Dan Snow's History Hit - The First Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Sarah Churchwell and Kathryn Gray joined me on the podcast to discuss the first Thanksgiving of 1621. They critique mythologies of Thanksgiving that have arisen from 19th century ideologues, to Reagan, to the present day, and reframe settler colonial narratives.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone listening in the good old U.S. of A. 400 years ago this week, the Mayflower dropped its anchor at the north end of Cape Cod, that beautiful island on the eastern seaboard of New England, which may have been visited, by the way, by the Vikings. 600-ish, 500 years before. Who knows? Let's hope we're going to find that out one day. Anyway, not important. The Mayflower dropped its anchor and within days a group of so-called pilgrims had got in the open boat and were set to explore what they thought of as a new world. They ended up establishing the Plymouth Colony. They ended up having a desperate time over the first winter, surviving with the help of indigenous people who taught them techniques, what to sow and and when and by this time of year in 1621 they were ready to feast to give thanks it was the first thanksgiving

on this the 399th anniversary of that first thanksgiving i talked to two brilliant scholars of american history sarah churchwell who i've been lucky enough to have on this podcast before, I'm very lucky because she's so articulate. When the thoughts come out of her mouth, they require no editing. They require no burnishing, no improvement. Like Athena coming out of the head of Zeus. That brilliant. She is a professor of American literature and the public understanding of humanities at the University of London. And she is a Mayflower descendant. I'm also very lucky to have the equally brilliant reader, associate professor in early American literature at the University of Plymouth which is where, lest we forget, the Mayflower called in at to do some repairs before sailing across

the Atlantic in the autumn fall of 1620. She features prominently in our recent 400th anniversary documentary about the Mayflower, which so many of you have watched on History Hit TV. So great to have them both on this podcast. As you'll hear, I was in the room with Sarah. We sat there in a chat, but renewed lockdown meant that I was interviewing Catherine over Zoom. So there's a slight difference in quality. If you want to go and watch the documentary we produced with the Mayflower 400 commemorative team, you go to historyhit.tv. Because it's Thanksgiving weekend, because it's Black Friday, as we call it in the rest of the world, we've got our ridiculous offer on History Hit TV. It pains me to say this, but the offer is as follows. If you use the code BLACKFRIDAY, all lowercase, all one word,

you get a month for free. Then you get the four months after that for 80% off. So you get four months after that for just over four pounds in all. That takes you through to virtually the middle of next year for less than the cost of a beer. If you've ever wondered about getting History Hit TV, get it now. And let me tell you, December, we are dropping our first big drama documentary about the First World War. It's going to be fantastic. So use the code BLACKFRIDAY. Check out the Mayflower documentary. It's like Netflix for history. In the meantime, everybody, here is our podcast about Thanksgiving. To get things started, I talked to Sarah Churchwell.

Sarah, so good to have you on. Nice to be here. There were other colonies and there were other attempts to settle North America. Why do you remember this colony? Why do you remember the Plymouth colony? Why do you remember the Mayflower? And why is this first Thanksgiving so foundational? So I would say there are two main reasons why it began to accrue a mythology. The first was that they managed to, unlike their predecessors in Jamestown, they managed to actually establish a community that survived the first harsh winter

that wiped out a great number of them, but they established a toehold. And then when subsequent ships like the Fortune in 1621 came, they began to actually establish an agricultural community that could survive. And they began trading back with the old world. And so suddenly you have something that's working. And so it became exciting. It became an exciting possibility for immigration from the old world. And so there's actually a population explosion in New England of immigration in the first 50. And so there's actually a population explosion in New England of immigration in the first 50 years or so. So that's the first reason. So, you know, you have Massachusetts Bay Colony develops next and next door, but Plymouth was really the first of the British settlements to establish itself as a community. Another reason

why it's become really important in the way that we talk about the history of the United States as a democracy is this document called the Mayflower Compact. And because of a series of accidents of the way the voyage went, they thought they were going to Virginia. That was where they intended to go. But that doesn't mean modern day Virginia. It means what was the Virginia territory at that time, which went all the way up to the Hudson River to modern day New York. And that was actually where they were heading. They were going to the Hudson River. That was what they had a patent from the king that had land to go settle. And they weren't supposed to be as far north as Massachusetts. They went a little bit off kilter in the voyage. They had some storms

