Sherman’s Letter to Atlanta: Setting the Scene

Welcome to part 1 of a small series on the letter General William T. Sherman sent to the city leaders of Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1864 before his army advanced on the city. Part of this letter has become famous as both a hard-bitten, honest description of war and an example of Sherman’s intransigence, his unwillingness to back away from inflicting the horrors of war that he so deplored. In general, the letter has the reputation of being unfeeling toward the citizens of Atlanta and blaming Sherman’s own war crimes on his situation.

In this series we will look at exactly what Sherman said in his letter, but first we’ll examine the letter he was responding to on September 12, 1864—the letter from the mayor and city council of Atlanta that Sherman had received the day before, September 11. And we’ll begin here by setting the scene for this famous exchange.

The Battle for Atlanta took place in July 1864, when Sherman’s forces defeated Confederate forces led by General John Hood. Hood had been retreating toward Atlanta from Tennessee just as General Joseph Johnston had done before him, and these months of steady retreat toward Atlanta had the city in a state of extreme anxiety. Hood’s army suffered heavy casualties in the July battles and fell back into the outskirts of Atlanta itself. Sherman besieged the city, firing shells into it while he sent detachments of his army to cut the supply lines between Atlanta and Macon. Confederate units repulsed these attempts, and so Sherman sent his entire army west to Jonesborough, where it finally cut off the line from Macon. Now without hope of new supplies of food, ammunition, or reinforcements, Hood withdrew his army from Atlanta on September 1st. He destroyed existing supply depots and set fire to loaded ammunition cars, leaving the city completely unable to defend or provide for itself.

Atlanta Mayor James Calhoun met with a Union office and surrendered the city to Sherman on September 2nd, asking for “protection to non-combatants and private property”. Sherman accepted these terms and telegraphed Washington the next day to let the president know that “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”, and set up his headquarters in Jonesborough. Two weeks later, he ordered the burning of all public buildings, machine shops, depots, and arsenals in Atlanta, and sent word to the city to evacuate all citizens. The burning of the city was the first of many during the “march to the sea” that was meant to destroy the south’s ability to make war by destroying its military industry and its civilian infrastructure.

Thus the stage is set for the two letters between Atlanta and Sherman. In the next post we’ll look at the first—the letter the mayor and city council of Atlanta sent to Sherman.

Next time: Atlanta’s argument against evacuation

American Isolationism: The Mock Trial of Hitler

In our last post on American isolationism before WWII we ended with the promise of an extraordinary demonstration against German fascism that took place in the U.S. in March 1934. That event was a mock trial of Adolf Hitler.

This article depends for its quotations on two good sources: “Publicly Deliberative Drama: The 1934 Mock Trial of Adolf Hitler for ‘Crimes against Civilization'”, Louis Anthes, The American Journal of Legal History , Vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 391-410; and In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson, Crown, NY, 2011.

The trial, which was attended by 20,000 people, was sponsored by many groups; it originated with the American Jewish Congress and included many labor unions–in fact, two months earlier New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and AFL Vice-President Matthew Woll had led what they termed a working-class anti-fascist rally at the same location, Madison Square Garden. Now they joined two dozen other leaders in American society, religion, and politics, including former New York Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Seabury; John Haynes Holmes, Minister of the Community Church of New York City; Raymond Moley, former Under-Secretaryof State under Roosevelt; and Mayor LaGuardia.

The Case of Civilization v. Hitler begain with an indictment against Hitler and his government which, amongst other crimes, “has not only destroyed the foundations of the German Republic, but, under penalty of death, torture, and economic extermination, and by process of progressive strangulation, has reduced and subjugated to abject slavery all sections of its population.” Hours of speeches from the famous men assembled concluded with a decision against the Nazis. [Anthes 392]

The Nazi government was furious. It had protested to the U.S. State Department before the trial, news of which had reached Germany in February, and Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the U.S. met repeatedly with State Deparment personnel, including Secretary Cordell Hull; each complaint and meeting ended with the Americans repeating that “our constitutional guaranties of freedom of expression” prohibited the federal government from stopping the trial, or any other peaceful public demonstration. The Germans persisted in complaining, and six days after the trial Luther raged to Hull that “such offensive and insulting acts by the people of one country against the Government and its officials of another country” should not be tolerated. Four days later, he appeared in Hull’s office with a list of what Luther described as “abusive and insulting expressions of American citizens toward the Hitler Government.” [Larson 239]

Hull’s reponse was firm: “…America’s relationship with the previous German government had been ‘uniformly agreeable’ and [it] was only during the control of the present government that the troubles complained of had arisen… The whole problem would go away, Hull intimated, if Germany ‘could only bring about a cessation of these reports of personal injuries which had been coming steadily to the Unitd Stats from Germany and arousing bitter resentment among many people here.” [Ibid, 240]

The mock trial of Hitler on March 7, 1934 was followed by a few other trials and many rallies against fascism, culminating in another Madison Square Garden rally in July 1942, led by Rabbi Wise, against Nazi atrocities. By that time, of course, the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany. There are echoes of the 1934 trial in the Nuremburg Trials after the war, which the U.S. insisted upon over British and Soviet objections (Britain wanted show trials without a defense, if any, and the Soviets wanted to go straight to executions).

This trial and the anti-Nazi demonstrations that preceded and followed it do not, of course, mean that there was no pro-Nazi sentiment in the U.S; there was, and American fascists held their own rallies and marches. The largest was the German American Bund, which also drew 20,000 people to a rally in New York on President’s Day 1939. One feels more certain that many people attending this rally were truly isolationist; by February 1939 war was just months away, Germany had annexed the Sudetenland and Austria, and there was more concrete concern about America entering another war.

But the majority of Americans in the 1930s were not knee-jerk isolationists; they despised Nazism and were willing to oppose it in many ways, from boycotts to signing petitions to working with relief groups to try to help Jewish Germans. They did not want to fight another war, but they did not refuse to acknowledge that a) the Nazis had to be stopped, and b) that war might be the only way to do this. There is always a vocal minority that grabs the national spotlight; here we have two: the 20,000 who rallied against Hitler and the 20,000 who rallied for him. Given the commitment of Americans to the principles of our Constitution, and their willingness to fight once war did come, it is hard to believe that the latter group had more unspoken support amongst Americans than the former.

Were Americans really isolationist before WWII?

There are a few things you will read almost without fail in any history of the U.S., from textbook to blog: the Puritans had a strong work ethic; Americans were the underdogs in the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson was a champion of the common man; Mary Todd Lincoln was insane; and Americans were isolationists before each of the World Wars. Generally, the more you read about any “given” subject, the less certain you become of the common knowledge dispensed about it, and sometimes you do a complete 180, realizing that the traditional take on a historical moment is just not true. That’s where Truth v. Myth comes from, and that’s what we’re looking at here.

