch and go there for a very long time.

I’m grateful that I have my share of outdoor adventures. Well…almost my share.

I’m grateful for this Civil Conversations Project, the 14,410 readers we had over the last month, and a community who wants to make a difference in America’s most intractable and devastating problem.

I’m glad I was able to end a 20-year marriage with a minimum of animosity and even some caring.

I’m grateful that decades ago – fulfilling my childhood dream of being an explorer - I discovered the Colorado Plateau and that the rest of the world has not. (Although a few too many have!)

I’m grateful that I own an adventure truck.

And finally, I’m grateful that I live within walking distance of my favorite coffee shop – where Joe Neuhof and I conceived of The Civil Conversations Project; my favorite liquor store that gives me a senior discount, saving me many hundreds of dollars a year; and my favorite brew pub/eatery.

Now, back to Thanksgiving and Professor Richardson –

The Audubon Society

“Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday…but not for the reasons we generally remember.

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 wreck 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 in 1865, at least, they won.

Happy Thanksgiving.”