What You Don't Get Taught About Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims

 

Troy D. Smith

November 26, 2021

 

Two days ago, on the day before Thanksgiving, I was contacted by two different news venues to publicly opine about Thanksgiving in my capacity as a professional historian. The first was a local (Cookeville) radio station, the other was a local TV station in Chattanooga. The radio reporter only wanted to ask me a couple of brief questions about food, which I answered, but the TV reporter also wanted to talk about the story of Thanksgiving. Specifically, I was asked to add any detail that I thought might be interesting or important to know. So I did. That whole interview took about 15 minutes.

In that time, I told the parts of the Thanksgiving story that most people don’t know and are rarely, if ever, broached in K-12. “Wow,” the reporter said, “I never knew any of that -you never get taught that stuff in school.” I remember thinking to myself, though, that I would be amazed if any of those things made it into the final piece.

I was not wrong. Not a word of it was. I do understand that they were looking for a one-or-two-minute retelling of the feel-good myths to show on the holiday, and were not planning on showing anything that would challenge their audience’s assumptions or worldview… and certainly nothing which might make their viewers mad because it was an uncomfortable truth. When the fact becomes legend, as the newspaperman said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, print the legend.

Essentially, only the things I said about the menu on that first Pilgrim harvest feast, and the things that support the basic story as everyone was taught it in school (selectively taken from my larger conversation), were used. Again, I understand that editing 15 minutes down to 2 minutes means that 90% would be cut. But looking at my quotes in the article (which you can see here), you would get the impression I said nothing about the Native American Indian perspective on Thanksgiving.

So I decided I would share with you, here, the story I told the reporter.

The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620. There were about a hundred of them. They really weren’t very well-versed in taking care of themselves in this new environment, and at the end of their first winter slightly more than half of them had died. They got crops planted in the spring -with significant help via pointers from an indigenous man named Tisquantum, which the Pilgrims shortened to Squanto. The following autumn they harvested those crops, and decided to have a thanksgiving feast to celebrate. This took place sometime between late September and early November, probably sometime in October, of 1621.

They did NOT invite the Wampanoags to their feast. In fact, Wampanoag leader Massasoit showed up with about 90 warriors… because the Pilgrims, in their celebration, had been firing their guns into the sky (which does make this sound like a uniquely American occasion) and the Wampanoags feared the newcomers had started an attack on them. When Massasoit saw that it was only a party, he had his men contribute five deer they had caught. But, to make it clear: there were no indigenous women and children present, only warriors; they had not been invited; it was kind of a tense situation, and was partially a Wampanoag show of strength.

Have you ever wondered how Squanto was able to communicate with the Pilgrims? It was because he spoke English. The Pilgrims were not his first contact with Englishmen; in fact, for years previous, English ships had plied up and down the coast, fishing and trading. And, whenever they saw a Native person alone or in only a small group on shore, they would kidnap them and carry them back across the Atlantic to sell them as slaves. This had happened to Squanto several years earlier (he had been tricked into boarding a ship) and he had spent years in Europe as a slave -first in Spain, then in London. He made his way back to New England via ship -perhaps, some have speculated, working as a sailor, or perhaps still a slave now owned by a naval officer. At any rate, he made his way home 14 or so years after his abduction, only to find that his people -the Patuxet, members of the Wampanoag Federation -were all dead. They had perished of disease introduced by English sailors. Incidentally, there were at least a couple of other Native American men in the area who had spent years as slaves of the English, including a Wampanoag named Samoset.

When the Pilgrims arrived, many Wampanoags wanted to wipe them out. They had come to associate the English with slavers. Squanto told Massasoit tales of the grandeur of London, and helped convince him that the English would make good trading partners -and would allow the Wampanoag Federation to maintain their primacy over their rivals in the region, the Narragansets (and, to a lesser degree, the Pequots). The balance of power had been disrupted by the epidemic that had killed so many Wampanoags. Hence the decision was made to allow the Pilgrims to occupy the lands of the deceased Patuxets. From the Pilgrim perspective, the fact they arrived to find empty land that was not only arable, but cleared as if it were simply waiting there for them, was proof that God was blessing them and was with their endeavor. Squanto was their principal contact. Many of you, like me, may have been taught in school that Squanto showed them an old Native American trick of planting a dead fish at the base of a cornstalk, for fertilizer. The fact is, he did show them that… but it was not a Native American practice. It was common in Mediterranean Europe. So Squanto must have learned it from Southern Europeans, either in Spain or perhaps from Italian sailors, and then taught it to the English.

By the way, Massasoit and other Wampanoags started getting suspicious of Squanto, and wondering if he were accurately translating between them and the Pilgrims. Squanto’s actions seemed, in the eye of some Wampanoags, to principally benefit himself; he may have been playing both ends against the middle. One year after the thanksgiving feast, Squanto died of an “Indian fever”; some historians suspect he may have been poisoned as a collaborator/traitor by the Wampanoags.

