[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 172 (Thursday, November 19, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H13334-H13340]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin) is recognized
for 60 minutes.
Mr. AKIN. Good evening.
I have a chance to get out here on the floor at various times, and
some of our subjects that we cover are pretty serious in the sense that
we are talking about overspending and some of the various government
policies.
However, at this time I would really like to turn to a somewhat
different topic, as we have already adjourned and are thinking about
heading on our way home to celebrate Thanksgiving. As many, many people
know, when you think of Thanksgiving in America, a uniquely American
national holiday, your mind goes immediately to the story of the
Pilgrims.
In fact, they were maybe not the first to declare a day of
Thanksgiving. Supposedly, according to history, in 1619 there was a
celebration of some Thanksgiving in Virginia. But the main one that we
think of is the story of the Pilgrims, and the Pilgrims' story is
probably the greatest adventure story that history has ever dealt to
mankind. It's bigger than life. It's bigger than the biggest screen
kind of thing you could imagine on television.
It's big because the fact that the Pilgrims had such a bold vision
for where they were going and what they were trying to accomplish. It's
big because of the tremendous amount of daring and their enterprise and
the tremendously high price that they paid; the suffering, and the
perseverance in
[[Page H13335]]
terms of character. It is a huge story because of the incredible
intricacies of the providence of God that wove all of these amazing
different kind of situations together in such a fascinating pattern.
It is the story of American Thanksgiving, but it is a story of much
more besides, because the Pilgrims gave us much more than just
Thanksgiving--they gave us our entire American system of government and
some views on economics and a couple of other very, very important
starting points for America.
The Pilgrims had a tremendous influence on the way that America as a
nation was going to start partly because of their early arrival date,
but also partly because of the vision and the source of where they got
their knowledge from.
Today, we are going to look at this incredible, bigger-than-life
adventure story about the Pilgrims. I believe it is probably being
recorded and may be available in segments on our Web site at some time
in the future.
First of all to understand the Pilgrims, we have to know who they
were. The Pilgrims were comprised of several different groups. The most
noteworthy were a group of people that were frequently called either
Brownists or Separatists. They were in England in the 1610-, 1620-ish
type of time frame, and they were, if you will, in a sense a sect of
the Puritans. They were what we would today call evangelical
Christians, except for they had this weird idea. Not weird to us today,
but weird in those days.
And that was, as you recall, in England after Henry the VIII, the
church in England had been taken over by the King. So the King ran
everything. He ran the church, he ran the state, and everybody's lives,
and everything else. So that was the way he did it in jolly Old
England.
But there was a group of these Christians who had been reading some
of the writings that were written about 1580 or so in Scotland talking
about a pattern that they saw in the Old Testament; and that pattern
was that there appeared to be several types of governments. They
noticed Moses seemed to be a little bit like the governor or the
President or whatever, but Aaron ran the worship service. They saw this
separation of civil government from church government. As they studied
it, they found other patterns.
They found the first King of Israel, Saul, and Saul had an army, and
the army was very frightened. Samuel was supposed to give a sacrifice,
and he was hoping the sacrifice would buck up people's courage. But
Samuel wasn't around when he was hoping he'd be there so Saul took the
initiative, offered the sacrifice, Samuel read him the riot act and
said, ``Now you really got God mad at you.'' And again you see a mixing
of civil and church governments which apparently in the Old Testament
seemed to be separated.
Anyway, this theologian was making notes, and this little group of
people called Separatists took the idea that they were going to
separate civil government from church government. Now, they never had
the idea of taking God out of anything. That's more of an invention of
the Supreme Court in the mid-1900s.
But this little group of people here, this picture that I have--which
has been touched up a bit; computers do wonderful things--is actually
in the public domain, and it is on the wall of the Rotunda of the
Capitol not more than a few hundred feet from where we're standing
right now. It's a bit darker. This has been lightened up some. You have
a picture here of these Separatists, and these Separatists are at
prayer, and this is being depicted. It has got a beautiful rainbow. It
says ``God with us.'' This has been touched up so you can read it a
little bit better. You have got the building of Delfthshaven over here.
You have the Pilgrims at prayer before they're going to be starting on
this fantastic adventure.
But we need to back up just a little bit to say, where did these guys
come from?
They were these Separatists in England. They met in Scrooby, England,
and there were different leaders. One was John Robinson, who was their
pastor; another one was Bradford, who was actually an orphan. He had
been growing up as a child with some relatives and then attached
himself to these Separatists--or as some people thought of it, in a
way, as a cult.
And what these people decided to do was to create their own New
Testament church. So they met at a manor house in Scrooby, England, and
together they covenanted to start this little church.
{time} 1845
It was not under the king, particularly King James. They didn't like
King James. King James was a little bit weird. He had some very weird
habits. They didn't want him running their church, and they decided
they were going to be Separatists, get their own pastor and have their
own worship service.
