How the Plymouth Pilgrims took over Thanksgiving – and who history left behind
In “The First Thanksgiving, 1621,” historian Jean L. G. Ferris delves into the complex history and evolving narratives surrounding the American Thanksgiving holiday. While approximately 90% of Americans celebrate Thanksgiving by gathering around a table filled with food, Ferris argues that the popular portrayal of the holiday, particularly the iconic image of Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal, oversimplifies and obscures a rich tapestry of communal rituals and diverse cultural practices that predate the 1621 feast. This narrative, which has become entrenched in American culture, often marginalizes Indigenous peoples, Catholics, and Jews, thereby limiting the understanding of who truly belongs in the American story.
Ferris highlights that the Pilgrims’ meal in 1621 was not merely a harvest celebration but also a significant diplomatic event that marked an alliance between the English settlers and the Wampanoag people. The historical context reveals that the Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620, were not the first to establish Thanksgiving traditions in North America. Long before their arrival, Indigenous peoples held their own harvest festivals and communal feasts, such as those celebrated by the Cahokians, who gathered to give thanks centuries earlier. Ferris also emphasizes that the Pilgrims’ narrative was shaped over time, especially during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when rising immigration and nativist sentiments prompted a romanticized view of the Pilgrims as the quintessential American founders.
Furthermore, the article illustrates how the Thanksgiving narrative has been manipulated to serve various socio-political agendas throughout American history. For instance, the Pilgrims were celebrated in the context of national identity as the nation expanded and grappled with issues of immigration and cultural inclusion. This culminated in events like the 1920 commemoration of the Pilgrims’ landing, which coincided with a surge of nativism that led to restrictive immigration policies. As Ferris suggests, while the story of the Pilgrims and their first Thanksgiving can be a unifying narrative, it is essential to approach it with a critical lens that acknowledges its complexities and the broader historical context, ensuring that the diverse voices and traditions that contribute to America’s identity are recognized and honored.
‘The First Thanksgiving, 1621,’ by Jean L. G. Ferris.
Library of Congress
Nine in 10 Americans
gather around a table to share food on Thanksgiving. At this polarizing moment, anything that promises to bring Americans together warrants our attention.
But as a
historian of religion
, I feel obliged to recount how popular interpretations of Thanksgiving also have pulled us apart.
Communal rituals of giving thanks
have a longer history
in North America, and it was only around the turn of the 20th century that most people in the U.S. came to associate Thanksgiving with Plymouth “Pilgrims” and generic “Indians” sharing a historic meal.
The
emphasis on the Pilgrims’ 1620 landing
and 1621 feast erased a great deal of religious history and narrowed conceptions of who belongs in America – at times excluding groups such as Native Americans, Catholics and Jews.
Farming faiths and harvest festivals
The usual Thanksgiving depiction overlooks Indigenous rituals that give thanks, including harvest festivals.
The Wampanoag
, who shared food with the Pilgrims in 1621, continue to celebrate the
cranberry harvest
, and similar feasts were held long before Columbus sailed and Pilgrims landed.
As I note in my 2025 book, “
Religion in the Lands That Became America
,” for instance, celebrants
gathered for a communal feast
in the late 11th century in the 50-acre plaza of Cahokia.
That Native city
, across the river from present-day St. Louis, was the largest population center north of Mexico before the American Revolution.
The St. Louis, Mo., skyline is seen beyond Monks Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Ill., on July 11, 2019.
Daniel Acker for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Cahokians and their neighbors
came in late summer or early autumn
to give deities thanks, smoke ritual tobacco and eat special food – not corn, their dietary staple, but symbolically significant animals such as white swans and white-tailed deer. So, those Cahokians attended a thanks-giving feast five centuries before the Pilgrims’ harvest-time meal.
‘Days of Thanksgiving’
The usual depiction also de-emphasizes the tradition of officials announcing special “Days of Thanksgiving,” a practice familiar to the Pilgrims and their descendants.
The Pilgrims, who settled in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, were separatist Puritans who had denounced the
Catholic elements
that remained in the Protestant Church of England. They first sought to form their own “purified”
church and community in Holland
. After about 12 years, many of them moved again, crossing the Atlantic in 1620. The Pilgrims’ colony southeast of Boston was gradually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by a larger group of Puritans who did not split from England’s official church.
As
historians have noted
, Puritan ministers in Massachusetts’ state-sanctioned Congregational Church didn’t just speak on Sundays. Now and then they also gave special thanksgiving sermons, which expressed gratitude for what the community considered divine interventions, from military victory to epidemic relief.
The practice continued and spread. During the American Revolution, for instance, the Continental Congress
declared a Day of Thanksgiving
to commemorate the victory at Saratoga in 1777. President James Madison
announced Days of Thanksgiving
during the War of 1812. Leaders of the United States and the Confederate states
did the same
during the Civil War.
This tradition influenced Americans such as
Sarah Hale
, who called for a national Thanksgiving holiday. A magazine editor and poet best known for “
Mary Had a Little Lamb
,” she successfully pitched the idea to Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
Harvest feast of 1621
Many Americans’ view of “The First Thanksgiving” resembles the scene depicted in
a Jean Ferris painting
by that name. Finished around 1915, it is similar to
another popular image
painted around the same time, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe’s “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.”
