 © Joseph Mack Branchcombe
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The Miracle Harvest Click to read Click to |
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© Joseph Mack Branchcombe
|
The Miracle Harvest Click to read Click to |
The Miracle
Harvest
The last time I was in Plymouth, I found myself eavesdropping on a tour group.
These modern pilgrims were, not surprisingly, disappointed by the famous rock. Looming
like a Gibraltar in our national mythology, Plymouth Rock was in fact a sad little boulder
under a Victorian awning. Then a question was asked about Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims’
other claim to fame: "What kind of a farmer has a harvest festival in late
November?" Answer: "A bad one."
I had to bite my tongue. The first Thanksgiving dinner was actually held in October—October 1621. Plenty early for a harvest festival. Perhaps I should have told the tourists that the November date was Lincoln’s doing, in 1863. But that might have required a disquieting explanation, for what we often forget is that we as a nation get Thanksgiving not from the Pilgrims but from the Civil War.
The Thanksgiving tradition was still alive and well in the Northeast (with locally fluctuating dates) when Abraham Lincoln became President. But it had not caught on nationally. In declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday, Lincoln gave it so late a date he detached it from its agricultural origins. This was fitting, since he intended to use the holiday for political purposes.
In that autumn of 1863, the Civil War had taken a bad turn for the North. After the victory at Gettysburg in July, Major General George C. Meade had allowed Robert E. Lee’s army to slip away, to live to fight another day. The Union was then defeated at Chickamauga—and the Union command was left, in Lincoln’s words, "confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head." The country, Lincoln knew, was itself becoming increasingly confused and stunned by the sheer magnitude of the carnage. The casualties at Chickamauga alone were being estimated at more than 35,000.
So Lincoln was, quite understandably, worried about the coming election, particularly about the American people’s willingness to gather in this vast harvest of death. The Thanksgiving proclamation can thus be read as a first salvo in his re-election campaign. This proclamation did concede that the Civil War was "of unequaled magnitude and severity." But it asked the nation to view the losses from a broader vantage.
"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the Welds of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow or the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore."
This continued prosperous growth of the Republic, the proclamation added, was truly miraculous. It gave proof, for those who still needed it, of America’s providential destiny. We should, therefore, expect this same "Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation" and to restore peace and tranquillity and union "as soon as may be consistent with Divine Purpose."
One Lincoln admirer caught the religious spirit of the proclamation when he exclaimed in response, "No ruler of millions, since King David the Psalmist, has clothed great thoughts in sublimer language."
Well, perhaps. But I cannot help wondering about the original Pilgrims. What would they have thought of Lincoln’s use of their modest harvest feast?
They would not have objected to a Thanksgiving feast in the face of horrific death. Their own feast had been just that. They had arrived in Plymouth in the winter, a group of about 100, inadequately supplied and weakened by the anxious months of preparation and the arduous voyage. As a result, during the ordeal of that first winter, approximately half the colonists died, including the governor. Women routinely sacrificed themselves for their families—whether the mothers gave up their own food or just worked themselves into exhaustion in caring for the sick, thirteen of the eighteen wives died, but only three of the twenty children.
Moreover, the Pilgrims had survived their ordeal, if barely, only because a previous people had not. The colonists had found Plymouth deserted but with many signs of previous inhabitants. They found large corn caches, without which they almost certainly would have starved. They also found human bones scattered around—not just the occasional skeleton but piles of them, as if this had been a battlefield where corpses had been left to rot. The Pilgrims subsequently learned that the Pawtuxet Indians who lived there had recently been wiped out by an epidemic, a catastrophe that would become all too familiar to the indigenous peoples of eastern North America.
Squanto, the lone Pawtuxet who survived because he had been kidnapped by European sailors before the epidemic, adopted this strange new people occupying his ancestral lands. And at their first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621, the Pilgrims acknowledged that they had a harvest to celebrate largely because of the advice of their new friend. As for the numerous dead innocents, the Pilgrims did not need to remind themselves that the works of Providence were usually inscrutable to human reason.
Nonetheless, a true Pilgrim would have been appalled at Lincoln’s proclamation—not because of its general thanks amid innocent suffering but because of its politically cunning appeal to religion.
The Pilgrims were separatists, Protestants who had despaired of a true reformation of European society. Even to be part of such a corrupt society was to risk being polluted or entirely swallowed up. The only alternative was to seek a hallowed seclusion, to separate from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, to live in an artificial circle of exclusion from ordinary humanity.
They had first fled to the Netherlands. They were not persecuted there, but they did struggle incessantly against the insidious erosion of their community by Dutch prosperity and cosmopolitanism. So they heroically set out for the New World, and for a time they seemed to thrive in their own peculiar way. But then, as colonies became established around them (including a New Netherlands on the Hudson), the erosion began again, and this time their leaders had no heroic remedy to offer. Plymouth would eventually be absorbed into the far more ambitious and aggressive Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Pilgrims’ greatest governor, William Bradford, would look back on the early days of Plymouth with a perplexed sadness as he brooded over their failure. But he never lost his conviction that God speaks only through pilgrim peoples, separate and small and weak. As for the eventual appropriation of Thanksgiving by a great and prosperous nation, this was exactly the pollution of godly religion by worldly politics that he and his people had fled Europe to escape. But in the final analysis they failed. The world eventually despoils everything within it.
Nevertheless, we, if any reverence for the distant Pilgrims and their beliefs be in us, should at least remember on this day that our Thanksgiving, like our America, is not theirs. The holiday of Thanksgiving is properly of Lincoln and of our bloody crucible as a people, the Civil War.
Profile
Now A New World is in paperback. New York Newsday called it "a good, voluminous, gossipy read"—one of Art’s favorite blurbs. Art has published The Rivals, another piece of his mosaic of America, has finished a third volume which he calls Hell with the Fire Out, and is now researching the revolutionary period. Of course word mavens still enjoy his brief, clever exposition Figures of Speech (a must for creative writers and anyone else who needs to know the difference between a zeugma and an enallage).
For a guy who once feared he would be a "posthumous author," Art is quite irrepressibly and irreverently alive and bent on telling the rest of the decentered, manichean story of America. Strenuous labor, but, like Melville, Art Quinn has a whale of a subject on his hands.
—A Friend
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