By the time the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, English settlers were already well-established in North America. Interactions between Native Americans and settlers — both good and bad — were common. But what makes the story of these 102 religious separatists so unique and important to American history is their unyielding commitment to religious freedom, justice, and civil government.
Historian William J. Federer recently sat down with The Washington Times’ Higher Ground to highlight the truth behind the people who graced that first Thanksgiving table and why their story is one that’s still worth celebrating.
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“[The English] would cut off your ear and brand you on the face as a heretic if you were caught believing something different than the King. So, it was serious,” Mr. Federer noted. “[The Pilgrims] were basically Baptists… And so, [they] had a congregational covenant church model. They met in the home of William Brewster, a wealthy person that had a manor in Scrooby, England, but neighbors would snitch. And the police would bust into the house and raid them and drag them to jail and they would get punished and… it would happen again and again.”
Initially, the separatists fled to the Netherlands, which was considered the most religiously tolerant place in Europe at the time. But eventually, the group wanted to put even more distance between themselves and the Church of England and decided to travel to the New World.
“They decide on Virginia, which was named after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, founded 14 years earlier,” Mr. Federer explained. “It was a King-run colony, but they thought they would be 3,000 miles away and nobody would notice. And then they set sail.”
The 102 passengers braved 66 days of freezing, stormy seas in a cramped four-foot-high space between the deck of the Mayflower. At one point, the ship nearly sank. And when the weather made it impossible to sail further south to Virginia, the Pilgrims were forced to land at Plymouth Rock.
The renowned historian and author of “The Treacherous World of the 16th Century & How the Pilgrims Escaped It: The Prequel to America’s Freedom” noted that the Pilgrims had no town, no provisions, and no one to lead them. But they did have their faith, and their decision to rely on their faith to guide them on what to do next changed the course of history.
“[The Pilgrims] do something unique that we remember them for: they take their covenant church form of government and they make it their civil government,” Mr. Federer said. “And that became the model for the other New England colonies, [and] eventually the U.S. Constitution. And the word ‘federal’ is Latin for ‘covenant.’ We have a covenant form of government in America that came from the Pilgrims and Puritans so that’s why we always look to the Pilgrims as the beginning of self-government in America.”
But even with a new form of government, there would have been no Thanksgiving without the Native American people.
After half of the separatists died that first winter, the local Wampanoag tribe, with the help of the former slave and English-speaking Squanto, graciously taught them how to survive in the New World. From catching fish to planting corn and everything in between, the Native Americans showed them how to live off the land and the Pilgrims began to see God’s provision in the world around them, which eventually led to the first Thanksgiving.
“Squanto put them on good terms with the other [Native Americans] and that’s when you had the first Thanksgiving,” Mr. Federer said. “So the first Thanksgiving went on for three days… And they had a peace that went on for several generations… And [it’s] just a wonderful story of courage and faith.”
But that’s not how some people would have you remember this critical time in American history. Mr. Federer noted that in recent years, American culture has changed the history of Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims to fit a modern agenda.
“There is a [socialist] tactic called deconstruction where you go into a country and you want to erase their history, you see negative things about the founders of the country,” he said. “So there’s always this effort of coming in and erasing the history so that they can bring in their new idea. And that’s what’s happened in America with the pilgrims, right? [Socialists] wanted to rewrite the history and make the people that founded the country where we have more individual liberty and opportunity than any other nation in world history, you know, get rid of that.”
That’s why Mr. Federer is on a mission to research and share America’s noble heritage with the world in order to learn it. After all, if it wasn’t for the Pilgrims, America might be a very different country today.
“America is an experiment of self-government, where rights come from a Creator, not from a King, and that you have freedom. You have freedom of conscience that you can believe something other than the government,” Mr. Federer concluded. “If you like having freedom and you like expressing yourself and being able to go to church or not go to church, you need to be thankful for the freedoms that we trace back to these pilgrims.”
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Marissa Mayer is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her work has been featured in Christian Post, The Daily Signal, and Intellectual Takeout. Mayer has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Arizona State University.
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