[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 21]
[House]
[Pages 28262-28268]
[From the U.S. 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 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

[[Page 28263]]

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, 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

[[Page 28264]]

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 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,

[[Page 28265]]

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 
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.

[[Page 28266]]

  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 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

[[Page 28267]]

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 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

[[Page 28268]]

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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