American isolationism is a tricky topic. Generally, the cult of American isolationism has been built on these cornerstones: the lack of political action taken against Germany by the U.S. government until war was declared; Americans’ over-arching concern with the domestic economy during the Depression, which precluded any real or sustained interest in foreign affairs; and Roosevelt’s struggles to get Congress to authorize material support for Britain from 1940-1941.

The first and last of these concerns official government action; the second addresses the man in the street. They are often connected by saying, The man in the street did not want war with Germany and so the government tried to stay out of it. Only when Pearl Harbor was attacked did Americans rise up and demand war, and so Congress declared it.

But it’s clear when you study the U.S. in the interwar period that there was no single, national opinion on Europe and whether to intervene in German policy. The majority of Americans were concerned about what was happening in Germany; the increasingly oppressive and criminal policies the Nazi government introduced from the start of its rule in March 1933 were fully covered in the U.S. press, and that coverage alarmed and angered many Americans. More Americans had ancestors from Germany than from any other European nation, so millions of German-Americans were outraged at what they considered to be the Nazi destruction of German culture and civilization. Other Americans worried that Germany would provoke another war in Europe—not simply because they didn’t want the U.S. to fight another war, but because the struggling U.S. economy needed a strong European export market. Communist and Socialist Americans were united with Democrats and Republicans in decrying the rise of fascist dictatorship. And Jewish Americans spread the word of the growing persecution of Jewish Germans through every available outlet.

So we see that there was a great deal of concern and anger about the Reich and its policies, and there was also real activism against Nazi Germany. Jewish Americans led the way, in particular Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, who organized an anti-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1933 that drew 25,000 attendees. In the depths of the Depression, Wise called for an economic boycott against Nazi Germany that was supported by the American Federation of Labor and the International Trade Union Congress as well as the Jewish Labor Committee. The determination to isolate and attack Nazi Germany thus cut across religious lines.

Why didn’t the U.S. government act against the Nazis if so many Americans were against Germany? That is a very complex topic for another post (and has been addressed in many books), but suffice it to say, for here, that there were several factors at play: the government did not want to provoke another war if there was a diplomatic solution; the government did not receive any real support from any European nation for ostracizing Nazi Germany; and, significantly, the government, like most governments in Europe, simply did not believe that a government so oppressive, so cartoonish, so ridiculous and unstable, could possible last very long. Just as the Founders wrote slavery protections into our Constitution because they felt certain that slavery could not possible endure for very long in our democracy, so the U.S. (and Europe) continued to maintain as normal a relationship as possible with Nazi Germany, certain that it would quickly fall apart or be destroyed by an uprising of the German people.

In the meanwhile, Americans who also could not believe the Nazi regime would last did not ignore the growing threat. Local newspapers in big cities and small towns published the criminal actions of the German government. Many people with relatives in Germany worked to get them out of that country. Jewish Americans continually broadcast details of the emerging Holocaust. And, as we’ll see in the next post, there was an extraordinary demonstration against Hitler on March 7, 1934, that infuriated Germany and impacted relations with the U.S.

Next time: Hitler on trial in Manhattan

The Boston Tea Party: what does it mean today?

Part the last of our series on the Boston Tea Party considers its legacy in U.S. history, memory, and mind. With the rise of the Tea Party political party after the 2008 presidential election, this question of the meaning of the original act of protest is particularly important.

We’ve seen in this series that the original Tea Party (which was not called by that name, incidentally, until decades after the fact) sprang from a complicated and not very appealing tradition of using physical violence to achieve political goals. The governor of Massachusetts himself, Thomas Hutchinson, was forced to flee for his life with his wife and children in 1765 when a mob destroyed his home—literally ripping it to pieces—in protest of the Stamp Act. The men of Boston who supported the Body of the People carried out many attacks on tea commissioner’s homes, families, and persons in the months before the night of the Tea Party, attacks which we cannot approve of today. Using violence to get people to do what you want, especially in the name of justice, is the polar opposite of democracy, the representative democracy the U.S. is founded on. None of us would want to see mobs of people burning down the homes and businesses of people whose policies they didn’t approve of.

But we also see that patriot leaders in Boston realized that mob violence was not a long-term solution to Americans’ problems with British rule, and that it would not work as a political tool. Men like Samuel Adams and John Hancock knew that their goal—democratic self-rule—had to be based on civil political debate, freedom of conscience and speech, and rule of law. A war would have to be fought, perhaps, to gain independence, but after that rule of law must win the day.

That’s why the men who rallied the common people to protest were not the ones who ended up drafting the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. John Adams, not Samuel Adams; Thomas Jefferson, not Paul Revere: the men who enshrined rule of law through representative democracy were ones untainted by association with violence (except for John Hancock, an exception which proves the rule). So we can think of the Tea Party as the last act of colonial mob violence before the inauguration of the era of American democracy.

Today the Tea Party has become a synonym for “no taxes”, but we have seen that the protest against the tea was not a protest against the principle of taxation. It was a protest against a) taxation without representation, and b) taxes levied simply to fund government, with no benefits accruing to the people being taxed. No one wants to pay taxes that go only to fund the office of tax collection. Taxes are meant to better society, to provide services to those who can’t afford them on their own, not to entrench the government’s power to tax. The men who organized the Tea Party, the men who carried out the destruction of the tea, the women who boycotted tea even when they considered it vital to their families’ health all did so to establish the ideal of taxation for the general welfare. Warping that democratic goal by saying that all of those people actually wanted no taxation, that they didn’t want their money going to anyone else no matter what, is a cynical and unacceptable lie.

Let’s remember the Tea Party as it was: a gauntlet thrown down to set in motion the necessary violence of a war for independence that would, if successful, create a society where violence had no part in politics, and taxation represented a bit of freedom and justice for all.

What happened at the Boston Tea Party?

Part 4 of our series on the Boston Tea Party examines the protest itself. We looked last time at the tradition of violence in Boston, which would lead us—and people at the time—to believe that the final protest against the tea waiting in Boston Harbor to be unloaded according to the terms of the Tea Act would be bloody. The people of Boston were exasperated by their battles with the British government over tea, and, as Thomas Jefferson said, “An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.”

But the Tea Party itself was not violent. Here’s how it played out. Like our earlier posts, this one is deeply endebted to Benjamin Carp’s fantastic book Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (from which the Jefferson quote comes).

