If you were born in the United States, you have probably known the basic outline of the story since grade school: A small band of English Separatists, seeking a better life, cross the storm-tossed Atlantic in the tiny Mayflower and arrive at the coast of present-day Massachusetts in late 1620. Having arrived on the eve of a cruel winter, they endure unimaginable hardships over the next few months and one half of their number die before spring. But with the assistance of their new Indian neighbors, the remainder survive to reap a bountiful harvest in the fall of 1621, at which time they pause to celebrate the goodness of God with a special feast. It is an inspiring story, and it would be good for Christians this Thanksgiving to remember it.

But will we remember it correctly? If most of us have known of the story since grade school, it is also true that few of us have studied it seriously since grade school, and our understanding is usually simplistic—or just plain wrong. Among other things, we tend to misunderstand why these “Pilgrims” came to America in the first place, as well as how they understood the celebration that we—not they—labeled the “First Thanksgiving.” This is unfortunate, for the real story is actually more inspiring—and more convicting—than the myths we have created.

Let us start with the question of why the Pilgrims migrated to New England. The popular answer is that they came “in search of religious freedom,” but in the sense that we usually mean it, that is not really true. One of my favorite quotes is from Democracy in America where Alexis de Tocqueville observes, “A false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.”[1] The Pilgrims’ motives for coming to America is a case in point.

The popular understanding that the Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom is technically true, but it is also misleading. It is technically true in that the freedom to worship according to the dictates of Scripture was at the very top of their list of priorities. They had already risked everything to escape religious persecution, and the majority never would have knowingly chosen a destination where they would once again wear the “yoke of antichristian bondage,” as they described their experience in England.

To say that the Pilgrims came in search of religious freedom is misleading, however, in that it implies that they lacked such liberty in Holland. Remember that the Pilgrims did not come to America directly from England. They had left England in 1608, locating briefly in Amsterdam before settling for more than a decade in Leiden. If a longing for religious freedom alone had compelled them, they might never have left that city. Years later, the Pilgrim’s long-time governor, William Bradford, recalled that in Leiden God had allowed them “to come as near the primitive pattern of the first churches as any other church of these later times.”[2] As Pilgrim Edward Winslow recalled, God had blessed them with “much peace and liberty” in Holland. They hoped to find “the like liberty” in their new home.[3]

But that is not all they hoped to find. Boiled down, the Pilgrims had two major complaints about their experience in Holland. First, they found it a hard place to raise their children. Dutch culture was too permissive, they believed. Bradford commented on “the great licentiousness of youth” in Holland and lamented the “evil examples” and “manifold temptations of the place.”[4] Part of the problem was the Dutch parents. They gave their children too much freedom, Bradford’s nephew, Nathaniel Morton, explained, and Separatist parents could not give their own children “due correction without reproof or reproach from their neighbors.”[5]

Compounding these challenges was what Bradford called “the hardness of the place.”[6] If Holland was a hard place to raise strong families, it was an even harder place to make a living. Leiden was a crowded, rapidly growing city. Most houses were ridiculously small by our standards, often with no more than a couple hundred square feet of floor space. And in contrast to the seasonal rhythms of farm life, the pace of work was long, intense, and unrelenting. Probably half or more of the Separatist families became textile workers. Cloth production in this era was a decentralized, labor-intensive process, with families carding, spinning, or weaving in their homes from dawn to dusk, six days a week, merely to keep body and soul together.

This life of “great labor and hard fare” was a threat to the church, Bradford stressed.[7] It discouraged Separatists in England from joining them, and it tempted those in Leiden to return home. If religious freedom was to be thus linked with poverty, then there were some—too many—who would opt for the religious persecution of England over the religious freedom of Holland. And the challenge would only increase over time. Old age was creeping up on many of the congregation, indeed, was being hastened prematurely by “great and continual labor.” While the most resolute could endure such hardships in the prime of life, advancing age and declining strength would cause many either to “sink under their burdens”[8] or reluctantly abandon the community in search of relief.

