Fire Dreams
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)
I remember here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Pilgrims of iron jaws,
Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,
And the random chapters say
They were glad and sang to God.
And so
Since the iron-jawed men sat down
And said, "Thanks, O God,"
For life and soup and a little less
Than a hobo handout to-day,
Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,
Since the iron-jawed men sang "Thanks, O God,"
You and I, O Child of the West,
Remember more than ever
November and the hunter's moon,
November and the yellow-spotted hills.
And so
In the name of the iron-jawed men
I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.
God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,
God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,
I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: "Thanks, O God."
I could get into hot water for questioning Thanksgiving as we know it. I realize I could be accused of promoting revisionist history or even expounding critical race theory. However, the truth is the truth, and facts are facts. Neither honesty nor proof should diminishes our greater understanding. So, on with the blog entry. Critics may be critics.
First of all let me establish this: I love the holiday and the observance of Thanksgiving. To gather as families and give thanks for our blessings is so meaningful. And, of course, the feast we prepare is symbolic of an original American tradition. Loving family, sincere gratitude, and great food – what's not to like about Thanksgiving?
But …
Have you ever considered the Pilgrims? We make so much of these early settlers, yet just who were they and what eventually happened to them? Shouldn't the “rest of the story” of a people considered to be such an important group exist? We have the Mayflower, the settlement of Plymouth, and the feast and that's about it. Surely, there is more.
I mean … people revel so much in discovering they are direct descendants of those on the Mayflower. It's considered to be a big deal. In fact, more than a few would rise to prominence in American culture and politics – among them Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner and George W. Bush. I guess having such ancestors is an honor.
But …
Do you know any of these descendants who maintain the same religious traditions? Did the Pilgrims' influence made such a critical difference to American settlement? I mean we have Columbus and “first of the Indies” in 1493 and John Smith with Jamestown and "the first permanent English settlement" in 1607. Neither is as celebrated as Plymouth. What makes the Pilgrims so significant, if anything?
Peter C. Mancall, professor of history at the University of Southern California whose work has focused on early America, writes …
“After the establishment of the United States, historians and politicians cemented Plymouth in the script of American nationalism, minimizing its well-documented problems and magnifying its alleged wonders. In the centuries that followed, that trend continued, even as the form of that nationalism changed. The word 'Plymouth' may today conjure up visions of Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, but that vision did not reflect the circumstances on the ground in the early 17th century.”
(Peter C. Mancall “How America Keeps Adapting the Story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to Match the Story We Need to Tell.” Time. December 17, 2020.)
By the way, at this point, I have to ask …
What's the deal with those funny, stereotypical Pilgrim hats known as capotains? You know the conical, flat-topped ones? Well, guess what? Historians tell us that the Pilgrim capotain with belt buckles is a historical anomaly that is absolutely false. Experts have speculated that the buckle was added in the 19th century during Victorian portrayals of the colonizing of America.
Are you kidding me or what? All of my grade school teachers loved those things – If I remember right, we even made paper models of the hats we had to wear to amuse them. (Some lucky kids got to wear those great Indian feathers instead – you know, the Native attire of those considered “guests” – the people who actually supplied the life-sustaining food?)
The Mayflower Society offers this accurately researched description of Pilgrim men's apparel:
“The basic apparel for Pilgrim men would have consisted of a 1) shirt which also served as underwear; 2) doublet; 3) breeches or slops; 4) stockings; 5) latchet shoes, and 6) a hat (brimmed, flat, or monmouth cap).”
And, hey, the Pilgrims, in fact, wore a wide variety of colors. Many people think the Pilgrims always wore black clothes. This may be because in many images of the time, people are shown wearing black clothes. This is because in the 1620s, best clothes were often black, and people usually had their portraits painted while wearing their best clothes. Everyday clothes were made of many colors. Brown, brick red, yellow and blue were common.
(“What To Wear.” Plimouth/Patuxet Museum. 2021.)
So, do you see what I mean? The fuss over Pilgrims leaves a lot of room for questions. Let's explore a few.
The Name “Pilgrim”
Technically “Pilgrim” is not a term for a religious denomination. The fact is, the word “Pilgrim” became (by the early 1800s at least) the popular term applied to all the Mayflower passengers – and even to other people arriving in Plymouth in those early years – so that the English people who settled Plymouth in the 1620s are generally called “the Pilgrims” – traditionally referring to those who journey to a sacred place for religious reasons.