None of that adds up to a happy feast between friendly allies, cementing bonds of amity.

The reporter asked what would have happened if the Wampanoags who wanted to kill the Pilgrims had won out; would we still be here? What would have happened, I said, is that they would have been dead. We would still have been here, because other English colonies were being established- John Smith and company had been in Jamestown for 13 years before the Pilgrims ever showed up. The only real difference would be that we wouldn’t be talking about Pilgrims, other than the way we talk about Roanoke -as a failed colony. Most of the Thanksgiving traditions we associate with Pilgrims actually started in the late 1800s or after; Thanksgiving as an official holiday was instituted by Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War, as a way to unify Americans.

I pointed out that, to the majority of my indigenous friends, Thanksgiving is at best an unpopular holiday and at worst a day of mourning. It is extremely important to realize, I said, that within fifteen years of this feast the Pilgrims and the many Puritans who had joined them were committing genocide against neighboring tribes the Pequots and Narragansets (after the latter had allied with them against he Pequots), and within fifty years they had virtually wiped out the very tribe who had helped them, the Wampanoags. Pilgrims were nasty people to Native Americans, and were really bad neighbors in general (see "Thomas Morton").

After pointing out that the Pilgrims would probably have perished without Wampanoag help, I said that most people do not even know that November is National Native American Heritage month… and, really, every day should be a day for honoring Native Americans past and present.

This is the very short, 15-minute version of the Thanksgiving story. There are many more details, most of which I did not include in this abridged version. But there is a lot of unacknowledged truth just in this brief explanation.

The problem is, though, that most people prefer to hear a lie that makes them feel good than a truth that does not. And most people -especially the politicians who control public schools and much of the media that is reliant on commercial sponsors -would rather teach the warm and fuzzy misrepresentations which people expect to hear than the hard truth.

Benedict Anderson wrote several years ago that nations are “imagined communities” -they agree to forge a common identity based on imaginary connections and an imaginary origin story (or mythology). This explains the discomfort many feel when someone begins to unravel that mythology.

But historians are not supposed to be mythologizers. And, more importantly, Native American Indians are real people, with real ancestors and a real past, who do not deserve to have their reality denied or downplayed in order to make everybody else feel good about themselves. Finally, blinding ourselves to history in favor of comfortable mythology keeps us from understanding, not just what happened, but what the consequences are in the present, which then prevents us from addressing many of the issues that still plague us.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 A complete list of "A Liberal Dose" columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

 

 

A Liberal Dose, November 25, 2021 "History of Voting Part 4: Native Americans"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 25, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 4: Native Americans”

Read PART 1

Read PART 2

Read PART 3

 

As our look at the history of voting has been chronological, the next topic after last week’s discussion at the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement would be what are called “the Reconstruction Amendments.” That refers to amendments 13, 14, and 15, all passed in the first few years after the end of the Civil War. #13 ended slavery or any other form of involuntary servitude, except in prison. #14 specified that anyone born within the geographic boundaries of the U.S. was a citizen, with all the rights of any other citizen. That amendment was meant to specify that the newly-freed slaves could be citizens and vote. Finally, #15 guaranteed that no citizen could be denied their voting rights “because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Since this is Thanksgiving week, I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at what this meant for Native Americans, and save our discussion of African Americans until next week.

What did these amendments mean to Native people? Absolutely nothing. They were not considered citizens, although born in the country. They could be denied the vote because of their race or color. They were literally the only people the 14^th amendment did not apply to. Why? Because they were considered members of their tribe, which was separate from the United States even though it was physically within the United States. The government considered tribes “dependent nations” and “wards of the state.”

Think about that for a minute. Indigenous people have been called “American Indians” and “Native Americans”… but they were not considered Americans. This started to change, oddly enough, as a result of World War I.

A large number of Native Americans -including quite a few women -volunteered to serve in the U.S. military during the war. Unlike black troops of the time, or Japanese-American troops in WWII, they were not put into segregated units; they were scattered among the regular units, with the white soldiers. And there were a large number of them. In fact, in every American military conflict since WWI, Native Americans have had the highest proportional enlistment rates. The first “code talkers” were used in WWI, mostly Choctaws, while the more famous Navajo ones served in WWII. It was a way to celebrate their own military/warrior culture, and was also a way to show they were every bit as American as anybody else.

Odds are, just about every company had a few “Indians.” Their white comrades got to see that they had not become extinct, that they were patriotic, and that they were brave. When the war was over, as people learned that the Native people they had fought beside could not vote, there was an outcry. In 1919 citizenship and the vote were given to all Native war veterans. It was a start, but it was not enough. Finally, in 1924, Congress conferred full citizenship on Native American people. This happened 148 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which had called them “merciless savages.”