Well, King James didn't like that. He said, I'm going to harry them
out of my country. And so, they were harassed at every side, all kinds
of different taxes, their women put in stocks, humiliated, put in jail,
and property confiscated. In fact, the life of these Separatists was
made so miserable, even though they tried to meet secretly and arrive
at worship services at different times so people wouldn't get wise to
them, eventually they were harried out of England as the king said he
would do, and they moved over to Holland in the Leiden area.
Now, they worked there for a number of years. It was very, very hard
living. Of course, they had a different language, it was not easy to
make that cultural jump, but they did have religious freedom in
Holland. And after, though, about a 10-year-or-so period, what they
started to notice was there were a number of things that they didn't
like.
First of all, their bodies were being worn out. They had to work so
many hours 6 or 7 days a week that they were prematurely aging. But
worst of all, their children were picking up bad habits from the Dutch
children, and they had made such a big effort to try to walk closely
with God that they didn't like the idea of their children being sort of
absorbed into the Dutch culture. So they started casting about for what
they might do, and they had a vision for trying to do something that
was significant and different in their day. And so it was that they
struck on the idea of moving from Holland over to America.
At that time in England, there were these various loan sharks and
merchant adventurers and different companies that were being set up
that thought they could make a whole lot of money if they could just
get some trading posts set up over in North America. So they were going
to the king and getting what we would think of today as a corporate
charter to start a company, which was really planting a plantation or a
little colony, which would be a trading post or a base to do trade for
different things that might be of value in North America. There were
also some that were going down further into South America from other
countries as well.
So anyway, this little group of Separatists under John Robinson with
Bradford, who was the young, now strapping farmer who was growing up,
are here pictured on a ship that is called the Speedwell. Many people
have not heard of the Speedwell, but Speedwell was rented by them to
take across the ocean to North America. In fact, their charter that
they were getting was for a colony in Virginia. And so here they are,
and what has happened is they have gone from Leiden earlier this day in
three barges and run down some canals from Leiden to Delft Haven. This
picture is in Delft Haven and depicts one of their prayer meetings
before they were going to leave, just as they were departing.
Now, we have from history a record of some of John Robinson's, their
pastor's, words at this time of departure. Robinson was very much loved
by the Separatists because he was, first of all, a very kind and gentle
guy. He wasn't judgmental, and he tended to bring groups of Christians
together that had their different doctrinal disputes. They used to
settle things with fisticuffs and worse in these days if you didn't
agree with something theologically. Robinson was a much more tolerant
kind of guy but a man who knew what he believed, and he believed that
God meant civil and church governments to be separated. And so he
preached, and you can imagine, because he had many,
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many people who could not go on this expedition, so he stayed behind
with his congregation. But his heart was in this great, great adventure
that was soon to take place. So he set, in a sense, the tone by his
last words. This was the last time that Robinson would ever see his
beloved Pilgrim people again. And so, in a sense, he is preaching to
them here.
I think we need to take a close examination of these words because it
sets up the entire great story of the Pilgrims. He says, I'm fully
persuaded that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His
holy word. Remember, that it is an article of your church covenant that
you shall be ready to receive whatever truths shall be made known to
you from the written word of God.
Now, what he is saying here is the concept that while lots of people
can read the Bible, what he is saying is the Bible, in a sense, is a
blueprint for civilization, a blueprint to do something new that the
world has never seen before. So he says now you need to keep your
hearts and minds open to what is in God's word. Remember every other
article of your sacred covenant, but I must here withal exhort you to
take heed what you receive as truth. Examine it, consider it, and
compare it with other scriptures of truth before you receive it,
because it is not possible that the Christian word should come so
lately out of such thick anti-Christian darkness and that perfection of
knowledge should break forth at once. Now, here, what you have is a
vision for what Robinson was giving to the Pilgrims coming to this
land.
It's commonly told, people, that the Pilgrims came here for religious
freedom. Of course, that's not true. In fact, much of what you hear,
the stereotypes of history, in fact, are not true. They had religious
freedom in Holland, so they didn't come to America for religious
freedom. They had that in Holland. Instead, this shows a much greater
vision, a vision that they were trying to build a civilization
different from what they had seen in England and in Holland, a new
entire concept using the Bible as the blueprint to do things in a
different way.
Now that is not exactly a small thing to want to do because we tend,
as we grow up, to do things the way our parents taught us to do them.
We tend to do things the way the people around us do them. We copy the
habits and the way that our culture works. And so these people are
saying, wait a minute, before we just assume the way we used to do it
was right, we are going to keep checking it with the Bible and see is
this really a biblical way to do things? And so, this was the vision of
Robinson and it was depicted here by the artist as the Pilgrims here
are leaving Delft Haven and on their way over to England. They are
going to be shuttled to England over to Plymouth, and there they are
going to rendezvous with a larger ship, the Mayflower, and the
Mayflower also has some Separatists and other just jolly old blokes
that came off the streets of England.
