The pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in the Plymouth colony in 1621 had begun their journey over twelve years earlier, when they fled from religious persecution in England to Holland. Then with strong faith in the providence of God, that He was leading them to a new land where they would enjoy religious freedom, they boarded the Mayflower and sailed for America.
The oceanic voyage took twice as long as that of Christopher Columbus and was beset by several harsh winter storms. Then when they arrived in their new land they faced more bitter cold, danger, famine, and disease. By Spring half of them had died. Nevertheless, when the Mayflower made its return voyage in the Spring, none of the surviving Pilgrims returned.
Their first harvest was in the Autumn of 1621. Their own seed had barely grown, but the Indians had shown them how to plant maize (corn), and it yielded a huge harvest. This called for a celebration and thanksgiving to God. On that first Thanksgiving they celebrated God’s goodness with 90 Indians, and their feast lasted three days.
The custom of holding annual Thanksgivings that began with the Plymouth congregation spread to other congregations in Connecticut and eventually to Massachusetts Bay. After an annual Thanksgiving was adopted by Massachusetts, the custom spread to other New England colonies. By the time of the Revolutionary War in 1776, Thanksgiving proclamations also were exulting God’s granting them victories over their British enemies. The President of the Continental Congress, Elias Boudinot, was also the first president of the American Bible Society, declared a day of solemn Thanksgiving and praises on October 17, 1777, the first celebration proclaimed for all thirteen states.
President George Washington proclaimed a day of national Thanksgiving in 1789 upon the launch of the new federal government under the U.S. Constitution. The presidents that followed George Washington continued to issue such proclamations, but it was still the individual states’ choice to officially acknowledge the day, but gradually it became wide spread in state after state. In 1846 Sarah J. Hale, supported by the Congregational and Presbyterian churches, began a crusade to nationalize Thanksgiving as a holiday. Finally in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November “a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
President Lincoln spoke of the country’s great advancement, new territories, population growth, and abundant increase of resources. He said:
“To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.”
At that time the country was bitterly divided by Civil War, and hundred of thousands of lives had been lost. Inspite of this tremendous loss, Lincoln perceived the hand of God was upon the nation, and He spoke of God’s divine purposes for the future:
“No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”
That national repentance was a vital part of the Thanksgiving holiday is little known today, and certainly would not be acceptable to many Americans, whose consciousness of sin has become dull, if not dead, because sin itself has become acceptable. Anyone who truly understands America’s Christian foundations, however, would not be surprised to realize that this proclamation not only established our solemn duty to offer God thanksgiving for all His bountiful blessings; and we are the most blessed nation on the earth, even in economic downturns! But that we should also offer humble repentance for our sins, “national perverseness and disobedience:”
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
“And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
Today such a prayer in public places is decried as a violation of church and state, and falsely purported as being “unconstitutional.” I find this quite curious since it was in celebration of the Constitution that President Washington issued a national proclamation of thanksgiving for “the signal favors of Almighty God.”
The “Change” to Non Christian America
It is astounding to me how many “changes” have been made in one year that have replaced human counsel for the Biblically moral counsel and principles that founded and guided this nation for 400 years. A new cycle of religious persecution of Christians that demands all references to God, the Bible, and especially Christ, to be removed from public squares and schools, even a remote desert place where a cross stands to honor those fallen in war, to a Christian university where the cross was covered so as not to be in the background of a televised presidential speech, have been introduced. And in case there be any doubt as to the change in America’s 400 year old religious heritage, our president has stated to other nations thatAmerica is not a Christian nation!
So on this Thanksgiving Day who will you be giving thanks to? The U.S. government? The financial institutions? And who will be feeding the hungry and the homeless in our nation and caring for the poor and needy? Government? Wall Street? It will be the religious organizations, the Judeo-Christian churches and charities who honor the Word of God given through Moses and Jesus. Those who are heirs to those early settlers who saw America as “the Israel” of the New World; God’s chosen land and a city set on a hill.
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