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CHAPTER THREE

America Discovers the Pilgrims

They knew they were pilgrims.

—William Bradford

It is impossible today to imagine Thanksgiving without the Pilgrims. The two are linked inextricably in the modern imagination. But this wasn’t always the case. The Pilgrims didn’t take their place at the Thanksgiving table until the nineteenth century.

The holiday we celebrate in late November developed first from the religious days of thanksgiving that were observed in all the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanksgiving was a day for worship, homecoming, and a grand meal. But the Pilgrims? Who were they? The harvest feast they shared with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621, an event universally known and beloved today, was lost to history for two centuries. It wasn’t until long-missing Pilgrim documents were discovered in the nineteenth century that the story of their feast at Plymouth was brought to light.

Those are two roots of our Thanksgiving Day: the religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, and the Pilgrims’ feast with the Wampanoag in 1621. There is also a third root: a now mostly forgotten winter holiday that is celebrated in Plymouth on the anniversary of the day the Pilgrims landed there in 1620. For a glimpse of this holiday, find your way to Plymouth on December 21—but don’t plan to sleep late the next morning. Anyone not awake before first light on December 22 can expect to be catapulted from bed at dawn by three blasts of a cannon. Happy Forefathers Day!


If you haven’t heard of Forefathers Day, you are not alone. Today it is mostly unknown outside Plymouth, where it is still celebrated with gusto by a small group of enthusiasts at two venerable local organizations. One is the Old Colony Club, whose founders created Forefathers Day in 1769. The other is the Pilgrim Society, which was founded in 1819 to memorialize the Pilgrims.

Long before most of their fellow Plymouth residents are awake on Forefathers Day, members of the Old Colony Club begin celebrating the day. They gather before dawn for an early-morning march to the top of Cole’s Hill, where, as the sun comes up, they have an uninterrupted view of Plymouth Harbor and the replica of the Mayflower that lies at anchor there. Standing near a statue of the Wampanoag chieftain Massasoit, club members conduct a ceremony of remembrance, after which they fire off a salute on the club’s cannon. The Pilgrim Society’s celebrations include a festive dinner at which a noteworthy figure delivers an oration on the Pilgrims. These features of the Forefathers Day celebrations—parade, service of remembrance, cannon volley, banquet, oration—have changed very little since they first took shape in the eighteenth century.

In the history of Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day looms large for one important reason: It gave us the Pilgrims—both their designation as “Pilgrims” and a recognition of their importance in American history.

Before the first Forefathers Day was celebrated in 1769, the Pilgrims had fallen into obscurity. Their deeds were receding from memory, overtaken by those of the more successful and better-known Massachusetts Bay Colony, into which Plymouth had been absorbed in 1692. When they were spoken of, the men and women who had arrived on the Mayflower were called “First Comers” or “Old Comers” or “First Planters.” The name “Pilgrims” didn’t come into use until the 1790s, after a preacher employed it in a Forefathers Day sermon, and a poet used it in a Forefathers Day ode. The word itself, however, was first applied to the Plymouth settlers by William Bradford, the longtime governor of the colony. In his description of the settlers’ tearful farewell as they departed Holland, he wrote: “They knew they were pilgrims and . . . lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”1

Like Thanksgiving, Forefathers Day is a homegrown holiday. It was created in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, when Americans were seeking heroes and inspirational stories rooted in their own continent and their own New World experiences. For this, they turned to the original settlers of New England, the men and women who had sailed on the Mayflower.

As the thirteen colonies trod the path to rebellion, war, and independence, Americans began to see themselves in the Pilgrims. Like the eighteenth-century American revolutionaries, the Pilgrims sought freedom from the tyranny of the English Crown. A century and a half after the Mayflower had delivered the Pilgrims to the New World, the heirs of the Pilgrims were prepared to go to war to finish the job their forefathers had begun. They would liberate themselves for good from English oppression.


By the Julian calendar in use at the time in England and its colonies, the small band of Pilgrims from the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth on Monday, December 11, 1620. There is an arcane debate about whether that date corresponds to December 21 or December 22 on the Gregorian calendar we use today, and Plymoutheans politely agree to disagree. That’s why the Pilgrim Society holds its Forefathers Day dinner on December 21, while the Old Colony Club marks the day on December 22.