In explaining the Pilgrim’s decision to leave Holland, Bradford stressed the Pilgrim’s economic circumstances more than any other factor, but it is important that we hear correctly what he was saying. Bradford was not telling us that the Pilgrims left for America in search of the “American Dream” or primarily to maximize their own individual well-being. According to the governor, it was impossible to separate the Pilgrims’ concerns about either the effects of Dutch culture or their economic circumstances from their concerns for the survival of their church. The leaders of the Leiden congregation may not have feared religious persecution, but they saw spiritual danger and decline on the horizon.

The solution, the Pilgrim leaders believed, was to “take away these discouragements” by relocating to a place with greater economic opportunity as part of a cooperative mission to preserve their covenant community. If the congregation did not collectively “dislodge . . . to some place of better advantage,”[9] and soon, the church seemed destined to erode like the banks of a stream, as one by one, families and individuals slipped away.

So where does this leave us? Were the Pilgrims coming to America to flee religious persecution? No. Were they motivated by a religious impulse? Absolutely. But why is it important to make these seemingly fine distinctions? Is this just another exercise in academic hair-splitting? I do not think so. In fact, I think that the implications of getting the Pilgrims’ motives right are huge.

As I re-read the Pilgrims’ words, I find myself meditating on Jesus’s parable of the sower. You will recall how the sower casts his seed (the Word of God), and it falls on multiple kinds of ground, not all of which prove fruitful. The seed that lands on stony ground sprouts immediately, but the plant withers under the heat of the noonday sun, while the seed cast among thorns springs up and then is choked by the surrounding weeds. The former, Jesus explained to his disciples, represents those who receive the word gladly, but stumble “when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word” (Mark 4:17). The latter stands for those who allow the Word to be choked by “the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things” (Mark 4:19).

In emphasizing the Pilgrims’ “search for religious freedom,” we inadvertently make the primary menace in their story the heat of persecution. Persecution led them to leave England for Holland, but it was not the primary reason that they came to America. As the Pilgrim writers saw it, the principal threat to their congregation in Holland was not the scorching sun, but strangling thorns.

The difference matters. It broadens the conversation we can have with the Pilgrims and makes it more relevant. When we hear their resolve in the face of persecution in England, we may nod our heads admiringly and meditate on the courage of their convictions. Perhaps we will even ask ourselves how we would respond if we were to endure the same trial. And yet the danger is still comfortably hypothetical, whatever cultural hostility we may feel in 2024 notwithstanding. Whatever limitations we may chafe against in the public square, as Christians in the United States we do not have to worry that the government will send us to prison—as the English government did to Separatists in the 1600s—unless we worship in the church that it chooses and interpret the Bible in the manner that it dictates.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that we never ask ourselves how we might respond to such persecution. Posing that question can remind us to be grateful for the freedom we enjoy. It may heighten our concern for Christians around the world who cannot take such freedom for granted. These are good things. But I am suggesting that we not dwell overlong on the question. I am dubious of the value of moral reflection that focuses on hypothetical circumstances. Character is not forged in the abstract, but in the concrete crucible of everyday life, in the myriad mundane decisions that both shape and reveal the heart’s deepest loves.

Here the Pilgrims’ struggle with “thorns” speaks to us. Compared to the dangers they faced in England, their hardships in Holland were so . . . ordinary. I do not mean to minimize them, but merely to point out that they are difficulties we are more likely to relate to. They worried about their children’s future. They feared the effects of a corrupt and permissive culture. They had a hard time making ends meet. They wondered how they would provide for themselves in old age. Does any of this sound familiar?

And in contrast to their success in escaping persecution, they found the cares of the world much more difficult to evade. As it turned out, thorn bushes grew in the New World as well as the Old. In little more than a decade, William Bradford was concerned that economic circumstances were again weakening the fabric of the church.[10] This time, ironically, the culprit was not the pressure of want but the prospect of wealth (“the deceitfulness of riches”?) as faithful members of the congregation moved away from Plymouth in search of larger, more productive farms. A decade after that, Bradford was decrying the presence of gross immorality within the colony. Drunkenness and sexual sin had become so common, he lamented, that it caused him “to fear and tremble at the consideration of our corrupt natures.”[11]

When we insist that the Pilgrims came to America “in search of religious freedom,” we tell their story in a way that they themselves wouldn’t recognize. In the process we can also ignore aspects of the Pilgrims’ story that might cast a light into our own hearts. They struggled with fundamental questions relevant to us today: What is the true cost of discipleship? What must we sacrifice in pursuit of the kingdom? How can we “shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15) and keep ourselves “unstained from the world” (James 1:27)? What sort of obligation do we owe our local churches, and how do we balance that duty with family commitments and individual desires? What does it look like to “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33) and can we really trust God to provide for all our other needs?