Patriot protesters had developed the habit of gathering at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, where they heard speeches by patriot leaders like Samuel Adams and John Hancock. They called themselves “the Body of the People”, and they had no official power over the colonial legislature but they were the real power in town. Their meetings were important for two reasons: first, they presented a powerful threat to the Loyalist governor, tax officials, and tea commissioners. Because the Body was not elected, the governor could not control it by dismissing its members. Second, the leaders of the Body realized that, if talk and diplomacy failed, the Body could continue to make public statements of diplomacy and non-violence while authorizing certain of its members to take bolder action on the side.

So the Body passed a resolution saying that “the use of Tea is improper and pernicious,” a relatively mild and impotent statement that they hoped official town meetings would honor and turn into law, thus putting pressure on Boston and the governor… while certain of its members cried out “informally” that they would haul the tea ships up from the Harbor to Boston Common and burn them right there [Carp 120]. Members of the Body cheered, but its prudent leaders did not record this sentiment in the official minutes.

Thus when the last political effort to get the tea sent back to England failed, the Body officially dropped the matter. The hundreds of men gathered in Old South heard the leaders officially abandon the attempt to turn back the tea. And then they began to melt away, slipping out the back exits into the night. Fifteen minutes later, the room was surprised by troops of Mohawks with axes.

Of course, these men had met amongst themselves beforehand to decide what course of action to take if the tea ships could not be turned away and sent out of the harbor. Since we cannot name many men with certainty as perpetrators of the Tea Party, it’s hard to get a lot of data on how they decided on throwing the tea into the harbor (since, as we saw, other protests were suggested, including burning the tea). But once the plan of boarding the ships and destroying the tea was hatched, things moved quickly. “They determined that it would take a few dozen men with knowledge of how to unload a ship, and so the men who signed on for the task included a mix of traders and craftsmen. Each man would disguise himself as an Indian and swear an oath of secrecy… Everyone agreed on the ground rules: no one would steal or vandalize any property except the tea itself, and not one would commit any violence or mayhem. If the destroyers worked quickly and efficiently, the job would only take two or three hours” [Carp 117].

As these men now gathered back at Old South, the Body tacitly approved what it knew was going to happen. One man remembered that the last thing he heard before heading for the wharf was John Hancock shouting “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!”

Once at the ships, the men worked like professionals. The commissioners occupying each ship were identified and told to leave on peril of death. They did so. One Captain Bruce asked what the men were going to do. He was told the plan and ordered below decks with his men, and told they would not be harmed. They did so. [Carp 127] Then the Mohawks expertly hauled the tea out of the holds, working very quickly considering the huge weight of the tea chests. They knocked off the bindings, smashed the chests, and threw them overboard. Despite the allure of the tea, and the price it would bring in the morning, only two men attempted to steal any. They were instantly stripped of their clothes and beaten, and sent on their way.

The men made as little noise as possible. This was not the raucous rioting of Pope’s Day or the attacks on the tea commissioners’ homes. This was business, and it had to be done and done quickly before any soldiers discovered the men. It was imperative that the tea be destroyed, because if it was not it would be unloaded the next morning and it would be impossible to stop its distribution, and then Boston would be the town that let the Patriot cause down after the successful rejections and boycotts in New York and Philadelphia.

By 8:00 or 9:00 PM, the party was over. Everyone went home quietly and followed orders to turn out their pants cuffs and socks and shoes and sweep any tea leaves gathered there into the fireplace. In all, about 92,000 pounds of tea—over 46 tons—had been destroyed [Carp 139].

Reaction was swift. The Tea Party was a complete rejection of British rule. Anything less than a severe punishment would be condoning rebellion. That punishment came in the form of the Coercive Acts: the port of Boston was closed to commercial shipping, ruining its economy; Boston was to recompense the East India Company for the total value of the lost tea; the Massachusetts Government Act set in motion the destruction of the popularly elected General Court (all positions in the colonial government would now be appointed by the king); the Administration of Justice act moved trials of government officials to other colonies or to England; and the Quartering Act made housing British soldiers mandatory for all citizens.

Boston had been acting in concert with New York and Philadelphia, but it bore the brunt of the King’s wrath all on its own. It’s no surprise, then, that the Revolution was kindled in the hearth of Massachusetts. Next time, we’ll wrap the series up with reflections on the meaning and impact of the Tea Party today.

Next time: What does the Tea Party mean today?

The Boston Tea Party and a Tradition of Violence

Part 3 of our series on the Boston Tea Party focuses on the protest that patriots eventually carried out against the 1773 Tea Act. The actual act of dumping the tea was, in its nonviolence, unusual in Boston history.

When you read about the events leading up to the Tea Party, you quickly become a little uncomfortable with the readiness of Bostonians to physically attack people and destroy their property as the first means to their ends. Violence was sanctioned in odd ways in colonial Boston. “Pope’s Day” was an annual holiday, observed on November 5th, during which boys roamed the city knocking on doors and asking for money; if denied, they broke all the windows in the house. Later, older boys and men carried effigies of Satan and the pope, the two groups heading from North and South End and celebrating their meeting in the center of town with an enormous fistfight; the winning group then took the losers’ effigies and burned them.

This kind of “playful” violence was all too easy to organize into political violence. Here are just a few examples, again from Benjamin Carp’s fantastic Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America:

—August 1765: effigies of a British minister and an American stamp distributor (of the unpopular Stamp Act) were hung in the South End; at dusk the effigies were taken down by a crowd who then completely destroyed a building owned by the stamp distributor, went to the man’s house and threw rocks at the windows, broke in, and destroyed some furniture. When Governor Hutchinson tried to reason with the rioters, they threw bricks at him. The stamp distributor resigned the next day.

—June 1768: When smuggler John Hancock’s ship was held by authorities who suspected it had smuggled goods, a group of over 300 Bostonians attacked the customs officers, throwing bricks and stones at them, and then went to the house of one officer and broke all the windows.

—March 1770: a group of men and boys were throwing rocks at British soldiers who were competing with them for jobs (many soldiers moonlighted to enhance their income); this turned into the Boston Massacre when the soldiers opened fire, afraid for their lives as the crowd grew in size and malice.

—November 1771: customs officials seize a boat carrying smuggled tea; another boat comes up alongside and thirty armed men attack the customs officials with clubs, swords, and guns. They forced the British captain into the hold, where he nearly died of his wounds, while they took the tea and left, wounded men lying on the decks of two boats.

—November 1773: a crowd gathered outside the house of a man who had a commission to sell tea from the EIC, shouting and beating down his gate. The commissioner yelled at them from an upper window to leave, and fired a shot. The mob shattered all the windows of the house and were only turned away from assaulting the owner by the pleas of some patriots that there were women in the house.

