The people who comprised the Plymouth Colony were a group of English Protestants called Puritans who wanted to break away from the Church of England. These "separatists" initially moved to Holland. But after 12 years of financial problems, they received funding from English merchants to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in to settle in a "New World.
But windy conditions forced the group to cut their trip short and settle at what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. As the Puritans prepared for winter, they gathered anything they could find, including Wampanoag supplies. One day, Samoset, a leader of the Abenaki people, and Tisquantum better known as Squanto visited the settlers.
Squanto was a Wampanoag who had experience with other settlers and knew English. Squanto helped the settlers grow corn and use fish to fertilize their fields. After several meetings, a formal agreement was made between the settlers and the native people, and in March , they joined together to protect each other from other tribes. One day that fall, four settlers were sent to hunt for food for a harvest celebration.
The Wampanoag heard gunshots and alerted their leader, Massasoit, who thought the English might be preparing for war. Massasoit visited the English settlement with 90 of his men to see if the war rumor was true. Soon after their visit, the Native Americans realized that the English were only hunting for the harvest celebration.
To end the confusion, Congress decided to set a fixed-date for the holiday. On October 6, , the House passed a joint resolution declaring the last Thursday in November to be the legal Thanksgiving Day. The Senate, however, amended the resolution establishing the holiday as the fourth Thursday, which would take into account those years when November has five Thursdays.
The House agreed to the amendment, and President Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, , thus establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. House of Representatives, RG View in National Archives Catalog.
They showed them other crops to grow in the unfamiliar soil and how to hunt and fish. In the autumn of , bountiful crops of corn, barley, beans, and pumpkins were harvested. The colonists had much to be thankful for, so a feast was planned. They invited the local Iroquois chief and 90 members of his tribe. The Indigenous peoples brought deer to roast with the turkeys and other wild game offered by the colonists. The colonists learned how to cook cranberries and different kinds of corn and squash dishes from them.
In the following years, many of the original colonists celebrated the autumn harvest with a feast of thanks. However, in fact, the Pilgrims weren't the first immigrants to celebrate a day of thanksgiving—that probably belongs to the Popham colony of Maine, who celebrated the day of their arrival in And the Pilgrims didn't celebrate every year afterward.
They did celebrate the arrival of supplies and friends from Europe in ; and in and , the Pilgrims celebrated the defeats of the Wampanoag neighbors. The celebration in was memorable because, at the end of the feast, the rangers sent to defeat the Wampanoag brought back the head of their leader Metacom, who was known by his adopted English name King Philip, on a pike, where it was kept on display in the colony for 20 years.
The holiday continued as a tradition in New England, however, celebrated not with a feast and family, but rather with rowdy drunken men who went door to door begging for treats. By the midth century, the rowdy behavior had become a carnivalesque misrule that was closer to what we think of as Halloween or Mardi Gras today.
An established mummer's parade made up of cross-dressing men, known as the Fantasticals, began by the s: it was considered a more acceptable behavior than the drunken rowdiness. It could be said that these two institutions are still part of Thanksgiving Day celebrations: rowdy men Thanksgiving Day football games, established in , and elaborate mummer parades Macy's Parade, established in After the United States became an independent country, Congress recommended one yearly day of thanksgiving for the whole nation to celebrate.
Later presidents were not so supportive; for example, Thomas Jefferson thought that for the government to proclaim a quasi-religious holiday was a violation of the separation of church and state. In , Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's magazine, published the first of many editorials encouraging the celebration of the "Great American Festival.
In , in the middle of the Civil War , Abraham Lincoln asked all Americans to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving Day of Hale and Lincoln was a domestic event, a day of family homecoming, a mythical and nostalgic idea of the hospitality, civility and happiness of the American family. The purpose of the festival was no longer a communal celebration, but rather a domestic event, carving out a sense of national identity and welcoming home family members.
Homey domestic symbols traditionally served at Thanksgiving festivals include:. In , a Thanksgiving ceremony with more than 4, people took place at the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine.
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