Now, what is going to happen in this expedition is new to America in
this regard. It is true that Jamestown, there had been numerous
attempts to try to establish a colony there, but it was always groups
of men mostly interested in finding their fortune and finding gold.
This was a very different kind of expedition, because this, as you can
see, is men, women, and children, and they are coming particularly for
this great purpose of this great adventure.
The first thing that happened was a little bit like a family
vacation. The idea was to start across the North Atlantic in the
summertime. And as you think about family vacations, sometimes they
start with somebody forgetting their wallet, forgetting to lock the
door of the house, forgetting to bring a suitcase, and so they had a
couple of fitful starts. The fitful starts particularly were because
this ship, the Speedwell, when it put to sea, started leaking.
Now, leaking is not a good thing in the North Atlantic, and so they
had to go back and they had the ship recaulked. The Speedwell started
out again and, under heavy sail, she started leaking again. So they
brought her back, finally made the decision to leave the Speedwell, to
sell it, and to put as many of these different people we call Pilgrims
into the Mayflower; it turns out, 102 of them. So they were all packed
as tight as could be into the Mayflower. Speedwell was left behind, and
that, of course, delayed their getting off, and so they got off later
in the year at a more dangerous time in the North Atlantic.
As they were on that trip, to begin with, as you can imagine, the
first thing that happened was they started to get seasick. And if
anybody has been seasick badly and been on a little, small ship being
tossed about by the waves, it can be pretty miserable. There was a
boatswain's mate that made fun of them. He called them ``puke
stockings'' or ``puke socks,'' and he said they were kind of green
colored. And he said, We are going to be feeding you to the fish pretty
soon. We are going to sew you up in a sail and put a brick at your feet
and push you overboard, and you are going to be dying.
Well, what happened is the storms got worse and worse, and even the
sailors got concerned. It turns out the one guy, the boatswain's mate
that was teasing them and making fun of them, he just sort of amazingly
within 1 day got very sick and died, and he was the first one that went
overboard.
In the meantime, the storms got more and more severe, and the
Mayflower, and you can imagine 102 of these Pilgrims basically
underneath the decks, not safe to go on deck, underneath the decks,
seasick, lots of kids down there, men and women packed into these tight
quarters and being just tossed about continuously by the storms, and
they were a noteworthy group. These people did very little complaining,
and it would have been an absolutely miserable time.
How long were they down underneath that deck with the storms banging
them around? Well, on the main part of their expedition coming across
from Plymouth, England, over to the North America continent, that was a
66-day trip; in other words, 2 months of being under.
Now there was one young man that made the decision that he wasn't
going to stay down there. It smelled so bad, it was so crowded and so
noisy and intolerable, he decided he was going to go up on deck. He
went up on deck, and all of a sudden, the deck dropped out from
underneath him, and he found himself in the middle of the North
Atlantic in November. That water will wake you up in November. And it
is estimated that he wouldn't have lasted more than a few minutes at
that temperature. But at that time, the Mayflower was knocked over by
such a severe blow that some of the rigging dragged in the water, and
as he was drowning, he put his hand out, grasped the piece of rope--he
is turning blue he is so cold--holds on to it and is hauled back on
deck. He went down like a halfway drowned rat down below and did not
return back again on deck until there was a safe time to come up after
they had sighted land.
This was a very, very difficult passage for the Pilgrims, yet they
showed an incredible endurance and willingness to suffer hardship. So
we have this little group of people propelled by prayer, propelled by a
vision, not coming to America for religious freedom, but for a much
bigger vision, the idea of a new nation founded on a different set of
principles, unlike anything found in England and Europe before.
Well, let's see, how well did they do? Well, first of all, one of the
things that happened was, as a result of all of those storms, they were
driven off course in their ship. And as they were driven off course,
they landed or they first sighted land out on Cape Cod. We summer
vacation out in Cape Cod. I go sailing there and know something about
the nature of the way Cape Cod sticks out into the ocean. It's thought
it was pushed there by great glaciers. They saw the shore of Cape Cod.
They knew enough about the shoreline of North America to know it was
Cape Cod. They knew where they were. They knew where Virginia was. They
were too far north, and they immediately tried to head south down
toward Virginia because the contract that had been signed, or the
charter as it was called, was for Virginia. But the hard winds and the
weather did not allow them, even though they tried several times to go
south along the outside of Cape Cod.
If you think of Cape Cod as a great sandy hook, they were out on the
tip. They were trying to get south. But
[[Page H13337]]
these old square-rigged ships like the Mayflower were not very good at
pointing into the wind, and it was very dangerous to be caught with the
wind blowing you on the lee shore, and so they had to be careful. After
a number of tries, they decided instead to bring the Mayflower to
anchor around the tip of Cape Cod where there's a natural kind of swirl
of sand which we call Provincetown. There was a nice harbor there. So
they pulled the Mayflower into the harbor, dropped anchor, and kind of
caught their breath, if you will, from this trip.
