History Short: The First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving - in 1621 - was celebrated for three days not just one day, and probably not in late November.

The exact time-of-year is not definitely known, but it's believed to have been in late September / early October, which aligned with the harvest season.

The Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag tribe led by Chief Massasoit gathered for feasting, games, singing and dancing. After surviving the many hardships of the long voyage and their first year in the New World, the Plymouth colonists (the Pilgrims), were ready to celebrate (finally!) a successful harvest, which the Wampanoag tribe had helped them with. The tribe had passed on many skills to the colonists and helped them survive in the new and unfamiliar land.

The original Mayflower Compact had, unfortunately, set the Pilgrims up for failure. Basically, each member of the Plymouth Colony was “guided” to labor collectively, on behalf of the whole settlement. "Wise leaders" were put in place to decide when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work, etc. The plan was to create a communal society where everyone would share in the work and the harvest. They held land in common, brought their crops to a central storehouse, and distributed them equally. Specifically, the colony mandate was that “all profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, working, fishing, or any other means” would be collected into a common stock, and “all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.” In other words: The original Plymouth Colony was an experiment in socialism.

Understandably, this experimental system led to confusion, discontent, and hardship. People soon saw little reason to work hard if they were going to receive an equal share of the harvest, regardless of their individual efforts, and hard-working people became resentful of the redistribution of their efforts to others whom they imagined to be less hard-working than themselves. The result was a disaster of inefficiency and conflict that nearly wiped out the entire community. About half of the colonists died in the first year.

Pilgrim “leader” and “Colony Governor,” William Bradford, recognized that the forced resource distributions and disconnects between individual efforts and rewards – both inherent elements of a socialist model – required swift abandonment. It was a simple matter of survival. So, the Plymouth Colony reorganized itself, divided the land into parcels for individual families to oversee and grow food for themselves – as they saw fit, enabled individuals to trade with Indians, and dismantled the communal storehouse concept.

Surprise, surprise: The community began to flourish. Harvests became bountiful, and new colonists began arriving at the thriving settlement.

The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of genuine (rather than forced) unity, of the new relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, and it was a time dedicated to giving thanks to God for their bountiful harvest and – ultimately – their survival.