‘The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth’ by Jennie A. Brownscombe.
Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal/Wikimedia Commons
Both images distort the historical context and misrepresent Indigenous attendees from the nearby Wampanoag Confederacy. The Native leaders wear headdresses from Plains tribes, and there are too few Indigenous attendees.
Only one
eyewitness account
survives: a 1621 letter from the Pilgrim
Edward Winslow
. He reported that the Wampanoag’s leader, Massasoit, brought 90 men. That means, some
historians suggest
, the shared meal was as much a diplomatic event marking an alliance as an agricultural feast celebrating a harvest.
Ferris’ painting also implies that the English provided the food. Plymouth residents brought “fowl,”
as Winslow recalled
– probably wild turkey – but the Wampanoag added five killed deer. Even the harvest of “Indian corn” depended on Native aid. Tisquantum or Squanto,
the lone survivor
of the village that the Pilgrims called Plymouth, had offered lifesaving advice about planting as well as diplomacy.
The image’s cheerful scene also obscures how death had destabilized the area. The Pilgrims lost almost half their group to famine or exposure that first winter. After earlier European contact, however, even larger numbers of the Wampanoag had died in
a regional epidemic
that raged between 1616-1619. That’s why the Pilgrims found Squanto’s village abandoned, and why both communities were open to the alliance he brokered.
Pilgrims’ primacy
The Pilgrims were latecomers to the Thanksgiving table. Lincoln’s
1863 proclamation
, published in Harper’s Monthly, mentioned “the blessing of fruitful fields,” but not the Pilgrims. Nor were Pilgrims depicted in the magazine’s
illustrated follow-up
. The page showed town and country, as well as emancipated slaves, celebrating the feast day by praying at “the Union altar.” For years before and after the proclamation, in fact,
many Southerners resisted Thanksgiving
, which they saw as a Northern, abolitionist holiday.
This ‘Thanksgiving Day’ illustration, made by cartoonist Thomas Nast, commemorated its first celebration as a U.S. holiday.
Syracuse University Art Museum
The Pilgrims’ absence makes sense, since they were not the first Europeans to land on North America’s eastern coast – or to give thanks there. Spanish Catholics had
founded St. Augustine
in 1565. According to
an eyewitness account
, the Spanish leader asked a priest to
celebrate Mass
on Sept. 8, 1565,
which Native Americans attended
, and “ordered that the Indians be fed.”
Two decades later, an English group had tried and failed to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina – including a
Jewish engineer
. The English had more success when they
settled Jamestown, Virginia
, in 1607. A commander leading a new group to Virginia was instructed to mark “
a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God
” in 1619, two years before the Plymouth meal.
But over the years, Plymouth’s Pilgrims still moved slowly
toward the center of the national holiday
– and America’s founding narrative.
In 1769, Plymouth residents promoted their town by organizing a “Forefathers’ Day.” In 1820 the Protestant politician Daniel Webster
gave a speech
commemorating the bicentennial of the landing at Plymouth Rock and praising the Pilgrims’ arrival as “the first footsteps of civilized man” in the wilderness. Then in an 1841 volume, “
Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers
,” a Boston minister reprinted the 1621 eyewitness account and described the shared harvest meal as “the first Thanksgiving.”
Rising immigration
Between 1880 and 1920, the Pilgrims emerged as the central characters in national narratives about both Thanksgiving Day and America’s origin. It was no coincidence that these years were
the peak of immigration to the U.S.
, and many Americans saw the new immigrants as inferior to those who had landed at Plymouth Rock.
A late-1800s depiction of the Plymouth landing, published by the printmaking business Currier and Ives.
Mabel Brady Garvan Collection/Yale University Art Gallery
Irish Catholics already
had a presence in Boston
when the “Pilgrim Fathers” volume appeared in 1841, and more came after the Irish potato famine later that decade. Boston’s foreign-born population
increased further
as poverty and politics pushed Italian Catholics and Russian Jews to seek a better life in America.
The same was happening in many northern cities, and some Protestants were alarmed. In an 1885 bestseller called “
Our Country
,” a Congregational Church minister warned that “the glory is departing from many a New England village, because men, alien in blood, in religion, and in civilization, are taking possession of homes in which were once reared the descendants of the Pilgrims.”
During the
300th anniversary
of the Pilgrims’ landing and harvest meal, celebrated in 1920 and 1921, the federal government issued
commemorative stamps
and coins
. Officials
staged pageants
, and politicians gave speeches. About 30,000 people gathered in Plymouth, for instance, to hear
President Warren Harding
and Vice President Calvin Coolidge praise the “Pilgrim Spirit.”
Soon nativist worries about the newcomers, especially Catholics and Jews, led Coolidge to sign the
Immigration Act of 1924
, which would largely close America’s borders for four decades.
Americans kept telling the Pilgrim story after U.S. immigration policy
became more welcoming in 1965
, and many will tell it again next year as we celebrate the nation’s
250th anniversary
. Understood in its full context, it’s a story worth telling. But we might use caution since, as history reminds us, stories about the country’s spiritual past can either bring us together or pull us apart.
Thomas Tweed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