They weren't beaten by the waves, of course, there, and the first
thing that came to their mind was some of the people realized, hey,
this is like Australia. No rules, mate, down under, and so when we go
to shore, there is no contract. The contract was for Virginia. There
are no rules, and therefore we can do whatever we want.
Well, the Separatists saw that that was very much close to anarchy,
and they knew that they had to do something to establish some type of
order. And so they struck on the idea of pulling a piece of paper out
and writing what we call the Mayflower Compact. The Mayflower Compact
was actually the first U.S. Constitution and the first constitution in
the world of this type. And it was, as we will talk about in just a
minute here, you will realize that this was an absolutely incredible
foundational stone for the building of a new nation.
But let's take a look at what the Mayflower Compact actually said. I
just have some excerpts from it. It's about 2\1/2\ times longer. This
is pretty short, just one page. It starts out: In ye name of God, Amen.
We whose names are underwritten, having undertaken for ye glory of God
and advancement of ye Christian faith and mutually in ye presence of
God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a
civil body politick for our better ordering and preservation to enact,
constitute, and frame such just and equal laws as shall be thought most
meet and convenient for ye general good of ye colony under which we
promise all due submission and obedience.
Notice the basic ideas here in this document. The first thing is that
this is a contract under God by a group of free people to create a
civil government to frame just and equal laws and essentially to be
their servant. Let's say that again. This is a government under God of
a group of free people creating a civil government to be their servant
and to frame just and equal laws to protect their rights and liberties.
{time} 1900
That basic idea of this Mayflower Compact is the same idea as in our
Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights. Among these is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and
governments are constituted among men deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed.
Sound a little familiar? 170 years later, this is the first
Constitution in America, a group of free men and women, under God,
creating a civil government to be their servant.
Now you say, Well, that does seem like a nice thing, but what's so
unique or special about that? Well, you recall these people had a
vision of planning a civilization different than the way they did
things in Europe. If you take a look at the way they did these in
Europe, this becomes much sharper in how distinctive it is, because in
Europe the basic idea was the divine right of kings. For people who
were politicians, this was a good deal. The king says, God made me the
king. When I say jump, you're supposed to say: How high? And that was
the way it was done all through Europe, and yet these people rejected
the concept of the divine right of kings and said, No, the government
is to be the servant of the people, protecting their God-given rights.
They turned everything upside down.
Now this particular tremendous development in civil government not
only is at the beginning of our Declaration and U.S. Constitution; it
is also something that, to them, was fairly logical, because they had
done the exact same thing when they started their little New Testament
Church in Scrooby, England. A group of free people, under God,
covenanted together to create a church government. They merely took
their church government concept and moved it over into the area of
civil government, and in this regard displaced the whole concept of
divine right of kings and, in a sense, in 1620, in November, when this
was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, they were putting the
powder keg under the throne of King George that, 170 years later, would
reject the divine right of kings in the American War of Independence.
So we have already, before they've hardly had a chance to get dried
off from their trip, they have already established a completely new
idea for the foundation of the land, but this great adventure story
just has barely begun.
Here we have an old lithograph, a picture that was done of the
Pilgrims in the great room of the Mayflower, signing this Mayflower
Compact. We do not have a copy of the original Mayflower Compact. It's
been lost. It was probably lost back about 180 years later during the
War of Independence. But Governor Bradford--he was not yet Governor, he
was just Bradford, who was part of this great expedition--in his
chronicles wrote a lot in the history of Plymouth Plantation, a lot
about the story of these Pilgrims, and he has a copy so we have these
words that come down to us from Bradford. Here is a picture, again, of
them sitting with this Mayflower Compact.
Now they had a plan, and part of that plan included a prefabricated,
small-size boat that would hold maybe about 30 people--30 at the most.
It was called a shallop, a shallow-drafted vessel, and it had been
taken apart and left in pieces in the hold. It was to be refabricated
when they got to this country.
Well, the storms had beaten on the Mayflower so much that a lot of
these pieces were damaged, and they had to do some work so it took them
some time to assemble this shallop and get it so it was seaworthy. When
they had done that, they left the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor; and
a group of them went in the shallop around the inside of Cape Cod.
Again, Cape Cod is like a hook. The Mayflower is anchored out here in
Provincetown. And they head around the inside of Cape Cod.
Again, now we're starting to get into December, when the weather is
really cold, late November and December, and the spray off the waves
that are hitting the shallop is freezing to their clothes and they're
really cold. For a while there, they got on around the inside of the
cape. They made their first landing at Eastham, which is over about
here on Cape Cod, and spent the night. They pulled some different trees
and things together to make a little bit of a shelter for themselves,
and all night long they heard the howling and yelling of the Indians.
Those were the Nauset Indians. They had an attitude problem--and for
good reason. There had been some dishonest sea captains that had
shanghaied warriors and sold them into slavery.
So the Nausets had a bad attitude about white men and ships. So
early, just before sunrise, they attacked and sent arrows all through
the different coats that were hanging up, and yelling and screaming. In
the meantime, these Pilgrims had managed to get a couple of their
gunpowder firing--they were basically blunderbuss kinds of weapons--and
fired those, and nobody got hit. The Indians were bad shots with the
arrows because, fortunately, no one was hit of the Pilgrims.
Eventually, after sort of a confrontation, the Nausets were scared
off. And the Pilgrims, at that point, being well woken up, got back in
their shallop and headed back around the inside of Cape Cod. But as
they were coming around, the weather turned to the worse. It started to
snow heavily, and they were trying to find the entrance to what we
would call Barnstable Harbor. That, of course, is not the way it's said
up on Cape Cod. It's Barnstable Harbor. They were looking for
Barnstable.
They were out in the surf, with the snow going hard, very cold, water
freezing all over them, trying to find the entrance to the harbor.
Their pilot thought they saw it. They pulled in toward the shore, only
to see that it was just waves breaking on the shallow sands of Cape
Cod. That, of course, would have been big problems for the shallop.
There was a seaman among them by the name of Clark, and he grabbed a
[[Page H13338]]
couple of steering oars and swung the shallop between a couple of waves
around, pointing the bow out to the ocean, and he said, If ye be men,
pull for your lives. So everybody dug in with the oars. They pulled off
of the shore, got out where it was deep, where the waves weren't
breaking so badly, and there they were at night, with the snow coming
down, wind howling, ice freezing all over them, in Cape Cod Bay.
Well, as it turned out, before too long they found that they had
managed to get around into the shelter in the lee of some land, which
turned out to be an island. They called it Clarks Island. The next
morning, they woke up. They were cold and wet and everything, and
observed Sunday on Clarks Island, and then immediately started doing
some exploration and they found one wonderful thing after the next.
They found that they were in a natural harbor that was deep enough for
the Mayflower to be able to come around from Provincetown, come around
over here to Plymouth. And so it had deep water in the harbor.
There was land, fantastic land that had been cleared, that didn't
have a lot of trees on it, which of course is a big problem if you're
trying to farm, to get all the trees off the land. This land had been
cleared and there was beautiful fresh water coming down from several
streams from springs on the hill, with a hill behind, which was
defendable. You could put a fort on it and try to protect yourself
some.
So you had a place for the Mayflower to anchor, a fort on the hill,
beautiful fresh water, cleared land, and no sign of anybody there
except for a bunch of human bones and skeletons that remained and some
tattered pieces of fabric and all and some poles, various things like
that. A very curious kind of situation, but they didn't see anyone, and
there were no Indians to give them a hard time. And so they came as it
was, in December, to Plymouth Harbor.
Now when they got to Plymouth, they started in about Christmastime
and started to build some houses and things which, of course, was slow
work. And they had to wade through the water to get off and on, back
and forth from the Mayflower. They started to get sick, partly because
they didn't have very good food. Probably some of it was scurvy and
maybe their bodies were just weakened by the tremendous difficulties of
the crossing from the ocean. It was not uncommon when people first came
across the ocean for a number of people to die--not so much dying on
the trip, but when they got over, partly because of food, nutrition,
and various types of sicknesses.
So as December rolled along, they had, of their 102, we had six
people die. And then in January, another eight people died. Of course,
it's cold and they're trying to build the buildings. At one time, they
had one of the buildings built, they had people with blankets that were
going to sleep in the building, and all of a sudden somebody yells,
Fire, and the whole grass roof of the building was on fire. Inside the
building they had open barrels of gunpowder and the sparks are starting
to come down from the ceiling that's on fire. And they grabbed the
gunpowder, ran out into the night, and didn't escape with too much of
their blankets or clothing; but, fortunately, no one was blown up or
killed. So it was a very difficult time.
By the time in January, there were eight that died. February, 17
people died, sometimes as much as three or four people in a day. And in
March another 13 died. So now you're starting with about 102 Pilgrims
and you've gotten, in total, about 47 had died. When you take a look at
that, you must be thinking a little bit in your own mind, Look, John
Robinson, our pastor, had a beautiful vision for what we're going to
accomplish here, and we thought God wanted us to come to this new land,
but now look, almost half of us have died. This is kind of
discouraging. We didn't complain when we were cast about inside the
great room of the Mayflower as we were tossed in the oceans. Yet, now
half of us have died.
If you take a look down the list, you find that of the daughters--and
there were seven daughters--none of them died. Of the little boys,
there were 13 little boys. Three of them died. Well, the reason the
children didn't die so much is the mothers had been sacrificing. Of the
18 mothers, 13 of them died. And in the middle of the night, so that
the Indians wouldn't think that the Pilgrims were weak, in the middle
of the night sometimes they would take their dead and drag them out
across the frozen ground and try to scrape out with their hands a
shallow grave of rocks and leaves and things to cover up their dead and
the dead bodies. And so it was a very, very grim time.
When you think about the story of the Pilgrims, it's a great story in
terms of adventure, in terms of vision, but also in terms of the
terrible suffering that these people underwent here, not only in coming
across the ocean, but having almost half of them die in these first 4
months. It just seemed like death had them in its grip until about mid-
March, when they made their first sort of face-to-face, if you will,
encounter with an Indian.
It was, again, just like everything to the Pilgrims, it's bigger than
life. You picture here it is, mid-March, and somebody yells from the
wall, Indian coming. Well, you must have got that wrong. You mean
Indians? No, Indian coming. You look out and here, coming right up to
the blockhouse is this tall, stately dignified Indian, nothing on but
his loin cloth. He walks right into the blockhouse and right up to the
leader and says, Welcome. And they're thinking, How did this guy learn
to speak English?
They're kind of taken aback. Welcome, they said. His next words were,
Do you have any beer? That was kind of surprising to them, too, as
well. They said, Where did this guy find about how to speak English and
whether they had beer or not?
Well, it turned out they were out of beer, but they did have some
brandy. So he sat down and helped himself to the brandy and to the
roast duck and had a very nice large meal. They kept asking him
questions about the local Indians and he didn't say a word until he'd
had a nice, big square meal. Then, later on they find out who the
Indian was. His name was Samoset. Samoset was a sachem, or a chief, of
the Algonquins up in Maine. It seems that he had the concept of going
from Maine down south in the wintertime, and he had bummed a ride from
an English sea captain down the coast. He had learned to speak English
and had stopped to spend the winter with Massasoit down in
Massachusetts. So he would have gone from Maine to Massachusetts. And
when he heard about the Pilgrims, he decided to go pay them a visit.
So their first contact was actually an Indian from Maine, Samoset, a
great man; and he told them that the Indian chieftain in the area was
named Massasoit. He was a great chieftain and he ruled over quite a
number of the Indians, but the main tribe was 50 miles to the
southeast, some considerable distance away.
They asked him about whose land they were on, and he said, Well, this
land used to belong to the Patuxets, a very warlike tribe that had been
completely destroyed in a plague. And that was several years before. So
the land that they found didn't belong to anybody and the other Indians
thought it was cursed so they would have nothing to do with that
particular place.
So they found, by God's providence, perhaps the one or only area on
the eastern seaboard where they had cleared land, beautiful water, a
good place for defense, and nobody claimed the land.
{time} 1915
So that's what they had found, almost by God's providence, of course.
Well, before too long, it was about a week later, other Indians
arrived--not just Samoset, but Massasoit came with the other warriors.
Massasoit was of the Wampanoag Tribe. But there was somebody who had
attached himself, aside from Samoset, to Massasoit, and that was an
Indian by the name of Tisquantum.
Tisquantum had an incredibly interesting story. Tisquantum was the
last remaining Indian of the Patuxets. He had taken a trip with the
English some years before over to England, spent 10 years, learned to
speak English flawlessly, developed a taste for English food and
English customs and all, and then got a ride back across the ocean to
come back to the Patuxets.
Later, however, he was shanghaied, sold into slavery over in the
Spain area, was bought free by some monks
[[Page H13339]]
there, traveled back to England and made a trip again back to his
Patuxet Village in Plymouth. But when he arrived, he discovered that
his village was gone. There was no one there. The places that he had
learned to swim and play, the trees he had climbed in, the forests he
had walked in were there, but his tribe was all gone, everyone dead.
And heartbroken, he went and hiked for miles over to Massasoit and
attached himself for a while to the Wampanoags. But later in his
sorrow, he just kind of moved off and lived by himself. When he got
word that there was a little band of English settlers that were hard-
pressed, he figured out a new reason for living, and he decided to come
and visit with the Pilgrims.
Tisquantum became a great friend to the Indians, teaching them all
kinds of practical things. One of the things I am certain the young
ladies would like to know about was, they didn't have much food, and he
taught them how to take their moccasins off and to walk in the mud of
the creeks and to find eels with their toes and to trap the eels and
bring them up, fry them up and eat them. The eels were apparently good
eating.
He also taught the English settlers about beaver pelts, which were
very sought after. They became a mainstay of trade. The trade worked
between corn that was traded to the Indians for beaver pelts, and
beaver pelts were sent back to England and Europe and used for making
hats. You just weren't cool if you didn't have a beaver pelt hat when
you were back in England. So they got a very good price for the
beavers, and there were a lot of beavers still in the New England area
at that time.
By April 21, you have perhaps one of the great tests of the
indomitable will of the Pilgrim people. Captain Jones of the Mayflower
has lost almost half his crew to the same sicknesses and diseases, and
he had agreed to stay just to try to give them a little bit of a
headstart on their new home. But he went to the remaining 52 Pilgrims,
and he said, You know, things aren't going so well. I recommend that
you come back to England on the Mayflower with me. So it was that they
had to make a decision. Were they going to stay on with the vision that
Robinson had given them to plan new things, that they had felt God was
calling them to this great adventure? Or were they going to give up
after half of them died, almost, and go back to England?
So it was that Jones and the sailors with him departed in the long
boat for the Mayflower. They heard the sound of the old anchor cable
being wound in and the boatswain giving the commands, the yardarms
swinging into place, the bowsprit pointing out to sea, the sails
filling and being trimmed. The Mayflower, first large and then small,
disappears over the horizon as a speck. Nothing but the gray sky and
the wind blowing through the pine trees behind them. And there are 52
brave Pilgrims with still this dream that God's put in their heart to
build something unlike anything they'd ever seen before, something
based on ideas that they took from the Bible.
Well, as this summer started and the spring went on, things got a
little more cheery. In May, because of the deaths in some of the
families, they had their first wedding between Mr. Winslow and Mrs.
White. She had lost her husband. He had lost his wife, so they had a
nice occasion for a wedding. In October 1621, they decided to celebrate
a day of Thanksgiving. This is a beautiful picture of this day of
Thanksgiving. It didn't work quite the way they planned. The plan was
to invite Massasoit and a few of his chiefs to join them in the
celebration of Thanksgiving. What actually happened was Massasoit came
with 90 braves, and when the poor little 52 Pilgrims--those were just
women and kids, some of them, too--when they saw 90 braves, they go,
Oh, my goodness, how are we going to feed this Army?
But fortunately, Massasoit had had some of his hunters hunt for deer
and turkey, and they brought a lot of food with them. So they
celebrated a day of Thanksgiving. In the process of doing Thanksgiving,
the young braves and the young men of the colony took part in shooting
contests with rifles and with bows and arrows. They did wrestling and
foot races and leg wrestling, all kinds of activities. In the meantime,
the Pilgrims were taught about some new delicacies. They took the
ground corn and mixed it with the maple syrup--which perhaps even today
people put a little maple syrup on their cornbread--and found that that
made a pretty good meal.
They also took some of their precious flour and worked it with the
berries and wild fruit of the area and made pies and other kinds of
things as well as the turkey and venison and all that they had.
It seems that Massasoit liked a good party, and he had his 90 braves.
They were having a good time. So they decided to stay for 3 extra days.
So Thanksgiving was quite a celebration and treat. It wasn't too long
after the first Thanksgiving that another ship arrived, and that ship
dropped off quite a number of passengers. I think 30 or 40 as I recall.
The problem was, they didn't have any food or supplies. So that second
winter was also a very, very difficult one for them. They didn't have a
lot of deaths, but people didn't have a whole lot to eat either.
After that, the colony started growing. Of course Tisquantum, or
Squanto, had taught them about planting corn. That was the main thing
that they needed was corn. He taught them how to plant corn, how to
clear land for it, and how to put a couple of fish by each ear of corn
to help it grow. They had a problem, and that was because the loan
sharks or the merchant adventurers or whatever you want to call them
from England, the people who financed the expedition, had insisted that
the charter included that they would live socialistically. That was
that there would just be one cornfield, and everybody had to work in
the cornfield. Everything that was grown belonged to everybody. The
women were supposed to wash the clothes of everybody else.
And this was something that Governor Bradford--by this time, he was
Governor. I should have mentioned before that Governor Carver had been
Governor, but he had not been there for more than a few months when he
had some type of either a stroke or something wrong with his brain. He
just passed out, never regained consciousness and died several days
later. He was replaced and voted in by Governor Bradford, who was the
one who has given us in his wonderful diary a lot of the stories of the
Pilgrims.
Governor Bradford knew that socialism was un-Biblical. He knew it was
a bad idea. It wasn't going to work. Eventually they were forced to
throw it out because they're going to starve to death if they kept
working, trying to make socialism work. So these are words from
Governor Bradford's diary. After much debate of things, the Governor,
with the advice of the chiefest among them, gave way that they should
set corn to every man to his own particular, and in that regard, trust
to themselves.
In other words, instead of having a communal cornfield, everybody had
a piece of land they could grow their own corn on. This had very good
success, for it made all hands very industrious. Governor Bradford then
continues. He said, ``The experience that was had in this common course
and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men,
may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other
ancients''--these are the people, Plato and the other ancients, the
ones advocating socialism--``that the taking away of property and
bringing in community (or communism) into a commonwealth would make
them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.''
Governor Bradford had studied his Bible, as he had been instructed by
their Pastor Robinson, and realized that socialism was un-Biblical. It
was a form of theft, and it was not a good system for this community.