and they ended up in the winter in Massachusetts. And because of that, they knew that they didn't have the legal authority from the king to land where they were landing. So they didn't actually have the same kind of established government by distance, the same kind of understanding of what their sort of rudimentary government might look like. And they knew that they were undertaking certain kinds of risks by settling in a land that they didn't have formal permission to settle in. And so the 41 adult men, of course in a time when women couldn't sign anything legal,

the 41 adult men who were well enough to do so put together, as they were anchored off of Cape Cod, they put together a very simple document called the Mayflower Compact, where they basically agreed to abide by each other's decisions, to govern by consensus. And it was this kind of originary democratic statement, and in many ways is a kind of or document for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So that Mayflower Compact became an incredibly important part of the story. And then very quickly, they started telling stories about the Mayflower and about landing on Plymouth Rock as the story eventually developed. In terms of thinking about how those stories

started to take hold, it's worth remembering that on the one hand, we have a handful of families who barely survived. On the other hand, they were really prolific. and they had hundreds of grandchildren, some of these families. They intermarried really quickly. And so one of the more famous couples, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, famous because Longfellow memorialized them and mythologized them in a 19th century poem that was enormously popular called The Courtship of Miles Standish. Priscilla Mullins and John Alden had 10 children and somewhere between 70 and 80 grandchildren, I think.

So each of their 10 children had like 10 to 12 grandchildren. So they have millions of descendants now. Some of them were in their 70s and 80s telling grandchildren of the time about their coming there for the first time. And so for various reasons, those stories started to establish themselves as the kind of foundational, in more sense than one, this kind of foundational narrative about the British immigrants coming to what would become the United States. Next, I asked historian Dr. Catherine Gray to give me some context. Catherine, can you tell me where we are in the early 1620s with European colonisation of North America? What's the situation? Right, so the colonisation of the Americas

starts much earlier than 1620, of course. We know that the Spanish have been colonising South America and moving up into the north, and they're as far north as Florida by this time. And then we have the French who are colonising what we now know as present-day Canada. They're beginning to make inroads at this point. The Dutch haven't colonized anywhere

yet but they are present in the mouth of the Hudson River and they're beginning to trade in that region so they know this area really quite well and the English have been trying to colonize North America for a few decades now so they begin around about 1585 they're beginning to try and colonize this North American landscape and the first attempt truly is with Roanoke which we know as the Lost Colony and that was Raleigh's colony and then in 1607 we have Jamestown of course is established in Virginia but we also have a colony a little bit further north called Popham which only lasts a year and it's established in 1607. They go home in 1608. It doesn't succeed. And so by this point in 1620, when we have the Plymouth colony being established,

Jamestown is already there. Jamestown has been the successful attempt of English colonising North America, and Plymouth, therefore, is the second and will be the second attempt to colonise this region. What's the difference between the two colonies? If we want to compare Jamestown and Plymouth, and will be the second attempt to colonise this region. What's the difference between the two colonies? If we want to compare Jamestown and Plymouth, so I think Jamestown being the earlier settlement, it looks, I think, a bit more fortified.

And it's a very male-dominated colony, certainly to begin with. So it's quite militarised, I think, early on, certainly. And really, it's about, for the Jamestown colony, it's tobacco, the mercantile commodity that they're able to trade transatlantically. So that's really what sets Jamestown up as it were financially. For the Plymouth colony, it's a little bit different because the Plymouth colony is being settled more by families. Not all families, but there's more of a, and we might come to this a little bit later but it's women there's children there's men and so it's a very different kind of dynamic I think and certainly in those early years of colonization so when they begin to build their colony they're building houses they are beginning to parcel off land and that's quite common you know in early settlement that

they begin to try to farm this land in the way that they maybe had done back in England. So they're trying to imitate those methods in North America. And sometimes that's successful and sometimes it's not. Sarah Churchwell points out that it wasn't just Plymouth's success that makes it so celebrated. As ever in history, it's the fact that someone took the trouble to write it all down. So another important reason why the Plymouth colony was mythologised as such was that one of its leaders, who was named William Bradford, who was an Englishman who was living in Leiden, as many of the pilgrims were, the originary kind of settlement community,

and they sailed from Leiden in the Netherlands to meet another boat, which was in fact the Mayflower, in Southampton. Then they had to go back to Plymouth. They actually had two boats, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Speedwell sprung leaks. They had to go back to Plymouth. They actually had two boats, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Speedwell sprung leaks. They had to go back to Plymouth. And then eventually they sailed from Plymouth to what was supposed to be the Hudson River. They ended up a little bit off course, landed north in what is now Massachusetts. William Bradford was one of the leaders. And he later wrote an account called Of Plymouth Plantation,

where he actually wrote down his memory of the establishment of the colony. So we have a very early primary record that's quite detailed. He also wrote a list of all the Mayflower passengers, and he told the story of what we now call the first Thanksgiving, the harvest in October 21. So they landed in November 1620. They had a terrible winter, which decimated the population of the ship, primarily because the women and children were still on board

while they were trying to build the town. And so disease was spreading on the ship. And so the population was decimated by disease, but eventually the few who managed to survive, with the help of the native population, the Indian tribe known as the Wampanoags. Catherine, how did they survive that first year? Well, it's a challenge.

