What We Never Learned About the Thanksgiving Holiday

Most Americans, including Southerners, have been taught that it was the New England Pilgrim’s non-religious Thanksgiving Feast that was the very first Thanksgiving in our New World. However they forget that the Spaniards in what is now Florida probably held religious Thanksgiving services, and … long before any Europeans, including Spaniards, set foot in the Americas, the native peoples celebrated harvest festivals with dances and rituals, such as the Cherokees’ Green Corn Dance.

The first documented European Thanksgiving service held in North America happened on May 27th, 1578, in Newfoundland. Later, a Thanksgiving service was probably conducted by British Europeans in New England, the Popham Colony of what is now Maine, in 1607, and that same year there was the documented Thanksgiving at Jamestown in Virginia. The Jamestown colonists gave thanks for their safe arrival, and held another Thanksgiving service in 1610, after the arrival of a long-awaited supply ship. Virginia settlers at Berkley Hundred were required by their charter to celebrate a yearly Thanksgiving service observing the day of their first arrival, which they did until an Indian uprising wiped out most of the Virginia colony. All of these Thanksgiving services in America were held years before the three day Thanksgiving celebrations of feasting, gaming and drinking, in 1621 and 1623, held by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts. It was the June 30th, 1623 religious and social festival of the Pilgrims which seems to have been the origin of today’s Thanksgiving Day.

After the Revolutionary War, in 1789, Elias Boudinot, a Massachusetts solon, moved that a day of Thanksgiving be held to thank God for giving the American people the opportunity to create a Constitution to preserve their hard won freedoms. The motion was approved by Congress and on October 3, 1789, the President George Washington proclaimed that the people of the United States observe “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” on Thursday, the 26th of November.

(Reference: Encylopedia Smithsonian)

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