The Pilgrims’ arrival in Plymouth is often called “the Landing,” usually spelled with that grandiose capital letter. Legend has it that the Pilgrims stepped onto the terra firma of the New World by way of a massive boulder on the shoreline. This is the Plymouth Rock that has gained iconic status in American culture. There is, however, no historical evidence to confirm its role in Plymouth’s history. Bradford doesn’t mention the rock in his monumental history of the founding and early years of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. Nor does it put in an appearance in the extant letters from the period. Rather, the legend of the rock came to light in 1741 when an elderly townsman by the name of Thomas Faunce, upset that a wharf was going to be built over the boulder, claimed that it had been the stepping stone of the first Pilgrims as they came ashore.

Faunce was not a reliable witness. For one thing, he was ninety-four years old at the time he recounted the story of the rock. No matter how sound his elderly mind may have been or how prodigious his memory, he was relating a story he had heard as a child, three-quarters of a century earlier. Moreover, the story came to him at third hand. He said he had heard about the boulder from his father, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, three years after the Pilgrims. The elder Faunce told his son that he had learned about the rock from residents who had been passengers on the Mayflower.

The logistics of the Landing also make the story of the rock unlikely. As the writer Bill Bryson has observed, “No prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder on a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned from nearby.”2

The story of Plymouth Rock is a myth, but the heroic Landing is not. The small band of Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth in December 1620 were part of an exploratory party from the Mayflower tasked with scouting out locations for a permanent settlement. The Mayflower had reached Cape Cod in mid-November and set anchor off the tip of the peninsula in the harbor of what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. The English settlers knew that their survival in the New World would depend heavily on their ability to farm, and they quickly determined that the sandy soil of Cape Cod was unsuitable for that purpose. So the scouting party set off to seek a more propitious location. They hoped to settle on a site for their new home before the winter set in.

Eighteen men—Pilgrims and crew—set sail in a small boat called a shallop that had been carried in pieces aboard the Mayflower and then assembled at Cape Cod. The men on the shallop were looking for a protected harbor that one of the Mayflower’s pilots recalled from a fishing expedition he had made several years earlier. The pilot had only a vague recollection of the harbor’s location, but he thought he would be able to find it once they were in the area.

By then it was December, and the weather was unpredictable. Soon the shallop and its passengers were caught up in a violent storm—rain, snow, sleet, wind. The shallop’s mast snapped in three places and the rudder broke. The little party managed to get their boat ashore and take shelter on what they later discovered was a tiny island.

Mark Twain would later observe that “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, wait a few minutes.” So it was for the Pilgrims, who woke the next morning to a perfect day. Saturday dawned “fair” and “sunshining,” wrote Bradford, who was among the marooned men. The Pilgrims explored the island, dried their clothes, repaired the shallop, and, Bradford tells us, “gave God thanks for His mercies in their manifold deliverances.”3 In some sense, this was the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving on land in the New World.

The following day was Sunday, so the party rested and worshipped. On Monday, they departed the island and sailed the short distance across the harbor to the place that would become their new home.


Forefathers Day was born in 1769, when seven upstanding men of Plymouth decided to form a social club. Their motives were a mix of the sacred and the profane.

First, the profane: According to the minutes of the club’s inaugural meeting, the founders wished to have a private venue where they could gather away from the local hoi polloi. They wanted to be free from “intermixing with the company at the taverns in this town.” A “well-regulated club” would increase “the pleasure and happiness of the respective members” and also “conduce to their edification and instruction.” They incorporated their new society under the name Old Colony Club.4

The new club wasn’t just about drinking. It had a higher purpose too, one that the founders considered a sacred duty. The seven original members, proud of their town’s history, decided to solemnize the anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims by means of an annual celebration. The inaugural Forefathers Day was also known as “Old Colony Day” or the “First Celebration of the Landing of our Forefathers.”5

Club records provide a detailed account. The first Forefathers Day dinner took place at 2:30 in the afternoon at a local inn. The meal began with an Indian pudding, which was followed by a course of succotash and then one of clams, oysters, and codfish. Next came venison that had been roasted on a jack that the Pilgrims had brought with them on the Mayflower. The venison course was followed by “sea fowl”—probably gulls or cormorants—and eels. Dessert was apple pie, cranberry tarts, and cheese.

Succotash—a stew of corn and beans—became the traditional culinary feature of Forefathers Day dinners, as essential to the celebration of that holiday as turkey is to Thanksgiving. The word “succotash” is an Anglicized version of the Narragansett word sohquttahhash, whose literal meaning is corn beaten into small pieces. Tradition has it that the Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims how to make succotash.