Tea commissioners were routinely summoned to public meetings by anonymous letters which threatened their lives as well as their jobs if they did not show up. Commissioners and others deemed hostile to the patriot cause were tarred and feathered—the “American torture.”

When the tea that the Tea Act mandated be sold in America arrived in November 1773, the governor knew he could not protect the men commissioned to receive and sell it from the people; those commissioners (one of them an elderly man) fled to the British Fort William on Castle Island in Boston Harbor, and there they stayed for many months after the Tea Party, justly feaful of their lives.

This willingness to use violence got mixed reviews from patriot leaders. Some felt it was justifable because it was in protest of an unfair government. Others felt it gave the patriot cause a bad name, and attracted lowlifes who weren’t fighting for democracy. All knew it had to be carefully managed to keep it under control: at any moment a mob nominally in the service of colonial leaders could become a force that knew no loyalty and could not be controlled by anyone.

It is certainly unsettling for modern-day Americans to read about the tactics our ancestors were ready to use when they believed themselves to be crossed. Mob violence is not something we condone today, and so much of the violence in colonial Boston seems to have been based not in righteous anger but in personal habit and popular tradition that it’s hard to see it as truly patriotic.

Patriot leaders like Samuel Adams knew they would have to keep violence out of their official platform, disassociating the decisions of the General Court from the purveyors of mob violence. The Tea Party would be a triumph of this difficult position.

Next time: planning the Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party: Why was tea so important?

In part 2 of our series on the Boston Tea Party, we ask, why tea? Why was this commodity so symbolic, the one which American patriots chose to make a political stand over?

Until the 1700s, tea was a luxury item, very expensive and looked on with a little suspicion. But by 1765 tea trade represented 70-90% of the imports of the powerful British East India Company. For a very interesting description of the EIC, its role in the British government, and the debt that threatened to destroy it, all of which have a large role to play in the Boston Tea Party, see Benjamin’s Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, an invaluable book to which this Truth v. Myth series is deeply indebted.

Tea came to the Americas legally, through the EIC, and illegally, through American smugglers. By the mid-1700s, the price was low enough to move tea from exotic luxury to daily drink, but it retained its mystique. Tea-drinking was the center of domestic rituals in households high and low, and owning all the accoutrements of tea-making and drinking was to have status—status that was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. As Carp describes it,

“During the eighteenth century, tea became the drink of respectable British and colonial households everywhere. The wealthiest families adopted tea ceremonies first, giving tea immense cultural cachet. …tea was a regular family event. …The woman of the house oversaw the making of tea and assigned a series of tasks and errands to other family members, bringing the family together under her direction. …Tea became a ritual of family solidarity, sustenance, and politeness. To master the tea ceremony was to announce your own virtue… The striving ‘middle class’ of tradesmen, professionals, and landowners couldn’t resist the chance to partake in this elite pastime. You didn’t have to have a hereditary title, or even be particularly wealthy, to sip respectably at the tea table. …tea had become a new necessity. Addictive, stimulating, lightweight, and easy to prepare, [tea] could conquer sleep and thereby make a person more productive: in this way tea was contributing to the growing empire’s economy.” [55-6]

We see, then, that tea was many things: it was classy; it was a shared experience; it was family togetherness; it was caffeine addiction; it was a way for people of all economic classes to show their respectability. Poor families drank tea to get them through the long work day and to show they, too, could appreciate the finer things. Middle-class families drank tea to show the rich that they were sophisticated, too. Wealthy families drank tea with expensive porcelain tea services from Europe or China itself (where the tea came from) and silver utensils to show that they were just as good as people in England, too. All this sophistication was important to Americans, who were always self-conscious about looking provincial in front of their cousins back in England. Americans wanted to show that they were just as good as English people, just as trendy, just as well-mannered.

Of course, there were naysayers. Pamphlets were published on the negative effect tea had on people’s morals, as they did whatever they had to do to pay for tea and the sugar that went with it, and basically sold their souls for fancy tea-sets. Doctors deplored spending money on something that had no nutritional value. Tea, like gin, was seen as a gateway drug to a life of laziness, vanity, vice, and immorality. Valuing any material thing so highly was bound to cause trouble.

On the political side, some Americans worried about contributing so much money to the East India Company. They knew about the Company’s track record in India, where the lives and economy of the native people were held in little regard. American suspicions about the EIC were confirmed in 1769, when a famine hit Bengal, India, which was controlled by the Company. Over 1 million Bengalis died of starvation, the EIC refused to share its stockpiles of food, and actually raised taxes on the survivors to make up for lost revenue. “As Chatterji wrote, ‘People could die of starvation, but the collection of revenue didn’t stop.’ Warren Hastings, the new governor of Bengal in 1772, reported to London in chilling terms that revenue collection had been ‘violently kept up to its former standard.'” [Carp 11-12]

Such was the source of tea in America, and there were Americans who hesitated to put their own country in thrall to the EIC. (News of the famine and the EIC’s response to it would fan the flames of anti-tea rebellion during the 1773 protests against the Tea Act.) What would happen if America, too, became “enslaved” (as they put it at the time) to the Company? It was not as far-fetched a notion as it seemed. To pay off its mounting debts, which threatened the British government itself (because the government was heavily invested in the EIC and depended on its profits for a large part of its operating budget), the Company shipped more and more tea to the colonies. Europe and England had already had their markets saturated. Now tea rolled into America in ever-larger amounts, which brought the price down nicely for consumers, but also threatened American security because the option to purchase tea was seeming more and more like an obligation to do so. Ships that came into port carrying tea were legally required to unload that cargo—it was illegal to ship the tea back to England. It had to be sold. American commissioners, men who had signed contracts with the EIC to sell imported tea in America, were legally obligated to fulfill those contracts. If they failed to do so, the governor himself had to issue a clearance to send the tea back, but the governor would not do this without receiving clearance from the customhouse that said there was something wrong with the tea. If the tea was fine, there was no option but to unload it for the commissioners to sell. If the commissioners would not accept the tea, it was seized, along with the ship it came on—a ship usually owned by the commissioner himself. So men selling tea in America were in a bind: if they did not accept and sell the tea in America, they would lose their commission to sell tea in the future, lose their valuable ship, and lose the money they had spent to get the tea.

This smacked of coercion to many Americans. Did they really have no choice but to buy EIC tea? What would the Company do to them if they refused to buy the tea?