Governor William Bradford – often seen as the spiritual and political father of the Plymouth Colony – and the other Plymouth settlers were not originally known as Pilgrims, but as “Old Comers.” This moniker changed after the discovery of a manuscript by Bradford in which he called the settlers who left Holland “saints” and “pilgrimes.” Bradford wrote a poem in which he refers to himself as a pilgrim.
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FROM my years young in days of youth, |
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God did make known to me his truth. |
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And call’d me from my native place |
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For to enjoy the means of grace. |
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In wilderness he did me guide, |
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And in strange lands for me provide. |
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In fears and wants, through weal and woe, |
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A pilgrim, passed I to and fro: |
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“Providence and the Pilgrim” |
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By William Bradford (1590–1657) |
In 1820, at a bicentennial celebration of the colony’s founding, the orator Daniel Webster referred to “Pilgrim Fathers,” and the term stuck.
Who Were These “Pilgrims”?
Of the 102 colonists, 35 were members of the English Separatist Church (a radical faction of Puritanism) who had earlier fled to Leiden, the Netherlands, to escape persecution at home. Seeking a more abundant life along with religious freedom, the Separatists negotiated with a London stock company to finance a pilgrimage to America. Approximately two-thirds of those making the trip aboard the Mayflower were non-Separatists, hired to protect the company’s interests; these included John Alden and Myles Standish.
(“Pilgrim Fathers.” United States History. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
We don't remember and revere the group as Separatists. In fact, only 35 were of that church. In addition, a handful of those on board were sympathetic to the Separatist cause but weren’t actually part of that core group of dissidents. The remaining passengers were really just hired hands—laborers, soldiers and craftsmen of various stripes whose skills were required for both the transatlantic crossing and those vital first few months ashore.
Why Did They Come To America?
“The Pilgrims actually had no reason to leave the Dutch Republic in order to go to America to seek religious toleration – because they already had it,” says historian and lecturer Simon Targett, co-author of New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers. “Therefore, you have to look for other reasons as to why they might have risked the dangers of going across to the New World—and one of the big reasons was commercial.”
Other historians agree with Targett. Like tens of millions of newcomers who would follow in their wake to America, the Pilgrims were economic migrants. After working for more than a decade in Leiden’s textile industry, the Pilgrims possessed little beyond their religious freedom. The former farmers lived in poverty, laboring long hours for low pay by weaving, spinning and making cloth.
Targett says the group eventually turned to America to have greater economic stability and preserve their English identity. The Pilgrims also believed that the New World gave them the opportunity to evangelize to Native Americans and undertake, as Bradford wrote, “the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world.”
(Christopher Klein. “Why Did the Pilgrims Come to America?” History.com. Nov 13, 2020.)
Historian and Deputy Executive Director of Plimouth Plantation Richard Pickering sums the migration up as …
“There is a religious motivation in the desire to protect the church. But those that were living in Holland were safe, so that they could have remained and worshiped as they wanted, but it is an economic motivation to better the lives of their children and grow the number of church members.”
(Paul Solman. “Were pilgrims America’s original economic migrants?” PBS News Hour. November 26, 2015.)
Pilgrims were comprised of seventy-some-odd investors, known as "merchant adventurers.” The tradable goods of America were the three F`s – fur, fish and forests – which provided wood like pine for an increasingly clear-cut England.
So …
The idea of the Pilgrims coming to the New World for religious freedom may need amended. Some historians think this is an ideal later codified in the First Amendment and nothing could be further from the truth.
Kathleen Donegan, a Berkeley English professor whose book Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America was a source for the new documentary The Pilgrims funded by the National Endowment For the Humanities, says this …
“A big misconception is that they were for religious freedom and liberty. Actually, the Pilgrims saw the world as a wilderness, in which the one right way of practice toward God might cultivate a garden – and you needed a hedge around that garden to protect it from the wilderness. They were terrified of contamination. The Pilgrims were not for freedom of religion. Quite the opposite: They had very specific ideas about how to worship God, and were intolerant of deviations.”
(Craig Lambert. Who Were the Pilgrims Who Celebrated the First Thanksgiving? Humanities. National Endowment For the Humanities. November/December 2015.)
Consider another group of “religious” settlers of the country – the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It started in 1628 with approximately 100 settlers. Many were Puritans, not Separatists. About 20,000 Puritan people moved there in the 1630s. And, soon the Puritans outnumbered the Separatists by large amounts.
Puritans played leading roles in establishing the Saybrook Colony in 1635, the Connecticut Colony in 1636, and the New Haven Colony in 1638. And, the major difference between the Puritans and the Separatists was that the Separatists were more extreme than the Puritans. The Puritans were Protestants who believed that the modern church had strayed too far from its biblical roots. They felt that the Church of England (Anglican Church) had retained too many of the characteristics of Catholicism. The Puritans wanted to reform the Church of England from within.
Theologically, the Puritans were "non-separating Congregationalists." The Separatists wanted to form a separate church. They felt that the Church of England was too far gone and that it was not possible to save it.
“[The Puritan leader] John Winthrop talks about creating a church that will be a light to the nations,” says Oman. “The Pilgrims never really expressed that desire.”
(David Roos. “What’s the Difference Between Puritans and Pilgrims?” History.com. March 16, 2021.)
Historian Pauline Croft of the Royal Holloway University of London declares in the film, “One might say, if you wanted to be critical, they’re (Pilgrim Separatists) religious nutters who won’t settle for anything except the most literal reading of the Bible. They want to transform a nation-state into something that resembles what they take to be a Godly kingdom.”
(Craig Lambert. Who Were the Pilgrims Who Celebrated the First Thanksgiving? Humanities. National Endowment For the Humanities. November/December 2015.)
Religious “nutters”? The Pilgrims we all studied and colored and posted images of in our grade school classrooms?
Well, according to Bradford’s version of events they landed in a wilderness surrounded by “enemies who would not provide them succor, unlike the treatment of Paul among the barbarians (Acts 28).” Bradford shares: “The woods were so thick that they could not see the promised land because, unlike Moses, they could not climb a mountain (Deuteronomy 34).” And, they executed a teenage boy for bestiality, following guidance from Leviticus.
(Peter C. Mancall “How America Keeps Adapting the Story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to Match the Story We Need to Tell.” Time. December 17, 2020.)
How does all of that fit into your early childhood Thanksgiving education?
In his writing, Bradford concentrated on the Pilgrims’ struggle to create their godly community. He wrote that they exiled other colonists who held different religious views, and he chastised Indigenous enemies. His peers did more than just chastise: The Pilgrims sent an Anglican lawyer named Thomas Morton to England after they caught him cavorting with and selling arms to local Natives.
During a war in 1637, the English colonizers, with Narragansett allies, surrounded a Pequot village, set it alight and murdered those fleeing the flames. The Pilgrims thanked their God for the downfall of a “proud and insulting” enemy. The victors sold some of the captured Pequots into slavery. Religious and political freedom existed for the Pilgrims, but not for Native Americans—and other colonists—who disagreed with them.
(Peter C. Mancall “How America Keeps Adapting the Story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to Match the Story We Need to Tell.” Time. December 17, 2020.)
What Eventually Happened To the Pilgrims?
For starters, Erik Painter, a direct descendant of several of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, said there were not that many passengers and many died. Five died at sea. Between the landing and March, only 47 colonists had survived the diseases that they contracted on the ship. Forty-five of the 102 Mayflower passengers died in the winter of 1620–21 due to disease and starvation.
In Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford refers to this period as the “Starving Time”:
“But that what was most sad and lamentable was, that in two or three months’ time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of the winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and their inaccommodate condition had brought upon them. So there died some times two or three of a day in the foresaid time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained.”
In the fall of 1621 the Fortune brought 35 more. With arrival of the Fortune the colony had a total of sixty-six men and just sixteen women.
Then in 1623 the ships Anne and Little James were the third and fourth ships. They brought 90 passengers. 60 men, women, and children were English Separatist residents of Leiden, Holland. There 30 others were part of an independent emigrant group led by John Oldham.
Another ship made a voyage from London to Plymouth Colony in 1629 carrying 35 passengers, many from the Pilgrim congregation in Leiden that organized the first voyage.
Historial Note On The Mayflower: The ship returned to England from Plymouth Colony, arriving back on 9 May 1621. Christopher Jones took the ship out on a trading voyage to Rochelle, France, in October 1621, returning with a cargo of Bay salt. Christopher Jones, master and quarter-owner of the Mayflower, died and was buried at Rotherhithe, co. Surrey, England, on 5 March 1621/2. No further record of the Mayflower is found until May 1624, when it was appraised for the purposes of probate and was described as being in ruins. The ship was almost certainly sold off as scrap.
History.com relates that compared with later groups who founded colonies in New England, such as the Puritans, the Pilgrims of Plymouth failed to achieve lasting economic success. After the early 1630s, some prominent members of the original group, including Brewster, Winslow and Standish, left the colony to found their own communities.
The cost of fighting King Philip’s War further damaged the colony’s struggling economy. Less than a decade after the war King James II appointed a colonial governor to rule over New England, and in 1692, Plymouth was absorbed into the larger entity of Massachusetts.
(Editors. “Pilgrims.” History.com. A&E Television Networks. November 21, 2019.)
And the Separatists were absorbed. In time in New England, with distance from Britain and the Church of England, the Separatists became Puritans. By 1740 the Puritans had started to change into many movements. Mostly they became Congregational churches. By 1776, there were 668 Congregational churches. That was 21 percent of all churches in America. Congregationalists created the American Education Society in 1815 (which provided financial aid for seminary students), the American Bible Society in 1816, the American Colonization Society in 1817, and the American Temperance Society in 1826. In the 19th century the liberals had evolved into Unitarians. That broke away in 1825.
In 1800, Congregationalism was the established church of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. This meant that Congregational churches were financially supported through taxation. By 1833, the state constitutions were all amended to eliminate church taxes. In 1931 the National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States and the General Convention of the Christian Church merged to form the Congregational Christian Churches.
So, the Pilgrim faith changed merged and altered over time. The United Church of Christ, the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference and the Unitarian Universalist Association all descend from the Puritans.
(John R. Vile. “Established Churches in Early America.” The First Amendment Encyclopedia.)
The End
Fast forward to the 19th century. It was then that Plymouth and Pilgrims resurfaced as historians and politicians in New England claimed it was the birthplace of the nation. (Virginians, by contrast, celebrated Jamestown instead.) The New England argument hinged on two claims.
* First, the Mayflower Compact, the 200-word document written and signed on the journey, introduced the idea of self-rule maintained with a constitutional government.
* Second, Plymouth stood for the religious freedom sought by its founders.
Mancall says by that point, the ends for which Plymouth would be useful had changed. He explains …
“What had once been a story about religious obedience became a story about religious freedom. In 1820, on the town’s bicentennial, the statesman Daniel Webster venerated Plymouth in the racialist language of his age. Here, he declared, was 'where Christianity, and civilization' took hold in a vast wilderness 'peopled by roving barbarians.' The town, its 19th-century celebrants declared, launched a system that produced representative government and religious freedom, two hallowed tenets of America enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
“Yet when Webster made his statement, many Americans could not enjoy these privileges. Slavery remained widespread and the federal government in the 1830s forcibly relocated thousands of Natives from the Southeast. Webster and others across New England condemned slavery, but most politicians echoed Plymouth’s past: they touted grand principles that many could not enjoy.”
(Peter C. Mancall “How America Keeps Adapting the Story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to Match the Story We Need to Tell.” Time. December 17, 2020.)
In his Plymouth Oration (1820), Webster honored the Pilgrims and their arrival at Plymouth and even went as far as to say that they "impress[ed] this shore with the first footsteps of civilized man!" The key word here, of course, is "civilized." Webster intoned the following …
“Poetry has fancied nothing, in the wanderings of heroes, so distinct and characteristic. Here was man, indeed, unprotected and unprovided for, on the shore of a rude and fearful wilderness; but it was politic, intelligent and educated man. Everything was civilized but the physical world. Institutions containing in substance all that ages had done for human government were established in a forest. Cultivated mind was to set on uncultivated nature; and, more than all, a government, and a country, were to commence with the very first foundations laid under the divine light of the (C)hristian religion.”
(Peter C. Mancall “How America Keeps Adapting the Story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth to Match the Story We Need to Tell.” Time. December 17, 2020.)
What Webster doesn't note is the people that the Pilgrims displaced and the "cultivation" they enacted upon those people and their communities. Underwriting all Webster's ideas was an unshakable conviction that the Pilgrim past, the Massachusetts present, and the American future were united in a single destiny.
Of course, not everyone bought the positive spin. Writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to H.L. Mencken mocked the Pilgrims’ self-righteous piety.
Consider the Native American viewpoint. William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot historian who condemned the treatment of his ancestors. He is a fiery in his critique of Anglo American society and religion; he questions the integrity of Christians who treat Native Americans with a double standard.