It is fair to say that succotash is an acquired taste. The author of an 1883 cookbook warns that “strangers are rather shy of this peculiar mixture.”6 At Forefathers Day dinners in Plymouth in the twenty-first century, a tureen of succotash is set out on a table across from the bar during the cocktail hour. Guests are invited to help themselves. The line at the bar is longer.7

Toasting is another Forefathers Day tradition. Several toasts were offered at the first Forefathers Day dinner in 1769, including one to those “kings under whose indulgent care this colony has flourished and been protected.” According to James Thacher, who wrote an authoritative history of Plymouth that was published in 1835, the group conversed in “an agreeable manner” about “our forefathers.” The agreeable manner did not last long, and in 1773 the Old Colony Club folded. Thacher is discreet about the breakup, which was precipitated by disagreement about the most contentious issue of the day: independence for the thirteen colonies. Thacher hints at the acrimony that must have pervaded club events when he writes blandly that “unfortunately, some of the members were attached to the royal interest.” In other words, the membership of the Old Colony Club, like the citizens of the thirteen colonies, was sharply divided over whether to toast George III or curse him. Among club members loyal to the Crown was Edward Winslow Jr., a descendant of the Pilgrim of the same name. At the outbreak of war in 1776, the younger Winslow fled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, after fighting at the Battle of Lexington on the side of the British.

But Loyalists were in the minority in Plymouth. By the time the Old Colony Club disbanded in 1773, most Plymoutheans had joined in support of Bostonians’ protests against the Crown, and they welcomed the erection of a liberty pole in a place of honor in the town square. As Thacher tells it, they condemned “the tyrannical attempts of the British government to enslave our country,” voted to boycott British goods, deplored taxation without their consent, and opposed the British quartering of soldiers in Boston.8 Forefathers Day celebrations resumed in 1774 under the auspices of the town of Plymouth. A century later, in 1875, the Old Colony Club was revived and took up its early tradition once again.


Forefathers Day reached its zenith of popularity during the nineteenth century, when it was marked by public dinners, orations by distinguished public figures, grand balls, and myriad after-dinner toasts to the Pilgrims, Chief Massasoit, George Washington, the republic, and other patriotic subjects.

An English visitor to Plymouth on Forefathers Day 1824 described the celebrations in an anonymous article in a British journal. The festivities began with a “salute of artillery and a peal from the bells,” he wrote. In the church, “a brilliant and venerable assemblage” listened to an anniversary address on “the virtues, disinterestedness and sacrifices of the Pilgrim Fathers.” More than five hundred people partook of a dinner at Pilgrim Hall, where dozens of toasts were offered in honor of the Pilgrims and “the devout thanksgivings of two hundred years ago,” as well as to the memory of George Washington, to the “spirit of our popular elections,” and to that portion of the human race “guilty of a skin not colored like our own.” In the evening there was a “splendid” ball and a supper.9

Another English visitor, writing about Forefathers Day 1838, was struck by American egalitarianism, which was evident at the celebrations. “There was a great mixture . . . of classes,” he observed. “Every person that can save up the requisite sum of three dollars, and who feels no scruples of a religious nature as to joining in such entertainments, makes a point of attending the annual ball.” Nowhere was the egalitarian spirit of the Forefathers Day ball more evident than in the dress of partygoers. Only a dozen or so of the men were attired in “what would be considered a proper ball-dress at home,” the Englishman wrote. As for the ladies, the visitor was too bewitched to pay much attention to what they were wearing. The women of Plymouth were “specimens of feminine beauty hardly to be surpassed, I think, in any country in the globe.”10

In contrast to Thanksgiving, which is a family-centered, homey holiday, Forefathers Day was more masculine, being celebrated in the public sphere in which men circulated. Ambitious politicians made their way to Plymouth to deliver Forefathers Day orations, hoping to catch the public eye. One scholar analogizes the Forefathers Day oration of the nineteenth century to the modern-day, first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary in that it provided an opportunity for the speakers to attract national attention.11

John Quincy Adams, who would become the nation’s sixth president in 1825, delivered the Forefathers Day oration in 1802, when he was thirty-five years old. He celebrated the Pilgrims as early democrats and praised the Mayflower Compact—the civil contract by which they consented to be governed—as having laid the ground for the Constitution and America’s republican form of government.