Just because a Native person was legally allowed to vote, though, did not mean he or she would be physically allowed to vote. In states that had large indigenous populations -in the West and in Alaska -the Native vote was suppressed for decades, in much the same way the black vote was suppressed in the South: through violence, intimidation, coercion, deception, and general chicanery.

You’ve no doubt heard of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and know that it was passed to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. What you might not know is that it was also meant to protect the voting rights of Native Americans in the West. Legislatures in some western states still pass laws specifically designed to make it harder for Natives to vote.

This Thanksgiving, think about how little honor and appreciation have been shown to the first Americans.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, November 18, 2021 "History of Voting Part 3: Women's Suffrage"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 18, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“History of Voting, Part 3: Women’s Suffrage”

 

Read PART 1

Read PART 2

We’ve been talking about voting rights the last couple of weeks, and have mostly focused on how class and race determined which men could vote. Now we’ll turn our attention to the other half of the population: women. Specifically, we will discuss women’s suffrage. “Suffrage” means being allowed to do something. Remember, in the King James wording Jesus said “suffer the little children to come to me”…he didn’t mean make them suffer, he meant allow them. This wording is, in itself, significant: the question was not whether women had the right to vote, it was whether the men should “allow” them to do so, which speaks volumes.

Women were already asserting their rights as this country was being formed. In March of 1776, while John Adams was away from his Massachusetts home to help hammer out a declaration of independence in Philadelphia, his wife Abigail made her thoughts clear in her letters to him.

“And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

A few years later, in 1792, English philosopher Mary Wallstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argued that women are the equals of men. In fact, her daughter, Mary Shelley, would essentially found the modern science-fiction and horror genres in 1818 with her novel Frankenstein.

Nonetheless, these were individuals, not a movement. Women started to get actively involved in American social and reform movements in the 1820s and 1830s, initially in defense of others. Many women, especially in the North, contributed to the movement protesting Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears. Quite a few of them moved from that action to joining the drive to abolish slavery. Quite a few women were prominent figures in abolition, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to the Southern-born Grimke sisters. In the process of defending the rights of minorities, more and more women came to realize that they, too, were treated as second class citizens.

Some argue that the women’s movement started in 1840, when the American abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott traveled to London for an anti-slavery convention- and were not allowed in because they were women. They organized the first women’s rights convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Soon joined by Susan B. Antony, they began organizing to gain the vote for women. At the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851, an ex-slave and feminist named Sojourner Truth gave a powerful speech called “Ain’t I a Woman?” She asked the audience, where did Jesus come from? God, and a woman. “Man ain’t had nothin’ to do with it.”

It was a long, hard-fought process… and a slow one. Interestingly, many Western states allowed women to vote in state and local elections, beginning with Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870. But in most of the country women had to keep protesting. The 19^th Amendment, passed in 1919, finally guaranteed women the right to vote (Tennessee’s ratification of the amendment was the one which officially passed it). Former slaves got the right to vote soon after the Civil War, so for half-a-century black men could vote while all women could not.

From that first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls to the 1920 national election, the first in which women could vote, 72 years had passed. 72 years of tireless work, inconvenience, incarceration, and sometimes enduring physical violence.

May they never be forgotten.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

 

A Liberal Dose, November 11, 2021 "The History of Voting in America, Part 2: Poor white and free black voters

 

A Liberal Dose

November 11, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“The History of Voting in America, Part 2”

(Read Part 1 HERE)

 

Last week we discussed how, in the early days of the country, there were many restrictions on voting. Not only could women, slaves, and Native Americans not vote, but even among white men only those with substantial property could cast a ballot. Surprisingly, free black men who met the minimum property requirement could vote in 10 of the 13 original states (excluding Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina).

In the 1790s, after the Constitution and the government it mandated went into effect, property requirements became unpopular. There was more emphasis on individual liberty, and a man’s ownership of his own person and his own labor became, in the eyes of many, as important as the ownership of real estate. The first new state admitted to the Union, Vermont (in 1791), guaranteed the vote to all men regardless of color or wealth. When Kentucky was admitted the following year, they made the same guarantees. Also in 1792, original states Delaware and New Hampshire removed property requirements; no new state admitted to the Union after 1800 had them. By 1825 only three states still had property requirements for white males: Virginia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Virginia’s requirement was $25, or $788 in today’s money; Rhode Island’s was $132, or $4,200 today. A few states in the north allowed Native Americans to vote IF they owned property, and several states that did not have property requirements for white men in general still applied them to white men who were foreign-born or did not speak English, making immigrants second-class citizens.