Granted, much, perhaps most tea for sale in America was illegally smuggled by traders unaffiliated with the EIC, men who had no commission from the British government to sell tea (legally, only the EIC was authorized to sell tea to the Americas). You didn’t have to buy Company tea. But as the Company fought for its life financially, a crackdown on smuggling began. Now Americans faced the prospect of being forced to turn in smugglers to the Company or being punished by the British government. They had to help the EIC maintain a monopoly on American tea sales, strengthening a company that had no respect for human life, as Americans saw it, and which would not hesitate to destroy America as it had destroyed Bengal if necessary. If the Company had a complete monopoly, what price might it begin to charge for tea, which was now seen as a necessity? What political power might it be given in America?

So we see why tea became the flashpoint for rebellion in America. When the 1767 Townshend Acts first put a tax on tea, it was seen as outrageous for a few reasons: a) tea was a necessity and raising the price through a tax would put it out of the reach of many; b) the Company was already making a good profit on tea; c) the new tea tax went to pay the customs officials who forced tea to be unloaded and sold in America.

Americans boycotted tea to protest the Townshend Acts. By now you realize what a huge move this was. Giving up tea was very difficult. It threatened the status of the rich and the energy of the poor. On the most basic level, the boycott led to caffeine-withdrawal headaches that confirmed peoples’ notion that tea was medicinal (since drinking tea again would soothe the headache). Given all this, it is telling that although smuggled tea was available, people did not drink it on principle. Violence escalated, and in 1768 Boston was occupied by British troops, whose presence led eventually to the 1770 Boston Massacre (more on violence in Boston in the next post). The Townshend Acts were partially repealed, but the tax on tea remained because the EIC was sinking further into debt (in part because it had flooded every market for tea). It had 18 million pounds of unsold tea in its warehouses that it could not sell. And so the Tea Act of 1773 was introduced, on top of the existing tea tax, mandating that the surplus tea be shipped to America and sold at a steep discount. Americans who were trying to keep the tea boycott alive, who knew that many Americans were dying for a chance to return to tea-drinking, were furious. They knew that if the American market was flooded with extra-cheap tea Americans would not be able to resist it, the boycott would end, and the tea tax would be entrenched—the first, perhaps, of many harmful taxes that offered no services to the colonies but simply helped the British control them more tightly. America would be enslaved to the EIC after all.

Now it was paramount to overthrow this tea scheme. In the next post, we’ll see how protest began.

Next time: a tradition of violence

“Born Fighting”: Truth v. Myth, part 2

Part 2 of our Truth v. Myth on Sen. James Webb’s take on Scots-Irish history in America, the broadcast of “Born Fighting” recently aired on the Smithsonian Channel, finds us in post-Revolutionary War America, following the Scots-Irish in their ever-westerly travels.

Webb reaffirms the group’s “hatred of tyranny… and the belief that personal freedom should be a right, not a privilege.” Again, continuing with the theme of this investigation, it seems one could say that of any and all Americans, barring slaveholders, and one could point out that the entire population of the new nation had just ratified a federal government dedicated to the principle that freedom is a right. So it would not be just the Scots-Irish who felt this way. But Webb, a Senator, is anti-government, as he makes more and more clear in this documentary, and so he separates the principle of freedom being a natural right from the government and locates it fully in this one particular group.

Webb also says that the Scots-Irish believed that “only ability should dictate success”, and uses this as a springboard for talking about his greatest Scots-Irish hero, Andrew Jackson. We have dealt with Jackson here and here, and hopefully laid aside the idea that he was any kind of hero. But Webb buys into Jackson’s self-created propaganda that he was a man who stood up for the rights of the downtrodden, and gave power to the average American, the frontiersman, and the little guy. To do so, Webb first says that, thanks to Jackson, all white males had the right to vote by 1840.

Universal white male suffrage had begun long before Jackson’s Administation: Vermont had always had full white male suffrage, and New Jersey, Maryland, and South Carolina had it by 1810; states entering the Union after 1815 either offered universal white male suffrage or an extremely low landowner’s tax requirement (a small farm would count to pay this tax); by 1821 Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York had universal white male suffrage. So the white male suffrage revolution did not come after 1828 but before it, and it benefited Jackson rather than being a gift he gave the nation.

Webb says Jackson’s populism “undermined aristocratic elites and protected the weak… Jackson said the poor and humble require the arm and the shield of the law.” The Americans Jackson enslaved on his plantation in Tennessee might not have realized he felt that way. Neither would the Chickasaws whom he “removed” from their land, which he then sold and made a fortune on. Neither would the Cherokees, whom he did his best to destroy after they proved they had the right to stay on their lands. Perhaps it is only the poor and humble white frontiersman whom Jackson wanted to protect. Webb’s one nod to this reality is his statement that Jackson’s “legacy isn’t flawless—he was a product of his time… but he stopped the notion of a permanent aristocracy.” Excusing slaveholding because someone is “of his time” is perhaps the emptiest of all defenses. Plenty of abolitionists were of the same time. And it’s not as if people did not debate the morality of slavery during Jackson’s time. Finally, no one group defines “permanent aristocracy” in “their time” like slaveholders, whom Jackson sought to shore up at every turn. Jackson was “of his time” as well in his reliance on political machines to control who got into office, and his insistence on giving political office to and pushing through legislation for party loyalists, many of them rich business men in the East.

We reach the Civil War. Webb states that the Scots-Irish enlisted in droves for the Confederacy, but, predictably, that “few fought to preserve slavery… they fought against invasion, to save their homes, and protect their families.” We’ve dealt this this idea here; we can sum up this stance that the average Confederate did not fight for slavery this way: revisionists say that while powerful southerners fought for slavery, the average Confederate in the trenches was a poor man who didn’t own any enslaved people, who only fought because his homeland was invaded. Most notable in spreading this idea was Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civi War, who quotes a Confederate telling a Union soldier that he fought “because you are down here.” This is the argument put about now—that the average Confederate soldier did not fight for slavery, and therefore bears no shame for his part in the war. But why was the Union “down there” in the first place? Because the southern states had seceeded so they could continue slavery. If the average poor Confederate really did have nothing in common with, and even hated and resented the rich whites who held slaves, why fight their war? Why fight and die so those rich whites could continue to control society and politics, have slaves, and keep poor white people poor? No war is simple. There’s no one reason why poor southern men fought for the Confederacy. They fought, as all people do, for a mix of reasons; in this case, fear and anger at being invaded, a sense of having no choice but to enlist once war began, wanting to join their friends in the army, loyalty to rich white leaders in their own towns and counties, excitement at the prospect of war, resentment of the North’s “anti-southern” policies, and a host of other, private reasons. Union soldiers had the same mix, and many of the same inducements. But no matter why they fought, they fought, and they fought to preserve the Confederacy, which was a slave society. There’s nothing noble about that.