So the boat, the Mayflair stays for some time, so they're Well it's a challenge so the boat the Mayflower stays for some time so they're able to have some accommodation on the boat but they have to begin to find a place to build the colony and they find it in a clearing as they say it around the coast in Cape Cod and it's a place called Patuxet which had been a Native American village, had been an indigenous village and that village we know from historical records had been affected by disease, European disease, that had preceded the passengers of the Mayflowers, that preceded the arrival and had wiped out that population of Tuxed. So they find an area that had been settled as a village before and that's where they choose to build their own colony. The consequences though of the time it takes for them to settle this colony we know from William

Bradford's account that by March around half of the colonists had died either through disease or exposure so those first three or four months were very difficult for them. The environment that they were occupying was very difficult for them and that late arrival had set them back quite significantly. Once the spring arrives and once they're able to settle, they'll be able to plant, to use the land in ways that they would have done back home, things begin to pick up for them and they are able to sustain that through the summer and the autumn. How important were relations with indigenous people? So they strike up an alliance with the people who are in this area, occupy this area. We refer to these people now as Wampanoag. Pekanake is a name that's used in the primary text as well as the, you know, this particular tribe.

So they develop an alliance with their leader and in the text he's called Massasoit but that's simply a name that means leader in Wampanoag. So that relationship, that alliance sustains them and they have a treaty with the Wampanoag ultimately so they're able to agree a set of terms where they will live alongside each other, support each other and it becomes a sort of mutual defence mechanism too. So there's something about security that's really important that suits both parties in that sense. And the reason for that is that there are other indigenous groups

in the region that already, you know, before the Mayflower arrives, there are pre-existing political tensions and diplomatic tensions in this area. There's a shifting power base in this area, partly because of the European diseases that have been taking effect on different tribes at different rates. So there's sort of geopolitical circumstances to think about at this time.

So when the Mayflower arrives and this community settles, it has an impact on those current geopolitical circumstances. So the relationships with the Narragansett, with the Pequot, with the Massachusetts, who are other indigenous groups in this region, are not the same as the relationship that they have with the Wampanoag. So it's a really mixed picture, I would say. More on Thanksgiving from Sarah Churchwell and Catherine Gray after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive,

but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Sarah Churchwell told me how the relationship with the indigenous groups changed dramatically over time. Birchwell told me how the relationship with the indigenous groups changed dramatically over time. When we now go back to reconsider our earlier and very simplistic and very Western European Anglo orientated version of the histories, which basically says the pilgrims came and they brought God and they brought civilization to the savages, which is the earliest version of it. And of course, that's the version that gets mythologized in Westerns and becomes, you know, incredibly. That's the version that gets mythologized in Westerns and becomes incredibly, I mean, that's 19th century stories,

but still the same logic that this civilization is being brought by the Europeans to the savages in the wilderness. As we have finally acknowledged that we need to considerably complicate that story and that we're by no means the good guys in this story. And that obviously, as is always the case with histories of settler colonialism, you're talking about great violence. You're talking about the destruction of ways of life, about, you know, destruction of ancient religions and ancient languages and ancient cultures, and also ancient ways of inhabiting the environment, all of which has, you know, huge consequences for how we live today. And so that becomes a story about tension and a story about violence and a story about intercultural violence and indeed genocide when we get to the way that the European settlers eventually treated the natives. But at the beginning, they didn't, which is really quite a remarkable story. And in the first 20 to 50 years, so basically the first generation to two generations,

the leaders on both sides, for a host of complicated reasons that historians still think through and debate and talk about, they decided it was sort of mutual benefit. It was enlightened self-interest. It was in everybody's best interest to get along. The two most famous leaders who were from different peoples and had different experiences, there's this very famous in American mythology Indian called Squanto. And he was someone who had actually been traveling with Europeans

and he'd actually been to England and he spoke English and then he'd come back. And so he was a kind of translator figure in more ways than one, not just linguistically but also culturally. But he was also a more complicated figure because he had certain kinds of conflicting loyalties, not unsurprisingly, given some of the things he had experienced. And he had encountered some of the earlier settler communities, right? And then you have Massasoit,

who was the leader of the Wampanoags, who were the nearest tribe. Now, they had just been decimated by disease, probably the bubonic plague, which, again, the earlier settlers had brought over with them. So what had been a huge, thriving agricultural community had just been wiped out. And he had tensions with his historic tribal enemies, and he was trying to protect his lands,

and he had a kind of skeletal number of his kind of warriors, and his whole tribe, as I say, had been all but wiped out. So for him, it's a kind of skeletal number of his kind of warriors and his whole tribe, as I say, had been all but wiped out. So for him, it's a question of survival. But it made sense that if these people were going to be peaceful, and they could have certain kinds of treaties that they could establish and honor, then they could live in peace as, you know, the Wampanoags would have their land. And from their point of view, the Puritans would have their land, and everybody would know where they belonged. Within a couple of generations, it turned out the European colonialists didn't look at it that way.

There were early bits of violence and flare-ups of tension, of course, when they first landed. But quite quickly, they established a kind of neighborliness, which again, we shouldn't sentimentalize. There was violence and there was lots of misunderstanding, of course, great cultural misunderstanding. And the Puritans, as we are aware, were not the most tolerant of people. I mean, the other thing to remember is that, you know, when we talk about the Puritans coming over, I mean, we're talking about literally people whose vision of how to practice religion was so intolerant that, you know, they just couldn't get along with anybody else.

I mean, they just absolutely repudiated anybody else's right. And they were horrified by the idea that you could worship except in the way that they worshipped. And so, you know, in another sense, these very, very, very blinkered people and ideologues to the nth degree. But they were pragmatists. And at the end of the day, they had to survive. They were dying.

So they made these compacts. So Catherine, the settlers survive. They make it through this first brutal winter. They sow their seeds. And now let's move forward to the autumn, the fall of 1621. And let's get on to Thanksgiving itself. What is Thanksgiving and how does it come about? So I guess the first thing to say is it's more than a day.

This goes on for at least three days, maybe more. So they talk about bringing the harvest in. They talk about how they've gone out to hunt. They've shot some fowl, as they say. They've been fowling. So they've got some wild turkeys and they brought that back. Enough, they say, to last them a week. And then they set off their arms, they say, so they fire shots. And that's when Matasoit comes with 90 men they say and then those men go out and hunt some deer so there's venison and they stay there for three days and they say they feast for three days and they stay there for together in that space so that's the event that I guess the 19th century when this is recreated in the 19th century this is the event they are going back to it's this moment of the indigenous people,

the colonists together for those three days and feasting as far as the text tells us. When does Thanksgiving become a great national holiday? So this happens in the 19th century and it's part of that larger 19th century exceptional narrative. So when the United States separates from, you know, has its revolution, you know,

is independent from Britain, and it becomes its own country, in the 19th century, it's beginning to look back at its history to begin to understand and articulate a kind of linear heritage, this narrative of themselves and identity that they are beginning to establish. And much of that comes from the Plymouth Colony. So lots is made about the Mayflower Compact, which we also have from the Plymouth Colony. And Thanksgiving itself is also part and parcel of this identity that's been created in the 19th century to help articulate this national narrative that they are forging, newly forging at this time. So there's lots of paintings, there's lots of fictions, there's lots of political discourse around through the 19th century that really captures the significance of the Plymouth colony as it becomes the origin story of the United States. Never mind that Jamestown already, you know, predates Plymouth, but Plymouth does become the focus of that often in these narratives. But it's not until the end of the 19th century after the Civil War,

where Thanksgiving becomes a national holiday. And that's, you know, a post-Civil War moment. So it has a different kind of political urgency, maybe a different kind of political context there for it. So I think the Thanksgiving that people think about now probably comes from that 19th century moment. So it seems to me that in the 19th century you see this profoundly racist attitude from white European settlers all over the world towards indigenous people, partly because of this kind of gigantic technological gap that has now opened up. Was that racism there in the 17th century when the technological chasm wasn't quite as pronounced between these two peoples?

I think they did see themselves as much more advanced. I think it would articulate itself probably in technology actually if we think about literacy, if we think about the printing press, especially European cultures see that as another mark of what they would call civilisation. So the fact that indigenous people were an oral culture rather than a literary culture, that was seen as a marker of civilisation. So technology, I think, does play a role in that in terms of the printing press as well. I think that's significant. But religion is one of the key aspects too. So the idea that Christianity is also a central component to the aim of civilisation. So they would see the fact that indigenous people were not Christian as something that should be changed.

Much of English colonisation is often about converting indigenous people to Christianity. And part of that is a project of what they would call civilisation as well. Sarah, until recently, this story was pretty unambiguous. Americans knew what it meant. It was triumphalist. What about now? Is that changing now? So it's a really good question. And certainly, I mean, as you say, until very, very recently,

it was talked about and written about in a highly triumphalist way about white people coming and creating the glory that would be the United States and this great democratic experiment. We have a kind of revisionist version of it in two directions. One is to double down on the triumphalism. Reagan famously popularized this phrase, city on a hill, to a point where Sarah Palin referred to it as Reagan's vision of the city on a hill. But of course, as Sarah Palin didn't know, but Reagan did know, Reagan didn't come up with that phrase. That phrase came from John Winthrop in 1630, who was describing the experiment in the New World,

and he said, we shall be as a city upon a hill. What Winthrop meant in 1630 when he said that was, he said, all eyes will be upon us, and they will be judging the success of our experiments, and therefore we must not fail, because we will fail in the eyes of God. So basically, the godly were coming to show that their Puritan way of worshiping was the right way, and they wanted God to vindicate them. And if they lived immorally or they failed, then the eyes of the world, having watched this unique singular experiment, would say, your way of doing this is wrong, the Puritan way is wrong. So it was

a test. So he said the city on a hill is like what we would call in modern language a goldfish bowl. He was just saying, everybody's going to be looking at us, so don't screw it up, right? I mean, that's basically what he was saying. And then 400 years later, we have a president who says we shall be a shining beacon upon a hill as an example to the world. Well, that's kind of the opposite of what Winthrop was saying. Winthrop was saying don't mess it up,

and Reagan was saying everybody knew we would be the best from the beginning. And that gets taken up by the right as a kind of, as I say, a kind of triumphalist narrative about settler colonialism. So that's one way in which it's been revised. Of course, the way in which you're referring to is our much greater historiographic nuance and understanding that the version that was told by the European settlers was to say the least a one-sided version of the events that occurred during settlement and the native genocide that eventually took place. So what happened was all of these people who came over and then started applauding themselves for establishing a democracy

worked really hard at creating an aristocracy within that and that aristocracy was about your descent and can you establish that you were descended from the Mayflower. There is a whole group called the Mayflower Society, which you have to be able to establish and certify in various kinds of ways that you were, you know, got all the paperwork and stuff. And then they have to, like, ratify it. And then you can become a member of the Mayflower Society. There's another one, which is the Daughters of the American Revolution, which, again, you have to demonstrate not only that you have an ancestor

who fought in the revolution, but that they fought on the right side of the revolution because if they fought on the right side of the revolution, because if they fought on the side of the king, we're not interested. And so there are these various kind of aristocratic groups that developed. You won't be surprised to hear that those groups really formed and began to establish certain kinds of social power and cultural status in the 19th century, and particularly at the end of the 19th century, as more immigrant groups were starting to come over, these groups decided to differentiate themselves

and establish themselves as the Native Americans, which is to say not indigenous in the way we would understand that, not indigenous peoples, but native-born. And then the further back you could demonstrate that you had come than the more aristocratic you were. And so that would have been around the 1880s, the 1890s, and that's exactly when all of these pressures around immigration began to make themselves felt.

And the arguments around anti-immigration restrictionism, this thing called nativism, which had been building since the 1840s and 1850s, was really starting to take hold, and really an embedding of white supremacists, of implicitly and explicitly white supremacist ideas about the superiority of Northern European stock, and these eugenicist arguments about these people being inherently superior. So then if you can also trace this ancestry, then you're supposed

to be a very special person indeed. And Sarah is very special, obviously, not least because she can trace that ancestry back to the Mayflower but mostly because she's obviously so brilliant and as was our other contributor Catherine maybe she and I can't trace our lineage back but we've got we got heroes in our veins as well thanks to them both we'll have more on Thanksgiving obviously next year and what it's meant over the centuries for the 400th anniversary of it in 1621, in 2021. In the meantime, happy Thanksgiving, everybody. This year, I am grateful for health and family and experts, obviously.

Experts are back. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense.

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