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Every schoolchild
in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the
Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest
feast after surviving their first bitter year in New
England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of
the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land
by European colonialists--and of the ruthless ways of
capitalism.
* * * * *
In mid-winter 1620
the English ship Mayflower landed on the North
American coast, delivering 102 Puritan exiles. The original
Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been
killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there.
When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left
smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90
and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying
most villages completely.
The Puritans landed
and built their colony called "the Plymouth Plantation" near
the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They
ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet
named Squanto had survived--he had spent the last years as a
slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke
the colonists' language and taught them how to plant corn
and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also
helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the
nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.
These were very
lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia
settlement had been wiped out before they could establish
themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the
Puritans not only survived their first year but had an
alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two
decades of peace.
John Winthrop, a
founder of the Massachusetts Bay colony considered this wave
of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a
friend in England, "But for the natives in these parts, God
hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest
part of them are swept away by smallpox which still
continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our
title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being
in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."
The deadly impact
of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag
allowed the Puritans to survive their first year.
In celebration of
their good fortune, the colony's governor, William Bradford,
declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first
harvest of 1621.
How the Puritans
Stole the Land
But the peace that
produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the
Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on
the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 Puritans
in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements.
But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that
soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of
Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new
settlers came.
And as the number
of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous
as the Wampanoags.
On arrival, the
Puritans discussed "who legally owns all this land." They
had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon
traditions, but because their particular way of farming was
based on individual--not communal or tribal--ownership. This
debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois "rule of
law" does not mean "protect the rights of the masses
of people."
Some Puritans
argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces
were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor
Winthrop declared the Indians had not "subdued" the land,
and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to
English Common Law, be considered "public domain." This
meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists
decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they
seized new lands, they only had to consult the
representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).
The Puritans
embraced a line from Psalms 2:8. "Ask of me, and I shall
give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the
uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." Since
then, European settler states have similarly declared god
their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa
to the Zionists seizing Palestine.
The European
immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm
it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They
pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the
inhabitants.
The Birth of
"The American Way of War"
In the Connecticut
Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an
alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the
Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they
were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633,
the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now
sits--land which the Pequot had recently conquered from
another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were
killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed
the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.
The Puritan
preachers said, from Romans 13:2, "Whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and
they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240
under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a
thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis
Jennings writes: "Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot
warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned,
unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose.
Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to
fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk,
and Mason had determined that massacre would be his
objective."
The colonist army
surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River.
At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers
set the village on fire.
William Bradford,
Governor of Plymouth, wrote: "Those that escaped the fire
were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run
through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly
dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus
destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to
see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink
and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice,
and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so
wonderfully for them."
Mason himself
wrote: "It may be demanded...Should not Christians have more
mercy and compassion? But...sometimes the Scripture
declareth women and children must perish with their
parents.... We had sufficient light from the word of God for
our proceedings."
Three hundred and
fifty years later the Puritan phrase "a shining city on the
hill" became a favorite quote of Ronald Reagan's
speechwriters.
Discovering the
Profits of Slavery
This so-called
"Pequot war" was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition.
Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible
again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found
justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the
captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained
alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living
in Connecticut was 21.
Some of the war
captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts
allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans,
Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking
war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.
The remaining
captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the
West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery
that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with
that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the
profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually
paid for the cost of seizing them.
One account says
that enslaving Indians quickly became a "mania with
speculators." These early merchant capitalists of
Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The
slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped
Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant
capitalism.
Thanksgiving in the
Manhattan Colony
In 1641 the Dutch
governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first "scalp
bounty"--his government paid money for the scalp of each
Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered
the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty
were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer
balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was
castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh
while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft
hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the
Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford,
Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian
residents were put to the sword.
A day of
thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As
we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving
Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for
harvest and friendship.
The Conquest of New
England
By the 1670s there
were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United
New England Colonies--6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With
the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth
colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved
them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original
Thanksgiving Day.
In 1675 a Christian
Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The
Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag
without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.
As Mao Tsetung
says: "Where there is oppression there is resistance." The
Wampanoag went to war.
The Indians applied
some military lessons they had learned: they waged a
guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements
and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan
soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the
main Indian populations.
When this war
ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of
the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle.
Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But
the colonists won.
In their victory,
the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the
remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government
offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40
shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery.
Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child
under 14 they could capture. The "Praying Indians" who had
converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the
European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops
during battles with "hostiles." They were enslaved or
killed. Other "peaceful" Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were
invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts--and
were sold onto slave ships.
It is not known how
many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign,
500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth
alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes,
probably about half died from battle, massacre and
starvation.
After King Philip's
War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern
British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan's New York
colony: "There is now but few Indians upon the island and
those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely
they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English
first settled in these parts."
In Massachusetts,
the colonists declared a "day of public thanksgiving" in
1676, saying, "there now scarce remains a name or family of
them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or
fled."
Fifty-five years
after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had
destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring
tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His
head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still
hung on display 24 years later.
The descendants of
these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant
capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the
Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of
Massasoit, the Pilgrim's original protector, was sold into
slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels
But even the
destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of
survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in
every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a
revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance.
The historian MacLeod writes: "The first `reservations' were
designed for the `wild' Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the
first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of
Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen
service in Ireland under Cromwell."
The enslaved
Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts
government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved
Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were
tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.
A Massachusetts law
of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will,
declaring it was "lawful for any person, whether English or
Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in
any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to
command them under their guard and examination, or to kill
them as they may or can."
The northern
colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the
people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave
from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up;
Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening
get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes
for being out after nine o'clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made
it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African,
an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the
importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a
slave revolt.
Celebrate?
Looking at this
history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the
survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day?
Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to
celebrate.
A little known
fact: Squanto, the so-called "hero" of the original
Thanksgiving Day, was executed by the Indians for his
treacheries.
But the ruling
powers of the United States organized people to
celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their
interest. That's why they created it. The first national
celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George
Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal
holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right
as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).
Washington and
Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to
forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European
settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story
was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building.
It celebrates the "bounty of the American way of life,"
while covering up the brutal nature of this society.
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