But Webb buys into the blameless Confederate soldier myth, quoting what he calls a “beautifully put”Confederate war memorial in Arlington Cemetery as saying the Confederate fought “in simple obedience to duty, as he understood it.” This monument was installed in 1912 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy; here is a description:

“Completing the frieze are six vignettes illustrating the effect of the war on Southerners of all races. The vignettes include a black slave following his young master; an officer kissing his infant child in the arms of her mammy; a blacksmith leaving his bellows and workshop as his sorrowful wife looks on; a young lady binding the sword and sash on her beau; and a young officer standing alone. The base of the memorial features several inscriptions. On its front face are the seal of the Confederacy and a tribute by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, followed by the Latin phrase: “Victrix Causa Diis Placuit Sed Victa Caton.” This phrase means: The Victorious Cause was Pleasing to the Gods, But the Lost Cause to Cato.”

This is the sort of revisionist, pro-Confederate insult statuary that flourished from the end of the Civil War to basically the 1960s. It celebrates slavery as a benign, even good institution, and states that while the terrible heartless North may have won, the truly righteous were on the pro-slavery side. “Simple obedience” to that kind of duty is no honor.

Now Webb really lays into the current United States by lambasting the North for its overwhelming cruelty to the South after the war. “The North would go on to enjoy the victor’s spoils, while the South was left a devastated wreck… two-thirds of Southern wealth disapeared…[and the south was]occupied and controlled by the North… economic decline suffocated individual opportunity… Economically, it resembled a colony” owned and controlled by outside forces. This was the sad state of things until WWI.

It’s truly astonishing that a U.S. senator would make these statements. First, because they are so patently false; second, because they are anachronistically pushing a radical right, Tea Party agenda into the late 1800s, and third, because they are part of his lengthy attack on the validity of our federal government.

The North had few “spoils” to enjoy. Its industry continued profitably as it had done before and during the war. Its farms prospered as they had always done. In other words, regular life went on. The South didn’t lose 2/3 of its wealth to the North; it lost the bulk of that wealth because it lost its slaves. The majority of that figure is loss of slave labor and investment in slave trading. And one can only wish that the north had occupied the south like a colony, instead of abandoning it and the Reconstruction effort in 1877, because then the return to slavery in all but name and the grinding decades of economic decay the south experienced would not have happened.

Instead, the federal government (“the North”) did not re-distribute plantation land, which all remained in the hands of the original slaveholding owners; pardoned all Confederate soldiers and politicians except for those in high office; and allowed former Confederates to be elected to state governments and to Congress. There was temporary military rule in 1867, which was necessary to keep whites from stopping black Americans from voting for the first time. Southern leaders refused to industrialize or give up the plantation system, using sharecroppers instead of slaves, and local white southern merchants were the ones who gouged the poor, black and white, by miring them in unpayable debt.

It was the north deciding to wash its hands of the south, feeling that enough money and blood had been spent there, that led to the south being ground down into poverty and misery. The refusal of the white power elite to give up plantation agriculture with strictly human labor guaranteed a future of poverty. Their refusal to grant blacks their full rights guaranteed generations of crime, fear, and hate.

Webb clearly feels the federal government has not changed since the war and that it is an instrument of oppression. As we move away from his clenched-jaw description of the south’s self-inflicted wrongs, we move west once again with the Scots-Irish. Leaving the south, to Webb, means that Scots-Irish culture “became the basis for its greatest American legacy. New European immigrants gravitated toward the embrace of the Scots-Irish, their values spread wherever they went: self-reliance, equality, fighting any domination from above [see federal government]… their values and traditions were re-shaping America from the bottom up… over time, they lost their Scots-Irishness and became harder and harder to identify. They became more and more the mainstream of American development. Against all odds, the Scots-Irish working class ethics are now basic American values.” All country music is Scots-Irish, and everyone in the military is, too. Basically, any time you see a church, you are looking at the Scots-Irish.

So in fact you are Scots-Irish if you don’t know you are, the entire middle class is basically Scots-Irish, and those fight, sing, drink, pray values that no other group on Earth shares are the American Way. Of course, as always, we can say the same things of almost every group of Americans, every ethnicity: the Germans, the Irish, the English, the Dutch, the Italians… every group has intermarried beyond recognition and fanned out across the country with ethics of hard work and independence. Because they are all Americans.

“Over the centuries,” Webb goes on, “the Scots-Irish defined mainstream American life.” If you are individualistic and ambitious, you are Scots-Irish. Rosa Parks was Scots-Irish (through her great-grandfather; how might that have happened?). The Scots-Irish are “the molten core at the very center of the unbridled, raw, rebellious spirit of America… they faced the world on their feet, not on their knees. They were born fighting, and if their cause is right (like colonizing for Britain, killing Indians for their lands, or fighting for slavery) they will never give it up.”

This relentless emphasis on rebellion, fighting, and the sins of the federal government sound all too familiar to us today. This is the mantra of the far right, the Tea Party, which tells Americans their government is a terrible mistake and must be destroyed; terrible because it regulates business and provides social services and makes sure our water and air are safe. Americans, this theory goes, must always reject every demand on them—taxes, regulation, equal opportunity laws, etc. What Americans do is shoot guns, fight the government, and look out for themselves first and foremost.

This is not really America. This is not our “molten core.” These are not our core values. We don’t have an unstable, dangerous, molten core, we have a core of law, justice, and democracy. We cooperate to create a fair government that can protect everyone in this country without taking away our basic freedom. We do not primarily fight and drink. We all pray in different ways, or not at all. We all sing everyone’s songs. We are not all Scots-Irish, and the Scots-Irish are not as they are described here, as people who fight only for their own profit rather than for ideals of communal justice and freedom. People who hold slaves are not heroes of liberty. People who prevent their fellow citizens from exercising their full civil rights cannot blame someone else for the problems that causes. Re-writing history to validate whatever people do because of their ethnicity is not history. “Born Fighting” is a slur on the Scots-Irish, our government, and our nation that we hope will continue to be countered by factual histories of this nation and its people.

Truth v. Myth: “Born Fighting”

Senator James Webb (D-VA) published his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America in 2004; the Smithsonian Channel just broadcast the video adaptation recently. It was aired in two parts. Part 1 focused on Scotland, beginning with Hadrian’s Wall, and followed the eventual appearance of Protestantism in Scotland, the conflicts with England over non-conformism, and the recruitment of Protestant Scots by England into the north of Ireland to settle land seized by the English government from Catholic Irish landholders (thus changing the Irish population, it was hoped, and calming the place down for English rule). The Scots encountered growing hostility from the native population they were helping to colonize, and after the siege and battle of Londonderry, in which they received no help from England in beating off the Catholic Irish, many of the Scots—now called Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish by the native population who did not accept even those born in the country as Irish, left for another English colonial land: America.

This first part of the documentary was not perfect, but it was at least technically accurate in most of its details. The second part goes dramatically off-course into the damaging kind of us-vs-them, who’s-a-real-American, America-is-about-violence, and racial politics that is characteristic of myth. We’re going to take the time to rebut the myth perpetuated by one of our Senators because it’s important to call people in high office on the damage they do to historical truth and our own citizens’ perception of what our country stands for.

Like most people who have a thesis that one group of people, one invention, one idea, etc., has shaped the course of world history, Webb consistently makes statements about the Scots-Irish that could be true of any group. “This culture shaped America”, he begins, “…creating the very basis of American democracy.” Which culture that is part of America has not shaped it? Which culture has left no imprint on our government, political history, treasured ideas, or important battles? And since our democracy has been constantly evolving since 1775, no one group can claim to have established the basis of that democracy. (If you had to choose, you’d have to say Americans of English descent. The men who framed our government and put its ideals and principles into law were overwhelmingly of English background.)

Webb’s elevator description of the Scots-Irish is “fight, sing, drink, pray”. This to him sums up their willingness to fight any war, their resolve and determination, their rebellious refusal to submit to “outside” law, and their strict morality. Again, it’s not hard to think of other groups do not have the same reputation: the Irish, Greeks, and Mexicans come to mind. But Webb begins part 2 with the story of the first Scots-Irish in America, again recruited by the English to put down the locals and act as colonizers. Scots-Irish people settled in Pennsylvania on the borderlands between Quaker settlement and Native Americans. Webb describes their experiences there in what he calls “the unimproved wilderness”. The word “wilderness” comes up frequently, and is never questioned as inaccurate (as the land had been settled, hunted, and known by its native inhabitants for millennia). The Quaker refusal to fight is mentioned repeatedly, and seems to be put out there to deride the Quakers and anyone else who questions the value of violence and war. This is a theme that runs through the show.

Again, at the end of the Pennsylvania section, Webb says that the “flood” of Scots-Irish immigrants that followed “would eventually transform America”, and again it’s a claim you could make about anyone, including the English, French, and Germans who preceded or came along with the Scots-Irish just about wherever they went.

It is almost funny when Webb describes the pioneers in the Shenandoah Valley who “carried their few belongings with them” (unlike all other pioneers?) into the “wilderness” only to discover “they weren’t alone”. The fact that the land was inhabited is, of course, the first indicator of its not being a wilderness. The Native Americans whose land the pioneers were settling are basically presented as threatening, though it is of course the natives who were threatened by white settlement and claims of land ownership.

When the French and Indian War began, Webb says, the Scots-Irish fought eagerly and made their name as “unflinching fighters”. He characterizes their attitude as “This is my land and I’m going to stay here and protect it and if I have to, I will fight for it.” Which again is the precise attitude of every group of people in human history who have been in a war on their own territory. Only the Native Americans, in this case, really had the right to say it.

Already, Webb is making a case he will repeat many times: the Scots-Irish a) like to fight, b) are brave (really braver than anyone else), and c) show their independence by fighting. The first tenet really discredits the second two. People who like to fight aren’t really brave, and they don’t fight for independence, but because it’s what they do. The Scots-Irish on the frontier fought because that’s what they had been hired to do by the British governors who brought them in (payment being the right to settle and the grant of religious freedom) and they wanted to keep the land they had settled. That is not really about bravery or independence.

In fact, we have seen the Scots-Irish now as established colonizers, people with no hesitation to help a colonial power destroy native people in return for those people’s lands. It is odd that this is never addressed in Webb’s tale of the Scots-Irish as freedom-loving people who always fought tyranny.

His description of the period between the end of the French and Indian War and the beginning of the Revolutionary War is, politely put, difficult to understand. “Britain tightened its grip over America’s east coast. And now, isolated from British colonial rule to the east, the Scots-Irish frontiersmen settled into their American roots… and turned their backs on bigotry in America’s colonial towns”.

The bizarre inaccuracies—British rule had always been most present on the east coast (which is why the British brought in the Scots-Irish to colonize the western frontier); but after the war concentrated more and more on controlling the western frontier; as frontierspeople the Scots-Irish had always been isolated from coastal society; and bigotry is never relegated to urban areas (see plantation life)—slowly make sense only as the show goes on and Webb talks about Andrew Jackson. Webb reveres Jackson, and has apparently bought into the idea Jackson and his followers evangelized for, that “elites” were running America and a cabal of “aristocrats” in the cities was ruining the nation. The idea that Jackson put power in the hands of average people is not true; he put his friends and financial backers into federal office regardless of their qualifications, he was a wealthy slaveholder, and he had no special regard for the rights of the “little guy”, as any Native or black American would tell you.

As for the idea that the previously isolated Scots-Irish were isolated still after the war, it’s not really true. Germans and Huguenots moved in large numbers into the American south from the mid-1600s right up to the Revolutionary War. Many of the Germans were Protestants unable to worship as they wished at home, and of course the Huguenots left everything behind in France to come to America in the name of religious freedom. Webb would have viewers believe the Scots-Irish were the only people in America (maybe in the world) who sacrificed for their freedom of religion, left everything behind, and braved the hardships of the frontier with no help from outside. All of the colonies of the south were first settled, of course, by the English. Most of them were non-conformists, just like the Scots-Irish, who refused to compromise their faith and left all behind in the name of freedom. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky, the Scots-Irish came in after the Huguenots and Germans.

The Revolutionary War saw many Scots-Irish enlist, just as it saw many members of all the groups in the colonies enlist. Webb focuses on the Battle of King’s Mountain of 1780, in which 900 Scots-Irish militia men routed 1200 British soldiers. The British, rigidly sticking to “European battle formation”, were mown down by the sniping Scots-Irish who were smart enough to use guerrilla tactics. Webb states there were 500 British casualties and 28 American. The ragged, poor militia “destroyed” the British army.

But it wasn’t completely that way. The British did not remain in formation, standing still waiting to get shot, but instead made repeated bayonet charges, which, while unsuccessful in winning the battle, at least made some sense. Of the five American militia leaders, one was of Huguenot descent (John Sevier), two were governors, two served in Congress, and two served in state legislatures; three were born into wealth, and one married into it. So the leadership was not completely rag-tag. The casualties were 244 killed, 163 wounded, and 668 taken prisoner for the British, and 29 killed and 58 wounded for the Americans. One reason for the high British death count was that the militia men continued firing after the British put up a white flag.