It was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much
employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. It went
on to say that people who, before, they had to almost whip them to get
them into going to the cornfield, now went willingly and happily
forward to grow the corn. The corn, again, was traded for the beaver
skins and all.
So you have the beginning of the colony. It wasn't until about 8
years later that Governor Bradford wrote that they had a chance to
almost catch their breath and taste the sweetness of the land. It was
scratching. Every day
[[Page H13340]]
it wasn't clear what the meals were going to be. It was a very, very
difficult time. But through this very difficult and trying time, this
group of people came together on a vision to build a new civilization.
So what was it now if we start to add all these things up? What was it
that the Pilgrims gave us?
Well, first it was the first of the northern colonies up in
Massachusetts. Second of all, they gave us the Mayflower Compact which
was America's first constitution and based on the same principles that
would later become the Declaration of Independence, the U.S.
Constitution, and other State constitutions as well. They did separate
their church and civil governments. They never thought that there was
any idea of separating God from any government. If you take a look at
Bradford's writing--he was the Governor. He is declaring a Christian
day of Thanksgiving to give thanks to God and encouraged people in
trying to run a Christian civil government.
But he also had Brewster, who ran the church, a different person, and
the church had a different function than the civil government. So they
separated church and civil governments, never thinking to take God out
of any government. They also had a vision for a Christian civilization.
And when you take a look at the things they gave us, first of all, the
idea of the written constitution, a group of free people under God,
covenanting together--that was quite a development. That was the
equivalent of Einstein to the science of civil government.
But they also separated church and State. We take that for granted
today as well, but when you think about the Muslim countries, they
don't tend to separate their civil from their church governments. This
was a very important technology for America, to bring a lot of peace
and harmony to America by this idea of separating civil and church
governments.
Then there was the rejection of socialism. Governor Bradford knew his
Bible well enough to know that socialism was in violation of God's law.
God's law says, ``Thou shalt not steal.'' It allows for the ownership
of private property, and it never gives the government the right to
take something that belongs rightfully to one person and redistribute
it to someone else. Governor Bradford understood that far better than
the pastors of our churches in America do today. They rejected
socialism.
And of course they gave us this wonderful tradition of Thanksgiving.
You perhaps may be wondering. You're saying, My goodness, Congressman
Akin. You are making a long story of getting around to Thanksgiving.
Well, that was a wonderful Thanksgiving, tremendous food, 3 days of
celebration and giving thanks to God. Thanksgiving became a very
popular holiday among different colonies up and down the seaboard. But
the first national day of Thanksgiving was declared in 1789 by George
Washington to thank God for the fact that the new U.S. Constitution had
just been ratified.
So the ratification of the Constitution was the event for the first
national day of Thanksgiving. And later on, under Abraham Lincoln, he
declared in the middle of the Civil War--in 1863, he declared that
there should be a yearly national day of Thanksgiving. There was some
moving around of when the date would be, and finally was settled in
November on the fourth Thursday. So we see that the Pilgrims gave us
this beautiful celebration of Thanksgiving. But so, so, so much more,
particularly the idea of our Constitution, the separation of civil and
church governments, the rejection of socialism, and particularly the
vision for civilization, so much different than where they had come
from.
Quite a work of accomplishment. Were the Pilgrims proud of what they
did? Actually they had a very hard time. The contracts that they were
part of--for the next 25 years, they were paying way, way more than
what was fair. The merchant loan sharks in London charged them a
tremendous amount of money. In fact, they paid 20,000 pounds after
having borrowed 1,800. So it was more than a 10 times ratio. Sometimes
interest rates at 30 and 40 percent. So they were really taken
advantage of.
{time} 1930
As they were older and the puritan culture had come in and settled
Boston, the seaboard was getting more and more ships coming across,
they might have wondered did we really accomplish so much.
But yet, Governor Bradford, looking back, must have seen into the
future when he wrote, ``Thus out of small beginnings greater things
have grown by his hand, who made all things of nothing, and gives being
to all things that are, and as one small candle may light a thousand,
so the light kindled here has shone to many. Yea, in a sense to our
whole nation. Let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.''
And so it was that though they didn't feel very important, this
little, small band of water-tossed saints of God, men, women and
children, daring to come across this vast ocean, landing on the stern
and rocky shoreline of Massachusetts in wintertime, carving out an
existence, barely snatched from starvation by Tisquantum, always
looking to God, were able to carve out a civilization which laid the
foundations for a Nation yet to come.
And so we have the great adventure story, a great adventure story in
terms of the sacrifice and the vision that is involved, and
particularly the trajectory of the great ideas that they established,
were to be the foundation and the pinning for our Nation.
So as we celebrate Thanksgiving, my American friends, we have a lot
to be thankful for, not just for some good food and turkey, not just to
remember the terrible sacrifices of those who have come before, but
also to remember how it was that as they used their Bibles, they built
a civilization unlike anything the world had ever seen before.
God bless you all. Enjoy a fantastic Thanksgiving.
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