November 22, 2007 (LPAC)-- Whatever little historical significance Americans today attribute to Thanksgiving is generally bound up with simple images of the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, celebrating their successful harvest after enduring near and actual starvation during their first winter in America. In the folklore of today’s environmentalists who annually reenact that Thanksgiving at Plymouth, the Pilgrims were a model society, living happily within the ‘limits’ of nature, in a labor-intensive, feudal stupor.
As a record of the Pilgrims’ accomplishment on their own, the folklore reflects a good bit of truth, as ten years after their landing in 1620, the Pilgrims still numbered only 300 people, huddled together and rapidly depleting the natural resources of the land adjoining Cape Cod Bay. But none of this has anything to do with our national tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving. It is time to recall what our Founding Fathers gave thanks for.
The first Thanksgiving Day proclaimed by the United States called upon Americans to thank almighty God for
"his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation;…for the peaceful and rational manner in which we have been able to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly for the national One now lately instituted."
That first national Thanksgiving—Thursday, November 26, 1789—was proclaimed by President George Washington, fully conscious that he now presided over the realization of America’s more that century-and-a-half struggle to become a sovereign republic.
This was not the first day of thanksgiving Washington had declared. As commander-in-chief of the victorious Continental Army, he ordered a cessation of all hostilities with Britain on April 19, 1783 and instructed the army chaplains to hold services to “render thanks to almighty God”—eight years to the day after Massachusetts militiamen delivered the “shot heard ‘round the world” launching the American Revolution.
--H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won
