Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, at the end of the harvest season, is a holiday to express thanks for our material and spiritual possessions.
While the holiday’s origins can be traced to harvest festivals which have been celebrated in many cultures since ancient times, the American holiday has beginnings in the survival of the English settlers with the help of Native Americans after the brutal winter at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
History
Spaniards
The first recorded Thanksgiving ceremony took place on September 8, 1565, when 600 Spanish settlers, under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, landed at what is now St. Augustine, Florida, and immediately held a Mass of Thanksgiving for their safe delivery to the New World; there followed a feast and celebration. As the La Florida colony became part of the United States, this can be considered the first Thanksgiving.
The Virginia colony
A collective prayer of thanksgiving was led by Captain John Woodlief in the Virginia Colony on December 4, 1619 near the current site of Berkeley Plantation, where celebrations are still held each year in November.
The Pilgrims
The Pilgrims were particularly thankful to Squanto, the Native American who taught them how to catch eel, grow corn and who served as an interpreter for them (Squanto had learned English as a slave in Europe and travels in England). Without Squanto’s help the Pilgrims might not have survived in the New World. The explorers who later came to be called the “Pilgrims” set apart a day to celebrate at Plymouth immediately after their first harvest, in 1621. At the time, this was not regarded as a Thanksgiving observance; harvest festivals were already parts of English and Wampanoag traditions.
The Pilgrims did not hold a true Thanksgiving until 1623, when it followed a drought, prayers for rain, and a subsequent rain shower.
Gradually, an annual Thanksgiving after the harvest developed in the mid-17th century. This did not occur on any set day or necessarily on the same day in different colonies in America.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony (consisting mainly of Puritan Christians) celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time in 1630, and frequently thereafter until about 1680, when it became an annual festival in that colony; and Connecticut as early as 1639 and annually after 1647, except in 1675. The Dutch in New Netherland (the capital of which – New Amsterdam – is now New York City) appointed a day for giving thanks in 1644 and occasionally thereafter.
Charlestown, Massachusetts held the first recorded Thanksgiving observance June 29, 1671 by proclamation of the town’s governing council.
The Revolutionary War to nationhood
During the American Revolutionary War the Continental Congress appointed one or more thanksgiving days each year, each time recommending to the executives of the various states the observance of these days in their states. The First National Proclamation of Thanksgiving was given by the Continental Congress in 1777.
George Washington, leader of the revolutionary forces in the American Revolutionary War, proclaimed a Thanksgiving in December 1777 as a victory celebration honoring the defeat of the British at Saratoga.
Thanksgiving in the first 30 years of nationhood
As President, on October 3, 1789, George Washington made proclaimed and created the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government of the United States of America. George Washington again proclaimed a Thanksgiving in 1795.
President John Adams declared Thanksgivings in 1798 and 1799. No Thanksgiving proclamations were issued by Thomas Jefferson but James Madison renewed the tradition in 1814, in response to resolutions of Congress, at the close of the War of 1812.
Lincoln and the Civil War
In the middle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, prompted by a series of editorials written by Sarah Josepha Hale, proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated on the final Thursday in November 1863.
Since 1863, Thanksgiving has been observed every year in the United States.
1939 to 1940
Abraham Lincoln’s successors as president followed his example of annually declaring the final Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving.
1941 to present
The U.S. Congress in 1941 passed a bill requiring that Thanksgiving be observed annually on the fourth Thursday of November, which was sometimes the last Thursday and sometimes (less frequently) the next to last. On December 26 of that year President Roosevelt signed this bill, for the first time making the date of Thanksgiving a matter of federal law.
Since 1970, a group of Native Americans and others have held a National Day of Mourning protest on Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the name of social equality and in honor of political prisoners.
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