The best-known Forefathers Day address was given by Daniel Webster, who delivered a stirring oration at the bicentennial in 1820. Two hundred years ago on this day, “the first scene of our history was laid,” he told the crowd.12 He went on to catalogue the Pilgrims’ virtues, which included laying the ground for “more perfect civil liberty” and “a higher degree of religious freedom” than the world had previously known.13 He lauded their respect for private property and the rule of law. He also used the opportunity to denounce the slave trade in powerful images:

I hear the sound of the hammer. I see the smoke of the furnace where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, foul and dark as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.14

Senator William Seward of New York, a leader of the new Republican Party, made the trek to Plymouth in 1855. His Forefathers Day address praised the Pilgrims as advocates of political equality, freedom of conscience, and “the spirit of freedom, which is the soul of the republic itself.” In 1920, the year of the tercentennial, Vice President– elect Calvin Coolidge said of the Pilgrims: “No like body ever cast so great an influence on human history.”

The most enthusiastic Forefathers Day celebrations were held in Plymouth and Boston. But as was the case with Thanksgiving, the holiday traveled westward as New Englanders carried it with them across the expanding country. New England Societies in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Charleston, Buffalo, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities also marked the day. Several still do.


Forefathers Day elevated the Pilgrims to the national consciousness and helped to secure their place in American history and, eventually, their association with Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims and their story were widely known by the time the nineteenth century began—and Webster’s high-publicity bicentennial speech gave them a further boost.

It took a while longer, however, for this historical thread to be woven into the Thanksgiving story. For that we must look to the discovery of an obscure footnote in a scholarly volume that was published in 1841. James W. Baker calls it the “missing link” between the First Thanksgiving of 1621 and the Thanksgiving holiday that Americans celebrate today. Baker’s historical detective work uncovered a believeit-or-not fact about the First Thanksgiving: Before the 1840s, no published document about the Pilgrims made reference to a thanksgiving or a harvest festival in 1621.15

The missing-link footnote appeared in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, a collection of original documents from the early years of Plymouth Colony. Among the entries was a copy of Edward Winslow’s 1621 letter in which he described the harvest feast shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. Winslow’s letter had originally been published in London in 1622, in a booklet titled Mourt’s Relation. But the booklet soon disappeared from circulation, and while its contents had been summarized in subsequent publications, the passage on the First Thanksgiving was not mentioned. In 1820, a copy of Mourt’s Relation was discovered in Philadelphia, and in 1841, Alexander Young included Winslow’s letter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was the first time since its original publication in 1622 that the complete text of the letter—with the description of the 1621 feast—was published. Young added a footnote, which read: “This was the First Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England. On this occasion they no doubt feasted on the wild turkey as well as venison.”16

The only other eyewitness account of the First Thanksgiving, found in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, made a similar journey before being rediscovered in 1855. After Bradford’s death in 1657, the manuscript passed to his family, among them his nephew Nathaniel Morton, who used it as the basis for his influential history of Plymouth. Morton also copied portions into town records. Early in the eighteenth century, the manuscript found its way to Thomas Prince, who referred to it in his 1738 history of New England. Neither Morton nor Prince, however, mentioned Bradford’s account of the First Thanksgiving. After Prince’s death, the manuscript was kept in a library in the steeple of the Old South Meeting House in Boston, where it disappeared during the Revolutionary War when British troops occupied the church. The trail then went cold for nearly a century until, in the 1850s, it turned up in the library of the bishop of London—presumably having been carried to England by British soldiers who had looted the Meeting House during the war. When the complete text of Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation was finally published in 1855, it included the passage describing what came to be considered the original Thanksgiving celebration. It was the first time that passage appeared in print.17

Baker says that Alexander Young’s 1841 identification of the 1621 event as the “First Thanksgiving” was slow to gain traction with the public. The Thanksgiving holiday was already well established, Baker notes, and had “developed a substantial historical tradition quite independent of the Pilgrims.”18

Still, by the 1860s, popular culture had enthusiastically adopted the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving story, which was being retold in painting and song and literature. The artistic renderings sometimes contained more fiction than fact, but the basic story came through loud and strong, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the Pilgrims’ place in Thanksgiving was here to stay. The poets and the painters and the novelists may not have gotten all of the details right, but the essence of the story of the First Thanksgiving was right on target.

Thanksgiving

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