M O R E F L A P D O O D L E The Fake Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1623 On FB postings I have recently seen shared some material about David Barton. who evidently won a lawsuit in which he accused a couple of people of slander for having made false statements about his politics. Had they been more concerned about his historical errors, they might not have fared badly in court. The following is a long excerpt from my online article written about a dozen years ago, Thanksgiving on the Net: Roast Bull with Cranberry Sauce. sail1620.org/Articles/thanksgiving-on-the-net-roast-bull-with-cranberry-sauce The excerpt addresses the fake 1623 Thanksgiving proclamation that William J. Federer and David Barton were at one time publishing - a fake that still gets repeated in the world of zombie internet postings. My article starts by indicating that the Pilgrims 1621 thanksgiving was not a secular harvest festival and was not an occasion for giving thanks to the Indians - both ideas being popular but inaccurate interpretations often found on the internet. [from Thanksgiving on the Net:] The invented secular harvest festival augmented by the redirection of thanks towards the Indians and the assertion that Pilgrims was a name not used by the colonists, has become widely accepted. Whats to be done? Fake it! Instead of simply pointing out that this version of the past fails to account for the Pilgrims habitual piety and is thoroughly inconsistent with the documentary evidence, someone has felt it necessary to invent a document that replaces the 1621 purported non-thanksgiving with a celebration that does include all the sentiments and specifications that Winslows description lacks. [...] The cute text, widely circulated on internet sites (or excerpted, for example), is: William Bradfords Thanksgiving Proclamation (1623) Inasmuch as the great Father has given us this year an abundant harvest of Indian corn, wheat, peas, beans, squashes, and garden vegetables, and has made the forests to abound with game and the sea with fish and clams, and inasmuch as he has protected us from the ravages of the savages, has spared us from pestilence and disease, has granted us freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. Now I, your magistrate, do proclaim that all ye Pilgrims, with your wives and ye little ones, do gather at ye meeting house, on ye hill, between the hours of 9 and 12 in the day time, on Thursday, November 29th, of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and twenty-three and the third year since ye Pilgrims landed on ye Pilgrim Rock, there to listen to ye pastor and render thanksgiving to ye Almighty God for all His blessings. — William Bradford Ye Governor of Ye Colony [Ravages of the savages indeed! Ye, ye, ye, ye!] This is demonstrably spurious, as my friend Jim Baker pointed out in 1999. [...]. The false proclamation does not appear in any 17th-century source - not in Bradford, not in Winslow, not in Mortons New Englands Memorial, not anywhere. Internal evidence suggests it is a 20th-century fraud. No mention of Plymouth Rock exists before it was pointed out in the mid-18th century, and the term great Father (for God) is a 19th-century romantic quasi-Native term that Bradford never used in his acknowledged writings. There are further anachronisms. For example, in 1623 there was no pastor in Plymouth Colony. Pastor John Robinson was still in Leiden, so services were led by Elder William Brewster. William Bradford never referred to himself as your magistrate in years when he was governor. Bradford dated documents in the year of our Lord - sometimes adding the year of the monarchs reign. He never referred to landing on Plymouth Rock (not even as Pilgrim Rock) and certainly did not use it as a date-base. The Pilgrims did not imagine themselves as seeking freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. They wanted freedom to worship according to their interpretation of biblical commands, which they thought was exclusively correct - and correct externally to any dictates of their own consciences. Finally, its amusing that the 29th of November 1623 (Old Style) was not a Thursday but a Saturday (according to the tables in H. Grotefends Taschenbuch der Zeitrechnung des Deutschen Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (ed. Th. Ulrich, Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1960). While it is often impossible to locate the ancient origin of such internet myths, this fraud is relatively recent. Samuel Eliot Morison was unaware of it when editing Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Knopf, 1952); Eugene Aubrey Stratton does not mention it in his Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986). I have not discovered whether it appears anywhere before it made its way into William J. Federers Americas God and Country: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Coppel, TX: Fame, 1994) and the source Federer gives - David Bartons The Myth of Separation (Aledo TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1991), p. 86. The text has been dropped from recent editions of Bartons book, but that doesnt put an end to repetition of the nonsense, especially on internet sites. A request to David Barton for information on this remains unanswered. On Bartons historical inventiveness, see: Rob Boston, Sects, Lies and Videotape: Who Is David Barton, And Why Is He Saying Such Awful Things About Separation of Church And State? (Originally published in Church & State, 46, Nr. 4, April 1993, pp. 8-12). Rob Boston, David Bartons Christian Nation Myth Factory Admits Its Products Have Been Defective. (Originally published in Church & State, 49, No. 7, July/August 1996, pp. 11-13). Jim Allison, An Index to Factual Information About David Barton And His Books. Nicholas P. Miller, Wallbuilders or Mythbuilders. That people stressing the religious attitude of the Pilgrims use this invented 1623 Thanksgiving Proclamation is ironic. They might have been satisfied with the truth. The 1621 event did express the Pilgrims religious attitude of thankfulness for Gods providence and therefore should be adequate for their modern purposes. Moreover, in the summer of 1623 the Pilgrims held another special day of thanksgiving to God when they considered that their prayers for rain were answered, a drought ended, and their crops were saved. It wasnt in November and no stirring proclamation is preserved. Yet the secular interpretive ignorance that denies that the 1621 event was a thanksgiving had triumphed to the extent that someone from among the fundamentally disgruntled must have thought it clever to fight back. It is another question entirely, what the relation of the Pilgrims religious attitude bears to modern understanding, that would make it urgent to use faked evidence to prove the Pilgrims were thanking God. Obviously the Pilgrims were religious - but what has this to do with anything other than an honest understanding of the past? Their religiosity scarcely provides support for any particular doctrinal viewpoint now; and no one is likely to become religious because it has been proven that the Pilgrims were. Bartons interest is to paint a picture of America as a particular sort of Christian nation since the beginning of its colonization. To make the Pilgrims even more religious than is indicated by their own words is dishonest. Removing the spurious quotation is a commendable step in the right direction. Considering that the Pilgrims interpreted their religion to mean that the Christian community bore responsibility to treat the Indians with respect and legal equality (see my book Indian Deeds, Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1699 (Boston: NEHGS, 2002)); noticing that the Pilgrims laws proclaim that the community bore responsibility for the care of widows, orphans, the poor, and the infirm; and discovering that the Pilgrims minister John Robinson argued in favor of cautious religious toleration and asserted that the church had no special authority over the magistrate, which he said was required to deal equitably with non-believers as well as believers, Id be happy to see such Christian principles applied to modern America. Good luck to Mr. Barton and his colleagues in ensuring this happens! [end of excerpt] For the recent Barton news, see also: patheos/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2014/12/21/david-barton-settles-defamation-claims-out-of-court/ illustration: Plimoth Plantation sketch, 2011. copyright JDB
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 16:12:56 +0000
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