In the same way that we misunderstand the Pilgrims’ motives for coming to America, we are typically confused about the meaning of their 1621 celebration after their first harvest in their new home. Certainly, there is much about it that we should admire. Think again of the context. The previous autumn, 102 men, woman, and children had departed from Holland on the Mayflower, taking sixty-five days to cross the stormy Atlantic in a space below deck roughly the size of a city bus. Following that came a bitter New England winter for which they were ill prepared. Due more to exposure than starvation, their number had dwindled rapidly, so that by the onset of spring some fifty-one members of the party had died. A staggering fourteen of the eighteen wives who had set sail on the Mayflower had perished in their new home. Widowers and orphans now abounded. That the Pilgrims could celebrate at all in this setting was a testimony both to human resilience and to heavenly hope.

And yet this episode of the Pilgrims’ story that modern-day Americans have chosen to emphasize does not seem to have been that significant to the Pilgrims themselves. More importantly, it fails to capture the heart of the Pilgrims’ thinking about God’s provision and our proper response. Almost everything we know about the Pilgrims’ experience after leaving Holland comes from two Pilgrim writers that I have quoted frequently above: the colony’s governor, William Bradford, and his close assistant, Edward Winslow. Bradford never even referred to the Pilgrims’ 1621 celebration in his history of the Pilgrims’ colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. Winslow mentioned it but briefly, devoting five sentences to it in a letter that he wrote to supporters in England. Those five sentences represent the sum total of all that we know about the occasion!

This means that there is a lot that we would like to know about that event that we will never know. It seems likely (although it must be conjecture) that the Pilgrims thought of their autumn celebration that first fall in Plymouth as something akin to the harvest festivals common at that time in England. What is certain is that they did not conceive of the celebration as a Thanksgiving holiday.

When the Pilgrims spoke of holidays, they used the word literally. A holiday was a “holy day,” a day specially set apart for worship and communion with God. Their reading of the Scripture convinced them that God had only established one regular holy day under the new covenant, and that was the Lord’s Day each Sunday. Beyond that, they did believe that the Scripture allowed the consecration of occasional (not annual, scheduled) Days of Fasting and Humiliation to beseech the Lord for deliverance from a particular trial, as well as occasional (not annual, scheduled) Days of Thanksgiving to praise the Lord for his extraordinary provision. Both kinds of holy day featured solemn observances characterized by lengthy religious services full of prayer, praise, instruction, and exhortation. The Pilgrims 1621 celebration featured games and feasting and, as far as we know from Winslow’s account, no religious service at all. 

From the Pilgrims’ perspective, their first formal celebration of a Day of Thanksgiving in Plymouth came nearly two years later, in July 1623. We are comparatively unfamiliar with it because, frankly, we get bored with the Pilgrims once they have carved the first turkey. We condense their story to three key events—the Mayflower Compact, their supposed landing at Plymouth Rock (which they never mentioned), and the First Thanksgiving—and quickly lose interest thereafter. In reality, the Pilgrims’ struggle for survival continued at least another two years.

This was partly due to the criminal mismanagement of the London financiers who bankrolled the colony. Only weeks after their 1621 harvest celebration, the Pilgrims were surprised by the arrival of the ship Fortune. The thirty-five new settlers on board would nearly double their depleted ranks. Unfortunately, they arrived with few clothes, no bedding or pots or pans, and “not so much as biscuit cake or any other victuals,”[12] as Bradford bitterly recalled. Indeed, the London merchants had not even provisioned the ship’s crew with sufficient food for the trip home.

The result was that the Pilgrims had to provide food for the Fortune’s return voyage as well as feed an additional thirty-five mouths throughout the winter. Rather than having “good plenty” until the next harvest, as they had anticipated, they once again faced the imminent prospect of starvation.[13] Fearing that the newcomers would “bring famine upon us,” the governor immediately reduced the weekly food allowance by half. In the following months hunger “pinch[ed] them sore.”[14] By May they were almost completely out of food. It was no longer the season for waterfowl, and if not for the shellfish in the bay, and the little grain they were able to purchase from passing fishing boats, they very well might have starved.