We’ll end this post with Webb’s second bizarre leap away from historical fact: he claims that “In 1783, America acknowledged the efforts made by the overwhelmingly Scots-Irish militiamen in the south in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution”. First, the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 with the rest of the original Bill of Rights (the Constitution wasn’t written and ratified until 1787). Second, a starkly modern political agenda is expressed here as historical fact. Webb goes on to say basically that people in the south care so much about gun ownership because they were once frontiersmen, and the frontiersman’s duty to protect his family over time turned into a right “for people with a long history of mistrust of the central government. There’s a saying around here: I’ll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Where to begin. First, what region of our nation never had a frontier? Is it that the north was never frontier land? The west? Every region of the present United States began as frontier land, where people had muskets or rifles to hunt with and to fight Indians and to use as part of the local militia in times of war. Second, either gun ownership is about self-reliance (the frontiersman) or it’s about not believing in government. If it’s that southerners never trusted the federal government, that’s not about the frontier. That’s a mistrust of the federal government that was shared by New Englanders, Mid-Atlantic states residents, and every other region you can think of. That’s what made creating the federal government in 1787 so difficult; even the “elites” on the east coast had their doubts about it turning into a tyranny. (It’s funny that this suspicious government is the one that made a special Amendment to preserve the rights of the Scots-Irish. One wonders what prevented them from looking more kindly on such a government.)

Webb, I think it’s fair to say, is looking at 1791 through the lens of 2011 and 1865 to say that the south is right not to trust the unfair northern government that oppresses it today and has oppressed it since the end of the Civil War. (You’ll see why I say this in the next post.) But the Second Amendment was not written to give people a way to create a state; our Founders believed that our system of law, our democracy, would keep people safe and free. It’s our government and the laws it is based on and that it enforces that create our liberty, independence, freedom, whatever you like to call it. Guns are not law, they are an alternative to law. So I quarrel with Senator Webb’s description of the origins of the Second Amendment, and the validity of the southern (as he calls it) attachment to weapons. The Amendment was not written as a thank-you to the Scots-Irish, and it is not about substituting gun ownershp for centralized government.

Next time: Jackson, the Civil War, and how the entire middle class is Scots-Irish

Truth v. Myth: The First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving: it’s a hallowed phrase that, like “Washington crossing the Delaware“, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” or “Damn the torpedoes!”, does not bring up many solid facts. Unfortunately, “the first Thanksgiving” is usually either completely debunked, with people saying no such thing ever happened, or used as a weapon against the Pilgrims—i.e., they had a lovely Thanksgiving with the Indians and then killed them all.

The truth about the first Thanksgiving is that it did happen, in the fall of 1621. The Pilgrims had landed in what is now Massachusetts the previous November—a terrible time to begin a colony. Their provisions were low, and it was too late to plant anything. It is another myth that they landed so late because they got lost. They had intended to land south of Long Island, New York and settle in what is now New Jersey, where it was warmer, but their ship was almost destroyed in a dangerous area just south of Cape Cod, and the captain turned back. They then had to crawl the ship down the Cape, looking for a suitable place to land. Long story short, they ended up in what is now Plymouth.

Most Americans know how so many of those first settlers died from starvation and disease over the winter, and how it was only by raiding Wampanoag food caches that the colony survived at all. By the spring, there were not many colonists left to plant food, but they dragged themselves out to do so. They had good luck, and help from the Wampanoags, who showed them planting techniques—potentially just to keep the Pilgrims from raiding their winter stores again. By November 1621, a very good harvest was in, and Governor William Bradford called for a day of thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims often had days of thanksgiving. In times of trouble, they had fasts, which were sacrifices given for God’s help. In celebration times, they had thanksgivings to thank God for helping them. So thanksgivings were a common part of Pilgrim life, and calling for a thanksgiving to praise God for the harvest would not have been unusual, and would have been a day spent largely in church and at prayer.

So the men went out to shoot some “fowls” for the dinner, and perhaps they ran into some Wampanoags, or maybe a few Wampanoags were visting Plymouth, as they often did, and heard about the day of celebration. At any rate, here is the only—yes, the one and only—eyewitness description of what happened next:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

That’s Edward Winslow, writing about the thanksgiving in his journal of Pilgrim life called “Mourt’s Relation”, published in 1622. We see that Massasoit and 90 of his men arrived at some point, having heard about the feast, and the Pilgrims hosted them for three days, and had some rather Anglican sport firing their guns. Certainly the Wampanoags had a right to feel they should join in, since it was their help that had led to the good harvest. A one-day thanksgiving turned into three days of feasting and games.

And that was it. People often wonder why there wasn’t another thanksgiving the next year—we have seen that thanksgivings were not annual events, but came randomly when the people felt they were needed as a response to current events, and the idea of celebrating the harvest every year didn’t make sense to the Pilgrims. They had only held a thanksgiving for the first good harvest because it was a life-saving change from the previous fall. Once they were on their feet, they expected good harvests, and didn’t have to celebrate them. It was also against their Separatist beliefs to celebrate annual holidays—like the Puritans, they did not celebrate any holidays, not even Christmas. Holidays were a human invention that made some days better than others when God had made all days equally holy. So to hold a regular, annual harvest thanksgiving was not their way. When things were going well, Separatists and Puritans had days of thanksgiving. When things were going badly, they had days of fasting. None of them were annual holidays or cause for feasting (of course fast days weren’t, but even thanksgivings were mostly spent in church, with no special meal).

If only that first thanksgiving–an impromptu, bi-cultural celebration–had set the tone for the rest of the interactions between the English colonizers and the Indigenous peoples of North America. Since it did not, we can only think happily of the Thanksgiving called for by President Lincoln, who made an annual Thanksgiving a holiday in 1863.

The hype around the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving only began after 1863, when historians noted the tradition of impromptu thanksgivings in the 1600s and made an unwarranted and improper connection to the new holiday to make it seem less new and more traditionally American. Before then, their many days of thanksgiving and fasting were completely forgotten. The Pilgrims certainly weren’t the inspiration for the holiday we celebrate today—they were retroactively brought into that in the worst, most ironic way: after the Civil War, southerners resented Thanksgiving as a “Union” holiday celebrating U.S. victories in the war and so the focus was changed from fighting slavery to the Pilgrims… who supported slavery.

This year, spend Thanksgiving however you like, and share the truth about where the holiday really comes from—the depths of a terrible war fought for the greatest of causes. Let Thanksgiving inspire you to stand up for the founding principles of this nation and re-commit to upholding them in your own daily life of good times and bad.