A Nation Built on Gratitude
When Abraham Lincoln made a proclamation of thanksgiving during the height of the Civil War, many marveled at his ability to call forth such a strong sense of gratitude at a time of such division. The principle behind setting aside a national day of thanksgiving proved to contribute significantly to the reunification of a horribly divided country. Today, the ever-increasing need for a rebirth of that gratitude may be fulfilled in a way no different from that which gave rise to the very first Thanksgiving almost 400 years ago.
The story begins in Holland with a small congregation of Puritans, who would shortly thereafter be known at the Pilgrims. They had left their English homeland to escape the religious tyranny of the Church of England. These Puritans believed the Church had become far too corrupt to reform. They wished to live much like the early Church and Holland was a place of religious freedom where they could worship as they liked. But the materialistic Dutch culture influenced the Puritans’ children. Many of them left their families and forsook their English and Christian heritage. When the opportunity came to sail across the Atlantic and start anew to build their own society, a small group of barely one-hundred saw it fit to risk everything and go. The events that proceeded to unfold the Pilgrims attributed to Divine Providence and they may have been exactly right.
After multiple delays, which were caused by conspiracies aimed to prevent them from leaving Holland, the Puritans were finally permitted to board the Mayflower and set sail for the New World. They were destined for the island of Manhattan. However, fierce winds blew the Pilgrims off course 250 miles north. They found themselves just off the coast of Massachusetts. It was December of 1620.
Before settling on land, a scouting party was sent to find the ideal place for their new settlement. The party was soon caught in tossing waves and heavy rain, unable to ground their delicate boat on shore. But miraculously, the small boat was carried safely into a small island and in sight of what seemed to be a perfect location to build the settlement — Plymouth. They found the location to be an Indian village with cleared fields, stored supplies of corn, and a reliable source of freshwater. The pilgrims looked for people to pay for the corn but could find no one. Instead, they found human bones. The village was deserted.
Within a matter of a few days, a Native walked out of the woods and into the Pilgrims’ small camp. At first, the settlers were alarmed until, to their surprise, the Native welcomed them in their own English tongue and introduced himself as Samoset. He had learned some broken English from fishermen that frequented the waters further north. Samoset told the settlers that the former inhabitants of the village died due to three years of plague which almost immediately preceded the Pilgrims’ arrival.
Not long after, Samoset introduced another Native to the pilgrims. This man spoke fluent English and was already a Christian. His name was Squanto. He was raised in the same village where the Pilgrims were beginning their new settlement. When he was a young man, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Spain. After four years of enslavement, he was freed by a group of monks and made his way to England. Finally, he managed to get back to his homeland only to find his family and his people dead from disease. He had returned just after the plague wiped out his entire village.
Over the next few months, Squanto helped the Pilgrims plant crops and negotiate a friendly trade agreement with the most important chief in the region, Massasoit. He even facilitated the formation of a diplomatic alliance between the many tribes of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. This alliance proved to help Massasoit and grow the Wampanoag nation as it brought the Pilgrims to the defense of Wampanoag in response to enemy attacks.
The Pilgrims and the neighboring Native Americans became so close that many of the Natives embraced Christianity and began naming their children Christian and English names. Edward Winslow, one of the Pilgrims, saved the life of Massasoit with medicine which further strengthened the bond of the two Peoples. This, of course, was all thanks to Squanto. In fact, William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, believed Squanto was “a special instrument sent by God.”
In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims hosted a three-day harvest festival, which is believed to have been inspired directly by the Biblical holiday of the Feast of Tabernacles. They invited the Wampanoags to join them in their celebration of their first harvest — for without them they may not have had a harvest at all. Ninety Natives attended the festival. They joined the fifty-three remaining settlers. Almost half had died in the brutal winter. Still, the Pilgrims provided what food they could: vegetables, fish and perhaps even wild turkeys. The Native Americans brought five recently hunted deer as their contribution to the feast. There probably wasn’t much food to go around, as is often the luxury in most homes on Thanksgiving today, but it was a bountiful festival nonetheless.
What led the Pilgrims to host a festival of celebration just after most of them had lost family members to the freezing conditions of winter? And how could Abraham Lincoln declare a national day of thanksgiving amid the bloodiest year of our nation’s Civil War? The Pilgrims believed they were blessed by Divine Providence. After being blown hundreds of miles off course only to land upon a perfectly prepared spot, to arrive in a place so close to perhaps the only English-speaking Christian Native on the continent, and to strike up such a beneficial alliance with the most powerful tribe in the region, the Pilgrims saw gratitude as the only right response, even in the face of terrible hardships. For many generations after, that sense and belief remained a part of the American people.
In the same way, Abraham Lincoln recognized that Providence had remained with the nation, even in the midst of a war-torn country. He recognized that more could be gained not from fear, blame or guilt, but from gratitude. Both the people of the Union and of the Confederacy, Lincoln called on as one people, Americans. And he called on them to focus on the nation’s steadily increasing prosperity, security, and freedom. And to that end, he wrote, “No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God…It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” He goes on, “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States…to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens…[And I call on them to] fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
Our American nation was built on gratitude for the unmerited blessings bestowed upon us by our Creator. A refocusing on these great gifts and a humbling of ourselves together in harmony will invoke in us the same gratitude of our forefathers, the same gratitude that united people so different from one another and which extended for the first many years of our history. It is my belief that an unselfishly united gratitude and reverence for the Divine Hand as the reason for the prosperity of our nation is the only means by which this country will continue to flourish. It is therefore the responsibility of those who remain holding this reverence to find in themselves that same gratitude and pray ardently for the leaders and people of this great nation that they, too, discover this transcendent gratefulness. So, may God who commands these mysterious things to fall so meticulously and perfectly into place allow such fortune to continue so that we may persist in extending these blessings to the world.