The harvest of 1622 provided a temporary reprieve from hunger, but it fell far short of their needs for the coming year, and by the spring of 1623 the Pilgrims’ situation was again dire. As Bradford remembered their trial, it was typical for the colonists to go to bed at night not knowing where the next day’s nourishment would come from. For two to three months, they had no bread or beer at all, and “God fed them” almost wholly “out of the sea.”[15]

Adding to their plight, the heavens closed up around the third week in May, and for nearly two months it rained hardly at all. The ground became parched, the corn began to wither, and hopes for the future began dying as well. When another boatload of settlers arrived that July, they were “much daunted and dismayed” by their first sight of the Plymouth colonists, many of whom were “ragged in apparel and some little better than half naked.”[16] The Pilgrims, for their part, could offer the newcomers nothing more than a piece of fish and a cup of water.

In the depths of this trial the Pilgrims were sure of this much: it was God who had sent this great drought; it was the Lord who was frustrating their “great hopes of a large crop.” This was not the caprice of “nature,” but the handiwork of the Creator who worked “all things according to the counsel of His will” (Eph. 1:11, NKJV). Fearing that he had done this thing for their chastisement, the community agreed to set apart “a solemn day of humiliation, to seek the Lord by humble and fervent prayer, in this great distress.”[17]

As Edward Winslow explained, their hope was that God “would be moved hereby in mercy to look down upon us, and grant the request of our dejected souls. . . . But oh the mercy of our God!” Winslow exulted, “who was as ready to hear, as we to ask.”[18] The colonists awoke on the appointed day to a cloudless sky, but by the end of the prayer service—which lasted eight to nine hours—it had become overcast, and by morning it had begun to rain, as it would continue to do for the next fourteen days. Bradford marveled at the “sweet and gentle showers . . . which did so apparently revive and quicken the decayed corn.”[19] Winslow added, “It was hard to say whether our withered corn or drooping affections were most quickened or revived.”[20]

Overwhelmed by God’s gracious intervention, the Pilgrims immediately called for another holy day. “We thought it would be great ingratitude,” Winslow explained, if we should

content ourselves with private thanksgiving for that which by private prayer could not be obtained. And therefore another solemn day was set apart and appointed for that end; wherein we returned glory, honor, and praise, with all thankfulness, to our good God.[21]

This occasion, likely held at the end of July, 1623, perfectly matches the Pilgrims’ definition of a thanksgiving holy day. It was a “solemn” observance, as Winslow noted, called to acknowledge a very specific, extraordinary blessing from the Lord. In sum, it was what the Pilgrims themselves would have viewed as their “First Thanksgiving” in America, and we have all but forgotten it.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this November, perhaps we might remember both occasions. The Pilgrims’ harvest celebration of 1621 is an important reminder to see God’s gracious hand in the bounty of nature. But the Pilgrims’ holiday of 1623—what they would have called “The First Thanksgiving”—more forthrightly challenges us to look for God’s ongoing, supernatural intervention in our lives.

Endnotes

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (HarperPerennial, 1969), 187.

[2] William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (Modern Library, 1981), 19.

[3] Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked: A True Relation of the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Company against Samuel Gorton on Rhode Island (1646), 88, 89.

[4] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 25.

[5] Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial, or a Brief Relation of the Most Memorable and Remarkable Passages of the Providence of God Manifested to the Planters of New England in America (1669), 3.

[6] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 23.

[7] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 23.

[8] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 24.

[9] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 24, 25.

[10] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 281–83.

[11] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 351.

[12] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 101.

[13] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 100.

[14] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 105, 121.

[15] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 144.

[16] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 143.

[17] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 144.

[18] Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England: or a True Relation of Things Very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New England (Bladen and Bellamie, 1624), 55.

[19] Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 145.

[20] Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 55.

[21] Winslow, Good Newes from New England, 56.

Tracy McKenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College, where he holds the Arthur Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning, and is a past president of the Conference on Faith and History, a national association of Christian historians. He is the author, among other works, of The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History. Ordained Servant Online, November, 2024.