This trend toward eliminating property requirements for white men in the 1820s helps explain the rise of Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote in 1824 and the electoral college in 1828. Andrew Jackson was the seventh president, but he was the first who had come from a working-class background. Yes, he had become wealthy by the 1820s, but he had literally been born in a log cabin whereas all six of his predecessors had come from privileged, wealthy families. Jackson appealed to the “common man,” famously opening up the White House to the general public during his inauguration (to the dismay of many Washington elites). Every presidential candidate after Jackson would have to find ways to appeal to the average white male voter, rather than just to the wealthy and middle-class, and this would fundamentally change politics.

While the status of unpropertied white men was rising, however, that of propertied free black men was falling. Within a couple of years of Kentucky coming into the Union as a state that allowed free black men the franchise, the state rescinded it. Other Southern states began following suit -but so did Northern states, as well. Those who did not ban the black vote outright kept property requirements attached to it, even though they had been removed from white voters. For example, New York removed property requirements for white men in 1821, but raised it for free blacks -to $250, or almost $8,000 dollars today. This was about double the average farmer’s annual income. Only 16 black men in New York were wealthy enough to vote that year. By 1825, only 68 of the 13,000 free black men in the state could meet the requirement.

By 1860, free black men had the equal right to vote in only five states, all of them in New England. Why were their rights diminishing over time?

The answer is simple: cotton. Eli Whitney’s new invention the cotton gin -invented in 1793, the year after Kentucky became a state -immediately started making cotton a profitable crop to grow. By the 1820s it dominated the U.S. economy, eventually making up half of all exports. Cotton’s profitability meant new life, and new protections, for slavery. Restricting the rights of free blacks served to reinforce the color barrier that made slavery easier to maintain.

Race had become more important than class.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

 

A Liberal Dose, Nov. 4, 2021 "The History of Voting in America, Part 1"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 4, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“The History of Voting in America, Part 1”

 

In November, most peoples’ thoughts (in the U.S., anyway) turn to two things: Thanksgiving, and voting. Among other things, we are taught from childhood to be thankful for liberty and freedom; the vote (sometimes referred to as “the franchise”) is a fundamental part of that freedom, and is therefore one of the things we should be most thankful for. “No taxation without representation” was one of the principles that led to the American Revolution and the creation of our nation. And yet, we probably take voting for granted more than just about any country. This is demonstrated by the fact that we have the lowest voter turnout anywhere in the western world. The right to vote was hard-fought and hard-won, with enormous struggle and sacrifice along the way, and if taken for granted could easily slip away. As Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman in the crowd asked him, “Well, what have you given us?” He responded, “A republic, madame, if you can keep it.”

Despite Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men were created equal” (leaving women out entirely), not even all men were equal in the early republic where voting was concerned. Male slaves and male Native Americans, of course, did not have the franchise -but, and a lot of folks nowadays don’t realize this, neither did poor people. Each of the thirteen states continued the policy they had followed when they were colonies: you could only vote if you owned a certain amount of property. So, if you were a free, white male aged 21 or older but you worked in a factory, or were hired labor on a farm, or were in training for a trade, you had no voice. The people in power, though, looked at it differently. They would tell you that you DID have a voice- theirs. This was the same argument Parliament gave to the colonists in the lead-up to the Revolution. Elected officials represent the whole country (or county, or district), so they represent you and your interests -you’re just not allowed to participate. Patriots were not willing to settle for that, yet at first they, too, limited the franchise.

Their argument was that, if you have a landlord or an employer, you are not really independent; there was a good chance you would vote, not your own conscience, but the will of the person who controlled your livelihood or your living conditions. A person of property, on the other hand, had an investment in the community and could be trusted to have a broader view. Interestingly, in the early days of the southern colonies -and in 10 of the first 13 states (Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina being the exceptions) -a free black man, if he owned property, could vote (free blacks had been able to vote in Virginia in the mid-1600s). This means that a free black man with a sizeable farm or a business in North Carolina could vote when many white men in his community could not. Race was obviously a major factor in his life, but -at the time -so was class.

And so, too, was religion. Among the original 13 colonies, when they were colonies, only New York allowed Jewish people to vote. This changed when the new republic was established -but not everywhere. Jews were still not allowed to vote in many states, especially in the South. Those states argued that the Constitutional ban on having religious requirements to hold office applied on the federal level, not the state. Maryland was the last state to pass a law allowing non-Christians to vote, in 1826. Its many critics called it “The Jew Bill.”

For the first 50 years of America, then, only roughly 10 to 20 percent of citizens could vote. Next, we’ll examine how that started to change -positively, for some, but not for all.

(Note: one of my mentors, Orville Vernon Burton, has a new book out -co-written with Armand Derfner -called Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. It deals with some of these same issues, and I highly recommend it.)

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE