Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Remembered and retold as an allegory for perseverance and cooperation, the story of the first Thanksgiving has become an important part of how Americans think about the founding of their country.

But what happened four months later, starting in March 1622 about 600 miles south of Plymouth, is, I believe, far more reflective of the country’s origins – a story not of peaceful coexistence but of distrust, displacement, and repression.

As a scholar of colonial New England
and Virginia, I have often wondered why Americans tend to pay so much less attention to other English migrants of the same era.

The conquest and colonization of New England mattered, of course. But the Pilgrims’ experience in the early 1620s tells us less about the colonial era than events along Chesapeake Bay, where the English had established Jamestown in 1607.

A compelling origin story

The Pilgrims etched their place in the nation’s history long ago as plucky survivors who persevered despite difficult conditions. Ill-prepared for the New England winter of 1620 to 1621, they benefited when a terrible epidemic raged among the Indigenous peoples of the region from 1616 to 1619, which reduced competition for resources.

Having endured a winter in which perhaps one-half of the migrants succumbed, the survivors welcomed the fall harvest of 1621. They survived because local Wampanoags had taught them how to grow corn, the most important crop in much of eastern North America. That November, the Pilgrims and Wampanoags shared a three-day feast.

This was the event that now marks the first American day of Thanksgiving, even though many Indigenous peoples had long had rituals that included giving thanks and other European settlers had previously declared similar days of thanks – including one in Florida in 1565 and another along the Maine coast in 1607.

In 1623, Pilgrims in Plymouth declared a day to thank their God for bringing rain when it looked like their corn crop might wither in a brutal drought. They likely celebrated it in late July. In 1777, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, the members of the Continental Congress declared a day of Thanksgiving for Dec. 18. The Pilgrims didn’t even get a mention.

In the 19th century, however, annual Thanksgiving holidays became linked to New England, largely as a result of campaigns to make the Plymouth experience one of the nation’s origin stories. Promoters of this narrative identified the Mayflower Compact as the starting point for representative government and praised the religious freedom they saw in New England – at least for Americans of European ancestry.

For most of the last century, U.S. Presidents have mentioned the Pilgrims in their annual proclamation, helping to solidify the link between the holiday and those immigrants.

In Virginia, a tenuous peace shatters

But the events in Plymouth in 1621 that came to be enshrined in the national narrative were not typical.

A more revealing incident took place in Virginia in 1622.

Since 1607, English migrants had maintained a small community in Jamestown, where colonists struggled mightily to survive. Unable to figure out how to find fresh water, they drank from the James River, even during the summer months when the water level dropped and turned the river into a swamp. The bacteria they consumed from doing so caused typhoid fever and dysentery.

Despite a death rate that reached 50% in some years, the English decided to stay. Their investment paid off in the mid-1610s when an enterprising colonist named John Rolfe planted West Indian tobacco seeds in the region’s fertile soil. The industry soon boomed.

But economic success did not mean the colony would thrive. Initial English survival in Virginia depended on the good graces of the local Indigenous population. By 1607, Wahunsonacock, the leader of an alliance of Natives called Tsenacomoco, had spent a generation forming a confederation of roughly 30 distinct communities along tributaries of Chesapeake Bay. The English called him Powhatan and labeled his followers the Powhatans.

Wahunsonacock could have likely prevented the English from establishing their community at Jamestown; after all, the Powhatans controlled most of the resources in the region. In 1608, when the newcomers were near starvation, the Powhatans provided them with food. Wahunsonacock also spared Captain John Smith’s life after his people captured the Englishman.

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Wahunsonacock’s actions revealed his strategic thinking. Rather than see the newcomers as all-powerful, he likely believed the English would become a subordinate community under his control. After a war from 1609 to 1614 between English and Powhatans, Wahunsonacock and his allies agreed to peace and coexistence.

Wahunsonacock died in 1618. Soon after his passing, Opechancanough, likely one of Wahunsonacock’s brothers, emerged as a leader of the Powhatans. Unlike his predecessor, Opechancanough viewed the English with suspicion, especially when they pushed on to Powhatan lands to expand their tobacco fields.

By spring 1622, Opechancanough had had enough. On March 22, he and his allies launched a surprise attack. By day’s end, they had killed 347 of the English. They might have killed more except that one Powhatan who had converted to Christianity had warned some of the English, which gave them the time to escape.

Within months, news of the violence spread in England. Edward Waterhouse, the colony’s secretary, detailed the “barbarous Massacre” in a short pamphlet. A few years later, an engraver in Frankfurt captured Europeans’ fears of Native Americans in a haunting illustration for a translation of Waterhouse’s book.

Waterhouse wrote of those who died “under the bloudy and barbarous hands of that perfidious and inhumane people.” He reported that the victors had desecrated English corpses. He called them “savages” and resorted to common European descriptions of “wyld Naked Natives.” He vowed revenge.

Over the next decade, English soldiers launched a brutal war against the Powhatans, repeatedly burning the Powhatans’ fields at harvest time in an effort to starve them and drive them away.

Conflict over cooperation

The Powhatans’ orchestrated attack anticipated other Indigenous rebellions against aggressive European colonizers in 17th-century North America.

The English response, too, fit a pattern: Any sign of resistance by “pagans,” as Waterhouse labeled the Powhatans, needed to be suppressed to advance Europeans’ desire to convert Native Americans to Christianity, claim Indigenous lands, and satisfy European customers clamoring for goods produced in America.

It was this dynamic – not the one of fellowship found in Plymouth in 1621 – that would go on to define the relationship between Native Americans and European settlers for over two centuries.

Before the end of the century, violence erupted in New England too, erasing the positive legacy of the feast of 1621. By 1675, simmering tensions exploded in a war that stretched across the region. On a per capita basis, it was among the deadliest conflicts in American history.

In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag elder named Wamsutta, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, pointed to generations of violence against Native communities and dispossession. Ever since that day, many Indigenous Americans have observed a National Day of Mourning instead of Thanksgiving.

Today’s Thanksgiving – with school kids’ construction paper turkeys and narrative of camaraderie and cooperation between the colonists and Indigenous Americans – obscures the more tragic legacy of the early 17th century.

Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Thomas Tweed, University of Notre Dame

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Julie Lesnik, Wayne State University

Most Americans probably don’t realize that we have a very limited understanding of the first Thanksgiving, which took place in 1621 in Massachusetts.

Indeed, few of our present-day traditions resemble what happened 400 years ago, and there’s only one original account of the feast.

As an anthropologist who specializes in reconstructing past diets, I can say that even though we don’t have a definitive account of the menu at the first Thanksgiving, letters and recorded oral histories give us a pretty good idea of what they probably ate. And we know for a fact that it didn’t include mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.

A main course of waterfowl and venison

The main course is the one scholars can speak about with certainty.

The only eyewitness account of the first Thanksgiving comes from a letter written by Edward Winslow on Dec. 11, 1621. In it, he describes how the Puritans, after utilizing fertilization methods imparted by Tisquantum (also known as “Squanto”), had their first successful harvest. To celebrate, Governor William Bradford “sent four men on fowling” and they returned later that day with enough food to feed the colony for almost a week. Since waterfowl was plentiful in the Massachusetts Bay area, it’s widely accepted that they were eating goose and duck rather than turkey.

The letter also recounts that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit Ousamequin was present, along with “some ninety men,” and that they gifted five deer to the governor. Therefore, venison likely had a prominent place alongside waterfowl on the first Thanksgiving table.

Not cranberry sauce, but sobaheg stew

The natural bogs of the the region contained wild cranberries that could be dried and used all winter to bring variety and vitamin C into the diets of the Wampanoags. They even have their own holiday, Cranberry Day, that resembles our Thanksgiving.

However, there’s no account of cranberries at the first Thanksgiving, nor is there any mention of cranberries in other records of foods introduced to people who arrived on the Mayflower.

This may be due, in part, to the location of Plymouth Plantation relative to the boggy regions of Massachusetts, which are several miles away.

If bogs were not in the immediate area, then the fruit may not have been as readily used by the Wampanoags of this region as they were in other places with Wampanoag settlements, like Martha’s Vineyard.

Instead, for a side dish to the main course, a stew called sobaheg was most likely served. An easy way to make use of seasonal ingredients, the stew often included a mixture of beans, corn, poultry, squash, nuts, and clam juice. All are used in the traditional dish today, and all would have been available in 1621. In fact, clams, fish, and other seafood were abundant in the area, so they were probably present in some form, whether in sobaheg or another dish.

For carbs, look to cornbread, not potatoes

Historians attribute the first New England crop of potatoes to Derry, New Hampshire in 1722, so there’s no way mashed potatoes could have made an appearance during the first Thanksgiving.

Corn, on the other hand, was the staple starch of the time, and in the published notes of William J. Miller on the Wampanoag tribe, he indicates that among the foods introduced to them, the corn bread, called maizium, was “kind.” European settlers didn’t often speak favorably of indigenous food, so mazium stands out as a recipe that likely made it onto the table at this first feast.

A ‘green sauce’ gravy

Although the settlers may have made a gravy out of the drippings from the meats procured for the feast, a common staple for these early colonizers was a dish known simply as “green sauce.”

Although the best accounts of this sauce come from later records when households had their own gardens of European crops, recipes also utilized crops introduced to them by the Wampanoag. In addition to the corn (and barley) mentioned in Winslow’s letter, the harvest of 1621 likely included beans, squash, onions, turnips and greens such as spinach and chard. All could have been cooked at length to create a pulpy sauce that later became a staple in early New England homes.

What about dessert?

A regular supply of sugar or maple syrup wasn’t available in the area until much later. Sugar, which was the major export of Caribbean plantations, didn’t become popular in New England until the 18th century.

As for maple syrup, Native Americans of the Northeast are credited as the first to procure it; however, it’s believed that European settlers didn’t begin harvesting it until 1680.

Although it is tough to think of Thanksgiving without decadent sweets, at least the first attendees were spared the awkwardness of having to refuse dessert after such a large feast.

Julie Lesnik, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.