Apess countered Webster, and others, by claiming that what they, and their forefathers, did in the name of Christianity did not represent what he knows about God. In effect, Apess took the language of the master's house and used it to dismantle the structure. Apess partly wrote …
“But some of the New England writers say, that living babes were found at the breast of their dead mothers. What an awful sight! and to think too, that diseases were carried among them on purpose to destroy them.
“Let the children of the pilgrims blush, while the son of the forest drops a tear, and groans over the fate of his murdered and departed fathers. He would say to the sons of the pilgrims, (as Job said about his birthday,) let the day be dark, the 22d of December, 1622 let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the Rock that your fathers first put their foot upon.
“For be it remembered, although the gospel is said to be glad tidings to all people, yet we poor Indians never have found those who brought it as messengers of mercy, but contrawise. We say, therefore, let every man of color wrap himself in mourning, for the 22d of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy. Let them rather fast and pray to the great Spirit, the Indian's God, who deals out mercy to his red children, and not destruction.”
(William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip. 1836)
Orators remembered Plymouth and its founders well into the 20th century, again shaping the story to fit their needs. For example, speaking at Plymouth in 1920, on its 300th anniversary, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge saw in the Pilgrims’ experiences the “foundations upon which the great fabric of the United States has been built up,” a telling statement as the world recovered from the influenza pandemic and a world war.
Thus, through tradition and slanted politics, Pilgrims became stock figures in this story of early America. In truth their tale is one not only of brave endurance in a wilderness but also of hostility, slavery and pandemic. As it unfolded, it was a hugely complex situation, and the way we remember it largely depends on our preferred point-of-view more than on factual references.
Steven Peters, a spokesman for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, said. He and other Mashpee and Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe members have been working with museums and on platforms such as Vimeo to elevate the history of the indigenous people who lived in the region for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived.
“It’s not a fun story,” Peters said, but its telling brings the focus away from the white Europeans, the Pilgrims, and shifts the balance back to the people who were harmed. Its telling builds the empathy that has been sorely lacking when it comes to Native American lives.”
(Eryn Dion. “What you learned about the ‘first Thanksgiving’ isn’t true. Here’s the real story.” USA TODAY Network. November 19, 2020.)
Massachusetts Bay leader John Winthrop on March 21, 1630 said the Puritans wanted to be a beacon of light in a fallen world. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” Winthrop said. And, boy, did Winthrop get that right. The “eyes of the world” have been upon the United States of America since its first days of European habitation.
And, it that constant examination and analysis of our democracy continues to shape our destiny. For that reason, we must always strive for truths as noble guideposts for the future. Corrections of our misconceptions of the past serve to aid the never-ending quest for more perfect liberty and justice for all.
Thanksgiving has grown to become a significant part of our nation’s shared cultural inheritance. I celebrate the Pilgrim connection. However, at the same time, I acknowledge the enormous amount of misinformation associated with the holiday. And now I understand here are reasons many parts of the story did not make it into school history books and pageants.
What squares the truth? Maybe realizing much of that story is a myth riddled with historical inaccuracies helps our nation. Claire Bugos, journalist and former print intern at Smithsonian magazine, says this about we – you and I – should be teaching our kids about the Pilgrims …
“They should be learning about why native people reached that point, rather than this nonsense that native people willingly handed off their country to the invaders. It does damage to how our native countrymen and women feel as part of this country, it makes white Americans a lot less reflective about where their privilege comes from, and it makes us a lot less critical as a country when it comes to interrogating the rationales that leaders will marshal to act aggressively against foreign others.
“If we're taught to cut through colonial rhetoric we'll be better positioned to cut through modern colonial and imperial rhetoric.”
(Claire Bugos. “The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue.” Smithsonian. November 26, 2019.)
Damn, that's a heavy thought – “better positioned to cut through colonial and imperial rhetoric” – but one lesson with such a beautiful outcome. As a teacher raised with Bloom's taxonomy, I understand that teaching that lesson requires student participation at the higher levels of learning, going quickly through remembering, understanding, and applying and straight into analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Call it revisionist or CRT but whatever, it's good stuff.
And, doing so doesn't even teach children to limit their understanding of Pilgrims to coloring and cutting out black-and-white figures donned in those ridiculous-looking capotains. It's a win-win.
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