I love Thanksgiving because it brings families together. Yet, as someone who also loves history, I’m troubled by how the holiday’s familiar myth replaces a complicated past with a comforting national story. It recalls the newspaper editor’s observation at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The national Thanksgiving observances proclaimed by President George Washington in 1789 and President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 did not commemorate English Pilgrims and Native Wampanoag people awkwardly sharing a meal in 1621. Lincoln’s National Day of Thanksgiving called for prayer for the nation’s survival and for healing from the Civil War.
The largely fabricated — though partly true — story of the 1621 gathering became a marketing tool in the late nineteenth century to mitigate the racist government attacks on Native American culture. The reassuring origin story of a shared meal obscured the Wampanoag experience, and the similar experiences of other tribes of distrust, broken promises, warfare, colonization, and devastating European diseases.
But that uneasy 1621 shared meal strangely led into the events of March 5, 1770 — what Paul Revere and Samuel Adams would call the Boston Massacre. Crispus Attucks, a Boston whaler of African and Native ancestry, was the first American killed by British troops when they shot into a crowd of rowdy Boston colonists.
Attucks was of Wampanoag ancestry — the same Native nation that fed the English immigrants during the first “Thanksgiving” story.
John Adams — future Founding Father and second president of the United States — successfully defended most of the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre shootings. Adams, a prominent Boston lawyer, disparaged the Boston crowd as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattos, Irish Teagues and outlandish Jack Tarrs.” He singled out Attucks as someone who had “undertaken to be the hero of the night” and whose “mad behavior,” Adams argued, helped provoke the conflict.
Alas, the courtroom was not the only place where John Adams faced a consequential dispute. In March 1776, his outspoken wife, Abigail, wrote and urged him to “remember the ladies” as he worked in Philadelphia with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Hancock, and other Founding Fathers to declare independence from England.
Abigail objected to husbands exercising “unlimited power” and argued that women should not be subjected to laws in which they had “no voice, or representation.” John dismissed her argument. He wrote that he “could not but laugh” at her proposed “extraordinary code of laws” and joked that men would never submit to the “despotism of the petticoat.”
They apparently did not take their arguments to bed with them. Our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was their son.
Each Thanksgiving, my family shares what we’re thankful for. Personally, I’m grateful for the American freedom to seek truth beyond cherished myths. I’ll have a second helping of that, please.
Happy Thanksgiving.
— Chuck Wieland,
Madera